What’s this world coming to?

[Google is back to making it difficult to add photos.]

Yesterday I noticed a fresh clover bloom in the ditch along the road in front of the house. That seems out of season, as do the two seed heads on the dandelion stems. I have no idea what’s going on in the natural(?) world, and, if we insist on including humans as part of nature, we’ve just made nature more unnatural, haven’t we? Do you find the relationship between humans and nature confusing? depressing? I do, too often.

Then again, I was today year’s old when I learned about "dark matter and dark energy, which together make up 95% of the universe but their natures are almost entirely mysterious...” To clarify, I knew of the existence of dark matter and energy, but not that they made up 95% of the universe. For that matter [couldn’t resist, sorry], how do we, how can we, know that dark matter and energy are the only other components of the universe? Or, perhaps they’re just generic terms for what we don’t know?

Do you remember Don Rumsfeld’s wonderful quote about:

“There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don't know.”

We seem to have reached a point at which the unknown unknowns are growing rapidly. I do know that we went and voted this morning. It will remain unknown for some time how the election turned out and it will be even longer before we learn what the election results result in. Personally, I found the world and the universe more comfortable and reassuring before we learned just how much we don’t know we don’t know. Then, again, I spent many adult years thinking “meaning” is something that exists outside ourselves that we’re here to go find. Then I realized that meaning is like the future, it’s something we create with every single one of our actions at every moment of every day. 

Human Knowledge

By Robert Wrigley

About the only thing I thought I knew

was that nothing I’d ever know would do

any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part

of the horse’s hoof that most resembles

a human palm is called the frog;

certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use;

the abstruse circuitry of an envelope

quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation.

 

Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made,

I took heart in the pointlessness of stars

and lay there until my teeth chattered.

I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge

building a birdhouse out of license plates

manufactured by felons in the big house.

No more paramilitary organizations for me,

I said, ten years before I was drafted.

 

I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick

fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook

a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend,

his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took

my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid

through the church service among the pipes

of the organ and still did not have faith,

although my ears rang until Monday.

 

I began to know that little worth knowing

was knowable and faith was delusion.

I began to believe I believed in believing

nothing I was supposed to believe in,

except the stars, which, like me,

were not significant, except for their light,

meaning I loved them for their pointlessness.

I believed I owned them somehow.

 

A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare.

The horse I loved foundered and had to be

put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope

quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right.

In cold air a nipple horripilates

and rises, the sun comes up and up and up,

a star that bakes the eggs

in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse.

 

God was in music and music was God.

A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag

chain and threatened to beat me

to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign

I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags,

the one he said they’d leave in my mouth

before they zipped the body bag closed.

Yet one more thing I’d come to know.

 

He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass,

no more true than my ownership

of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord

in five or six places on the neck of a guitar.

A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s

becomes a callus, smooth as leather.

Stars are invisible in rainy weather,

something any fool knows, of course.

 

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.