Showing posts with label centre of the galaxy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label centre of the galaxy. Show all posts

2023-04-06

NaPrWriMo 2023 - 6 - The Post-Industrial Research Assistant's Tale

This has been half-written in my pile for *ages*...

It came from consideration of how a university department is, like most small communities, pseudo-independent of the larger world in which is embedded.  Concerns of the dept. are not necessarily concerns of the wider world, but every inhabitant of the dept. is also an inhabitant of the world in general, and brings all that baggage with them.

In this poem, society has (semi) fallen apart but the department keeps on keeping on in a slightly revised way, ignoring to some extent the turmoil in the street...


The Post-Industrial Research Assistant's Tale



I wake and follow my routine
every window in the department has it's crop
tomatoes, cucumbers, French beans
and I go round with my basket
and watering can. It's a trade
I like to think I plants aren't enslaved
but rather there's a meaningful exchanging
of water fertilizer and well-lit, sheltered positions
for produce: veg and fruit --
and we may as well admit to weed
since there are no University authorities anymore.

I've found I can grow
almost anything as I have learned
to be slow and patient so I don't tire
of watering, or picking out the weeds
I have no problem germinating seeds
as I can set their perfect temperature
on the incubator salvaged from biophysics
and later move them round, between window ledges
the break room table
and half a dozen other sunny spots
as suits their thirst for light. But today
is shopping day,

so I take my basket and go
into the town to do the deals
that spin the wheels of life.
I exit the quad
via the turnstile at the rear
because there's fewer people forcing leaflets
in your hand
although I still get ones
for transcendental cyber-feminism
and The Church of Happy Nihilism
which apparently is off Brewer Street
and I make a note to avoid that route on
-- check the leaflet -- Thursday evenings
useful.

The High Street is, from the sound of it,
in its usual disorder--
two Parties of National Unity
(don't ask me which)
are trading insults and half bricks
which means I cannot get to Tesco's
which all-in-all is good
because although I do keep flogging
that particular horse corpse,
the repeated mental pain
of going round the empty shelves again
and occasionally giving the checkout assistant
a tomato
so hungry does she look,
is not a happy morning in my book.

But High Street is out today
so I make my rather more cheerful way
to the Anarchist's Market
where the great thing is
to a mind like mine
that the sellers cannot legitimately say
the trade I offer
is less than fair in any way
and so they just obliquely opine
that for their part they feel
I ought to offer more
and I never tire
of this semi-comic back and forth
as we circle round the deal.

As usual I can get corned beef
and not for the first time wonder
does their supply chain extend all the way
via cliques and communes
and counterculture shipping lines
to South America?
Who knows, but corned beef comes
and fresh veg goes
and life goes on and so...

I return,
via the caretaker's garden
to leave a cucumber in the honesty box
and take a handful of new potatoes
which you cannot grow on windowsills.

All of which leads me to conclude
that it's corned beef hash again
and thus I keep the department fed and they, in turn,
add me to their published papers
but now I brew tea in the break room
where Maria and George are frowning at output
from the quark telescope array
Oh no! I joke,
don't tell me that far out in space
the Wolf's Star Faction have turned this way?

There is a slightly embarrassed pause...



2018-04-04

NaPoWriMo - 2018 - Day four - Considering the Kardashev scale


  • A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy which reaches its planet from its parent star.
  • A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star.
  • A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.

    (simplified from Wikipedia)


Now let us speak of things you're yet to do:
let's take apart those planets we don't need
and put that mass to other use; let's produce
machines the size of worlds, from components
the size of atoms; let's move the stars into a neat
array; let's have our way with every aspect
of natural law; and let's, when that becomes a bore,
consider ways in which laws might be repealed;
let's turn our backs on brute humanity and stroll
so cool, so rich, so strangeinto the very small,
the very far, the very long; let's sing that song
of a hundred million years; let's edit all the tears
from our experiences; let'sto be frank
die no more.  Is any of this in your manifesto?
I thought not, and this is why: no!
You cannot rely upon my support
in the forthcoming local government election.




