Saturday, June 28, 2008

Aphrodite speaks


A holy man scorns the legend of Aphrodite
she, no longer exists
love has a new definition
in the name of god
A savior
that is the new name of love

A practical man laughs off the possibility of Aphrodite
love, is just a fleeting chemical reaction
Science, can explain it
it all comes down to biology
that is the new name of love

A business person ignores Aphrodite
love, has no place in the market
it does not yield profit
in fact it often involves high risk
of unknown rates of return
Money
takes the place of
and is the new love

A player says of Aphrodite
love, is not related to sex
they are two different states of being
it is silly of the Greeks to place them into a single being
Aphrodite should be a hermaphrodite
Sex
is not love

A feminist says of Aphrodite
love, whatever that is
should not be an excuse
women, must henceforth never be made into symbols again
love, is love
and woman is woman.

Aphrodite, if she could exact revenge would
make the holy man betray his very own faith
and the practical man dismiss science and its shallow logics
bankrupt the business man for a scandal in which he loses his wealth and prestige
to the player, she would make him fall after a one night stand
the feminist obsessed with symbols, becomes one herself.

These things Aphrodite would do, if she wants revenge
but love, her symbol. Not
her the symbol of love ,as most people mistakenly know
is a mystery.
Even if she had her revenge
the holy man would call it temptation
the practical man would call it the eternal progress of science
the business man, a bad business decision
the player, a passionate fling
the feminist, a sexist society.

But if Aphrodite quotes Shakespeare
would say
revenge
by any other name
would be as sweet.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Ever since the temporal revolution, time has been flowing backward. It has happened a little by little until people started noticing it. At first it was just fits and starts of such little time discrepancies. Like someone in a fastfood restaurant ordering something, he says his order, the person over the counter asks for the order once again in the exact same tone of voice with the exact same expression.The person orders again in the exact same manner. A mere glitch in time some people choose to ignore without big disruptions to everyday life. Or a train may pull up at the platform and reverse then pull up once again. Some observant people have noticed that something strange has been going on without quite being able to put their finger on it. Sometimes, something repeats itself in the exact same sequence without there being a truly identifiable reversal in time. For example, a mum with a baby was trying to take the bottle from her baby when it fell, she gasped, reached for and caught it. She then gives it to her baby once again, dropping it in process, gasps and reaches for it, catches it and hands it back to her baby. It is akin to watching a strange repetition of events. Sometimes in the same sequence sometimes in differing sequence. Sometimes with the same outcome sometimes with a drastically different consequence.

I have been noticing these strange little occurrences with interest and trepidation. most people do not even see it or have learnt to accept it and even assimilate it into their everyday life. I do not blame them. It is not a thing about being clever or even observant. Time is a tricky thing. Even if many people think they are in control of their time, that their watches never lie or are foolish enough to think that a day is made up of 24 hours or 1440 minutes or even 86400 seconds, they are often wrong. They forget that their measurement of time is not a fixed natural rule. Yes, the sun rises in the east every morning and sets every evening. It does not make everyday the same length nor the duration of the day a fixity. Their clocks may lie. Einstein almost had it right but he was too chicken to take things to their natural conclusion. Time, as so many have said, is an illusion. It is the same with any magician's magic trick. It works as long as most people believe it. The ancients may have had a better system, using concrete objects, like the rate of falling sand, or dripping water or burning wax. Time then had a physical nature not a mere conceptual presence as it has become today. but even the ancients were wrong. Using the placement of the sun only gives you a rough guage, as they found out quickly, the place of the sun varies in length and duration with the changing season. Our constant search to pin down time into standard fixed units have been a unsuccessful project, what we have done instead is to imprison our minds and instead have created tools which will fix our experience so that we may feel the constancy of time. But this lie is not an individual lie. It is not a prank some supremem powerful organziation or god-like being played on us. It is a merely functional phenomenon we have long ceased to challenge. It is a habit that has become a necessity for even survival. Trying to remove this understanding is like trying to turn a herbivore into a carnivore, it violates the human nature to the point that should one fall outside of this way of thinking, the person ceases to be a human.

