Voyager

“More than 15 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory, an 8-track tape recorder, and code written in FORTRAN. It’s controlled using 50-year-old blueprints and takes 22 hours to receive a single command.”
~ Lisam Maia, NASA Explores The Universe (social media group)

Nowadays, phones and laptops with less than 4GB of memory cannot adequately handle their bloated operating systems and apps, and become almost completely useless without a constant WiFi signal or cellular data, unless you use them like an “old school” word processor or an electronic version of sticky notes.

Voyager 1 exited our solar system on 1977 technology with the power of a calculator or pocket watch, now having traveled 15.5 billion miles from Earth, at a speed of 38,027 mph, and still managing to communicate with us, without WiFi, cellular data, Bluetooth, and massive amounts of memory.

Relatively speaking, very little is required to launch a rocket towards eternity. Most likely, Voyager will continue its journey long after the earth, as we now know it, meets its end.

Timeless

“We cannot apply our notion of time to the unconscious. Our consciousness can conceive of things only in temporal succession, our time is, therefore, essentially linked to the chronological sequence. In the unconscious this is different, because there everything lies together.”
~Carl Jung

Facebook meme:
“Sorry I just saw your text from last night,
Are you guys still at restaurant?”
~ Thomas Lélu, Lacan Circle of Australia

I chuckled upon my first reading of this meme, my initial reaction being that the text writer was still waking up and had not yet recovered a sense of time—past versus present. You know, that foggy haze we sometimes wake up with, being confused as to where we are and what time it is.

However, just maybe this fictional text message is more complex than meets the eye, suggesting the way we sometimes hold on to images, thoughts and memories that continue to affect us, as if they are timeless and continue to exist or haunt us in the present, like an echo of something that seems as real today as it was yesterday. Dreams often operate on this level, combining images of the past and present from different places; the dream depicting them as occurring at the same time and in the same space.

Some psychologists and physicists believe that everything is happening in the here and now, and it is only our minds that divide them into past, present, future, and separate spaces.

Are time and space convenient illusions? What about cause and effect? Try to imagine a lifetime of relationships, people, things, places, events and situations existing together in the here and now; no need to separate any of it into past, present, future, spatial distances, or causes and effects. Impossible?

Nothingness

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
~ Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

The concept of NOTHINGNESS is extremely difficult to imagine or wrap ideas around.

How could there be NOTHING, not even the void of space, since a void could not exist if there were nothingness? What would nothingness be like if we could perceive it through vision, hearing, smell, touch?

Whenever I attempt to imagine nothingness, I think of a darkness that is darker than darkest black I’ve ever seen; no light or sound whatsoever, nowhere to move to or towards, like being buried alive six feet under or death itself. Yet, how could there be colors and darkness if there were nothing or nothingness? How can nothingness be described, explained or written about, if never experienced or observed? Even more imponderable, is the idea that “SOMETHING” could come into existence from this nothingness.

Note: I’m using NOTHING and NOTHINGNESS interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference. NOTHING refers to the absence of specific things, whereas NOTHINGNESS refers to a state of non-existence, non-being; an existential, all-encompassing void.

Continue reading “Nothingness” →

Dystopia #2: The hills

Traded my bus ticket for an old phone with a journal app. No service or WiFi. The bus ticket was useless; where could I go on the remaining $4.72? I’ll travel by foot from now on, journaling as I move along, from place to place, kind of like Marco Polo in Invisible Cities.

So, today, on my way to nowhere, I passed a scraggly looking man in a stained white T-shirt, torn jeans showing too much like a flasher, and a cap with “Sinner” on the front. He was sitting on the sidewalk curb with an old tattered bible by his side, pointing a finger towards the city limits.

I pretended to fiddle with my phone, when he said in a trembling voice, “Fella, watch out for the girls in the hills over there, they’re not fully human.”

He repeated the same to a straggler passing behind me, my curiosity was piqued.

“What hills?” I asked him.

“Down yonder, over there, beyond the city.” His crooked finger still pointing and appearing frozen in place, catatonic like.

Continue reading “Dystopia #2: The hills” →