Time and Death -- A Personal Perspective
The Black Hole -- A Crush into Nothingness?
Time and Death
In my recent hub on time and immortality, I had referenced a conversation I had with British physicist Julian Barbour, author of the book The End of Time. The following are two poems I shared with him about time and death. He told me that my poem Death corresponded with his worldview, although in a much more brutal way than he would have expressed.
Death
Engulf the blasphemous grey damp struggle to know your putrefaction, the incineration of
deferred dreams.
Join in thought the billions of your cells already swept away in the presumed horror of extinction -- allow them the same honor that you give yourself as you think about
your death
Turn the energy of your desperation toward satiating the hunger of the cosmos for corpses, skies, blue eyes,
tiny fingers grasping mothers’ hands.
Honor so-called dead elements that have given birth to billions of us from just a few, those beings now reshaped in forms committed to the delusion of self-awareness and human preeminence. Meditate on a society that chooses pigs over dogs for slaughter, cattle over dolphins, veal over horse, intelligence over instinct,
nuclear devastation over chemical genocide.
Above all, glorify the extinction of your consciousness, that monster that creates the horror and illusion of your death and the deification of individuality and concept over
the wonders of experience.
Embrace the morphine of acceptance, the bliss of not knowing, the transcendence beyond care, the fulfillment of disintegration, the light of the void,
the suffocation of desire.
After all -- It will happen anyway
Copyright 1998 Chuck Lund
Time
If I, by salvation or passive destiny, remain beyond time, what time will there be for remembered time – wisps of lovers, children growing, times of joy and sorrow?
When am I to nurture memories of precious times? In a time beyond time? Where shall I sit to remember? In a world without end, amen?
To what End does Eternity stretch its noble definition – its warm, comforting Certainties that defy Comprehension?
Oh blessed boundaries that I know, The outline of loved ones, Boundaries of lips, eyes, conversations, glances, Taking time to be here or there.
Love and marriage, Time and space Death and taxes, Human race
The Edge of the Universe
the end of my nose
The End of Time
the end of me
Copyright 1998 Chuck Lund (published December, 1998, Mosaic magazine University of Pennsylvania)
