Quote of the Week?

Here's something new. Maybe I'll keep up with it, maybe I won't, but I feel like doing it regardless.

"Le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort."
- Oscar Wilde

One of my favorites, actually.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854, during the Late Victorian Era. He was a prolific writer of plays, poetry, journalism, and novels. Wilde was known for his flamboyance in dress and speaking, famous for his impeccably sharp wit and conversational abilities. He helped to popularize the concept of aestheticism, or "art for art's sake". He made it clear that he preferred art to nature in many ways, exalting the creativity and decadence of mankind's artistic tendencies. It states that morality and art are two separate entities, that art not only doesn't have to be useful but that true art should not be useful in any sentimental or moral way. Art should be designed to be a pleasure to the senses over all else.

The quote, from Wilde's play Salome, is French for "the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." I interpret it as the comparison between the within and without in all of our humanity - love is "within," an internal feeling that we produce inside ourselves, contrasted with death being the "without," an external actor that affects every living thing. Using this logic, Wilde seems to suggest that introspection is the key to discovering ourselves and pushing ourselves closer to the "wholeness" we all subconsciously strive toward.

It is not to say that the mystery of death is wholly unimportant. External forces acting upon humanity and its collective psyche are important simply because they act. Perhaps we will never find out why death exists, or what universal forces (entropy?) make it necessary. But really, it's the same logic and rationale that people have when it comes to space travel - why should we go out looking for more puzzles when we have plenty to solve right here? Why should we venture out into the cold reaches of inhumane death when inside each and every one of us is carrying around a massive amount of secrets if we'd only look inward?

In a less romantic view, love and death are simply different states in what amounts to a finite state machine of a brain. Different chemical configurations flooding neurons with what we interpret as a "feeling," or lack of one in the second case. Are we simply the sum of our parts or have we become more? It's hard to argue that we're not more, in my opinion, with the sentience we've achieved, the art we create, and the constant need for more we're compelled to feel as living things. Though until we figure that out, it's also pretty easy to argue that we're simply the sum of our parts. With drugs available that can make us feel a specific way, flood us with dopamine and seratonin, happiness seems truly like "just another state of mind."

Sky

she of the sky
and i of the earth

if i hold her up
should she tear me down
steal the crown from my head

alack
she was not the first
to bellow with ashen breeze
for i lit the flame
Fault cannot be measured by the inch.
not blameless
and so came to pass

her ice and my fire

i spewed a dragon's breath upon the sky
her delicate snows could not withstand
the heat of flame
But what of blame?
blame is worthless to me now

no snow will land on my fiery surface now
not of her; not falling from her gray-tinted sky

Accidents

I would be lying if I said it had been intentional.

Then again, most of the truly great inventions of our time have been accidental. Alexander Fleming is credited with going on vacation while leaving bacterial cultures strewn about his desk. Upon his return, he noticed that there were areas of the culture plate which had been contaminated with fungal growth. The fungi resembled rocky peaks rising from fecund forests of bacterium - the bacteria were unable to flourish upon them or at their immediate bases. Thus, penicillin was born; perhaps the most important discovery of the twentieth century made mostly due to the chaos of an uncleaned desk.

The modern discovery of vulcanized rubber is generally attributed to both Charles Goodyear's good fortune and clumsiness. It's true that Mister Goodyear was searching for a way to harden and stabilize rubber at the time, a quest that he had set out upon half a decade prior to his accident. In the process of mixing another experimental concoction of rubber, lead and sulfur, he spilled a bit of it upon the hot surface of his stove. The result was a near instant curing of the substance into a much more versatile form. This made way for the modern sneaker, the automobile tire, and the ever popular SuperBall.

So is it, then, that accidental discoveries are truly made by man? Is the hand such a necessary ingredient when said hand is guided by serendipity to a conclusion? It would be convenient for me to answer 'no' to this question, though Mr. Goodyear and Mr. Fleming would almost certainly say 'yes'. The reality is that the hand itself is, in a way, an accident in itself. Darwin's process of natural selection is remarkably elegant in this way. Of course, there is no discrete moment where the hand suddenly appeared; it likely the natural extention of a fish-like creature's rudder-like fins. Adaptations such as the hand, the leg, the ability to breathe oxygen, and the immune system original appear as mutations, mistakes in the transcription process of DNA.

