TWO ELVES

Paradise Lost

[RETOLD]

Cold as is Winter

I went through The Woods
stumbling into ruins & tripped by disasters

hunting with my broken bow

through mad choruses of witches & saints
devils & angels, children & my fellow men

screaming at the top of their voices
a murky darkness to envelop me

yet I went through the darkness
hunting for my life       

           ... for that
is the lot of a man, God chanting

The World is a funny place
Ace, the World is a funny place!

upon His cirrus mantles wrapped
my tertiary nude feet's unsuspected rhythms

(straying into the unannounced
temple of Science

forever deferring The Ultimate Question)
disrupted by the propaedeutics of

Life singing in her slangs about a preacher God
who loves life less than preaching,

who hath (of lately) become The Word
& leveled a curse on Man glittering
muscular, the delight of savages

& turned him into those zebu people you see
endlessly marching, twos & twos

in inarticulate orgies
down the tropical streets in the dead of Winter
almost half-dead, parched & panting
(love's unaccepted absolution)

like such savage beasts that it frightens us
civilized people, and we shut down all our doors
quite tightly against them-not-men,

for the World is a funny
place, Ace, the World is a funny place

filling the streets of never-reaching
in the golden portents of Winter

with their peeling skins
from last Summer's bounty of sins

under Man's excellence like a frightened candle
under the great sun: God

more jealous than all men's sins
(this seeing) cried out, "It is good!"

having decided it all on His own

& shone with a terrible gleaming
that made us poor souls scatter screaming
from under the murderous Sun's freckleless
speeches (Man's skin-cancer

lampposts looking mostly in the Dark like cowards
for Light rewards with closed eyes
& always finding                 
                        ... it
too costly

burning & burning so many times

but always / always at last returning
in our final moments

to the worship of The Spark!
never learning that the World is

a funny place, Ace, the World
is a funny place!

Man is mostly but The Rock-Bottom
Hydrocarbons of God's Heart hotly inseminated

into the sick-brown sinews of the dirty earth
already half-burnt up with such locutions
as, "Better burnt brown than red raw!"

his yachts over the solemn glossy skating on ice,
being wound-up in the torches of the ever-moving

stone & steel cities & cultures
bulging in answer to the unholy lust

of living's intrinsic must
calling for its mothering breasts
but God (the faggot) never had a wife!
& answereth dark pollutions only

& easily burnt up constitutions

& souls but a most fine smoke

watching it all wringing & wringing
up to the burning brine like brimstone

before the bursting of the empty bubble
with but a very sharp grin

drowning'em out like rats

while He keeps sending his mortal seeds
across the portals of our never-ending

sufferings: eyestalks like lightnings,

witnesses to our frailties

trying to inspire the world into feverish
self-consumption & self-absorption,

celebration of Man

(which in His eyes is a deadly sin
so another strike! another bombing

of His Might!) calling for the acrotic terror
in men's hearts of sympathy chanting

in hot exultation the World is a
funny place, Ace, the World is a funny place!

Fable: If ever Beast loses his pastoral covering
& is discovered to be no Lamb!

sweetly hovering over our worries

but some monstrous, infernal, barbarous
& blind Asshole torturing & murdering Mankind

do we really care
whether He has a Purpose!?

crazy with carnal vengeance,

mad in the power of His Ire,
and O so resentful to find Himself
the spiritual parasite

of Man!... that His ravings blurt forth
quite slurry (and He punishes us then
for not understanding it on top of it all)

If ever it reached the bitterest brim
of Man's understanding
(that he is being whipped for victimless crimes,
being only against himself): I wonder
if Man would be influenced one way or the next

I wonder whether he'd be gripped with The Absurdity
& die laughing his head off, or live

bitterly cursing down to his last drop of blood
all that he had ever worshipped before
in his innocence               

        ... or if he'd simply
excuse his inaction (his inability to defend himself
against Ignorance) with some pretext or another
such as now he is himself become the Lamb!
... Matter never existed, really...
or maybe even: he just doesn't give a damn

whistling in his willies
while The Monster wildly chants:

O the World is a funny place, Ace,
the World is a funny place...

cold as is Winter & Man's cold feet
escaping across the crotchery marmalade
Sweetness-quicksands of his sinking way,

over his head: the rock-bottom hydrocarbons
of The Lord printing upon The Dust
like a clean slate:

the quirky Mankind race,

its Soul but the passing patterns
of some proverbial windy nouns,

while the worms that hold up
the dress of Salvation, our Flesh

after the proper wedding: the consummation
with the maggots of our moments: O

even the living skin crawls!

with its breathing sin
pushing through the pores
of our suffocating self-delusions

to a hairless Hell of resolutions without end

suffocating us, aspiring
from our stuffed godsends of Purity:

We inherit earth!

