Even light itself, released from the dawn of the universe, must travel for billions of years to reach us, to tell us its story of the beginnings of all things.
Who are we to know this, yet we must try for it speaks to us of significance and proportion, of ambition and its limitations.
*
Beyond the peerless blue envelope of the sky, blackness – void beyond imagining, stretches away in every direction – broken here and there by outposts, light collectives, generating their own noise to grab our attention as we look up into this beyondness. Yet not even all this can contain us, here on our insignificant speck of lava-filled rock hurtling around its very own self-consuming source of light and heat, consumed with this ‘hubris’ of knowing: What exactly? That our pathetic little lives have meaning, significance, beyond cosmic droppings, dust, intermingled in such a way to create forms to express this desire? Yet, amidst all this chaos of forms, of ideas, something continues, something that not only thinks on such things but demonstrates an eager willingness to continue to search, to know more, to reach out into this blackness, to discover meaning, where everything screams of…what? Nothing? Yet, there it is…repeating down the aeons of time until it coalesces in us…me, sitting here looking out and looking in at the same time…unwilling to admit my life serves no purpose, has no meaning beyond this collection of atoms of dust, adrift on a small blue-enveloped planet in an insignificant solar system tethered in space by a ball of nuclear explosions!
*
But wait! If the brush is too broad it reduces us to nothingness, too narrow and too much is left out to make any sense of what we see.
With too broad a stroke we may make some guesses, reasoning from what we can see down to that which we can’t. Some of these surmises, driven as they are by this deep need to know may indeed contain some grains, or even nuggets of truth, but they can never reveal the whole picture in all its rich, living diversity. Likewise, too small a brushstroke may reveal astonishing layers of individual bits of information, some even large enough to speculate about what the ‘whole’ (whatever that is) might contain…perhaps here too one may see nuggets and grains of truth.
Like my ‘Topographical Mapping’ [see pieces already blogged on topography of the soul’s journey] scale here is all important to the possibility of any potential ‘knowing’ that may arise; it all depends on where one wishes to start, and how far one intends to go/reach!
Knowing – in this sense – is not an end in itself, but it is helpful when one is trying to navigate this terrain of life, short as it is; one doesn’t wish to be continually trying to retrace one’s steps, and starting again. It may be essential however where one is confronted by this vastness of nothingness and our ‘state of being’ within all of this. I seek to know I matter, not in some abstract theological sense to some unknowable ‘Being’ out there (or in-here) somewhere, but in the same way that I may view an ant or a fly as precious to itself and not simply swat away its existence! Without such a groundstate of significance – my life matters to me, yours to you, the ant or the fly to themselves – the rest is just passing circumstance along an ever changing tableau of meaninglessness hurtling through some unknown and ultimately unknowable infinity; wherefore then pattern, order, pulled together out of these colliding bits of matter (animate or otherwise) in all this immensity?
As the poet William Blake (1757-1827) wrote so long ago, in the poem Auguries of Innocence (from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794).
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
…
(And also)
…
Little Fly
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength & breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
Tracks in a Pathless Land 