Just as in human affairs, most of these 'accidents' yield negative or neutral results. Dropping a mixture on a stove, for example, would usually only necessitate another batch be made. The sudden appearance of a very small fin mutation on a fish, however, may allow the fish greater locomotive capability. It is thus more capable of reproduction, and thus passes the gene to its offspring. So perhaps it's not the accident that needs steering, but rather a process to recognize the accident, be it a hapless scientist or the force of natural selection. Penicillin, after all, had likely existed for millions of years prior to its human discovery. It only took application.

Is it not just as likely, then, that my work was just a rubber plant in need of a hot stove? Lightning that simply needed a jar? It's true that similar structures exist naturally in the universe, and similar things are probably going on all the time. Without the ability to directly witness them, they remain in the realm of phenomena rather than invention. It's impossible to say, then, that my invention is a simple mimicry of black holes or binary neutron star systems or tremendously powerful supernovae; I would not be surprised in the least, though, as the method is quite similar.

Einstein's theories of special and general relativity may not seem important in any capacity save science fiction and the modern imagination. This is far from the actual truth. In a world where global positioning systems use the time it takes a signal to beam from orbit to earth, relativity is important as a corrective factor. Satellites falling around the sphere of the earth travel at thousands of miles an hour - about eighty-seven hundred miles per hour. Such speeds necessitate a correction by a factor of approximately 1/12,342,857,143, or about seven microseconds per day. Of course, this appears to be a very, very small factor when thinking practically. And for all intents and purposes, it is small in this case.

My discovery exploits this dilation several billionfold. What if the aforementioned factor could artificially be made larger, perhaps much larger? In the case of the orbitting satellite or space station, there is a ratio of nearly 1:1 between the time passage of a point on the orbital structure and a point on the earth. One cannot ignore the rounding error in this assessment, however - an error of approximately 0.000000008%. In order to increase it, my research used another of Einstein's assessments; that a sufficiently dense mass could indeed produce a very similar effect. And indeed, this it did quite well. The experimental setup managed to create a phenomena very similar to a black hole without its characteristic voraciousness. It was theorized that such a structure would evaporate in nanoseconds, but the trick of time dilation stretched nanoseconds into days, years, millennia in a particular frame of reference.

A lauded physicist named Katherine Freese is famous for having declared that given an infinite amount of time, she will one day reappear. This is necessarily true. Given an infinite amount of time, all possible events must happen an infinite number of times. Such is the nature of time and probability.

This was the secret to my 'invention'. This was the secret to how all this mess was made. This was the secret of backward time travel.

Bullet

I'm certain at this point everyone has been in a situation where time slows down, crawling as if in a traffic jam, waiting for the choke point to pass, for the congestion to be cleared. It used to happen to me, for example, when I made small errors in judgment while driving, resulting very nearly in a car accident. You can feel your heart beating, your blood pumping in your capillaries, you reflexes and thoughts speeding to handle a threatening dangerous situation.

This feeling is what I am experiencing right now, one hundred fold. My ears hadn't yet registered the gun shot that would prove to be my undoing, but the first two bullets had been fired and ricocheted harmlessly off the pavement. The third was right on the mark, and somehow I already knew it, my brain could sense its end as if it was rehearsed. The script of my life, with all its droll dialogue and useless subplots that went nowhere, about to end.

Time was slowing down, almost enough that it stood completely still. I could feel droplets of sweat on my forehead slowly forming, drop by drop secreted within each gland beneath each pore. I could feel myself moving, as if automatically, though painstakingly slowly. The only feeling I could have compared it to was my brief stint in ballet class when I was much younger - a choreography that, again, implied that this was planned. An awkward dance of movement, of desperation.

My life began to flash before my eyes as I felt the bullet tear through my flesh, as they say. It was an odd feeling, though not completely unpleasant. At the very least, it ignored all the negative portions and focused almost exclusively on the positive. First memory, first kiss, wedding day, all that. It completely skipped over my divorce, the loss of my children to my spouse, who at that point was planning on moving across the country - Boston, had the court officer said? I shook off the thought as being unimportant. In fact, pretty much everything seems unimportant in this situation. I would say you should try it sometime, but you undoubtedly will.

