![]() UncertaintyA Poem by Robert Ronnow
There cannot be two identical things in the world. Two
hydrogen atoms offer infinite locations within their shells for electrons. Thus, nothing can be definitely eventually known. All to the good because golf and chess and basketball, as well as mathematics, language and genetic recombination are systems for discovering the possible (which is more attractive than the probable) in what we thought we thought about the sun and clouds. In Borges' The Parable of the Palace, the poet's attempt to replicate the world in a word results in what, surprisingly, is his termination personal obliteration a piece of anti-matter that occupies no known shell in this or any other instantiation. Got the plot? We are "moving through some allegory between a City of Hope, where history has been abolished, and a City of History, where hope can be slipped in only as contraband." Actually, the recombinations which make prediction and intuition fortunately hopeless and each individual an experiment gone well or wrong, are represented by equations of such complexity they differ not at all from the very stars and neurons whose interactions we wish to count. The world keeps up or ahead of the collective attention span by offering inexorable expansion or otherwise rapidly contracting universes, big bang by big crunch. I like that, I like that I can't know what I'm doing (until it's done). Therefore, faith and understanding (hope and history) become one absolutely fluid quantum motion, a lovely early Spring morning a thunderstorm, a terrifying and (for someone) final tornado or volcano. Oh well. From his earliest published work, Ronnow displays a fascination with death, the world without the self, a ridiculous consideration considering time's geological pace 6.5 x 1010 sunsets and sunrises over mountains and deserts (for every merchant, traveler) themselves rising and setting via magmas, oceans, tectonics, meteors, forever. Do your homework I said to Zach. Why bother was his attitude. I explained time is an illusion, an invention man made, there is only change. Birds know this. But the calendar and colors, genus and species, bacteria and galaxies, are the innumerable wonders about which Sophocles said man's most wonderful why because we can identify or classify birds by the complexity or beauty of their songs. © 2023 Robert RonnowAuthor's Note
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Added on December 25, 2014 Last Updated on February 22, 2023 Tags: Atoms, Birds, Borges, Complexity, Death, Equation, Faith, Genetic, History, Hope, Hydrogen, Illusion, Infinite, Language, Mathematics, Obliteration, Quantum, Uncertainty, Universe, Wonders Author
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