“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake
Fun fact: when Jim Morrison and pals were naming their edgy new band in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, the Blake quote above was the inspiration to call themselves the Doors. Impress your literate friends with that one at your next faculty mixer.
I know I missed a day again, but would you crawl out of bed at 6:30 in the morning to write if the lovely P had the day off and were curled up next to you? I reckon you probably shouldn't answer that, me being the jealous type and all.
"I love you Peggy Bowen". I say it in darkness every morning when we're together, like my own little liturgy in this sacred space. "I miss you Peggy Bowen" comprises my substitute greeting to the day when I'm alone watching the bay come to life outside 407, or watching the sun rise between my feet at Wyldswood.
Thinking deeper thoughts than usual (don't say it, because I know what you're thinking: the bar has been set awfully low, hasn't it?) after watching A Trip to Infinity with P last night on Netflix, as we were washing down a pile of vegetables and lamb in chile sauce with a Topo Chico as part of our new health kick.
Not many television programs have tapped that volume of receptors between my ears. The premise is deceptively simple: a series of chapters covers very deep topics in a very short time, such as "Infinity is Very Small" and "Infinity is Very Slow" through interviews with some of the era's most prominent, and certainly well-spoken, physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers, interspersed with retro-feeling animated vignettes used to illustrate a point about physics or the math of the infinite. And the speakers and thinkers are, well, really cool, unlike a lot of the folks I recall lurking around the physics department at USC. Or maybe they were cool as well, and I was so busy killing brain cells and trying to capture the gaze of the fairer sex that I totally missed it in my immaturity.
One of my favorite popular scientists/philosophers, Alan Lightman, appears on the film, and called me up short when he was asked about our ability as people to perceive infinity, given our limited faculties. Lightman responded that he'd never been able to sense it, that is until he fell in love. I think he's talking about tapping into something larger than and beyond ourselves, so large as to have no boundaries. True love is like that, isn't it? What do you think?
I couldn't look away for the duration of the film, and was a little sad to see it end. Candidly, none of the mathematical concepts were as mind-blowing as the reviews suggested--if you've spent any time around mass audience science writings, from Sagan to Lightman, the fact that a Planck Particle is to an atom in size what a tree is to a galaxy may be a startling analogy, but the concept is certainly not unfamiliar.
Or maybe my little fighter pilot brain just takes complicated subjects and dumbs them down to the point that they don't seem so complicated. A defense mechanism for the mediocre.
And naturally, my mediocre mind strained all of this through the black box of organized religion, particularly of the traditional Anglican variety where I spent my formative years and actually played a speaking role, however briefly. How very small my God seems, in the light of a universe in which an infinite number of Donks is currently experiencing alternative versions of every combination of moments and experiences possible. Maybe there's a Saint Donk out there tramping down the path to heaven while Saint Not-So-Much here on terra firma dreams of a picnic boat and casts written aspersions at opposing counsel in smarmy court filings. How does one define the divine in an infinite universe? The white bearded fellow seems pretty absurd in this tableau, worrying about whether I washed my hands after I went to the john while the universe expands at an increasing rate into . . . what?
Maybe quantum physics has something to say here; maybe God is like a photon, everywhere at once until we define Her by observing and ascribing characteristics. The notion doesn't lend itself to anything sentient, but what in the hell do I know?
It's all hiding here in plain view, this infinity, in the "untrespassed sanctity of space", in a ball whose surface goes on forever, in the divine revelation of calculus. And in love, certainly in love, that one time we not only touch the infinite but, if we're lucky enough, feel its presence.
A more disciplined blogger would take the time to edit the above so Little Joe doesn't look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it's time for me to dig into the more mundane thinking project of drafting a summary judgment motion that seeks to answer the question of when a series of emails and purchase orders evolves into a contract. The finished project is due in the oh-so-finite confines between now and close-of-business today. Back to reality, or to the illusion we treat as such.
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