Now the question gets strange and urgent. Every single human being has the ability to slip out of the trained way of experiencing time, and it happens at least once in a lifetime. Sometimes more often. The opportunity for an alternative understanding of time happens even though most fail to spot it not to mention fail to grab the opportunity. Some time ago, one such man experienced one such moment. His name was M Descurius. As he was stepping off a train, a newspaper boy brushed past him dropping a paper. M swooped down to pick up the falling paper. However as he was swooping down to catch it, he saw the big second hand of the station clock. It twitched then froze. He let the paper fall and it stayed stationary. He thought he had willed time to slow or to stop just by not taking his eye off the clock to pick up the falling newspaper. He did not move his gaze and still the second hand stayed, the newspaper was still falling even though time was for a second divorced from the physical reality. It had shown its stretchable flexibility. Most people, M says, gets distracted by the physical reality. They will react spontaneously to reach for the falling paper. They will by instinct look at the action, respond to it and later attribute the epxerience to the invisible constant flow of time. But M did not take his eye off the station clock and when he did he caught the newspaper in mid air and asked the boy if he had felt that, that inexplicable sense of the extraordinary flexibility of time. . The boy, shocked and scared by this sudden unexpected behavior, took off in fright. According to M it is like seeing through a magician's trick on stage for the first time. It is to discover the trick as it is unfolding. Most people are unable to see through magic tricks because they do not know the direction that the magician is taking them. They are trying to understand what the magician is doing on stage during the performance but not how he is doing it. They are too stuck on why he is doing a certain action that they do not see how he is doing it. The magician gives little clues about his act. so that not being able to piece together the reason for things, people does not look at what he is doing and how he is doing it. That question only comes later. It is the way we understand logics. But by the time we ask the question of how the magician did it, the question has come too late. But M also says it is a bad analogy. There is no magician for the case of time. It is the senses which are fooled. That he could even have spotted the still silent second hand of the clock was a mere coincidence. The only true thing which time cannot yet fool. And the only escape for humans from the illusion of time.

But it is never a choice. One cannot plan a concidence. It is to a large extent a dictate of chances, and chances never follow any pattern. It is not rule bound. Unlike the illusion of time which to our mind follows the strict pattern which we follow all through life. Most people are only capable of such a comprehension for a mere second of their lives. For that mere second when such a divorce happen they will be conscious of the discrepancy but they will not follow through with it, because these seconds usually carry with them the potency of chance. Their life is at stake, they will choose to react to the given choices in front of them. If a vehicle suddenly swerves left, heading right for your own car. You react to save your life. You do not suspend the divorced time. You do not marvel at the flexibility of time but rather at the gravity of the physical event happening in front of you. That is the human response, and to choose to do otherwise you cease to be human. And what follows after only those who can choose it can find out.

To want to see the slow effects of the temporal revolution, only those who have been so favored by chance as to escape can spot these little glitches. Should time the illusion continue to reveal more serious flaws, most will not notice but merely continue adapting themselves to these changes. Afterall, the illusion of time will not collapse as long as most people still believe this illusion. The magician still performs his tricks and the audience are still puzzled and amazed long after the curtain falls.

Monday, June 02, 2008

I often wonder where people get their weird ideas from. You know, like wanting to fly, so we invented the plane. Or wanting to breathe underwater and hence the submarine. Then to explore outer space and we built rocket ships. We are a race of explorers of the unknown. WE have always wondered what's out there. It seems kind of disappointing to say that "Hey. Sorry but you've reach the end of the universe. No more out there for you to explore." But all good things come to an end. The era of external exploration has reached its end. WE have reached our physical limits for physical exploration. You know that feeling, when a world has been completely and utterly discovered and the ending has finally arrived. Like reaching the end of a video game, all possible goals have been accomplished. Now just imagine it on a much grander scale. No more objective remains for exploration. We have reached the end of the universe. The impossible has now been made possible. Physically, externally, no more impossibility remains. And Geez what a disappointment. What we found at the end of the universe is a random little star. A very random ordinary star. Even more random, more ordinary and smaller than Earth itself. The unremarkable star holds the very unremarkable message for all of us on Earth for our remarkable attempt to search for answers. And sadly, it is an answer none of us Earthlings would appreciate. Those kind of answers which flatten the question completely and to top it all off, the answer has to flatten the question with ultimate boredom and randomness. And after the answer, the whole race of Earthlings have to deal with the worser question. "What Now?" "Now What?" For a long time, no one quite knew how to react to the discovery at the end of the universe. WE have always been prepared for the worse. WE imagine the worse that perhaps, it is an infinity, it just stretches on forever it will be like trying to find the end point of two parallel mirrors where the reflection stops. Or we thought, perhaps at the end of the universe, we would find NOTHING. Appalling nothing and turn around and head back home and announce that there is nothing at the end of the universe. Even the thought of it all being a grand old joke as we pull back into earth and find that the universe is really just a big circle. The kind where you just end up where you started off. Even that could have made perfect sense. I would have much prefer if the universe was really just a big circle. The universe would have been so much more elegant despite its senselessness. Now it is just a cheap joke made at our expense. The only thing is no one finds it funny when the joke's on you.