It was a shame that it took until this moment to feel that happy and content with my life, to feel as if everything was inconsequential. Finally, I was able to truly let go, to loose control and be happy about it. I suppose it's exceedingly easy to forget about your cares as a bullet slowly tears through the nerve centers of your brain, debilitating speech centers and motor control functions alike. I didn't need them anymore.

NOTE: Well, I didn't ever finish this one. Figured I'd post it, anyway.

The Last Stop

There's something about the bus, and in general all public transportation, that inspires some type of unity in me. The enclosed spaces, the silent staring. This was made abundantly clear to me when I took a job between second and third shift, and had to pull out the schedule to make sure I could time everything out perfectly. Said schedule was a bit too confusing for me, but one of the receptionists at the front of my building was happy to oblige. This is when I discovered the virtue of being the last stop.

There were regulars and there were people you'd see rarely. The latter were mostly young people returning from parties, too drunk to stand, much less drive their own cars, but this was mainly during the end of the week. Revelers rarely showed up on the Monday night drive, and that's why it was my favorite. You see, on the long stretch of road between the last stop and the one immediately before it, there were never many people, and none of them were too open to conversation. That's what attracted me to them.

The first one I talked to was a seemingly successful businessman who had buried himself in work. He had a wife and two children, but apathy gripped his brain after years of sameness and monotony. He pulled twelve and sixteen hour shifts until his near-omnipresence at the office caused him to become indispensable. He theorized that if he were let go, the entire place would fall around the owners' feet. He might have been right.

Homeless people are fairly common on buses, especially in large cities and such where vagrants can find temporary shelter in disused buildings or park benches. Or the bus, as it were. Some of them had romantic tales of self-sacrifice or adventure to spin, though I'm not sure exactly how many of them were true. One woman claimed she had come from far west of here, carrying everything she owned on her back and in her pockets. Fate intervened in a way she didn't expect, and she was robbed blind by this city. She was forced to stay. She was a regular when I started riding, but all at once I never saw her on the lonely Monday night ride again. Perhaps she found the better life she had set out to look for. I like to think so, anyway.

There were the bar-hoppers, men and women who left their homes in nice dress and sharp haircuts. They were still accompanied by these traits when they began to drift home, but their manner of dress was juxtaposed by the melancholy expressions they wore. Not many of them wanted to speak to me. I'd wager the women just thought I was hitting on them, the men too lost in thought about the mistakes of the night to be bothered.

In every story, there's an end, though, and eventually I managed to get bumped up to a better shift for more pay and more visibility, working more "normal" hours. I even managed to move into an apartment that offered me a garage, and driving to work became a welcome possibility. But I kept riding the bus. Even late at night, for no real reason except addiction. Addiction to the unity I felt with all the other patrons. Every night I fell in love with each of their stories, I fell in love with all of them. And when we stepped off at that last stop, they were all just people again, busily brushing past me. Perhaps this is why I never had motivation to start a family in my life. I had the bus. For all their flaws and all their pain, problems, and frustrations, I loved all of them, for fifteen minutes at a time.

Untitled

It started with a hand on my shoulder. It was one part being surprised and one part at the suddenness of the touch that made me jump a little before spinning to face her. As her face and soft smile came into the focus of my vision, I had a moment of doubt. I've been amassing those moments as of late, stacking them neatly into piles. I'm even anal retentive in my own head, organizing the doubts by when they occurred, what sparked them, or just for no reason at all. One of the piles represented the doubts that would become regrets very shortly, that would fester with guilt and pain and fear and angst once I unlocked my car door and climbed in. I stacked another metaphorical box on that metaphorical stack as I greeted the doctor.

I had been here before for an examination. I had signed every piece of paperwork they put in front of me, made every relevant decision, and taken every preparatory drug they'd prescribed. The doctor showed me to the operating room, a place I hadn't seen before. I flashed her a smile as she excused herself for her preparation, leaving me in the sterile room with no company save the buzzing of the florescent lighting. I stared at it for what seemed like eternity, keeping time with its occasional but regular flickering by tapping a foot absently. The stacks were growing higher.

