The Sun Just is.
The sun just is.
The story reads itself.
Any dream is as real.
A mind roams the universe.
We feel
We think
We see.
Everything adds up to nothing.
Nothing contains it all.
We wonder
We taste
We conjure.
Reality is inexplicable.
Consciousness an illusion.
We touch
We think
We disappear.
I just am
When I am.
Opher – 7.12.2021
Explaining infinity, consciousness, dreams or reality requires magic.
We exist.
There is no explanation.
My old man sat in his usual place on the settee with his newspapers on the seat beside him. My mum sat in her armchair. The telly twittered in the corner. It was some comedy programme; no more than a distraction from the boredom of reality. I sat and half watched as Morcambe and Wise went through their routine. It was quite funny. My dad looked a bit like Eric Morcambe with his pipe gripped between his teeth as he rifled through the papers with half an ear tuned into the programme. That was about all it took to keep abreast of the action. The bulk of his mind was digesting the stories making the news. He worked in newspapers and kept up to date in the evening by reading through a range of different papers.
At ten it was time for a milky drink and then off to bed.
They’d got their life sorted out into a routine. It worked for them. They weren’t really religious although my mum did subscribe to the Spiritualist church. She believed in the afterlife. Sometimes I got the impression that she was looking forward to the afterlife more than she was enjoying life itself. This was something that had to be got through in order to get to some happier, freer place over there where she would meet up with her Mum again. Dad never seemed to give it a thought. He’d had his fun when he was young and got on with the living. He didn’t seem to question it too much. In fact he didn’t seem to have any desire to do anything apart from getting on with his job. I suppose you could say he was happy in his rut. At least he wasn’t unhappy. But then he wasn’t exactly ecstatic either. You got the feeling that he felt that there was no great need to change. He had no desire to get out and enjoy himself. Every now and then he had a quiet night with a couple of pints at the pub but they never even went to the pictures and no friends dropped in. His life was work, the telly, the kids (us – I had two sisters) and the daily routine. It filled the day and the days rattled past.
I chuckled at the well-rehearsed routine. Eric made fun of Ernie’s ‘wig’ and slapped him round the face. It was very familiar and still funny. It worked.
I could slip back into this. They were pleased to see me. I felt easy here but at the same time I knew there had to be more!!!
What the fuck was this all about?
Belinda’s party was short but eventful. She was still living at home you see, with her mum. Her dad had run out a long time before and her mum always seemed strung out and harassed to me. In hindsight I think it might have been a good idea if Belinda had mentioned to her mum that she’d invited a whole load of freaks round for a party. It must have been quite a shock for her when she got home from her weekly visit to the Laundromat to discover the house overrun with longhaired freaks. Already there were couples up in the beds and the air was heavy with smoke and incense sticks. Music pounded and the house was thumping. It had attracted quite a crowd. It must have been quite a sight as she struggled home on her bike with the big bags of laundry to see all the lights shining and hear the music rockin’ from the end of the road.
I don’t think she could quite believe her eyes and ears.
She started shrieking, hitting people with cushions and hysterically chasing people out of the house.
At the time we were all quite amused. Well, except for Oz who had got Beena up in the bedroom and was getting round to some serious rumpy pumpy when Belinda’s wild-eyed mum had burst in on them.
Come to think of it I don’t think I ever saw Belinda again. Perhaps she had been grounded forever. Perhaps her mum had completely flipped and done her in! No, I think I might have heard about that!
Jack and I had just been passed a nice fat jay and ambled off to the park to sit on the swings and finish it off.
It was nice in the park, one of those balmy evenings.
“Has to be more to life than this,” I observed.
“Fun, sex and getting out your tree?” Jack queried, raising an eyebrow. “Who could ask for more?”
“I could, I guess,” I replied, getting a little more philosophical with every draw on the surprisingly strong jay. “I wanna get to the bottom of it. I want some mystical understanding, some insight. I wanna stare at the sun until I get a vision. I wanna go without sleep until I’m crazy enough to understand it all. I wanna whirl around like a dervish until the whole universe stands still so that I can dissect it. I wanna try some of that South American stuff they shoot up your nose with a big tube so that I can become a jaguar or condor, or something. I wanna meditate until I can fly. I wanna starve myself until I hallucinate. I wanna reach Nirvana and be one with universe.”
“Yeah, man. Nirvana or bust,” Jack said with a chuckle. “Just pass that joint over here.”
“Nirvana or bust.” I agreed.
We both laughed and stared up at the big old moon. It was so big and clear that you could see all the craters.
“Nirvana or fucking bust,” I murmured. I was burning up inside with the need to live. I wanted it all. There had to be more to life than this.
One Endless Day
One long day
Interrupted
By the spinning
Of the Earth.