2017-10-07

Devotions (dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)

(Dedicated to Brenda Levy Tate)


My favourite of Brenda's recent photos
this has everything: a galaxy, a self-portrait,
an outhouse...
Brenda is somebody I know but have never met.  Thus is the power of the internet.  Brenda and I used to hang out with other like-ish minded individuals on a poetry forummany years ago now.  We shared and critiqued work, we chatted of this and that...

More recently I've known her on Facebook, and I've come to appreciate the great love she has for her family, and the region where she lives (Yarmouth in Nova Scotia); her on-going quest for interesting bargains in the local shops (the "interesting" is more important to her than the "bargain")...  She also often shares her concern for her fellow inhabitants, their political travails, and the local weather and its impact on the fishing crews (some of whom she's related to...)

But the most wonderful thing about Brenda is her unreasonable devotion to staying up all night, or getting up at 6:00 a.m., or even 3:00 a.m. and going out alone into the surrounding countryside for no reason except to photograph the stars.

This photograph here is my favourite recent example, and this poem is a recent one of hers that won first place in the IBPC poetry competition for January 2017.  This site contains some of her photography, although not a huge amount of the astrophotography which she admits needs updating.

Is Brenda my friend?  Can you have a friend you have never met and never will meet?

The answer, of course, is it doesn't matter!  Labels are not required.  The internet has invented several new types of friendship over the years, and no doubt will again.  The fact that, as a species we can invent new kinds of friendship: that's surely something hopeful, something worth devoting ourselves to...







Devotions

After she leaves the nunnery, her suitcase waits
for the shuttle bus, patient in Italian dust.
She returns to Coventry, to rain and rooms
with a distant Aunt.  She is adrift.  She tries

to lift her mood in the public library
but chances into the reference section
and reads it all.  Three years later she upgrades
to a visitor's ticket at the University;

still lost, but finds Philosophy to be filled
with many helpful guides.  She chats with Plato;
hides from Nietzsche; finds Kant natural
but Heidegger hard and chances at last

on Teilhard de Chardin who takes her in hand.
They hike four hundred Dewey Decimals north
to land in Astrophysics, right next to Carl Sagan
and the world moves

the very next day in Morrisons--her palm
against fluorescents is filled with brighter light.
We are star stuff.  We are golden.  And as for the Garden...
it's obvious we've never left.
 
***

The check-out assistant frowns,
but sells the apple anyway.

***

Most mornings now she jogs, and in the afternoons
her job at the railway information desk
will let her set lost travellers on their way.

So much for the days.  In the evenings she returns
to the tiny room.  She has travelled now so far
that light leaving the Abbess at T = 0
will never catch her up.

Sometimes she works on relating theory
to everything; sometimes she sits
and watches stars go past the window. 



2017-09-03

Sept 3rd - Engineering

Engineering

...come with me for there is much to do,
coils to degauss and pets to delouse and exoplanets
to scope and spectra to analyse
and there are needs
to edit out of the human psyche
and bugs in our genes and there are machines
to design and build and machines for planning
the mechanisms for other machines to construct
devices to make machines that fix
the faults in all our stars and all I ever wanted
was that big swivel chair with the screen
to show where we are going and one day
we'll play Thus Spake Zarathustra and one day
right there in easy reach
the big lever...







2017-05-04

NePoWriMo - 2017 - April 30th - You there!

This was inspired by the wonderfully abrupt way that a dodgy Facebook geezer approached a female acquaintance some years back...

I think he probably had romantic intentions.  So yes, "You there!" was the perfect opening line.



You there!

You! And thus I name you...
You are a "you" distinct from any "me"
you may encounter.  They say you stand apart
in a realm of your own devising
where he tells me that I would fear to tread.
She watches you.  Eyes haunt you.  I want you.
You are not beyond me.  You there!