We, leeches so charmingly hung
from around the twisted neck of Verb!
the rawest: One final & superfluous link
in the unneeded sequence (sins,
sins), eyes troubled with all of their lack
& jammed up with terrible boosters of Blood

(Grace is much too unacceptable to us
creatures cringing not so much from the pain
as from the idea of it)          

           ... envisioning
the exquisite figures of the unmuddy rain

a drapery spreading like an impossible butterfly

when The Bible says only the mud is creative,
and endless in its empty disguises:

where lines like crevasses become whole Worlds!
of fine lines and May swirls

the bones of Man & good, thick, unbroken
waves of indefinite design:

the shocking vows of perhaps

(the cold/commingling imperishable tenderness
of the Autumn warmth--again rescuing the world
from the Sun's indefinable hints

& colors of the craziest
& most stark) hues: Phenomenons/shadows

the-thing-in-itself

met, although not quite unavoidable
--Lines! winding & winding down th'breaks
of darkness that are the souls of men:

th'metaphysical rightness & motionless
machines of Chance

like so many cowboys-trees lassoing the breeze
with th'limbering limbs of their heavy presence,

Reality subdued in the remembrance...
Past & Future riddles of calm lake spittle

its legs like the snake-
twisting sad side-winder shapes
of Progress headed where?

... from mimics to apes & back to mimics

or less: the edict leaves of Autumn
maimed by matter! the indispensably fatal,

pureness prolonged to a plush

& memory speaking out an eloquent voidness
in the looming everywheres & everythings

(th'insufficient moment of Instead) and barren
cascades of the World is a funny place,
Ace, the World is a funny place!...

Trying to make soapbubbles eternal
by enclosing them in a thought,

or some another ridiculous endeavor
(of theologians who should be doing
better by their fellow men,

religious men who awaken in the universe
to the smell of fresh paint
& conclude from it
that existence's just a few slight minutes old)

and then scientists who contribute their odd sorts
of controversies with studies that prove
(by the rate of paint-drying)
that life's well above two weeks old

at least... that's where it stands:
What do they know of a thousand-years-old tree

outside, in the Garden,

of grains of matter billions of aeons old,
of dreams beyond Time? Tonight the Glory
& tomorrow the Broom!               

               What gives here?
... the harder you work, the less money they pay you

The people trying their best to keep us from Communism
keep trying their darnest to abolish due-process

& that most common of decencies: respect
for the dignity of ALL men,

they want to suspend our civil liberties
& human rights, they want to censor the press
and run ramrod over The Law (funny
I always had the idea that THAT was Tyranny)

or: all those entertainers who make their living
by playing benefits!... What's going on here?

Pro-life nuts ( parading
in a passionately sincere demonstration
for the sanctity of human life)

happen upon some poor damned soul out on a ledge
& right off start shouting a chorus of "Jump!

Jump! Jump!"... People who think the World is coming to an end
& buy a lot of stuff on credit            

                ... the Red Baron
(a man much-celebrated for killing a hundred men)
--What kind of creatures are these
(mankind)... "It was the way he kill'em
that made't A Grand Achievement")

Good Heavens!... Feasting before a starving child:

Thank God we live in a country
where we have a choice of whether or not to help him
(and not in some country where one has no choice
at all): What's happening here!?

Everybody's afraid (all around me):
'God helps those who help themselves!'²⁰⁴

Only the foolish & the young seem unafraid
& there you have: the soldiers and their superiors
right there... innumerable armies murdering each other
over whether the invisible color roloc really exists

while the unfortunate Springs of the universe
are thawing out themselves into caricature

streams' & dreams' currents
the unredeeming mourning

burning in the sorrowful mortal flames
of any magnificence shorting out

in the sublime unnamed

but atop the flayed hide of common sense
like some merciless cowpoke at his game
irrevocable in his guitar-strumming violence

of vocables raw & wry

ire sans Aim... Life: that amusing bauble
of self-abusing! dance of self-pretense!

forever the human heroes of th'Light
flashing momentarily in the silence's cadences
through the conquering coward darkness

of closed eyes: the World is a funny
place, Ace, the World is a funny place!

