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 Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
You've probably heard of the five W's and one H? They are who, what, when, where, why, and how. These are the essential questions of journalism and also the existential questions of life. Only four of them have answers that I find at all satisfactory. I'll start with who. Descartes famously said, "I think therefore I am." The big questions only matter, or even exist, because we are here to ask them. I think who is self-evident (so to speak). And if you don't think, then please stop reading now. 🙂 What is similar to who, but the perspective is outward rather than inward. In a way, the who is merely a subset of the what and the what is the observable universe of the who. What simply is. Our senses, and the scientific instruments that extend our senses, provide the measure of what, but they don't actually explain anything. All we can do with what is observe, accept, and describe. When is a bit slippery, but time seems to be a fundamental component of what. Einstein developed equations that describe how the passage of time is intertwined with mass and velocity. Every experimental test of Einstein's theory has confirmed the fundamental nature of time. We don't even think to question it. "What time is it?" is the only question that all of humanity agrees on. There are no alternate belief systems with different values for the length of a second or the number of hours in a day (could this faith in time become the basis of a universal religion?). We're constantly aware of time, but it isn't considered a seventh sense. It is, however, an inescapable part of everything we observe, everything we do, and everything we think. I've decided that I can reference the standard of Greenwich Mean Time and simply accept that when is always now (see my poem Conscripted  .Where is another subset of what, and like who, it's pretty much self-evident: Everybody has to be somewhere and if you're not where you're at, then you're nowhere. - ?. It seems obvious to me that I am where I'm at. And I sincerely hope that you are where you're at. So, I'll accept that where, in general, is the here of the who in the what. How is where I lose the thread. All that we observe has a beginning and an end. Sunrise and sunset mark each day. Birth and death delimit each life. Empires rise and fall. Mountains are lifted up and wear away. But what came first? Aristotle wrote about the prime mover. He observed the inexorable forward march of cause and effect and then reasoned that all of existence could be traced backward in time to reveal a prime mover unmoved by any other mover. And he, she, or that would be the first cause of all the effects that culminate in the now of our universe. Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. - Wikipedia. But Aristotle stopped at this navel-gazing idea of God and didn't provide any further speculation of how the prime mover came to be. Aristotle just kicked the can down the road and congratulated himself on an elegant half explanation. Science has arrived at a similar point with the big-bang theory. Stephen Hawking said that information can’t survive a trip through a singularity, so it’s impossible to know what preceded our universe. In addition, he said that time began with the beginning of the universe. So, the very concept of before doesn’t apply. Our reality begins with the big bang and that’s all we know or can know. Hawking's big bang is the equivalent of Aristotle's prime mover. Again, a half answer that leaves me doubly unsatisfied with how. Why is the crux of the mystery. No one has ever provided a satisfactory explanation of why. There are far too many self-serving politicians, televangicals, and con artists who have an answer to why. And too few authentic spiritual guides who offer a more genuine response. Either way, it doesn't seem logical that Aristotle's self-contemplating perfect God would need humanity in general, let alone me in particular. And what's the point of all the beginnings and endings of cause and effect if God is eternal? The only answer I've come up with for why is that I have no other choice. Reality is the only game in town. I have to keep going even though I doubt I'll ever find out why. People are fond of saying "everything happens for a reason." They're at least half right, everything happens. I'm not so sure that there's a definitive reason. At the quantum level, reality seems to be governed by probabilistic (random?) processes. Einstein disliked Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He insisted that, "God does not play dice with the universe." But the uncertainty of reality at the quantum level has been verified extensively. And we still don't know why. I pinball between the despair of agnosticism and the desperation of faith. Planning and striving help to pass the time, but then God hits the flipper again and something else happens. The lights flash and the bumpers beep, but there's never any sense of completion, no brass ring or happily ever after. I write poetry to deal with these things that I'm unable or unwilling to approach head-on. My poem Observational Bias sums up what I've tried to express in this post. Wouldn't it be a wonderful (and horrible) cosmic joke if my 'why' is merely to annoy you with mediocre poetry? |
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