Higgs boson

How does the universe create a rock out of sunlight?

You know those holograms you can stick your hand into, those laser projections you see at those science exhibits that I mentioned in an earlier post?  What if you could flesh out holograms and make them “physical,” like your toaster?   That’s sort of what nature (the cosmos, your Self) is doing way down inside your atoms, somehow or other turning an electronic light show into flesh and blood.  How about that!?   What a magic act!

If that doesn’t blow your mind, you could reflect on one atom in the nail of your little finger. What’s going on in that package of stuff you call your body?  I recommend you  write down your reflections.  That usually turns the trick.

But if your view is still kind of ordinary, here’s handful of intimations to reflect on.  You’ll have to give each one a chance to blossom.

And then try to connect them to each other and make a nice package.

And then, to make it better and better, reflect on the intimations of other postings here in the Realms of Gold.

Have a nice day.  A nice life?

• In the San Francisco Chronicle the other day I noticed a documentary is coming out, “A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet.”  The title came from Aldo Leopold who became an environmentalist after killing a wolf and seeing in her eyes a fierce green fire.  I made a little poem out of that:

Awakening

In the dying
wolf’s eyes,
a fierce
green fire.

• First Connection:

Immediately some lines in a song, “Guantanamera,” that Pete Seeger sings – a poem by  the Cuban poet  Jose Marti, who died in the revolution – popped into my conscious mind :

Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma
Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmin encendido

Before dying I want to share these poems of my soul
My verses are light green
But they are also crimson red

We’re talking fire here, GREEN fire, CRIMSON fire.  Atomic fire.  Something visible in those eyes, something in that poet’s soul.

•  Next connection:

And right away, Dylan Thomas:

 The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age . . .

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood . . .

How can I not connect those lines, lines that have been stored in my mind, body, Self, soul, for decades? What force would that be, Mr. Thomas?  The force that makes toasters?

•  Next Connection:

Tumbling into my consciousness – of course! – Gerard Manly Hopkins’ “The Windhover” that I put into my  February 15 post.   In fact, I just now looked it over and that entire post fits gorgeously with this one.

 AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
[Hopkins addresses this entire poem to Christ.]
. . . and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gold vermillion, my, my, my!

• Last – for now – Connection

This one’s from William Blake, whom I’ve quoted in other posts.

THE TIGER

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies           
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?     
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp     
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?    

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Pouring God into God a la J. D. Salinger

Between Two Infinities

All day long

the Self

takes imprints

from the cosmos

and

nourishes

its

deepest roots.

The Warm Cushion of Your Brain

If the poem below doesn’t make sense right off the bat, you could use it like a saloon puzzle to practice on, like the one in my 11/7/12  post.  The payoff is that tingly sensation that comes over you as you begin to”get” it and the burst of pleasure when you do.   It took me a little while to catch on, but when I did, all sorts of realizations came popping out.  I’m still discovering connections that make me smile, and with a little attention, are astonishing.  I can guarantee you one thing: This poem is as wonderful as you are willing to let it be.

First, look at the poem and see if it makes sense to you.

       Memory

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

– William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

If the poem makes “sense”, you’re on your way to the Realms of Gold.

If it doesn’t make sense, mess around a while using the surface-features approach [5/29/12], noticing anything that’s there on the surface. Slow-walk it, too. [1/15/13]; let the images wash over your senses.

Or Try Some Connections. 

Where is all the stuff from outside that got past your skin stored up? After all, you’ve accumulated an infinite pile of it, haven’t you?  So where, actually,  do you store her lovely face?  What’s left of their charm when they  have  gone away?  Did you save it up inside yourself somehow?

Or Think About Gravestone Rubbings.

And then have another look at the poem.   If you’d like to take home the actual lettering on some early ancestor’s gravestone, for example, you can make a rubbing.  I did that one summer  in Unity Cemetery just out from Latrobe, Pennsylvania,  where some of my forebears – Hannas, Steeles, Niccolls  –  are buried,  going way back to the late 1770s. (Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood is entombed there, too.)

What you do is get a big piece of newsprint, lay it over the gravestone, and rub over it with a charcoal pencil or an oil pastel or chalk – whatever’s handy – like what I did with a silver dollar pictured here.  (That silver dollar  “coincidentally” is dated the year Mary Steiner– my wife Ruth’s mother, who married Joseph Luttner – was born.  Just think, a bit of the physical world in 1886 found its way into my hands and onto this posting and now on to you.)

What your Self is up to, as the day goes on, is taking impressions from of whatever it touches,

and then adding all those to everything that it’s ever encountered,

Like Making Rubbings Off Grave Markers.

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or many years and stretching cycles of years.

The early morning lilacs became part of this child,

And the grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird.

– Walt Whitman

You’re busy all day making rubbings off your encounter with wind and rubies.

The little kid sitting on a wall

in Carmel

eating ice cream

leaves an impression

on the warm cushion

of your brain.

It’s that that stays. 

The Zero Point Field

That may sound poetic, but it’s also a description of how particle physics works. I’m talking about what’s down inside your atoms.  Memory (our word for it) finds its way down that far into the warp and woof of things.  Go far enough and our artificial dictionary distinctions between physical and spiritual dissolve.

Your constant capturing of rubbings off the world you move around in – of which you are a part and which is a part of you  – is more like making holograms, those clever projections that physicists have figured out how to create.  Most of us have seen those 3-D  laser projections at science fairs or in the mall that you can walk around and see from all angles and even put your hand into.

Physically, that’s pretty much what your body (a big transceiver like the  satellite dish on your roof ) does.  By way of the sensors all over your body, inside and out, your Self is absorbing the pretty face and the charm in a permanent vessel that can never forget.  If you cut off a bit of the hologram film and run the laser bean through it, it works just as well.  Every little bit is the whole.  What a memory device! That device is you.

Hold to the now, the here, through which a ll future plunges into the past.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

And, what a bonus!, all that went on  before you started walking around the planet is in your DNA, your genetic memory — where all your forebears are and everything thing else too.  Or as Wordsworth put it, “Trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God which is our home.”

Yeats understood this completely. If you “get” his poem “Memory”, you will get it on your senses. You will take a rubbing.  Then you understand particle physics — yes, you do! — and the Zero Point Field – a sea of microscopic vibrations in the space between things –

where the little girl is eating her ice cream.

Memory

One had a lovely face,

And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

So, if you really want to remember something for some artificial thing like a school quiz, take a rubbing. Your self will remember.

What’s it all about? 

Well, you have your work cut out for you:

Task: to be where I am.

Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd

role: I am still the place

where creation works on itself.

— “Guard Duty – Tomas Tranströmer