You!  And thus I summon you.  Approach
and be known, friend.  Carnally or Biblically
I covet your neighbourly ass, come warm my guest chair
drink thin soup and wait for dark.  You there!

For "you" are "there".  I place you.  I locate
your self in the world of selves.  Unique and one,
individually rapt and indivisible,
inseparable from identity, your own sense of "yourself."  You there!

You!  I fathom your nature for you are there
by definition.  You're present but tiny
a seed at the heart of everything.  Embedded,
grit in oyster or gene in cell,
or minute caterpillar, asleep in the rose of the World.

You there, you!  I am talking to you.


2015-12-18

Down time

Black Holes - Monsters in Space
A black hole: far, far away...


It's Christmas time and there's no need...

So here it is, merry...

So, this is Christmas, and what do I think...?

Well I don't think I need formal religion to make me gather my loved ones together and hand out presents.  Midwinter is upon us and ice-giants roam the borders, muttering behind rime-encrusted beards about climate change and the rising price of air-con.

Why wouldn't you get everybody around the fire to sing and laugh and eat and drink?



To explain the same thing in a different way: a singularity lurks at the end of December, a zero-sized, zero-temperature point of infinite density, with Janus packed into it—like one of those joke canisters of spring-loaded snake.  Except it's an ancient god of narrow doors, instead of the snake; and we have to pass through to reach the verdant, sun-lit pastures of 2016.

So hold your drink in both hands, strap your mince pie into the padded receptacle, specially built into your acceleration couch, and hold your breath as I gun the engine and point the pointy end of life straight at that tiny point of rapidly approaching darkness, because here we go again...



Best Wishes Everybody!  I'll see you all, safe on the other side.








An ancient Aztec calendar:
long, long ago...
Down time

And I travelled in a bald and freak October
—the rubbing of the wind and the chafing of the skin—
where clothes supposed to keep the warmth
got soaked around my wrists and ankles.

And I have travelled via plaintive, sleek November.
I fell cold upon the empty hill, with eyes
drawn to the gaps between the stars—
even such hollow space can't chill me now.

And I did travel, solitary, through December;
deliberately I spiralled round and down—
there's a nothing-point at the centre of the maze,
an absolutist's zero, the boundary of days

—and in the ice-crystal, breath-held silence,
I waited for the calendar to turn.





2015-08-21

A slightly drunken message from the geeks

Geek sensibilities, earlier today

Geeks are, of course, the sub-set of nerds who can realistically be hired and set to work with  normal people.

Also, apparently, the geeks are going to inherit the Earth—I'm expecting to receive the paperwork any day now.

In the meantime, it would be wrong to say that geek sensibilities were 'special' and that people "just don't get us"—or rather it would be true, but no more than it is for everybody else.  Everybody has their own desires, wishes, aesthetics; and everybody thinks they're not appreciated, and everyone thinks nobody understands.

Obviously some industries run almost entirely on geek power, and sometimes non-geeks take the credit.  This happens when 'leaders' do not realise their role in the process.  They imagine they have 'vision', 'drive' and 'clarity'; when what they really provide is 'naivety', 'stubbornness' and 'blind luck'.

Be all that as it may, one day the geeks may decide they've had enough, and then...



A slightly drunken message from the geeks


Be not afraid, for though we are much cleverer than you,
although rogues are a proper subset of thieves
and liars a superset of leaders
I have enumerated them all
(appendix A). Good day

if you are reading this message then we are missing
presumed... well this is the question
to be, have been, be being
and yet to not be present at the desks,
terminals and laboratory benches
where previously we lived.

Yes, we were paid.
No, that was never the point
and basically the point,
the point is that you never understood
the beauty of a well-crafted subroutine,
gear train, enzymatic inhibition feedback loop
which was all we ever wanted. So...

if you turn your questioning eye
to somewhere on a cloudless night
in Autumn and the direction
of the galaxy's core you will find
a tiny point of light red-shifted
almost into nothing. And that's us. Cleverer.