Our discovery really made a big impact on certain cultures. You know the kinds of societies which value exploration, knowledge and had some kind of pride in human intelligence. Not to mention it destroyed some of the world's religions, especially the promise that human had a special place in the scheme of things. After our discovery, there have been cases of devastated individuals wandering off cliffs, randomly ingesting toxic substance at toxic end of the universe parties. Only the pessimists were secretly happy that they were right for once. And of course for cultures where nothing really mattered, this was just one more additional matter which did not matter. Many thinkers who have been locked up for the longest time in asylums with crazies celebrated that they were finally acknowledged for their correct way of thinking. And they could finally prove to themselves that they were indeed "not crazy". This time it was backed by concrete evidence. The NASA crash followed when truckloads of scientists at the celebration party for discovering the end of the universe while dancing stiffly to geeky electronic music suddenly found themselves jobless. And without a meaning in life. I can't go so far as to speculate what would happen in the future. All I know that the future of space exploration is completely certified dead. I mean we can still try to locate other intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe, or warn some others, but what's the whole point. If no one bothered to warn us of our find which could have spared us the misery, why should we be charitable? Why rob some other race of intelligent life of their fair share of devastation right when they felt that they were at their most glorious. The universe is fair, the same shit is dished out to all kinds, everyone gets the same serving.

I guess I really should get to the crux of the story. The part about my landing on the star and my discovery. You know, this story could have been worth a whole lot more if only what we found turned out to be completely different. I could have been hailed as one of the heroes of this century and the next instead of being the biggest loser of all time breaking the bad news to everyone that we are all sad sad sad losers. Afterall I am very much into this space exploration thing for the fame and the glory and of course the curiosity, but who knew. So we landed on that unremarkable star. I hate the word unremarkable because it can never convey to you unremarkableness of it all. The space shuttle doors opened, and we are faced with this tiny thing. Not even a planet, just a tiny pathetic star. Here we were breathing exhiliarted. In total disbelief that we have finally made it, decked out in our finest gears. We were the representative of our race at this new frontier. The best and the brightest, bearing the beacon of hope to this unfamiliar territory bringing all the good will from our little blue planet. The doors open and there in front of us was this pathetic little building. It had holes of all shapes and sizes, a little bit like a weird looking cheese. And there we were looking at this ugly thing made out of what resembles cheap concrete on Earth, trying to make sense of it all. Expectations can be very deadly thing. We should have known there and then to turn around, walk back into the shuttle and head back home saying "Yep, there's nothing for us here." But you know we were too stupid to let it all sink in that "this is it" "This is all." Somewhere at the back of our head, we still expect more. We all thought there must be more grandeur behind this. We marched on still high from our triumphant landing.

The building was even more hideous up close than from afar. We filed in through one of the holes, the secret must lie in there we all thought. We were shocked to find that the interior was empty and equally grey, safe for a big sign somewhere in the distance. The sign was what undid us all.

The giant sign had lots of weird scribblings on it. We were amazed at our find, bemoaning the fact that we did not have some of linguistic experts on deck with us. We were rejoicing our finds which established for a fact that there were other intelligent lifeforms then we heard the robotic announcer.

'WELCOME. WE HAVE ESTABLISHED THAT THE VISITORS ARE FROM PLANET.....E.A.R.T.H. PLEASE CHOOSE THE DISPLAY LANGUAGE."

We must have picked English somehow because the scribbles on the sign then changed into perfect English. It read.

"Congratulations you have reached the end of the universe. This is originally the finishing point of a race for different races across the universe to participate in. The first race to find the end of the universe was to get the grand prize. The treasure hunt has long been over, yet we still get participants turning up hoping to claim a prize. WE are sorry to inform you that the game has been over for 4500000000000000000000000000000019000billion lightyears 3876000000000billion millenias 5090200000000000000000billion centuries and three days. We are sorry to inform you that you have lost the game. Try again next time. "

Below that there were the organizers' statement:
"This is a fair competition for various races spread across the universe. The incentive is to drive the development of intelligence and curiosity. All race are given equal opportunity and access to development of capacities despite variations in designs."

The information on the organizers at the bottom of the sign said " Not available. Organization no longer active."

For the longest time we just stood staring. Then we silently headed back to our ship and made our way home. All the way home we played Britney Spears music. Nothing ever sounded so good and meaningful. Her songs now made perfect sense.