chooses its value when it is named. This is an effect of the mind.
Logic is to language as geometry is to the universe.
The reason for something is not in the state from which it emerged,
but in the end it serves.
There is a great rift between the self and the external world. The
self is not part of the universe to be explained.
...
Dark Matter
Seeing, like that, only purple
You would understand your world
From a few iris,
A few bolts of silk,
And emptiness.
And knowing the gravity of iris
You might postulate stems,
Though green were unimaginable
And seeing the silk fall in folds,
A body, though flesh could not be thought.
And speaking in purple
You might acknowledge still
The universe outside of sound.
...
23? October (Sunday)
The collapse of the Wave Function as We Know It
I suppose it occurs to everyone eventually
That simply by considering the beginning of everything,
The wave function of the Universe
We must whip it into such a state
(Our thinking being inescapably of us
And more irresistible than we imagine)
That it collapses, finally into the unique heap
From which we inevitably and necessarily
Have already emerged
...
31 October Problems in Cosmology
Origins
As a flower might invent
Some memory of the smooth
Husk of seedhood
So we imagine seeds of galaxies
Shaken in the dark soil soul of space
In the unconscious Universe
Let there be substance
Moving neither mass nor light
Sufficient to flatten space
And curb infinity
And close itself in one
....
A summary of contemporary cosmology
...
We conceive ourselves to inhabit no special part of a Universe which has a kind of geometry, which may be infinite, which is everywhere the same, thinly spread substance some of which has collapsed into points of mass which throw off light, much as abstractions collapse into words. The vast, the dark, the unconscious universe, which is most of it, we cannot see but we suspect its presence from the way it makes things move. And everything is flying away from everything as space itself expands outward from a universal point of origin (which is by definition everywhere) in an explosion which could have been silent, there being no outside medium to transmit sound, and no listener. (Though we cannot know this, we imagine our universe to have hatched like a shark from a solitary, unguarded egg, unobserved in an ocean which we are not supposed to imagine, but cannot help it.) And since light travels at a constant speed, we can see all of this, like a memory, or think we can, by looking deep into space. We have always invented the universe in our image, animistic, ecclesiastical, mechanised, anthropic. We live now in the epoch of self-recognition. We are the dawning of the universe upon itself.
We observe the universe, predict it, calculate it, expose it to rationality, we ask it carefully phrased questions. We ask the reason for the universe, and look for the answer in the state from which it came, not the end it serves …
1994
1 January [Scanno]
Head full of languages
Auguries
A shrouded mountain, rain
Return to Frattura Vecchia
House full of noise and smoke
Filling the mind
Sucking at the stuff of the mind
You might run out into a wet field
Or up a plane of white snow
Wind whipping spindrift from the ridge
But no, we sit, we eat, we sleep
We are reduced to the most basic
Of what is human
In comfort still, and discomfort
From what suffocates
We walk in the dark down roads
The headlights of cars
And the lights of houses spilt in the lake
And last night eruptions of sound
Eruptions of light from the cups of houses
For the sake of another voyage, and the sun.
Does the earth feel itself to have reached
Again the same point in space?
There is no reaching a point in space.
Nothing stays the same.
Just the slow falling of snow
On the eve of anniversaries
Six months since a hot afternoon
Coming like the Earth to the same
Point in space
And finding a different season
And different people
How basic are our needs
How we come and go to a table of meat
And warm ourselves at the flames
Of burning trees.
We destroy, we destroy
We destroy to live
We live to destroy
A school of fish
A pair of hens
A pair of rabbits
A tree with its moss
Ourselves
Consumed
And the lake boiling with lights
No more dark silence
On the television, people dying
No answers
Can we believe ourselves
To be all one?