But surely, Man!
surely you still acknowledge your inevitable lord
God!... Tell me your story

that I may know how I can again change you
into Dust the smart:

If there is a God, He is a pinball machine
and His Name is Pachinco!

... It was a holiday, I'd been to the movies
--I was religious then (Surprise!)

and for the same reason everybody else is religious:
I thought I'd be rewarded. You know:

After my passing I'd get to Heaven
& there'd be Jesus waiting for me
with the embrace of almost an equal;
then he'd hand me a rifle & deploy me
somewhere behind The Heavenly Gate

wherefrom we can shoot down all th'damned
motherfuckers who (belonging in The Other Place)
might be trying to crash our private party

Jesus & I would be LIKE THAT !

know what I mean)                       

                   ... It was a holiday
and I was getting out of the movies:

outside there was a stand selling burgers
made from roasted pig (the aroma went through you
like snorting cocaine--you just HAD to have one)

so I started home listening to the sweep
of infinity (shhhhh!)
and biting down on that roasted pig, when

suddenly I found myself in front of the church
& remembered what holiday they were celebrating:

Goddamnit!... the friday anniversary
of Jesus's sacred death!!!

I knew I'd had it, then:
Eternal Damnation! Mortal Sin! The Biggie!

... that was when I realized
I was just like all the other vermin

of this sinful world--That Jesus'd be shooting at ME
when I'd be out there trying to get my ass into Heaven,

so I thought: What the shit & finished th'rest
of my piggish sandwich, and that

was the first time ever I heard in my head
instead of a sacred, a human voice

saying the world is a funny
place, Ace, the world is a funny place!

omissions like martyrs
& martyrs like madmen

comforting, shaving off troubles
with Th'Bluntest War!

in a lather of laughters like tag lines
and coalitions of grace lines:

the Champion no less than the Vanquished
begin but only in a few unblinking lines

tangled in the giddy
splendor of life's goings-on (knots
nonetheless) the self-contorted Nothingness
at its forever sum harvesting powerful pulses

like years in the brain sinking & sinking
ending in the ever-more confining circle
of endless tears mixing & mixing

in our mortal confines swollen to an ancient creature
called Sin: thick in its tragedy,

its hands like little shells skating over our flesh
of granite: frozen maneuvers of inwardness

finally realizing an odd sort of humanity outwardly
over the long of Time interminable ^[sic]

as they draw the most infinite existence
in the fewest imaginable lines

th'common experiences of Man sorting things out
from th'bleak dismembered memories
of last Summer's temptations

imbued with the unthinking agitations of
caprice, there Beauty
floating like a ruby Glory over Reality beneath:

that scaffolding against The Void
that's always struggling to collapse to a central point

while above: the clamoring muds
of our splattered purposes or loves,

or principles taking the fleshy form
like a formula (so defineless!):

the spiteful tease of fatality
by the teaspoons, of that certain attitude

that if you die without knowing you've failed
then failure is not such bad a thing,

of Suspicion dropping in a rain
its footsteps of hints,

of coughing amongst the roses of incomprehension,
trailing gallantries always through the catastrophes,

suffering from the remedy of regret,
shaped to a vanishing!

in rainstorms romancing us muds
to a dust but Memory at its self-embroidery

ever-changing shapes; symbols & ceremonies
like dolphins unfurling in the waves

where every Man is an exaggeration of Mankind
in some respect, though none falls short of it

--There in that shoreland choke,
that God-goading Destiny:

the birds of Fate
in the downward trying to outrace the edge,

the freezing-cold comets of Again

and fires of Only
dowsing or lolling in the glassy (distance

like an overdose)... while offshore--the Shock!
... the winds like swindlers huffing & huffing;

th'dogs of along

running the suddenly self-made
makeshift precipices

and drunk against the wines of the wise
trying to shut out Truth (that metaphor),

striding atop the impossible parallels
(like stilts) & stumpless
as the marshy hymns of our Human Progress

in the floppish brawl of existence crawls Man
to the undying chanting of his God
(ungranting all but th'coldest possible adv-

ice: The World is) a funny place,
Ace, the World is a funny place!