Over the past few days, the changes were constant. My mood flickered like the bulb above me. Click, self-loathing. Click, tenuous pride. Click, anger. Click, a wish that it could all be over. I did wish it could all be over, I still do, but life is never that simple. Life never lets you get away unscathed, no matter which paths you take. It's the brambles or the bothersome insects, unless you'd like to go for the sheer drop. I had considered them all, even that one.

The anesthesiologist was one of the kindest men I've met, despite the difficult job he had applying the local anesthetic. I had wanted so badly to be put under general, but the staff said the inherent risks involved weren't worth it. I would keep my eyes focused like a laser on that buzzing light, and I imagined myself a stone. An unfeeling stone, a stone with no need for anesthesia or doubt or regret or hurt. I concentrated harder and continued to repeat in my mind this desire, squeezing my eyes closed and letting a tear slip slowly down my left cheek, tracing its path down the smooth, rocky edge, collecting dust on its way to the earth. I was a stone. I had to be a stone, now.

I opened my eyes, and I knew it was done. The doctor that had startled me earlier put her hand on my shoulder once again. On her aged features was the expression my mother had given me when I was eight and our pet cat was struck by a car. But she didn't say anything for a moment, and when that moment ended, all she did was inform me that the procedure was done. I appreciated her frankness and brevity.

They kept me in one of the clinic rooms for about an hour and a half after the procedure. This time the object I focused on was the blank television screen. I thought about the ways the light bounced off of the convex screen. I thought about how I felt six hours ago, how I'd feel six hours from now. For now, I couldn't stop the tears from sliding down my face, tracing the pre-carved paths of their predecessors.

I thought about those neat piles of doubt. By the time I arrived at home, my mind felt as if it had been ransacked, all those neat piles torn down carelessly, thoughts scattered and littered on the floors, everything out of order. For the first time today, I didn't care about the rationality of my neatness; I just wanted to torch it all, no matter the collateral damage. My apartment was empty, as I had left it. Of course, he was still gone. The only evidence that he had ever existed was the painting he'd made hanging crookedly on the wall. I'd normally level it out, make everything outwardly perfect before I moved on. Today I didn't.

Miraculously I found my bed by wading through the fog of regret that existed only in my perceptions. I fell on it. My eyes focused on the spinning fan above the bed, not bothering to follow its arcing, circular path. My mind was quiet now, and I was a stone.

Eloquence

Being eloquent was never something I would have thought would be difficult. It's just like any other thing - if you want it enough it can happen, like learning to play the guitar or tame a lion. It's just effort and nothing more, nothing less. Natural talent is something that I've never actually believed existed; the world is a mixture of efforts with just a tiny smattering of aptitude.

But it's easy to be eloquent, and it's easy to not be eloquent. Oftentimes these two states of being are juxtaposed by the intentions, with your more severe efforts to be proper and smooth ending in the most utter failures. I would speak about the other direction, but that's not nearly as important in a society like ours. Someone trying to lack seriousness or poise or tact is generally not going to end up looking elegant by accident. I say generally, though, because I'm sure it's happened.

Eloquence is especially important in matters of courting, and it was never more important to me in one such situation. Her name doesn't particularly matter, but it was a strange one, so I might as well say it; she was Jewel. A suggestive name from proud parents, it seemed, and probably expressive of what most parents think of their new, pink, unblemished spawn. Fiery red hair also made the suggestion that her parents may have taken one glance at the newly birthed creature and thought "ruby."

Jewel was one of the most proper humans I have associated with in all my days. In all my four decades, I'd never before met a woman who had actually been to finishing school. From my cinematic experiences (I had worked in a drive-in theater in my youth, screening film after film for those who would watch, and those who didn't watch but showed up anyway), I had briefly been introduced to the concept by a dusty film featuring Ginger Rogers. Regardless, Jewel had a knack for always keeping her spine straight and her arms neatly at her sides as if balancing a fragile vase atop her head. When I approached her to ask for a date, elegance was an absolute necessity. I had saved my best denim jeans and button-up shirt for that day, even though the jeans were dusty and the shirt was wrinkled. I stood up as straight as my back would allow. Stammering and stumbling, I could feel my heart beating in the soles of my feet, my face heating up as I muttered the invitation. Hearing the answer was even more jarring than asking the question.

