ElleShaped

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Tag Archives: Real Life

The Unheard Eulogy Of The Stone

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by EBannion in Musings

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Poem, Real Life

Born from the embers of ancient dead stars
And shaped by the roiling youth of our sphere
Your edges were rough and your shape was untooled
Your creator the endless and natural law

Your birth-herald: anguishing cracking of rock
And the shattering cleaving of your mother shale
The wrenching, the roaring, the shivering earth
You were cast out on the high, lifeless shore

You were, and you watched, and the heavens spun on
No thinking, no wanting, no needing, no pain
Nor moved nor aroused by breeze or by gale
Your heartbeat, the eons that came and then went

When a sudden miraculous swirl then unfurled
Your timeless eyes dazzled, it burst out from nothing
It flooded your world and it flowed and it changed
Inconstant, ineffable, changing, bizarre

Blooming, then with’ring, then rising again
Its shapes inconceiveable to your solid mind
First specks, and then patches, then suddenly, roots
They, your first teachers of wounding and pain

Small fissures, a few chips, a weathering rut
Water flowed over and gnawed at your flesh
Then covered, engulfed, and shrouded in green
Around you, your brethren ground into sand

But you, you had fortune’s compassionate light:
The earth groaned and buckled and carried you high
So swiftly, so slowly, a mountain arose
And you were its capstone, its heavenly heart

But then, after ages! Your body, invaded!
So high were you pressed that the air became chill
Those precious few drops which had slithered inside you
They froze, they expanded, the agony grew

Then rending and killing it forced you apart
First one crack, then dozens, shards flaking away
Where you once had towered, a unified whole,
Now fractured and broken you cowered and fell

’till there was nothing to marker your tomb
No token remembered, no heart there aggrieved
Your glory once perfect now crushed and brought low
With nary a witness, and no one to mourn

Universe as Phantasmagoria

11 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by EBannion in Musings

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Cosmic Wonder, Phantasmagoria, Real Life, The Butterfly Experiment, Zen

Phantasmagoria –  /ˌfanˌtazməˈɡôrēə/ – noun – A sequence of real or imaginary dreamlike images. The original usage referred to an early predecessor of slide projection, primarily used to project unsettling images of ghosts, devils, and other terrifying creatures, making the word have somewhat sinister undertones.

This same dissonant, ethereal, ‘that ca’n’t possibly be real’ feeling is evoked when I look around at the state of the world around me.

I don’t mean the greater political landscape – though that terrifies me as well, for different reasons. I mean, literally, the world just outside my door. And, often, within as well.

We live in a world full of wonder. Every morning, the sun rises – an almost unimaginably hot, indescribably huge ball of nuclear fire claws its way up above the horizon in a blaze of colors ranging from faint orange to deep crimson, against a field of every brilliant shade of blue imaginable. Only those colors aren’t real – they are simply the only way our tiny brains can begin to interpret the vast spectrum of electromagnetic waves spewing at us across the immense distances involved. And, actually, it isn’t moving. We are, at more than 1,000 miles per hour, on the surface of a spinning orb that is, itself, moving in a complex dance that carries it, us, and everything we know through a deadly void that is as close to true nothingness as one can get.

We, ourselves, are amazing. Our bodies are built out of nearly countless cells – estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of one hundred trillion (that’s 100,000,000,000,000… but just typing that number out makes it clear how totally incomprehensible it really is to our minds. I know what it means. I can even sort of grasp the magnitude of it, with effort. But then I think about how just to count that high at my normal counting rate (roughly three numbers a second) would take, literally, a million years, and my mind just blanks again.

That’s not the best part, though. These cells come in a stunning variety of sorts, each radically specialized for its own particular task – a clockwork machine called a ‘person’ with one hundred trillion little moving springs and cogs and wheels. And it happened – most likely – totally by accident, one chance in a number so high it is essentially infinity that lead to something that could replicate itself, a process which snowballed into what we have today.

And each of these cells is, itself, made of one hundred trillion atoms – and this is even more amazing, if that is possible. The cells, at least, are ‘alive’ (whatever that really means, but that is beyond the scope of this post) and so their ability to do things is at least somewhat comprehensible. The atoms, formed into molecules, formed into larger arrangements, are simply a game of pachinko at a massive scale, tiny particles crashing and bonding and splitting and crashing again in a way that, through some ineffable miracle, gave rise to this self-motivated, apparently conscious, willful, powerful bag of dirty water which has incredibly – impossibly – incomprehensibly – gained consciousness.

And all around us are billions of similar creatures, and trillions more somewhat related clockworks, from tiny ones with but a single cog to those hundreds or thousands of times more massive than we are.

How do I get from here to phantasmagoria? Simple: we don’t see it. We blithely go about our business, moving from here to there and back, doing our ‘jobs’ – as if they were part of some natural law, totally heedless of the fact that everything we call society is just a consensual, mass hallucination shared by seven billion of us, fractured and subdivided by nearly imaginary lines. We allow ourselves to be so consumed by our nearly insignificant concerns, worries, joys, disappointments, victories, defeats, and other ephemeral-in-a-cosmic-sense experiences that we manage to be -bored-.

So: phantasmagoria. A dreamlike illusion of banality overlaid on an astonishing backdrop of staggering immensity.

I think I am going to make a point of watching a sunrise sometime soon, just to remind myself.

The Other Half

17 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by EBannion in Admin

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Computer, Real Life

Xeno would be grumpy at my extremely liberal interpretation of his original argument, but… he’s dead. Who cares.

While I was trying to write my eulogy for Glitch, my computer crashed. That wasn’t, itself, unusual… Sethra has never been very well since I built her, and despite a number of transplants and RAM replacements, it turned out that the hard drive was done for.

Replacing the hard drive, I decided to rename her. It seemed like a brain transplant was severe enough to pass the ‘not the old one any longer…’ test. However, the pondering did lead to my little fable, and so we see that all questions bear fruit.

Anyway. Windows 8 is strange. I sometimes feel like I’m putting on one of the programmable-silicon spacesuits they use in Peter F. Hamilton’s “Night’s Dawn” trilogy, and sometimes I feel like I’m being eaten by an ooze.

The new computer works better than the old one ever did. Her new name is Alessa. I hope that it is ironic and not foreshadowing.

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