Faces of crystal casting
The same light
Blowing bubbles in the dark
On the first day of another year
Numbered from the birth
Of this man who hangs
In effigy above our bed
These are the connections of things
The way they make signs
The way they speak
The way we discover the forms
Of bodies and faces and even birds
In the soft substance of a bone
Osso di seppia e suo spirito
To ask forgiveness for the destruction
To leave something behind
Touched by the urge to create
To climb high white mountains
To breathe, to sleep
To dream of flight
To dream
...
9 February
Faint blue galaxies
Fainter and fainter like candles,
Like fireflies in meadows
Blinking on, and extinguishing themselves
Morphological
Dreaming of a certain galaxy
A certain juxtaposition, galaxy with starburst
With companion
Star with long spikes
Ghost of a star
Itemised, categorised
All in a day’s work
Amid intercontinental communiqués
Barging with our spyglass
Into this, someone’s private piece of space
(And these handsome cats
Coming and going up and down the garden)
Like loud tourists
Would you look at that, spectacular
There’s a beautiful galaxy in the corner of the field
With a companion
Caught in some private act
Why do we delight so in detail
Not just galaxies, but a storm of galaxies
Like snowflakes in the vortex of a streetlamp
Don’t ask, just look, don’t look
Saying how distant we believe these things to be
1 March [St Louis Airport, Departure Lounge]
Knowing that you have not always
Looked beautiful in public
Thoughts on applying for an American visa:
How could they dare erect such a
structure
Surmounted by a great bronze bird of prey
And ask you to wait outside the door
With arrogance and inhumility
Protecting their greed
With a show of strength,
Of rigidity, like a game of soldiers
They take themselves so seriously
Asking you to wait outside the door
No bench, only the wet stone steps
And the grey London sky
And the great bird of prey
Arriving in St Louis
And to think, this morning we were by the low Thames,
The seagulls feeding on its banks
We were by white rows of houses
With wrought railings
Where people come & go closing the door quietly
Going to work with discrete steps
And here, fluorescence, everything a strange shade
And named with self-consciousness
As if nothing could take it away
The precious flight of quick departures
From the realities of this earth
It is all for us, this is how it must be done
The neon bud sign and the television
And the cocktail bar
And the lights probe into the deepest
Layers of your face, your lines,
Your weary colour-skewed skin
And you remind yourself
You have not always
Looked beautiful in public.
...
10? April [Palo Alto]
Weeks pass in the land of freeways, malls
Temperance of beach
And the handsome gulls with their weightlessness The handsome, weightless gulls
Baby Nora comes and goes in dreams
A presence in the bright air
We wake each morning to a blue sky
This was March:
Slow walking down suburban streets
In an unaccustomed heat
Goose bumps from a new sun
Smell of pine, of eucalyptus
And nausea, another chicken roasting
And saying this will pass,
This too will pass
All of this will pass
....
Five steps to a used car:
1. A fat blond guy in thongs
Locked the keys in the Honda Accord
Living with his mother, ulcers, you know
A bit much really
Small box by the freeway
Left at the Seven Eleven, nowhere
Left the lights on, ran the battery flat
Big swaying boat of a car
No good sign
2. Al the live butcher selling his Capri
Low, white, spoky hubcaps
Blue inside and slung back
And leaking oil expensively
Says the Turkish mechanic
Trying to sell us his own Plymouth Colt
Instead
And the Hispanics like these cars
They say.
3. A VW bug from a fat
Lady whose mother
In law only drove it
To the mall
4. A Hyundai from a sincere
Man-and-son in a too
Clean shop/garage in a
Place that looks like nowhere
He looks at you wide-eyed
Blue eyed wishing well
Every possible aspect of life.
5. A Mazda, from a Romanian
Immigrant with a sleepy
Daughter, in a complex
In San José, at least a
Meat market full of orientals,
A good price.
