--A September 17, 2015 Focus Lecture for the WomenExplore Fall Lecture Series
“What Matters to Me and Why?”
ONE It
Was a Dark and Stormy Night
For several evenings, my brown and tan, Domestic
Short Hair Rescue Cat, Shao Lin, had been staring intensely out of the window,
looking up at the stars. Unfortunately, this particular night’s weather
forecast indicated persistent clouds, curtailing her research.
And so she now sat across the
room with her tail thrashing irritably, her grumpy, green-eyed gaze focused
relentlessly on my left ankle.
Even Jean Luc, my often oblivious, but quite
loving, brown and tan, Main Coon Rescue Cat shifted restlessly in his soft,
white nest
on the couch. Noting the movement, Shao Lin
quickly shot him a disdainful glare and slowly stretched out her front paws,
brandishing her sharp, hooked, shiny nails. He was not to interfere.
Satisfied with his compliance, she now stomped
across the living room rug toward me, whiskers twitching, ears back, determined
to proclaim her latest insights into the
mysteries of the universe. Her Publish-or-Perish-Drive-to-Glory could
be discerned clearly in her arrogant, self-righteous demeanor. At one time that
familiar mandate also reverberated within my own soul, reminiscent of the
Academic Sandbox in which I had spent nearly four decades, running fast with
scissors.
Her narrowed eyes filled
with, “Why?”.
“Why
what?”, I wondered.
“Why
ANYthing?!” Finished with her terse, ontological appraisal,
she marched stiffly, tail high, back hairs up, toward her litter box, with not
a backward glance at me, the Inept Unfurred One.
Devastated, I decided to shore up my defenses by
sending:
A
Text Message to God
Dear God, please exist, and if you do,
please consider my desperate inquiry.
I know you could have made me a speck of
dust floating in the breathtakingly vast, expanding universe; or a bright
photon of light, zipping along in its wave of particles; or a mysterious bit of
Dark Energy lurking within ninety-five percent of everywhere.
In fact, You probably made me all of
these things, at one time or another. Except I wasn’t an “I” at the time. Just
an Eye of a rather large, Bang up Storm in the Dark Night.
Or You could have made me a rock. It
would have been ok. I wouldn’t have minded. Really. Why make me a
Consciousness, only
for me to be painfully aware of my own
eventual demise?
I ask
these questions in earnest. Why not? I have an opposable thumb. I walk on two
legs... mostly. I did reasonably well on my SATs. And yet, answers to
these questions consistently elude my understanding.
I waited for God’s
response... [pause]
Finally,
a Text Message From God!
[low
voice] My
dear, beloved creation,
You can be
such a persistent pain in the ass.
Go live your
precious life, and we will meet again, by and by, at the Gate, near the Tunnel,
where I will answer ALL of your inquiries.
I have to go
now to recharge my iPhone 5s.
Love and
kisses, God
PS: ...that rock idea might have some
merit... LOL...
TWO A
Star Filled Insight
It was early Friday evening when my mother picked
me up after work, from my Grandmother’s apartment, where I lived during the
week. It was now late Saturday night, as I perched on the arm of the fuzzy,
navy blue couch, next to her in the darkened living room, as she stared
anxiously out of the window, hoping her husband, my father, would come home. I
watched, focused intently on her tears, as they slowly moved down the sides of
her face, sparkling like stars from the reflected light of the street lamp outside.
Hoping to comfort her, I offered, “Mommy...
I’M here!”. She glanced at me, patted my upturned, little,
five year old head, and immediately resumed her dedicated vigil out the window.
I looked out of that window as well, up at those same stars, at the bigness of
the night sky, and understood that I would never be of real interest to either
one of them. I also understood that the opposite of love is not a heated
hatred, but rather a room-temperature indifference that slowly starves the
soul.
THREE Infinite
One day in third grade, Sister Helen George
mentioned the word, “infinite”.
Puzzled, I asked her what it meant. She explained
that it meant something that “never
ended”.
Later that afternoon, walking the one block home,
I tried out my newly won knowledge by wrapping the concept around numbers: “One...
two... a hundred!” (I was
impatient.) ”A
thousand. A million... plus one more! A bazillion, gazillion trazillions...
plus one more!” An
electrical storm swirled in my mind as I ran up the stairs to share my newfound,
thrilling insight with my grandmother. ”Bocky,
forever means infinite! Infinite goes on forever... plus one more!”
We laughed together. Then, over our lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise
sandwiches, we talked about the bigness of the idea.