Listen! to the musics of th'telephone
directories being torn in bars
to prove points of limited human

(also) strength without consequence
is the sole property of Man

toiling a stream of truths as irrelevant
as toads, or harvesting a bed of lies

the voluptuous lions in the cold (as is
Winter) snows & snows of Who knows

& Who knows sans satiety

Existence comes down the pipes
through certain inevitable chutes we call
the laws of nature: and

God can no more help being what He is
than you can help your big nose,

this is a sort of paradox
where you know you must go to the bathroom
(eventually), but the instant you pick
to (actually) get up & get on,
although it seems to make it a conscious act
--it's only an illusion:

Reasons are but the brick walls we bounce off of
in the cosmic pinball machine

where the murderer could not but murder
& the state could not but send him to his death,
the anti-capital-punishment-people could not
but stage their protest, and the poet (if he cannot
but be a good poet) cannot
but shrug at the whole affair,

given this does not invalidate dialogue,
discussion, hard work: after all,

we are such ignorant creatures!
and there is little we can predict,

dancing over the blueprints of Creation

artistically chased by that marvelous enamelist
Death!... following the patriarch Could

(so splendid at its peak)
always looking down on bottomless landing

through the buffaloed While
& the unmedicined, strange visions
of the mad, of the sad & formless,

listening to dreams (those dizzy deacons of Night
that honest, real religion)

forever dim in their luminous hymns
of man-made, the moonlit, watching all manners
of Awe                          
the little child admires:

                          ... the naked
cabaret dancers, and the speaker who best insults
us, that innocent young little child

studying under the birds: the scales & degrees
of sweet body movements from the majestic nest
of his mother's embrace
watching the uncaptured wideness of the world

moving! like direction the staccato of the leaves
(of Autumn) swirling along the streets

always deserted (paved over with stone peoples
discovered on the dry beach like pebbles
after the tide of the mind deserts it):

he holds up a finger, with the intention of
twitching it as an act of Free Will

... he stares at it in preparation
throughout an instant's eternity
until he finds at last that--is there no point to it?

after all... or, is the inevitable part
that he should move it--ergo:

the real act of Free Will is in not moving it
at all!... he cannot go through with it

and in shame hides his finger,

putting on the leaping garments of human agony!
and ploughing into the better burden of

Next: God's terrible whispering winds
racing over his twisted face

with the World is a funny place, Ace, the
World is a funny place...

And the single most marvelous & astonishing miracle
of all is: Movement!... the most basic,

most enigmatic mystery in the universe:

Were we to finally come to know
why there is movement at all:
it would explain All!

... That we lack a purpose
is but the result of motion not having One
single, traceable Cause (after so-many billion-years

of Chaos... a scornful, mocking name
with which we cover our ignorance)

but results from (apparently) an infinite number
of contingencies we have no inkling of at all

... Why there is motion is
at the root of all: Matter itself

but                                  
a  form                  

         ... of motion whose sum
we, for lack of better understanding, call

that Reality contained within the scope of our whatever
momentary thoughts... those misty bricks of

Certainty! with which we construct
what small thing we know
as if it were some clear, factual etching of

Th'Absolute... take
the religious Big Bang view

(for an instance) that
space itself is expanding!
--could anything else be more ridiculous?
certainly: What if matter itself is shrinking!
and we are at the center of a collapsing Black Hole:

obviously matters are always easier to explain
as long as they keep collapsing

to some infinitesimal point (than if
they are coming at us from an overwhelming one,

and then--The Night is our one genuine religion):
you wouldn't even have to change a single iota
of actual Reality (just throw in
some of Einstein's gravitational spells
with which to keep nearby matter always shrinking
at comparable rates): Why, hell,

Nothingness only exists in the human mind!

the human touch
(the miracle) is that Matter hugs itself!
and does not vanish in-place)

and you can do away with the irrational impossibility
of a Singular, Original Cause Uncaused,

raising logic (that Meaning-organizing Process)
to a still higher form of art

(where Meaning is but any peculiar shape):
the human Soul is the shape of your brain

--change the shape & you become brainless
and soulless as the pig or hummingbird

the automatic machines of the universe
chirping & chiding

unholy the World is a funny place,
Ace, the World is a funny place!

