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12.13.01
Things fall apart. I walk in disarray, like the day. Or something. And you can bet your aspect that I would fall miserably short of Lord Byron's standards of all that's best of dark and bright. Lately I'm feeling overwhelmed by the labor involved to simply break even, let alone come out looking beautiful. Most of all, I need to diet. But without ice cream there would be darkness and chaos.
I've also noticed that I seem to be getting older. Yes, older. My skin looks like I've had it for oh, say, 36 years. What's going on here is entropy, if you ask me. Let's see what Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus at Occidental College in Los Angeles, has to say about why I'm not walking in beauty, like the night:
Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused and spread out.
Obviously, my energy has spread out and landed on a younger, prettier woman. Wait, there's more:
The perfect illustration is: A hot frying pan cools down when it is taken off the kitchen stove.
There we go. Professor Lambert has flat out said it...I've cooled down and am no longer hot.
The second law of thermodynamics summarizes that totally different events involving all kinds of energy have a common cause. A blowout in a tire and lightning -- what could seem to be more unlike than those! Yet the reason for their occurring is the same, the tendency for the dispersal of concentrated energy.
A blowout of a tire, lightning, circles and crows feet under my eyes...it's all starting to make sense. But how do I keep my energy from dispersing? How?
Our psychological sense of time is based on the second law. It summarizes what we have seen, what we have experienced, what we think will happen.
What I have seen and experienced is that people grow old and become less beautiful. I saw Robert Redford and Paul Newman interviewed on Sixty Minutes II last night, and although still attractive, it was difficult to comprehend that they were the same vibrant, gorgeous men in the clips they ran from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Across an ocean of time, things will run down. Any structure we build will accumulate enough small hits that it can no longer stand. Over time, a circling satellite will be hit by many small meteorites; the second law of thermodynamics says that sooner or later, if it survives these hits, its orbit will decay and it will fall to earth and be destroyed.
I see. WE'RE DOOMED! Which means it's time to switch back again from the scientists to the poets. Go, Yeats!
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Go, Nazim Hikmet!
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
Okay, wait, this is terrible. We need some resistance here. I'm going to start a movement. The Anti-Entropy Movement! Rebel against decay and disarray! Reject the Second Law of Thermodynamics! Go, Dylan Thomas!
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Go, John Donne!
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
Go, James Weldon Johnson!
Weep not, weep not,
She is not dead;
She's resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband--weep no more;
Grief-stricken son--weep no more;
Left-lonesome daughter --weep no more;
She only just gone home.
And go, Shakespeare! Whoo!
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room,
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Long live life, and memory, and Word. Yay!
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