poetry

by

The Language of the Universe?

In the beginning was the Word?

Many say the language of the universe is mathematics, but the language of mathematics is not necessarily numbers. Numbers are a shorthand for words. In quantum mechanics collapsed waveforms is the term for a relationship between particles and their waveforms, in which particles, or indeed any combination of particles (atoms, molecules, chemical and organic compounds, even you) are seen as the focus or point of action of the energy waves involved. In the same way numbers and equations are like the collapsed waveforms of the huge quantity of words that might otherwise be needed to describe them. It is a good analogy. For many mathematical concepts the number of words would be as infinite as the cosmic extent of particle waveforms.

Pi (π), the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, is one such mathematical concept. Written as a decimal it extends to an infinite number of decimal places, of which the first thirty two are as below:

3.14159265358979323846264338327950…

Should you have any need to remember this, some time ago I came across a mnemonic for the first dozen or so places. I changed and extended it to thirty-two before getting bored. The number of letters in each word is the number at each decimal place.

Now –
I sing a scale excelling,
in mystic voice and magic spelling,
sublimest strains incarnate.

Art in its measures will reveal
an angel’s song for the carousel,
and in eternal harmonies dwell,
O!

Feel free to add more of your own.

The idea of numbers being a shorthand for words is not a difficult concept, after all without words how could we explain what numbers are to children? But there may be more to them than that. Pi is far more than the simple relationship of a circle to its diameter.

Pi

Are numbers and equations
the collapsed waveforms of words?
And is pi’s definition
the circling of the birds
round and wide above the hills?
or the volume of a drop of water from the rills
rolling down to plop into shining highland ghylls?

Then the circle of the sphere
and the rolling of a tear
when a sobbing child cries, ‘Why!’
and the Earth around the Sun in perihelion,
and the wide, wide width of tears is pi.

The quick birds’ wheeling cry,
and the crying tears of pain,
and the earth around the sun,
and the round drops in the rain,
and the signs of endless sky,
the music of the spheres,
and the circle of the years,
tell us why.

Birds circling round their prey
know the distance from their nest,
and swooping down from sky,
sharp claw and shining eye,
returning straight and high,
the circle and the swoop,
the short returning loop,
and the gather of the storm
round the centre still at rest
say more to you and I
than the radius and the circle
that are pi.

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The Self Creating Prayer

There is a moment
when egg and sperm become a fertilised cell.
Another before fission,
before one cell becomes two.

Another before the embryo becomes a foetus,
Before the first heartbeat,
the first formation of the brainstem,
the first input from developing eyes and nerves.

Until it ceases to be a foetus,
becomes an unborn child,
still entirely I
before the awareness that is we?

Flesh is translucent to light, carries sound.
The womb is warm, with room to move.
The inborn baby kicks,
sucks, feels, sees, hears.

It learns existence is co-existence long before birth.
Do we re-create this moment
in the fleeting moment of waking from sleep?

Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am,
flees before I am therefore there is other.
The awareness of one’s body in the world,
when I becomes we.

Existence is a common possession,
without which there could be no we.
It gives us our sum – our I am
our summa – our totality.
It sustains and guards us.

Language can be traced back
across continents, across times.
Sustain can mean feed
or provide continuing support.
feed and guard have the same root PA
from which by different routes
we get paternal and father.

There is a paradox.
The first father of whom we become aware
is our mother.

We co-exist in a world interdependent with us;
in which we live and breathe and have our being,
our all in all.

From the heart of I
to the farthest bounds of all our sight and knowing,
all that provides intimacy,
the wonder of our existence;
the familial closeness of child and parent,
within which we are constrained
and free,
calls for humility,
honour, respect and reverence;
all steeped in holy awe.

We renew it in our waking moments each day.

The I that seemed to be at its heart
is an echo of a greater I who keeps it all,
in whom we place our trust
our hopes for the coming day,
the feeding and guarding that a father provides:

Our Father …

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Great and Small Wonders

 
Can you discern the true seat of your soul?
Or say of what your true self is composed?
Give reason for your life? or know the way
In which the essence that is you arose?
Though close confined in flesh and bones, your eyes
Observe the turning world and endless skies.

Enclosed, your soul in seeming prison lies,
Restrained by flesh, particular, within
God’s infinite, eternal universe.
Our boundaries (self stops where else begins)

Show only what our senses will let pass.
Until you know what links your soul to sense
Make no decision as to here or hence.

