Thursday, April 17, 2014

Zoom Out




























Zoom Out


And you’ll know the insignificance
                               Of your life.
And the relief of your problems’
                          Lost smallness.

But what happens in this macroscopic dilation?

From a wide enough viewpoint everything is right.
Or is everything wrong?
                                    No, everything is neither.

The allotment of praise here and blame there
disappears.
    Complexity obliterates the thinking agent.
Leaving only fortunate and unfortunate parts of the world.

This is how an omniscient god would have to see things
To forgive all.
Let's say there is a murder:
The evil does not squirm in a single location. There is none
in the data. The deity sees all influences: nothing short of everything
That occurred beforehand ever everywhere. There is no choice,
Only an illusion of choice in the murderer, the jury, the deceased,
And in such fellows as I, crawling between ideas.
                                                                         The entire universe
Committed the act, and every other act too – Every flinch or blip
Of motion is a conspiracy of all particles to effect all particles.

This is how an omniscient god would have to see things
To forgive all.

But we can’t see things that way. Or we wipe away
The whole edifice of agency; of self itself.
Yes, the pang of guilt is gone, but with it goes you.
The bathwater, the baby and the bathroom too.

Our Virtue and Vice is but splitting hairs to the Gods
But we must keep to our solid illusions, choosing this
Over that, sometimes that over this. Or believe we’ve chosen
At least.
If life is a technique, it needs a dream of self to drive it.


Zoom back in.

No comments: