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| eternITy In a discussion with an old college buddy, (how like war veterans we are, looking back at that place in which we did not belong. That place where too many like baby birds with mouths outstretched continued to cry for food and instructions. It was a time when we were to spread our wings, find strength, and soar above the world in a burst of glorious self-reliance but most only cried for more) I complained of art openings and books and movies that were without passion. People pandering to the artist's desire, the artist petting their desires, and everyone in general rubbing warmly against each other, huddled to avoid the cold wind of the eternal. We talked of the way honest art made a man feel. Of the intensity with which one was forced to view IT. There are a thousand names for IT but it a concept of such vastness, I will let you grasp to name. IT is the thing that makes all words too heavy with meaning. Do you know what I mean? That sick lurching half-moment, when you realize you have taken on too heavy of a burden, that you are falling forward and have only pieces of a moment to assess the situation and figure out the most comfortable way to crash. This is how words feel in the mind after you see IT. IT is not good or bad, black or white. IT is the notion of knowing, IT is the container into which both good and evil are poured. IT is the part of us that we can hand to someone else. IT is the part of Sappho and Homer, Aristotle and Democritus that have crossed millennia and now live in darting flashes of electricity that span, in their tininess thousands of years. The Earth can make lightning that reaches miles and could power New York City for days. IT made New York City and has powered civilization for thousands of years. IT lifted man from the churning cycle of sleeping life and death. Now IT demands that you lift it from yourself, force IT forward, add to the tower of knowledge that might someday shelter man totally from fear. Evolutionary biologists have begun to suspect that IT might be a freak. That like the elephant's trunk, IT was born of chance. Life, they say, is certainly elsewhere, but thinking that IT must be elsewhere is like the elephant assuming all life must eventually have a trunk. WE might be it. We might be the only creature in the entire universe that wakes and searches for meaning. We might be the only place in the universe where IT watches. And we might kill ourselves over olive trees and tvs. We might kill the newborn, drown it in our fears and sufferings and forever snuff IT out. STOP. Think of numbers extending forever forward and forever backward. This is eternity. In us IT is barely born. We can imagine a forever. Imagine a universe, full of laws, of broken laws, of atoms, and gorillas, supernovas and anti-matter. Imagine that universe forever unobserved. Forever unnamed. A tiny flame is born, all the right moments. A great explosion, giant stars born then dying, their death throes spewing the basic elements, these elements slamming together, smaller stars born from the gassy corpses of the giants, planets born from huge chunks of stars, of gravity and space. On a tiny rock, inorganic material colliding, again and again, until by chance a code is born. Replication begins. And after life wraps water in skin and stumbles onto land a thumb is born. Chance turns the forest into plain and up onto two feet we run, moving more quickly from food source to food source. Now tools are to be had. IT is less than a moment away. And here we are. Still barely unhitched from our animal beginnings. With the vestige of evolutionary tools still swimming unhindered in our bloodstreams; competing with IT. They make us afraid, they make us want to conquer, not death, but other men. We let them make war. All the time we know we are doing wrong. IT screams that we should stop. Fear takes no effort, it like decay, spreads root in any that do not resist. Will there be another enemy after fear is slain? We can only know if WE help IT remove fear from every man. Is IT hidden in my words, does it snake silent under syntax, and wait for you in the moment of approaching silence? discover TRUTH name BEAUTY destroy fear BEHOLD eternity
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