A boy catches the Sun in a burning-glass. Its image dazzles his eyes blackening a paper sheet; smoke wisps curl, a tiny spot takes fire. A burning glass of photons, tiny portions of the Sun’s heat, so many they dazzle his eyes and light the paper. There are more photons in a burning-glassful of Sun than there are glassfuls of Sun’s rays shining on Earth.

At night; the boy lies in bed gazing out at the sky. Photons, filtered by the clouds, the atmosphere, his window and his eyes, focus in his eyes. He sees small wonders.

He is a marvellous harmony with the photons. Each photon is a harmonic of the whole cosmos and deep calls unto deep. The clouds break. He sees stars, planets, galaxies, the Milky Way. Photons are distorted, focussed and refocused by the gravitational pull of stars, galaxies and galactic clusters, by dark and light matter and the Cosmos itself.

Like a violin string producing harmonics and sub-harmonics, the music of the Cosmos is filled with waveforms and sub-forms. We call them fundamental particles but particles are just our name for the focal points of these very faint, weak waveforms. Although weak, the extent of each wave is as vast as the Cosmos itself. A photon is a fundamental harmonic, one of the smallest notes in the cosmic harmony. The Cosmos is a waveform with many interplaying themes. The burning-glass and the boy are unique and special themes; symphonies on the cosmic scale. It does not matter how many or complex the harmonies may be.

The boy, the burning-glass, the Sun and the farthest star, his body and brain, every cell, sinew and neuron, are part of that harmony. The workings of the mind, emotions, logic, faith, hope, love, may all be explained by analysis of the brain. Not because the brain is all there is but because it is a network of harmonies played on the greatest scale imaginable. Some say that the Cosmos can be examined solely on its own terms; others that it is a wonderful dream in the mind of God. Both may be right. Half a picture may seem complete in itself but it is still half the picture.

Lying on his bed the boy breathes deeply; fascinated by the stars. He listens to his breath. There are more atoms in a lungful of air than there are lungfuls of air in the atmosphere. Every breath since men walked on Earth disperses throughout the atmosphere. Any later breath will include some atoms from it: the dying words of Julius Caesar, the Beatitudes and Hitler’s wartime speeches; the breath of kings and commons, saints and sinners, old, young, hale and dying.

Plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. They fix nitrogen and other elements necessary to life. The same distribution goes on in soil and growing things as his breath in the atmosphere.

He takes part of every living thing and person from the beginning of life on Earth with every breath and every mouthful. He is involved in mankind from his birth and in every moment of living.

Earth is older than men. The boy lives in the presence of immense antiquity. No breath of his, of kings or commons, Moses, Abraham or Mahomet went into the Earth’s making. Men have raised up its stone at their most sacred sites, worked it, used it and admired it. But they are not part of it. It is part of them. The constituents of the boy’s body, like those of the Earth, were not formed on Earth but in stars and supernovae at remote times and distances. We are made of the ashes of dead stars.

A picture may seem complete and yet be part of a greater one. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are men so passionate about the way the world is if it means nothing? Should we listen to those who quote Macbeth: Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing? Or to a still, small voice that tells us: ‘All things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made that was made.’?

‘Before Abraham was, I AM.’

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Christmas sets me thinking.

We are often overwhelmed by emotions surrounding events, religious and non-religious. We can be partly blinded by them; particularly by the sweet tinsel of Christmas – just how silent is a night while a baby is born in a stable cavern? How still is a small town when it is overcrowded and every room and caravanserai full for a census? What would it have been like?

New Little Town Of Bethlehem

Oh, little town of Bethlehem
so full of noise and dust,
outside the inn they’re crowding in,
is there still room for us?
For in those dark streets shining,
is everlasting Light;
the hopes and fears of all the years
are meeting there tonight.

For Christ is born of Mary
and gathered all above,
while mortals sleep, the angels keep
their watch of wondering love.
The morning stars together
proclaim the holy birth,
and praises sing to God the King
and Peace to men on earth.

In waters and the blood of birth
the wondrous gift is given!
and God imparts to human hearts
the blessings of His heaven.
In tears of pain and tears of joy
and cries of birth is given,
the gift of God to humankind,
the promise of his heaven.

No ear may hear his coming,
through all this wide world’s din,
but where meek souls receive him, still
the dear Christ enters in.
Oh, holy child of Bethlehem
come live in us, we pray.
Cast out our sin and enter in,
be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels
the great glad tidings tell.
Oh, come to us, and live with us
our Lord Emmanuel!

