It’s about cussin’ time
You sat yourself down
And thought long and hard
About time, Dude.
Just abide your keen mind
Make yourself a cold drink
And have a good think
About time, Dude.
You know it’s just fingers
That set cuckoo clock hands
And some guy’s digits
Programmed your watch, man
And, that there hourglass
It’s just melted-down sand
You should ponder some more
About time, Dude.
Can you tell if it’s linear
As we travel forward?
Could it lasso itself
And ever tick backward?
Why’s it everywhere at once
And yet no place to walk toward?
Let’s think double hard
About time, Dude.
The toughest of all
Is sensing time depth
Try hard to imagine
How deep is each step
You can barely see it
In the rocks that were kept
Easily we forget
All the time that’s been spent
Leading up to this parley
About time, Dude.
If you’re just an amoeba
Time’s nothing at all
Humans don’t change
The window's too small
But, if you’re big as an elephant
Time’s fifteen feet tall
Humans grow up
They get wrinkled and all
And if you’re huge like Uranus
Generations go down
Folks aren't just groups
They’re towns upon towns
Then if you blimp-up galactic
New critters abound
Humans appear
And then vanish unfound
And if you expand to the universe
Now time is your body
Humanity's a flash
Humans are nobodies
Now shrink back down in size
Back where you and I belong
We can’t glimpse it all
But our grasp can be strong
As long as we quit aimlessly
Riding along
Long enough to
Appreciate time, Dude.
(c) Holly Dunsworth
Posts
Holly, the Poet Laureate of Anthropology and Beyond!
ReplyDeleteMusings on the mysterious nature of time in the context of life were irrelevant when the world was viewed as having been created only 6000 years ago. But once the fact of evolution was discovered, that changed. Recognition of the slowness and relative nature of time was prominent in Darwin, of course.
But he wasn't the first. The reviled Lamarck expressed the ideas eloquently in his famous Zoological Philosophy, in 1809. He beat Darwin by 50, and Steven J Gould's metaphor by nearly 200 years! He used a clock metaphor, with the imperceptible movement of its hands:
"If the duration of human life only extended to one second, ...., any individual of our species who looked at the hour hand of this clock would detect in it no movement in the course of his life..."
(one can find the whole quote by Googling)
time direction is all about entropy. Trippy.
ReplyDeletehttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110427-time-travel-not-possible-physics-big-bang-space-science/?source=link_fb20110427news-time
I'm not disappointed. All I've read about in the past....I don't want anything to do with it! And I have no reason to think people of the future (or on Mars) will be any more savory.
ReplyDelete