She and I dated for some time, but as anything, our interaction was fleeting. Whether by the choice of both those of a couple, a single one or the other, or neither, everything passes with time. Our love was not extinguished by either of our choice, the flame slowly deprived of oxygen until it could struggle no more. She was self-conscious about the wig she wore when we were wed, thought it didn't quite do her former fiery red hair justice. I agreed, but shared the sentiment that it was good enough as long as she was beneath it.

Seven months later, Jewel and I both knew time was short. She refused to rot in a hospital bed for any longer. She died in our bed on a Friday morning, a light rain pattering on the roof. It was seventy-two degrees on June 2, 1977. I was the only one there when she passed; we both told each other that our love was all we had, we weren't lying, aside from the usual and generally unimportant material things.

Life gives and it takes away. Of nothing else am I more certain.

Cold

It begins, invariably, in your toes. The very extremes of your body, the ones most vulnerable in their separation from the central trunk. Trudging through the vast expanse of snow, your toes begin to feel not-so-snug within the confines of heavy wool socks and thick rubber boots. The material surrounding your feet becomes saturated with sweat, conducting the heat from your body externally. Soon enough the socks begin to feel cold themselves, uncomfortably so.

Your fingers, too, despite being locked in thick winter mittens, begin to feel the sting of the cold. Dexterity suffers, of course, the joints little by little becoming stiffer. The snow crunches beneath your rapidly cooling feet as you continue onward. The cold becomes a minor sting, then pain sets in. The movements you make with each step forward strain on the arches of your feet, making you wince from time to time.

But the pain wouldn't last long. The toes are the first to lose feeling before the rest of the foot slowly goes numb. Your feet were soon like bricks; you were able to balance on them, but you weren't entirely sure exactly where they were as you haul yourself forward. Your hands, too, were losing feeling, though much more slowly. The loss of movement now hinders your ability to flex your fingers - would you feel them even if they could curl into a fist? The cold travels up your legs, up your arms, inexorably marching toward the core of your body.

As your feet before them, your legs become stiffer as you march over a snowy hill, peering down from its peak to find nothing but another endless white field. Forcing onward, the hill seems steeper than before, forcing you to break into a bouncing run. Your knees won't bend. You fall and splash into the hard snow, wincing as it permeates the space between your thick down coat and snow pants. It would take a few moments to drag yourself back up, working the joint of your knee until you were certain the same thing wouldn't happen again.

The bottom of the hill on this side looked the same as the one before it. Trees dotted the horizon, and you used the occasional one you pass to sturdy yourself to rest for a moment. Sweat drenches the linings of your jacket, the long underwear you wore. It is the enemy, siphoning precious body heat from your skin, robbing you of warmth. Onward you move, as the sun begins to set to your right, stars slowly becoming visible like pinpricks in a tarp.

Your mind was slowing now, as if afflicted by the same condition your body was suffering from. You are on the ground again, now, laying in the snow, unaware of how you got there. Your legs will not answer your commands, numb and stiff from the effects of the cold. Your body has abandoned them, and to a lesser extent your arms. The warm blood that still flows through you is devoted to keeping your trunk and brain active, though even this emergency procedure has begun to fail.

And just ahead is a cabin, suddenly. You hadn't seen it before but you are grateful for its presence here. Finding your legs unreliable you drag yourself toward it, tugging with both arms in the snow, taking your time. Before you know it you're in front of a warm fire, curled on the wooden floor of this miracle cabin. Content for a moment, you realize that the warmth was slowly increasing. You would have been thankful for it, but soon your skin felt as if it were aflame. Shedding your jacket grants you temporary reprieve from this, but the problem grew worse and worse. Your clothing is removed, one piece at a time, though you still felt you were on fire wearing the bare essentials.

Your capillaries flare in a last desperate attempt to save you, heating your skin rapidly as they flush your flesh with the last of the warm blood pumping through you. The process was faster now that you had no insulation, the cold quickly quelling the nerves in your skin, numbing and deadening. Hallucinations were constant, though grew no more or less realistic as the higher functions of the brain were already gone. The eyes grow heavy, the head grows weary. Sleep is all you know.