After a while, her face became very serious as
she clarified that not everything was infinite. Some things did end. That in
time, even people would end, that even she would die. I was startled. I never
thought she would not be there. Of course she was infinite and would always be
there! Horrified, I felt my warm tears slowly soak the front of my light blue
t-shirt, as I realized with increasing shock that someday I would actually lose
the person who saved my life by rescuing me from indifference. That one day I
would lose the only person who loved me.
FOUR The
Macrocosm / The Microcosm
My treasured pussycats are gone now, Shao Lin at
19-years, Jean Luc at 18. They both died 2 days before Valentine’s Day, two
years apart, in 2012 & 2014. Sometimes I find myself wondering if Shao Lin
has decided to bite Jean Luc, or if they’re both only memory energy-activating
synapses in my brain. And then I wonder, since those same brain cells
communicate through tangible synapses, where is the tangible part I call “me”
located, the “me” who activates those
synapses.
But for now, I’m the only one staring out of my
window at night, looking up at the moon, the stars. Even though I realize
they’re burning rocks, or exploding hydrogen, or dazzling White Dwarfs, yet
from my perspective, the night sky looks much like a navy, velvet cloth, with
benign, friendly, scattered pinholes of light. If we manage to look behind the
cloth, will we find The Magic Wizard,
or just more layers of Multi Universe cloth?
Immersed in wonder, I sense the amazing vastness
of the Cosmos, the MACROcosm. So big that even if I drove my impressive, 2013,
silver, 6-cylinder, Honda Accord EXL, at the Speed of Light, 186 thousand,
282.4 miles per second [whoosh!],
that fast, it would take just one second to span a distance equivalent
to the 24,901-mile equatorial circumference of the earth... nine times! And it
would take 2.5 million light years to reach our nearest galaxy, the Great
Nebula of Andromeda. Never mind that at that speed, SpaceTime would
slow down my ageing process; I would still be getting rather long in the
tooth...
And when I think of the other direction, the
smallest of the small, the MICROcosm, I am overwhelmed at the concept of
something billions of times smaller than the very atom itself, whose protons,
electrons, neutrons and nucleus were once thought to be the tiniest bits of
matter. But now we know from studying the Quantum, using the five billion
dollar, 17-miles in circumference, Hadron Particle Accelerator Collider in the
CERN Control Center [European Council for Nuclear Research] near
Geneva, Switzerland, that the Microcosm is like its own universe, where physics
folds in on itself, contradicts our beloved notions of how matter exists, and
teases our minds with being in two places at once... but only when actually
looked at! Matter becomes an entity so miniscule that I cannot use an ordinary
ruler to fathom it, and instead try to simply imagine I have magically become
the smallest unit itself, the very beginning of matter. Is there consciousness
here? Is all matter composed of willful consciousness, enveloped within energy?
Is this where consciousness begins? If matter goes so deeply into smallness,
will it flirt with the infinite, or
eventually simply disappear into nothingness, as our entire universe flies
apart and disappears into nothingness, each one of gazillions of stars burning
out its energy until only Darkness exists within
the very last Stormy Night? And then, does Time stop, or Bang into
existence yet again?
Or dance on a String, near a Multiverse Membrane?
How can I expect to have an Afterlife if even the Universe itself will end?
Yes, I will have many questions at the Gate, near
the Tunnel. That is, if the gate hasn’t disintegrated into rusty dust, lying on
a dark, velvet cloth when I get there. And then I think, “OMG!“. And
then, I, [low voice]
“LOL!“... to quote God.
FIVE So...
Some people’s hobby is art, or sports, or making
wine, or making love. My hobby is Astrophysics. But that’s just code. Don’t be
fooled. Striking as the stars are, my real focus is on longing. An
intense longing for some kind of an Entity to
care. To care about
me. To care about all
of us. Not like a Facebook “friend”, but
with His, Her, or Its
actual face... if there is a face. Why make us wait
until we’ve decomposed into heavenly ashes? Why
NOT now? At any rate, I’ve had more luck in my life with dorks than with
A Divine Being, with
the spirited than with The Spirit, with
the available than with The Almighty, with
pussycats than with parents.
So... what does the Universe mean to me? It means
Space, Time, Stars, Searching, Consciousness, Death, Life,
Loneliness, Hope, Courage, Despair, Emptiness, Fear, Creativity, Destruction,
Indifference, Intimacy, Tenderness, Love, Bocky, Us, ...God... maybe...
Everything. It means EVERYTHING THERE IS... to Infinity... plus one
more!