The sun
Always shines
Even when the clouds
Are pouring it down.
Sticking
Around
For as long as
Humanly possible
Before
Our bodies
Become covered
By the ground.
Leaving
Without
A sound.
Opher – 3.1.2023
The reality we live is just a product of our limited perception. The bigger picture is always a lot different.
In space there is no night. It never rains. The sun never stops.
Life is a fleeting existence in unreality.
A Quantum Poem
This poem exists in two places at once
And also does not exist at all.
It has no substance.
It changes its meaning
As you read it
But has no meaning at all.
It is the building block
For every poem
That has ever been written.
It is not a poem.
Then it is.
This poem has no rhyme or meter
To look for one would defeat you.
It has no structure or form
It is a wonder it was born.
The rules it follows are oblique
Yet perfectly clear.
It uses words in lines
To make its meaning queer.
No two people could read it the same
That is the nature
Of this
Universal game.
For this is a quantum poem.
You cannot pin it down.
Every time you understand
It changes.
Opher – 23.12.2019
It is not possible for my mind to marry the astounding reality of quantum physics with the physical world we live in.
Our world has substance. It has laws. It is rational.
The quantum world seems to exist on a different level. It does not work on Newtonian physics. It is weird.
The more we find out the more peculiar everything gets.
How can photons behave differently when watched? How can electrons be in two places at once and then disappear? How can subatomic particles arrive before they have left?
Some use this as an excuse, a spiritual answer. It reinforces their idea of god.
I choose to say it reinforces my sense of wonder and delight at nature.
There are no certainties or answers – just wider ignorance.
We should just appreciate the moments we are adrift within it – whatever this universe really is.
This is a quantum poem. It changes.
All is not what it seems
All may not be as it seems
As substance melts
Before the microscope,
As reality
Becomes subjective,
As mind impacts on matter.
For all of us,
Everything,
Might exist
In two places
At the same time
And misbehave
When watched.
Perhaps imagination
Is taking
A central role
In modelling
The world?
Opher – 16.12.2019
I am always amazed by the latest discoveries of science. They are much stranger than fiction, more extraordinary than any religion.
It seems that particles arrive before they leave,
That things can exist in two places at the same time
And energy behaves differently when watched.
Forget Schrodinger’s cat! It’s dead alive!
Perhaps they will find that we shape the universe with our imaginations?
The Stone And Reality
I picked up a stone,
A lump of flint,
And held it in my hand
That I might judge its reality.
It weighed heavy in my hand,
Solid and brittle.
The outside rounded
With nodules,
All chalky white,
Smooth with small holes
Speckling its surface,
Tiny craters,
Glimpses through the crust
To the darker kernel of its nature.
One side had sheered
Into a glassy sheet,
Alive with brown, grey and black hues,
With depth,
As if my gaze could pierce into its deepness;
As if it were an aqueous liquid,
An undulating vitreous fluid
In which the shapes and colours flowed,
But it was only light playing on its surface.
The stone was impenetrable.
This flint,
This brittle rock,
So easily shattered,
Whose shards
Have served us well in ages past,
As knives, arrow heads or scrapers,
But is this the reality of this stone?
The sum total of its being,
Its aesthetics?
Its uses?
Isn’t there more?
Shouldn’t we not consider its history?
Born from great pressure in chalk,
Silica seeping,
Slowly crystallising within the strata
In the earth’s crust
Over millions of years.
Chemicals fusing to form these nodules.
Should we not go back further –
To the birth of those chemicals in distant stars –
Their formation
In the nuclear holocaust inside a sun;
The Nova that spewed them forth into space;
The condensing into planets?
Or yet further back
To the hydrogen
That fuelled that fusion.
Or beyond that
To the Big Bang itself
When the fundamental particles
From which it was formed
Were created in a flash –
Into existence from nothing.
I held the stone
And slowly turned it in my hand.
Billions of years of change
Manifested itself before my senses.
Yet its reality was still elusive.
Should I not consider its molecular structure?
The atoms that it is made from?
The subatomic particles that lie within?
The network of forces binding it together?
The microcosm of my rock?
Should I not consider the energy it possesses?
The heat it radiates?
The light it reflects off every surface?
Its sound as I tap?
The radiation it emits as its atoms decay?
What was its reality?
I had barely scratched the surface.
I turned it slowly,
Examined it carefully,
Before tossing it away.
Opher – 26.7.2021
We are surrounded by mystery, complexity and wonder which we take for granted.
Everything is so much more complex than the reality we afford it.
Nothing is trivia.
I was thinking of Blake when I wrote this.
This is an anecdote from my childhood as clear today as it was then. The sensation altered my life – a spiritual epiphany.
