Dark Matters

Once the die had been fashioned, fired …

Once man could speak of his dominion …

Of fish fowl and flower, heaven and earth …

Of one equation …

There could be not turning back the clock,

time by nature was irreversible.

 

Having ceded the gift of free will

you had agreed to irrelevancy …

the inevitability of Eve

and Adam stumbling over the serpent,

giving in the congenital condition

of their likeness to the creator.

 

Since nothing is ever designed without intention --

good and evil were always part of you --

I only cast the shade for them

to sit and contemplate your apple.

Ken e Bujold 

Reviews

[Ookpik]

Hey Ken,

I've long maintained an internal debate with myself on the nature of fate and free-will. There've been a few coincidences in my life, one in particular, that feel weighted - in that a difference in the outcome of those events would have dramatically altered the course of my life.

One thing I tried, when trying to decide if the outcome was the result of my choice or something else's, is entertaining the idea that fate may not be singular, that it might be plural - fates - and that free will determines more one path out of many that've been laid out before us.

I'm not sure if that's the case, but when thinking about the course of my life in that way, I felt less like a man walking a path and more like a dew drop travelling the lengths of a spider's web, along potentiality and outcome, or along cause and effect.

I then considered that I was still envisioning the intersection between fate and free-will linearly, and tried to imagine what it might look like if it wasn't - if instead it was circular, and that I'd navigated the labyrinth before.

The end result was some kind of geometric pattern of choices and outcomes, like a snow-flake, or a kaleidoscope.

Anyways, it would be worth talking about over a beer, as a bar table feels a lot less lofty and a lot more grounded than the topic does, and it wasn't soon after exploring this train of thought that I concluded I had bills to pay and thinking about these things decided far less in my life than its necessities did.

Regardless, apologies for the monologue here - I enjoyed the piece, and couldn't fight the compulsion to spout a little nonsense.

Cheers,

- Ook

[Lorry]

Seeing as we are designed or born innocent, we begin life like an etch a sketch, shaking our misdeeds from memory. But the older we grow, that etch a sketch continues with its shake clean but slowly over time, it leaves memories around scratches and indentations, until we grow bored of it and move on to new toys and misdemeanours while kicking that etch a sketch under the bed, where we find it as an adult and think of the innocence we once knew, before those indentations and scratches built up so much that it might as well have spelt out "sinner" in 36 point bold lettering.
Wether believer or non believer, we all have that battered old etch a sketch lurking in the depths of ourselves, but most likely missing a know or dial here and no matter how we shake it, will never be even close to being nearly new at best.
Now I'm wondering if I want to contemplate that apple or go find my etch a sketch! 😃