what with Time, always with Time
(the triumph of wears & tears

trampling down our dusty cares): come
blossoming, th'true mothering breast of earth:

that miraculous Moment!
at its maddeningest (when we discover

Path the prophecy bruised to a maze)
pounding garbage cans, walls
shadows & tree shades, judgments, indecisions
& other assorted superstitions,
jailings & liberations

like some drunkard of chimney soots
(bathing in the disfiguring brocades

of pure civilization) one suddenly feels
the need to paint coming on
--of all things--

and it is a warmer feeling than our whatever
current seat (we being creatures
sticking with the warmth of the whatever):

Re-Interpreted: The fleeting need to paint
itself! and it's (already) beginning to
escape the unbounded Mind
like leaps! of the Imagination--So

THE THING must be painted as soon as one can:
Right then! before it's too late, too dimly lit,

stumbling through the stiff possibilities
in all their ever-setting patterns like cement,

nevermind it is wounding anew th'unhealed Will
with its groping griefs & untraceable images
jumping at you from the meanmouthing mirror of

your sins... the reverberations of nerves
over the hills like a hounding, bounding

murmurs like muds, thoughts subsiding
to a cold-blooded ooze that once would have crested
over the cosmic peaks--suddenly now stricken

with the panic of Time

(cold as is Winter), its vicious waves
voices in vain when Hope keeps crying Knowledge

the tongue disembodied,
pounding the shifting main with Hurry!

Hurry! Hurry! before the Sun slips again
wholly from the thoughts of Man:

comes that reminder from The Lord God
taking time off in the late afternoon
from a tea-party in the garden

to give the muddy common man

a good whipping with the World is
a funny place, Ace,
the World is a funny place...

And yet: will I, a man
as mean & petty as every other man,

will I (by the unalterable decree of the inevitable)

will I be king of the world?
... Use all available materials close at hand:
lipstick & ketchup, soysauce & mustards,
eye-shadow makeups, rotting fruits
& stuffs scaring you from the bottom of the Fridge
(to paint your pix): hot rhetorics,
rouge, coffee grounds for th'blacks, teas
for the light browns, cheesy yellows & sundry
condiment pinks & greens from some other backgrounds ²⁰⁵

--O, what th'Hell's the use!

what with such mortal matters (the red of our blood):
our brothers the primogenitor ants
or our dull ancestor worms
(all who'll again inherit us)
will probably make a grab for it,

carrying off our Masterpiece (life,
had we finished it) after all our hard work

But, if your inevitable future is to be king
you'll not go in this door a bum ^[sic]
& come out the other side a crowned head:

If there were Free Will there'd be a God
& you'd be it, my man--You see:

Man, fashioned in the Image of God,

if he is to understand himself
need only study his Maker (which he made)

or the reverse--You needn't put away all
the holy baloney
that is your earthy patrimony, ^[sic]

a new cosmology IS a new religion
and a new religion is a new cosmology,

always: they're all the self-fulfilling fancies
& fantasies of Man chanting

the World is a funny place,
Ace, the World is a funny place...

We can abide the paraphrase,
the repeating petty Instead,
the withholding plan,

dressed up in our white garments of quarry
across the scrambles of the mad snatching ages
searching The Woods for that sanctuary:

Shade! with no strings attached

--How can we get there
struggling prim & pretty

like a crab all over the sands
of Necessity (the metaphor) at eternity's utmost:
bloody revolutions, volcanic eruptions,
famines & plagues, wars,

men traveling by unknown means
to new unheard-of places

--these are all predicted
by the Old Testament prophets:

treasons, assassinations, destructions,
hurricanes--hair on men's faces, breasts
on women, scraped kneecaps, fat babies,
warts in unexpected places:          

                    Hell,
predict me a Chukumbaka instead
(that would indeed be Something strange
for a change)... the devil's an unforgivable wit,
my friend, already dear Prince--Don't these views
scare you at all?... Yes!
to the very foundations of my thoughts!

The gods don't like to be mocked, you know!

Ah, but, if the gods are mockable
then to mock them is the god-given job of Man.

... if I were not me I'd protest me

but, alas: Who can kill an idea?
--even a single one! much less
one his own?            

    ... and I'm just in no mood
for any of the many forms of suicide

when the world is a funny place, Ace,
the World is a funny place!

