Member Poem

A Cosmic History of Nameless Things

Remember
There is no path
There are only probabilities
There is only our imagination
There is only each inertial frame of reference in the extended present
Neither the past nor the future
The moment to moment interactions between sensory input and action in the world
An array of possibilities
There is no outside of the universe
There is entropy and massive structures of energy exchange
Forming and reforming, evolving over billions of years
In galactic networks
In star formation
Between and within human neural networks
In institutions, power structures, and in history
Accretion and temporality undergird the warp and weft of spacetime

Imagine this
Near the edge of our solar system
A craft built by human hands
Flies through
Interstellar winds
The space between stars
Past the heliosphere
Through clouds of hot plasma
Into a liminal place
The in-between
Don’t forget what is possible
What we have done
We must never forget

Remember
There is no path
There is no outside of
There is no border
And yet, the border is what we make it
Reconstituted in every action, in every moment
In fact, borders represent a failure of imagination
Not a static line in the dirt
Instead, imagine particles and wave functions
Superposition and possibilities
Transitory places in filamentary structures of gas
Look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image
Millions of galaxies
Points of red light from the early universe
How can borders be anything but a failure of imagination
In the context of the entire universe

Think about this
The histories of stars and planets (histories of us)
Are stories about the accretion of matter
Cycles of accumulation and violence (velocity)
Interactions between massive amounts of energy, over time
Galaxy formation
Looks like the aggregation of institutions and asymmetrical oscillations of power relations
Which hold the universe together
And blow it apart
Threads and spectrum
Of light streaking through the night sky
Flowing through the material and immaterial
Through bodies and the weave of ideas
Cohering in ways
We are forever naming
That is physics
It is literature
It is art
It is ethics
It is poetry and
Of course, it is music
It is mythmaking
And name giving

Remember,
There is no such thing as a static point in space
There is no one frame of reference
A fundamental discovery of 20th century physics
There is no core self
No singular choice
No outside of the relationships between us
Relational networks are exchanges of energy
Between stars and between people
Millions of years of moment to moment energy exchange
The constant input of sensory information which shapes our minds
As we, in turn, shape the world
Each moment is what we make it
Not in isolation
But as part of rippling outputs of energy shaped by sensory input
Which move out into the world and affect vast networks of matter exchange
Over eons

Think about it
There are singularities
Supermassive black holes
The mass of a billion suns
At the center of every galaxy
Holding stars and planets and galaxy clusters together
And each moment is what we make it
Each moment is a web of probabilities, of possibility
A coagulation of temporality, of ideas, of language and bodies and energy exchange
Remember, we can only interact with temporality through the extended present
Neither past nor future
We can create mental maps of the physical territory of the universe
We can build our imagination so that it holds both individuals and galactic clusters
At the same time
We can ceaselessly search the cosmos
We can take seriously the material ramifications of words and ideas 
Of matter and accretion