Torch

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TorchWhen we die there are two things we can leave behind us:  genes and memes.  We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes.  But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations.  Your child, even your grandchild may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair.  But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved.  It does not take long to reach negligible proportions.  Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away…  We should not seek immortality in reproduction.

But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool.

— Dawkins, Richard.  The Selfish Gene.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1976.  199.

I behave as if I’m carrying forward for my children.  It’s what I’m to do and what I’m to fail to do.  Just pick up and show them how to go forward.

I had two dreams about [my father] after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

I called my father today to make sure he was still alive as I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of months.  I checked for news of him in his small town and turned up a photo of a fresh looking grave stone stamped with his name, located in the town where he was born on the other side of the country.   Subtitled “Loving Son.”  His name is extremely rare, so it’s possible the grave contains a son of his I don’t know about.  Maybe he doesn’t know about either.  Not entirely surprising as I also found a marriage record for him and a woman who is not my mother dated just a couple of years before I was born.  He has at least two other sons I’ve never met, and I’m not sure how many times he’s been married.

He answers the phone and says he was just busy getting a new shoulder.  Got one side fixed up, a new knee, a hip, and time to move on to the other.  He ends with I can’t wait to get better.  I guess that’s some kind of moving on.

Orbiter View

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Orbiter ViewAged 14 and midnight I hover outside a downtown bar in Tulsa Oklahoma.  I’m with a coven of Christians hell bent on conversion of the drunken damned and debaucherous.  I’m terrified and sweaty, yearning for the church van to return.  I’m nowhere near committed to the mission of the witnessers who seem far beyond eager to plant some spiritual seed.  Even at this age I’m too skeptical and logical to lie to myself and worse, to those who exit the neon lit door of the bar I’ve been assigned.   What Jesus approach should a kid like me use when a beautiful whiskey laden girl, falling out of her clothes, steps out of the hand dirt stained door of the thumping club only to find me there with a floppy leather bible in hand?

I stutter of course.  And she laughs.   She walks around me.  Yes, this really happened.

This was the mid ’80s.  I’d arrived there with the core prayer group from Higher Dimensions Evangelistic Center, a pentecostal church emitting a high energy beam of charismatic nonsense.  Here’s the interesting part:  I was part of Pastor Carlton Pearson’s ministry.  Pearson’s church grew to over 6,000 in the ’90s.  He was made a bishop.  He made piles of money.  However, now, he’s been declared a heretic.  As far as I can tell, he’s lost his faith, or the original version of it that includes the concept of Hell.

Every once in a while, back when I watched TV, before his heresy, I’d see him wrapped in gold suits on the Trinity Broadcasting Network as I flipped past the channel.  He was rich and disgusting.  From what I hear, that’s all gone now.

Now I realize I was just orbiting their planet of belief.  Watching the activity from the skies.  I couldn’t connect with them or their faith.   Back then I was caught in a painful, soul sucking vacuum hose of fear, not just of Hell, but also of the political climate of the ’80s.  The Cold War and the rhetoric of Reagan had me terrified of nuclear war.  For years, due to charismatic churches, our government, and news media, I feared being beheaded while trapped in the Tribulation because I missed the rapture or toasting in the silent blinding white light of World War 3.  So full of fear.

It’s quieter and happier up here in rational space.

 

 

Quantum Foam

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Abstract

Quantum foam (also referred to as space time foam) is a concept in quantum mechanics devised by John Wheeler in 1955. The foam is supposed to be conceptualized as the foundation of the fabric of the universe.[1]

Additionally, quantum foam can be used as a qualitative description of subatomic space time turbulence at extremely small distances (on the order of the Planck length). At such small scales of time and space, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles and then annihilate without violating physical conservation laws. As the scale of time and space being discussed shrinks, the energy of the virtual particles increases. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, energy curves space time. This suggests that—at sufficiently small scales—the energy of these fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth space time seen at larger scales, giving space time a “foamy” character.

With an incomplete theory of quantum gravity, it is impossible to be certain what space time would look like at these small scales, because existing theories of gravity do not give accurate predictions in that regime. Therefore, any of the developing theories of quantum gravity may improve our understanding of quantum foam as they are tested. However, observations of radiation from nearby quasars by Floyd Stecker of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have placed strong experimental limits on the possible violations of Einstein’s special theory of relativity implied by the existence of quantum foam.[2] Thus experimental evidence so far has given a range of values in which scientists can test for quantum foam.

The fabric of space time is a mess of probabilities out of which everything you know and love takes the form of a wave through time.  You are not who–or what–you think you are:

Studies at the Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center have revealed that about 98 percent of all the atoms in a human body are replaced every year. You get a new suit of skin every month and a new liver every six weeks. The lining of your stomach lasts only five days before it’s replaced. Even your bones are not the solid, stable, concrete-like things you might have thought them to be: They are undergoing constant change. The bones you have today are different from the bones you had a year ago. Experts in this area of research have concluded that there is a complete, 100 percent turnover of atoms in the body at least every five years. In other words, not one single atom present in your body today was there five years ago.

Thinking back to my post on Triggers, how is it a fragrance from a flower shop takes me back to the frigid room I played in as a child, if I’ve literally been replaced several times over?

Dance

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Silicon II

Is it OK for Isaac to be outside?
Those hawks are circling around.

They’re just doing their dance.
They do that every night.

Oh.
OK.

The panic sets in occasionally
Of the mortality of it all.

Mary Karr has me now.
I see she’s full of the shit
That hurts most.

And, that’s OK, too.
Just like those hawks circling around.

They do that every night.