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How we Love Children

How we Love Children

How we love children…
continue to love naughty children…
… love them more… weep over alienation from them…
… scold, but still love…
remember, with sadness not blame, tantrums and bad behaviour…
… forget much or most, or remember with amusement,
for childish disobedience is part of growing.
We devote ourselves to them… weep with them…
… teach them to pick themselves up…
… stand back when they are making their own way…
… give them space to grow…
… admire their attempts even when they fail…
… see their hurt when they let you down…
… give them credit, love them even more,
when they try to be good but fail…
… and know this is just their childhood.
All their adult life will grow from this.

If love seems to fail… parent turning from child…
child from parent… the failure is in both.
Parents are also children, babes in eternity,
we have our failings and our fallings too,
and a good Parent who loves us
even more than we love our own children,
who weeps over us, with us,
gives everything, even life itself,
for us.

When we move on from this life we will not be turned away because of our childhood failings, because a good parent does not cease to be a parent when we grow up. However we tried and failed, the great Parent of us all will never fail.

All shall be well, and all shall be well,
And all manner of thing shall be well.
–                      Dame Julian of Norwich.

(Language changes, meanings change. When Dame Julian wrote these words ‘all manner of thing’ meant every possible thing. Now it has been weakened, ‘all manner of things’ is used to mean ‘lots of things’. Dame Julian’s meaning was total)

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The World God Loved

A murmuration of starlings swirl against the setting sun,
a parliament of rooks vote for home or beyond:
the farther field or the evening rest.
The quiet low of cattle,
the lamb’s call, its mother’s reply,
the stilling of the wind,
the pause of lift and sway in the alder boughs,
and the stream’s flow heard clearer
against the hush of the world.

‘My peace I give you,
not as the world gives,
not as the world gives.’

Then what is this ease of sunset into twilight?

‘Hope:
hope for the night,
hope for tomorrow,
hope for my peace.’

What is this calm that stills my soul?

‘Part,
just part of me.’

‘As the flock moves against the set of sun,
As the rooks call for evening rest,
their shape is seen,
their decision made.
The cattle move to home,
the lamb to its dam.
For this I formed the world,
the universe,
you.

‘They know me, the birds and the beasts;
that gather in shifting shapes,
they know me, that go down to the sea,
that face the uncertain waves,
the herds, the flocks, the flowing deeps.
The world they know is me.

‘In the beginning,
in the empty dark,
I brooded like a mother hen
over shifting, uncertain waves,
breathing on them,
choosing the good,
the perfect conditions.

‘Now!
Waves of light,
waves of every kind,
multiplying, separating,
expanding, condensing,
mass, gravity, liquids, solids.
Clusters, galaxies,
stars, planets, moons,
the Earth,

Tides and seasons of Sun and Moon,
driving evolution;
bacteria, cells, vegetal life,
animal life, birds, mammals,

Man, you, in my image,
mothering,
fathering,
loving.

‘Oh! How I loved you;

love you still!’

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So Loved

And God So Loved the World

I AM
the Other of you,
Your Father.

I made the first waking breath,
the infinite-finite moment,
the first pulse of love,
the flickering of desire;

Other than here and now,
Other than where and when,
the first breath, in the first waves
of growing light at dawn.

Other,
fission,
and the world was born:
waters and waves of light,

Other,
you, another,
others.
Loving eyes,
light, sound, colour, cries;
the infinite-finite moment.
Loving eyes, searching:
eyes lost in love.

Oh, how I loved you,
love you.

…

And God called the light day,
and the darkness he called night,
and the heavens and the earth
are darkness and light,
here and there,
day and night,
and it was good;
and God so loved the world.

For God so loved the world
that he gave,
he came,
he shared,
and died,
as his own son.

that whoever should believe in him,

who came, shared and died;
sent from whatever dimensions into these three,
into its tiny inner darkness,
no bigger than this universe,
this hazelnut universe,
this mere infinity of three dimensions,
than which there is so much more;

should have eternal life.

For the turning of the wheels of space and time
are no more than the smooth rolling shell of the hazel.

…

And can he love his lost ones,
lost within the hazel shell?
And if it roll so tinily in his hand,
did he yet enter it?
And are we held in time?
And was he here,
in the bright day
in the kernel’s heart?

‘Love those who hate, bless those who curse, do good to those who spite.’

We must love the lost
who cannot escape,
the captives in that outer darkness
no bigger than a hazel shell:
those who did not believe,
cannot believe,
will not believe
in Him.