Head In The Clouds
I was fed up mooching around. Jeff’s Mum had dragged him off shopping. I was on my own.
I set about touching up my track bike; the one I’d put together from parts I’d dragged out of ditches. I’d painted it in rainbow colours scrounged from my Dad. It needed touching up because it took a battering on our little race track in the woods.
After, I oiled the wheels and chain and adjusted the peg holding the cigarette cards so they flicked on the spokes sounding like a motorbike.
Cool.
I decided to call round for my mate Tone. Perhaps we could go hunting lizards? With the roar of the cigarette card engine, I set off up the street.
Tony wasn’t in so I decided to go on my own. The meadows weren’t that far away. I threw my bike into the long grass and started hunting. I checked under the sheets of corrugated iron, poised to fling myself down on any snake or slowworm, but there was nothing. I stealthily crept through the long grass straining my senses for the rustle of a lizard that I could dive on, but to no avail.
I soon lost the enthusiasm. It was too hot. I sat in the meadow, lost in the tall grasses. The smell of sun-dried hay, the delicate scent of wildflowers hung on the breeze. The meadow was alive with the bustle of activity. I watched, lost in fascination. Grasshoppers, harvestmen and beetles scurried here and there. The flowers were covered in colourful flower beetles, shield bugs and tiny flies. Honeybees, bumblebees, hoverflies and butterflies droned or flitted from flower to flower. Ants tended and milked their herds of greenfly.
It felt like I was peering through a microscope at a different world as they went about their business oblivious to my presence. I watched them feeding, seeking a mate, or scurrying around intent on some task that only they knew.
The air was full of electricity, powered by the heat generated by that summer sun. The sun beat at my skin but this late in the summer I’d already peeled, my skin now tanned dark brown, impervious to its rays. Delicious.
I plucked a long stem of grass, lay back enveloped in its rich aroma, surrounded by the industrious dynamo of nature, serene, sated.
I chewed, peering up into the azure blue sky, watching the odd cloud drift past, at peace.
As my eyes pierced the heavens an idea surfaced in my head: there was no end. The more my eyes penetrated into that pool of blue the more the incredible idea gripped me. There was no barrier, no end, I was staring into forever. The dizzying realisation of infinity seemed to take hold of me. The blue seemed to whirl and suck me into it, falling up into the euphoric metaphysical epiphany of the discovery of infinity.
Just like those bugs, my whole life was minuscule. Reality was infinite. Nothing more.
Opher – 22.3.2022 500 words.
Reality
Reality in a cloud of electricity,
In infinity
Within;
Created out of chemistry.
The universe
Manufactured
In the head,
Coalesced
From limited senses:-
Not the whole spread.
What we see
Is partial.
It is not the universe.
Opher – 4.5.2020
I think it’s philosophy.
We think we live in reality. But do we? All our perception is just electrical activity in our brains.
We think what we are seeing and feeling is real. It isn’t.
It is nothing more than some phenomenon of consciousness – a network of chemistry and polarised charge – nothing more.
We do not even know if anything really exists outside of our head.
Between
Between the atoms and the stars
Lies
The world of in between,
In which nothing is as it seems.
An unreality
In which we dream
And walk upon solid ground
And believe
One is more substantial than the other.
Opher – 24.4.2020
It fascinates me to think of the life we live. We think we live in some kind of reality but we do not. We are in between realities.
Solidity is an illusion. It is not based on substance – merely a forcefield.
The arc of the stars – the distance and speed are beyond our comprehension.
Infinity, atoms and galaxies are the reality.
The life we live is based on strange forces, microscopic and macroscopic, of which we only receive a glimpse.
My Existence is Questionable.
My existence is questionable.
In a few billion years
No evidence will exist;
No bones,
No fossils,
Not even an impression.
Nothing of my life
Will be remembered
No word
Of any poem
Remain.
Not even a whisper in the wind.
Every atom
That ever sang in my blood
Sent a shock through my brain
Or supported me against the force of gravity
Will be free.
Some of me
Will find its way to stars
To explode through galaxies.
Some of my atoms
Might even incorporate themselves
Into another sentient being.
There may be other words.
Opher – 5.3.2022
How pointless everything really is. How inconsequential.
All our little lives, trivial pursuits, matters of life and death, war and power struggles, wealth and greed. Even the destruction of the entire planet is trivial compared to the immensity of the universe. Our whole galaxy is but a pinprick, a tiny speck.
All our gods, palaces, castles and cathedrals are worthless and insignificant.
Our thoughts, dreams, hopes and aspirations, our fears, worries, anxieties and traumas, our pleasures and pains – all melt into oblivion when death claims our memories.
Yet atoms are perpetual. That is marvellous!
Opher's World 