I really thought on it too long a while
and that caused me (as a painter) to fail:

However, the painting I was after,
the one I momentarily had in my head

& should've realized (at once)
had not some Light malevolent
come uninvited into My Dark

room (enough for Imagination) merely to spoil my due

was: of                         

an Old Man,       

               older than man,

sitting ever so quietly upon his tired old sofa
trying to wind backwards the Clock

as all the while that sofa is enveloping him
in that terrible assassination: Comfort
the undoing of man            

     ... Somewhere behind him:
the pines (four of the most monstrous)
are sweeping up the clouds, while

in his mind (only in his mind does it matter,

and so it spares the painter
from having to develop the technique)

that Old Man is trying to gather up
the stardust burdening his living room

(Imagination enough), his bones

with the weary futility of his tooth-
pick years' but images like murdered men

bleeding his blindness (the stoic beckoning Past),

laughing beside himself, all his teeth,
within himself: starving in his self-serving

Moment the measureless dissolving

firm in its rickety truths

& the justice of the jug

nowadays a hazy drowsy malaise
spreading over the bony unnerving

world-shaking commonplace
of his cause ( like mayonnaise )
the beautiful daze of Mays innumerable
that with their blaze erase the freezing sanctimony

of a God so base as to try to faze us
with His sunny money and, Honey,

Believe me: The World is
a funny place,
Ace, the World is a funny place!

Headlong hurls the tempest of laughters
its flickering destruction (Mays the multiples)
& loquacious sunshine

the surviving guzzler of that shock
The Darkness--cold as is Winter

--Old reefs cut up the worlds untold
like ocean in rather neat halves
with their flow-through musics

bloom upon bloom, blossoms on blossoms
the broken or unfinished chords of drone
falling like bees for their honeys

amidst the preludes of breeze
complaining like anything, mile for mile,
about the crazy morning rising on

beyond the while: a marigold devoured
by some unknown unknowable
irrecognizable irreconcilable
hue (a Bird like fear above all heard,

a smear more like a smear
across the surface of smearing)

the listening, mute glistening
motions of trees like glasses
laid upon the table Galaxy
sinking down nothingness
by th'indeterminable Moods
condoned a babbling of blues

in the droll of plenty: that hollow hole
Despair, that Old Man's eyes sinking & sinking
into their ocean of wrinkles--Framed!)

... Not too bad a painting at that!

Now submit it to the critics of Now,
those traditions from our Past (the ancients
who like balloon strings keep us from floating away
and bumping our heads on the clouds

hard clouds) & other metaphysics
the God-like sense of Creativity!

surging inside us the fastidious blind
flaunting our faults
& cautious in the prevailing actual
where net is the point & the promise:

Send us no money now:
You'll be bilked later! my friend,
the cheek is in the mail

brace yourself for something phony straightaway
like praise, sonny--because, the

World is a funny place,
Ace, the World is a funny
place ...

and in this as in no other place
God spares us his parsimony

--Nevertheless, a mere altitude creates
in anybody, especially the artist,

the mad illusion of high aptitude
& dozens of pianists all practicing at the same time
sans harmony on the only keyboard at once!

we say, "O this has got to be Hell!"

One can so easily tell
a little of the poison having trickled
down the throat CHOKED UP

after all the disasters
having surmounted The Great Test
of our tight-fisted lips,

our pallid complexions marking the footsteps
of daredevil Fate
& measuring them out calmly as would a clock

our emotionless Structure of sensations
moves beyond the old set of reasons

into some newer game
in which our faces are spread flat as caricatures
refracting broadly upon the flattest state of being,

weighed down so languidly by the liquidest sadness
of all: our voices go down about a million RPMs

until World passes us bounding & bounding
(having a ball) rubber forever

& ever so small and bounding off the walls
of halls unknowable

chased there ecstatically, echoless,
sans self-control,
by the children who accept any & all
as being only for their own exclusive use

(love or abuse, only for their playing,

since they can always call a truce
with Destiny) O Prince,
& running away if confronted with any dead ends,

never believing, much less actually
getting to understand, such trifles as Death
playing with them--a game of waiting

for the Word yet unheard
in the whole wide world! while disguised
as a small rubber ball, echoless

in their halls of the flesh,
laughing & laughing in a whirl

like testimony unheard, the World
is a funny place, Ace,
the World is a funny place!