May the Lord bless you and keep you,
fallen away in the darkness.
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
fallen away from the one true Person.
May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you,
you we brand as demons, lost and unloving,
and grant you his peace

…

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All the Time in the World

Linespace

Concerning time we tend to ask,
(though feeling slightly foolish)
‘If time began with the Big Bang,
what happened before then?’
before when there was no before,
when there was not a when,

a question in a circle,
a circle in a round
when never was was never found
nor ever was again.
…

We are growing old together,
we two, the world and I.
and we often talk together
as I lie in the heather
and think of wind and weather
and what it is to die.

‘If time began with the Big Bang,
there must be something other.’

We both were born so very young,
we two, the world and I,
when time was nothing to be found,
except we heard a bugle sound
to live or die.

In these purple heather flowers
the minutes turn to hours
and the passing of the clouds
is passing time.
…

Concerning space we tend to ask
(though feeling slightly foolish)
‘If space began with the Big Bang,
with what beyond did it compare?
beyond where there is no beyond,
where there is not a where?

a question in a circle,
a circle in a round
where nothing there is ever found
nor ever will be there.
…

We are growing old together,
we two, the world and I.
and we often talk together
as I lie in the heather
and think of wind and weather
and what it is to die.

‘If space began with the Big Bang,
there must be something other.’

We both were born so very small,
we two, the world and I,
when there was nothing else at all,
except we heard a bugle call
to live or die.

In these purple heather flowers
the sky and space are ours
and the passing of the clouds
is far away.
…

Spacetime began with the Big Bang,
with no before or any where.
There must be something other.
Other than the world and I,
Other than the clouds and sky,
Other than the words we choose,
Other than the facts we use,
Other in the most extreme,
Other than all other.

Could that Other that is other
than this universe be nothing?
No time? No space? No thing?
A song we cannot sing?

We cannot think of nothing,
but we think of nothing less,
a void, an emptiness.
An emptiness in what?
So we look for something else,
for something Other.

We lie here in the heather,
we two, the world and I.
and we talk again together
and think of wind and weather
and what it is to die.

In the heather banks of spacetime,
in the flower bells of space,
tiny quanta flicker and tiny quanta chase,
ghosts of Might and Might Not,
ethereal as lace.
…

We two, the world and I, are lost in idle chatter.
Matter in our cosmos has mirrored anti-matter.
Is the Other anti-universe?
The Other in the Looking Glass,
converse of our own converse?
Has it mind? And does it matter?

Matter and anti-matter
annihilate each other,
What would become of spacetime?
No more us and no more Other?
No-thing, no where, no when,
questions in a circle, circles in a round,
where never was was never found,
nor ever was again.

We lie here in the heather,
we two, the world and I,
and we talk again together
and ponder altogether
just what it is to die.

We cannot think of nothing,
but we think of nothing less,
we look in an abyss, into an emptiness.
Asking emptiness in what?
always wanting something else,
something Other.
…

We two, the world and I,
have much to take and give.
We two were born a single kind
The world is home for humankind.
It is our home, we are its mind
we much search and we must find
just what it is to live.

We’re conscious here, why not the Other?
Years of searching, years of dreams,
for others here found nothing more.
Are we rarer than it seems?
Are we alone?

Mitochondrial DNA
has one root through all the Earth.
Cells of mosses and of trees,
spiders, antelopes and fleas,
the lion and the lamb, all these,
the fossil and the newborn babe
are each other’s families.

Only once was life’s seed sown,
in this dear Earth we call our own.
Once in this land and all its seas,
once in four-plus billion years,
with so slim chance are we alone?
…

We two, the world and I,
have much to give and take.
we lie and talk together
and still we wonder whether
If conscious mind is scarce to find,
what chance is there in Other?
Does it know? Is it awake?

Here the chance of consciousness
is cut by the click and chime,
of fourteen billion years or less,
but Other has all time.

Infinite is far without end.
Eternal, an ageless when.
If far is as far as the dice are cast,
and an age is as long as spacetime lasts,
and when all time and space is past,
the Other is beyond then.

More than ‘eternal’ and ‘infinite’,
Unbound by time and space
pervading here and now,
in every time and place,
distance, seconds, years, alike,
our world is a treasured seed
Other has all the room in the world,
Other has all the time it needs
to nurture and to weed.
…

We lie here in the heather,
we two, the world and I.
and we talk again together
and think of wind and weather
and what it is to die.
And the sheep go grazing yonder,
while the world and I still ponder
how the bush that flamed with wonder
could speak in tones of thunder,

‘I AM what I AM.’

