from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Wednesday 19 January 2011

quanta + qualia = 'me' (or 'you' 'him' 'her' 'us')

- where a quantum is a unit of mass/energy and a quale a unit of consciousness/subjective experience (seems like an elegant equation to me, but since I failed my maths O level [GCSE] twice, I wouldn't believe me if I were you).

So let me get this right. The particles of 'me' as I know 'me' are in a continual process of exchange with Everything That Is, meaning that 'I' am a mere surface ripple, tenuously holding together; the larger part of me extending way beyond my physical boundaries, the density of which are mere illusion. 'I' exist in many places and times at once.

What's more, they (the particles) are in a continual process of being waves as well as particles. This is why I can be in more than one place at once (and presumably my thoughts take wave forms rather than particle form, and may – or may not – manifest physically – or otherwise – elsewhere simultaneously perfectly easily. So if my waves-as-thoughts migrate to say the high Andes, or the rainforest, or a little Scottish island, in true 'reality' they could cohere into some kind of particle-mass too.)

So I'm somewhat disappointed to find that, skiving off yesterday afternoon into our gentle sunny pretend-spring day – near-full-moon rising baby-faced over the hill, wash of pale crimson lake flooding in – the being that was me as I knew her, she who had been briefed to sit at my desk and finish the outstanding (as in still due) work, had clearly bunked off too and trailed me. Damn.

This was an experiment to see if, when I'm away for the next few days bringing creative writing into the curriculum in a Wiltshire school, she could be trusted to sit at home at the computer and enter a blog or two for me. Clearly not. See you at the end of the week – unless, that is, I can manifest a few versions of virtual reality from there.

-----

Later quick update: refinement to my Unified Theory (CERN I hope you're looking; poet-in-residence in the Large Hadron Collider?):
quantum (unit of mass/energy or particle/wave) + quale (unit of subjective/intersubjective experience) = consciousness...

OK off to work. They may not realise they've booked a particle physicist in the guise of a poet (I wish!).

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