Time As Art

Staring the far, unlit unknown deep in the eyes usually leads to more questions than answers, at least if you're intellectually honest. Though there is one conclusion that is inescapable: no one knows exactly what the fuck is going on. It's easy to adopt one extreme form of ideology and eschew the other, a traditional dilemma played out over the canvas of thousands of years. In Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, he asserts that the universe can be explained without even inviting god to the party. He insists that, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing...Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke god to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." I can't help but laugh at the Hawkings and Dawkins apostles who hang on their every word. What are we? Where did we come from, and where are we going? No faith or school of thought can honestly answer these questions. Strong atheism is as equally foolish and dogmatic as religious fanatacism. The world of science consists of concepts like dark matter, multiverses, alternate pasts and futures, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Pascal’s Wager, Schrödinger’s cat, redshifts, wormholes, neutrinos, white dwarfs, quarks, gravitational lenses, String Theory, and its apparent successor, M-Theory. While both breathtakingly complex and simple, these mean nothing and shed no light on our predicament. These are simply science's alternate position to the bourgeois faith that god is still god even if he turned his back on us, that damnation and salvation still establish the boundaries of a small and fragile world. The conclusion still escapes us.

The only real hope is that we will transcend the entropy and decay that seemingly claim all things. We seek solace in knowing that the moments lived and experienced will still be around, if only in our memories. Death ostensibly changes this, kills our memories and moments along with us. It's like it never happened, even though it did. This is the tragedy, the very crux of what this blog is about. For all the bullshit I write on here and all my nihilistic posturing, I have to admit that life is good. Real life, the parts that make it all worthwhile, takes place in the little moments, the minutiae unseen en masse but fully absorbed by the self-aware. At the end of the day it is the individual and shared moments of realization, caring, love, and maddened enthusiam that inform one's life and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships. It's like the course of time itself is shattering all around us and the seconds and years yield to the "benign indifference" that the universe so graciously gives us. This fascination with the concept of time and how this fluid reality frames human existence calls into question the very nature of time itself. Time is an artificial construct and thus seemingly exempt from what we would consider real and natural, but something as simple as a glance in the mirror quickly dispels this idea. Time is art in the truest sense of the word. It is the great river that flows to its end. And yet the wonder and uncertainty caught in its current will remain there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. In the meantime, there's not much we can do other than look to the living, love them, and hold on.