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Saving the Earth

Many denominations celebrate creation in September, calling the month Creation-tide, thinking particularly of mankind’s care, or lack of care, for it. I wrote these lines to remind myself not to forget, in my love and hope for God’s world, that there is a greater work to be done.

If lightly we forsake the upward way
and Earth’s green pastures seem a worthy goal,
and if we save the forests and the seas,
the elephant, the tiger and the bees,
shall we then ask, ‘What profit is in these?’
if light along the way we lose our soul?

We who hold creation’s Word in trust,
were chosen by our Father as trustees.
Lilies fade in just a day to die,
and yet God sees.
Birds drop to dust beneath a soaring sky
as surely as one day will you and I,
and yet God sees.

We are worth more to him than these.

Guardians of this globe and all its gain,
its mountains and the mosses and the rain,
the slime moulds and the seas,
the wasps, the flies, the bees,
the sparrows, and the lilies, and the trees.

Are we worth more than these?

What is man?
When I consider the heavens,
what is man?

We hold this world in trust,
raised, like it, from dust,
with souls as fertile seed within us sown.
Though we dig and we preserve
we must risk the Living word,
or say, abashed , absurd,

‘Thou hast thine own.’

And will he say, ‘Well done!’?

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Genesis

You can talk of the Day of the Jackal.
You can talk of the Day of the Dead.
In Cromwell’s day, so it is said,
the days were black and the days ran red.

But the days that are as a thousand years,
and the thousand years as a day,
belong to Him who made the world
in six, plus one for play.

I have long wondered at the scientific accuracy of the biblical seven days as described in the first chapter of Genesis and the beginning of the second, and how few Christians think it has any accuracy at all, usually describing it as ‘truth dressed in story’. Its accuracy is particularly remarkable as it bears all the hallmarks of an oral tradition which predated writing. Even in the bronze age when it probably first found written form there was little scientific basis to draw on.

As in the poem above, biblical folk used day in the same varied way that we do. Peter, quoted in the second verse, gave an inspired explanation of this (2 Peter 3:8). I have interleaved the complementary biblical and scientific accounts below (or see children’s version, September 2016).

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void,
Space-time traces back to a chaotic void, in which possibilities, eventualites, shimmer in and out of being.
darkness covered the deep
an unstable, pregnant darkness.
and the spirit brooded over the waters.
The initial conditions had to be just right, in perfect balance…
God said, ‘Let there be light.’
… for electromagnetic waveforms to survive.
He separated the light from the darkness
Those first waves separated, producing others in the primaeval void.
***
God said, ‘Let there be an expanse…to separate waters from waters
The new waveforms burst in a vast expansion…
God called the expanse ‘sky’
… and space was created.
***
God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be drawn together…’
Waveforms condensed to particles, protons, neutrons, electrons…
… and let dry ground appear.’
… atoms condensed out of this ‘soup’ of particles, …
God called the dry ground land, … the waters he called seas.
… mass and gravity brought them together. Solids and liquids formed and eventually the Earth with its amazing landforms and sea-scapes.
Then God said, ‘let the land produce vegetation…
Primitive vegetal life began, probably in hot inland springs, and travelled to the seas.
***
God said, ‘Let there be lights in the sky to separate day from night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons, days and years…
The tidal forces of the sun and moon and stars drive and mark the seasons, days and years, which in turn drive evolution.
***
God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures…
Animal life, primitive at first, formed in the oceans…
… and let birds fly above the earth and across the expanse of the sky…
… then spread to land. Many early forms perished, including the dinosaurs, of which birds are probably the only descendants.
***
God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals each according to its kind…
After the great Permian extinction mammals proliferated and became the predominant large creatures on land…
God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in our likeness…
…of which man, the latecomer, came with the ability to wonder at creation and to love it…
… and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over livestock over all the earth and the creatures that move on the ground.
… and with the immense responsibility this brought.
***
... on the seventh day God rested from all his labour…
… like the first it lasted less than a millisecond.

Then the real work began.

The events and order in this early creation account match modern science almost too accurately. Then there is the coincidence of waters and waves and the apparently contradictary concept of a formless or chaotic void, translations of the original which quantum physics now supports. Those with a statistical bent may work out the odds. But whether we can, whether we want or need to, we can still be amazed. We should still wonder.