Metropolis

New air filled my lungs as I took it in. I held my breath for a split second longer than breathing would require just to fulfill my need to analyze the novelty of it. As the breath passed and I exhaled, the familiar projection of smokey steam rose from my lungs as I expelled the warm air from my nostrils.

This place was new, something I hadn't seen before. Glancing upward I was only offered a small sliver of the midafternoon sky, clouds lazily drifting from one side of the strip to the other. This was something strange, not seeing the sky stretch out before me as I had been used to. Here the streets were narrower, as if part of some remote Italian village where automobile usage never caught on. The buildings towered over me, blotting out significant portions of the sky in favor of squeezing in a pair of tenants in the crowded city.

The streets were not as bustling as I had expected, but did contain a fair amount of pedestrians, most of them hurrying toward their chosen method of public transit to return home for the evening. My own legs carried me from block to block, each looking uniquely different but still vaguely familiar; the same half-canopy of brick and aluminum rising to shield me from the sun's occasional appearance.

In the city, everything shifted constantly. In no direction could you observe a lack of movement. It reminded me inversely of stepping out of my front door in wintertime back in my suburban home. Silence when it snowed. Silence and a kind of permanent twilight, the reflective qualities of the cloud and snow cover exchanging the dim light as the sun sojourned on the other side of the planet. Dead quiet, no wind, with the eerie reddish-pink color that accompanied night in those times. Freshly fallen snow betrayed no trace of passersby, laying fresh and clean in the streets and sidewalks alike. Cold and silent.

The city was bright, the city was colorful, the city was noisy. Where those cold winter nights represented death and sleep, I told myself, daytime on these streets was the symbol of life and activity. Each of those people had a life to live, a place to be, people who loved them. It took a moment or two of pause to recognize this and to truly integrate it into my thoughts, but the feeling of epiphany was worth it.

Eventually the city held less promise than it once did, less splendor and wonder. Getting to know the street layout made navigation easier, but adventure much harder. It's a shame, really, that novelty has to eventually surrender to practicality.

Storytime

It was a fair day, warm by the standards of January in the nation's capital. A breeze had blown for most of the day, propelling leaves along the ground, making light scraping sounds as they skidded along the concrete of the sidewalks. The sun was hidden behind a bank of clouds, and thus the sunset was not accompanied by fantastic color, but rather by a dull fade from gray to black. Ripples rode atop the reflecting pool at the base of the Washington Monument. The obelisk itself stood watch over the place where many had gathered, abandoned by all save its watchful and unblinking gaze.

They had come from all corners; an impoverished couple from the inner cities of Washington had taken the day off to see. A Japanese tourist was there, snapping images of the area so tightly-packed with history that was not his own, but was nonetheless worth capturing. A group of children bussed in from Fairfax to the north of the beltway, whose history teacher felt that it was a day that would be not only significant, but invaluably informative. A family of four who had, together, worked at campaign offices, volunteered their valuable time, and felt it necessary to make the trip from Kentucky to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

There were millions, packing the National Mall to the brim, some hundreds of feet away. It may not have been the mere sight of the event that people wished to enjoy. No, perhaps it was the energy of the moment, of the day. Some, no doubt, attended simply to have a story to tell, or to forever remember exactly where they were on that day.

The dull roar turned deafening when the he emerged from behind the stage. It was like an open-air stadium, though whatever of the noise was lost from lack of enclosure was regained and then some from the sheer numbers. The ceremony itself was short, but the speech which followed didn't disappoint. It was rousing, pure, hopeful, just as those in the crowd had expected.

As the night began to set in, many hours after those millions had egressed, the lights in the White House flickered on. The historic home of the President of the United States looked the same as it always had, but the air was different. Crisper, perhaps more optimistic or hopeful. The eyes of those observing could see no difference, but their intuition would say otherwise.

The lights of the White House were extinguished one by one as the night continued, a brutal cold setting in around the District of Columbia. And so ended the first day of the Presidency of Barack Obama. It had been a difficult road, but it had been paved; from here on, he was forging ahead with no path to mark his progress.