18 April [Santa Cruz]
Dark art of life
Planting seeds, future harvests
The body numbs the mind
So much utopian
Climbing the high hill
Fog on the bay below
A boy in the high grass, drumming
What don’t see [sic] is old people
Struggling, so much attention
To the blind dull stuff of happiness
And what is beyond, righteousness
And bureaucracy and hygiene
A bit unmoved these days
Contented in an impermanent way
Waiting for the body to repair
Sometimes you wonder if you
Shouldn’t push harder, faster,
Or not push at all, just let.
Nothing much springs from this
Moist earth of utopia
This abundance of opportunity
And all the contented people
Wandering the streets and beaches
And the dolphins swimming up and down
And everything highlighted,
Drawing attention to itself
And people overdoing causes
Which don’t concern them,
Have already been done
Singing old songs only
Or songs which sound old
Incriminating past heroes,
Procreating, too easy life
Under a hot sun,
Boy in the grass
Beating a drum
Looking out over the bay
The fog, the blue,
The harp of Monterey.
What image comes to mind
In the grey, in the blue
Weightless sky small bird
Humming at the flowers of the
Lemon tree so close you could
Grab him out of the buzzing air
Long legged wave birds
In the surf edge
Improbable legs running
And elegant beaks probing quickly
In the foam
How the water goes away
Into the sand inevitably
What is this part of life
Floating in a California house
Going to the beach
Sleeping weightless, floating
Bumping into things, but not hard
Forgot the stars, which are no closer
Look at the earth
Nature by day
Cities by night
All the interstates of our earth
And the continents rimmed
In the temperate zones
With life
And even here on Earth
*We sleep in a kind of weightlessness
Bumping gently against the stuff of dreams
Space walkers
And one small screw alone
In orbit, in freefall
And who knows, eventually
It may fall through the atmosphere
Glowing for a moment
*And someone, somewhere
*May wish on the small screw
That got away
For such is the stuff of shooting stars
...
7 May
How to poeticise the computer terminal
How science is done
One night, bumping against a kind of subjectivity
Like this: first an airport, departure lounge
Then a tram with naked women,
Pale, round fleshed, some of them wounded
Then a land where whatever you imagine happens
First, invasions, then a bolted door
Another bolt, and another, each an act of concentration
Knowing you are creating the enemy from your own terror
And that this is hell, the land of subjectivity
And that dreams are not things that arrange themselves
But rather, spaces that exist, like rooms, inside your mind
That you can drop into, and if you have been there before
You know where the doors are
So, grabbing three small bags of seeds
And taking off my sandals
I began to run, down and down the spiral staircase
And out onto the other plane
Of prepared beds
Hi
gh above the ground.
...
Acts of Science
What we mostly do is neither so noble nor so difficult,
Making mechanical reductions of received light,
Our daily efforts rising like a dry noise,
Like so many frogs on a summer night
Picking apart the density of space
To discover, eventually, our own purpose:
More continuance than curiosity.
Always, we find ourselves at the divergence
Of two paths, travelling out.
Otherwise, our questions
Would already have been answered.
...
10 June
Can cosmology soothe the soul?
Does cosmology comfort the soul?
Two dogs running in the surf
A seal plunges from a rock
The surf never resting
A deep cave, not even shadows
Heaps of dark weed
A lost sweater
How the waves come in fingers
Playing the sand
...
20 June
Sunlight in a bamboo forest
And water, and quiet
Slow in the making these days
Climbing hills, the grass dry now
The sky blue
A long snake lying across the path
Moving as if unseen
How little time it takes them
To reclaim this hill
To the snake, only grass
No view of the bay, and the white boats
Which have become our familiars
And the air cool like spring
And perfect in a way.
...
28 June
NYT 26 April 1994
The quest begun by philosophers in ancient Greece to understand the nature of matter may have ended in Batavia III, with the discovery of evidence for the top quark, the last of twelve subatomic building blocks now believed to constitute all of the material world ...
The Twelfth Quark
Wandering the shore of inquiry,
Of faith in the irreducible,
We come upon a twelfth footprint,
Barely legible,
And feel our theories close upon themselves,
And we sit down and announce,