by Nils Peterson
Here is the longed-for Theory of Everything that we have sought since Einstein.
Dreams
Dreaming began 13 1/2 billion years ago with the big bang. The universe itself, as it began to unfold, began to dream. Why? Well, that is the unexplained part of the explanation of everything.
As each galaxy coalesced into being, it carried with it the original dream and gave its own shading made out of its unique balance, its proportion of light, dark matter, hydrogen atoms and original big bang stuff.
As each sun formed, it took the big bang and the galaxy dreams and gave them its own spin. A big star has a different dreaming than a small star though they both come from the same family tree and carry the dream DNA of all the dream time that’s gone before –
and when the sun gathered or spun off the stuff of planets and became a solar system, each planet took what it was given and made its own dreams. Mercury whizzing around the sun dreams differently from lumbering Jupiter. So place has something to do with each planet’s dreams as well as the matter of its making.
So our earth, third planet of our system, carries the dreams of big bang, our galaxy, and our sun into its own dream.
On our planet, the sea has different dreams from the plains, the mountains different from the valleys
and the whale plunging into the depths dreams differently from the minnow hugging the shore –
the shivering aspen dreams differently from the sturdy oak –
and the raven from the bee –
and you and I talking in this talking bring to it the particular stuff of our lives, our parents’ lives and of our ancestors’ lives, where they lived, the languages they spoke, indeed the dreamings of that great tree of life all the way back to the first bit of primordial soup that pulled itself together and and declared itself to be a self.
And we are selves, yet part of the dream of our place, our world, our solar system, our galaxy, and the particular big bang that happens to be the one we live in.
That is the DNA of our dreaming, so here is The History of Everything
First light and first pee arrive together. Lingering last dream. Find paper. Find pen. Drat. Find one that writes. Hesiod said first there was Chaos. Well, at least that’s something. We say, first there was not even nothing. Then the Big Bang.
Well, Not with a Bang. There was not even nothing before there was everything. Whateverwillbe arrived all at once in a great chord, all the notes, and all the almost-notes between.
Our new sun shone out of itself in all directions. Its light set forth bravely into immense darkness. Our earth caught such a small part – yet it is the manna on which we live.
Space-time curves. Beyond, nothing, or maybe the not-nothing. How far’s the edge? Far enough. How far’s the edge of your edge? Far enough? What’s there? a desolation? a forest? the sea? a heaven?
Language is the straw we use to make bricks out of the clay of the world.
Rain steady on the roof. Far shore lost. Sea quiet, gray, introspective – like me, I think, entering from stage left. This is what we’ve made language for – to enter the world’s drama as player, not just reflex towards food or away from the saber-tooth.
Footnote from Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction
[Buckminster] Fuller’s assertion was roughly to the effect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the second law of thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people, on the other hand, put things together. People build bridges and cities and roads; they write music and novels and constitutions; they have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it were needs somebody or something to keep it from falling apart.