Like daredevils the children of life,
but burly bags of blood & bones
bounce about the pricks of Destiny

blurred in their murderous hard-ons
(the sharpest ones of all falling upon them

being like drunks out in the digit dawn)
excited by the crimson smells of approaching darkness

& treacherous cadences
of You can tell all's well (et cetera)

& the facts which suddenly come to a dead stop
an instant before striking our bloated bodies

too beaten or flattened but floating helplessly
up in the skies without the strings of Tradition

which we nevertheless are still trying desperately
to sever in our gladness! to escape
the rising Destruction already laid down on the earth

below us like the Past unburied,
stinking dead in the air

Time Enough allows us to reach forward
with our tender, vulnerable fingertips-Mind

to question O the Point's sharp lethalness

that is all the hot air 'mounts to
in the end: merely to feel life's sharp veracities
an instant before they strike us--who
can't believe, much less actually understand

(cold as is Winter) cruel, and
refusing The Knowledge that may free our hands

that refuse to let go, mindless, all the while
retreating into a less useful yet warmer
(a metaphor) which bounding off the cozy walls
of our self-limits

becomes the house within which I am lost
out of myself

& maybe bounding off the pointiest twain
ever sundered like some passionate self-praise

the sunshine Perhaps
down the unending corridors of darknesses

& other sad lines
chasing the echoes of a small rubber
ball's hushed callings because:

Inside the house is IN

--outside the house from which I'm lost
the loneliest tree swings through absence
of breeze as the evening falls
with its late transparency
smothering that outside tree
and I look slowly upon its being devoured
by the Emptiness!
of a whole universe--I who am safe

in the confines of my limited existence

behind my window: I kiss away
Anxiety, palms sweat, Moment is held

in the lungs, the tongue plays small prays
for that tree outside too

& not just because of my tender humanity
or pained sympathy with another of God's
sensible-less & susceptible
beings, but         

          ... because: if
that tree (out there) can weather out
The Silence, the Laughter, the Doubt,

then inside: ME
the emptiness Silence, Laughter, Doubt
I still own, regardless: I may sing
with the strength of gladness

all my own, having a chance
of witnessing Tomorrow across its Gulf

against its Guilt, overthrowing the tree
of Rightness: Outside is frailer

always, IN is the Womb, Tomb
(two eyes witnessing Doom discover

it's the same! the Tomb, and Womb)

so the palm of the hand spreads out
into fingers naturally

and fingers spread out into all over
that palm: tearing off all the leaves

by leaves, murderously calm,

and not stopping until the palm is bare
... then the murderous fingers

return into the palm of the hand
& scratch it in satisfaction, sinister,

artist-like, and without shame, O Prince,
having at last made, finally

and like our God, having made
quite a killing

in the world is a funny
place, Ace, the World
is a funny place,

cold as is Winter in his Word
& murder like some ambulance
scaring up the mute populace

with a sound like an embroidered madness
tripping the timeless lines
with diminute agonies

like dynamite & other diagonals
& grafts of fitful overfondness

disconsolate in its whispering Always
like roundelays the language of The Blaze

that God first witnessed
--Life in those first moments of agony--

& called it Good, The Light!

The Black a watch over the frolicking fires
we catch for ourselves & guard
better than all desires combined

bitterly weeping when they expire
put out in the mires of our truths

like towers! crashing into the tiny cries
of Time the too hurried Heart, cold as is Winter

and disheartened, timing with iceberg lives

noises like dandelions at Night
& the golden guppies of dawn
saying it all with their brawls of death

the riot of bewildered Light is The Way
of The Undone by doing

the struggle of the wingless birds
versus the eternal downness

in front of those wondering circles
of witnesses like constellations

worn out with the ages, waylost
in the awaiting Away (the ancestral mold)

makes us God and Man

the two giants that grew perfect
in the splendor of each other's views

crony singing to crony

The World is a funny place,
Ace, the World is a funny place!

^{204} Obviously this assumes God works in a bank.@

^{205} You'd be king from the start --Also see footnote 126.

Gravity As Thermodynamics: The Explanation For The Universe. / S D Rodrian

There is a fear among thinkers too clever for their own good that perhaps none of them may prove to be sufficiently smart to understand the universe. Yet, unsuspected by them, it is not that they are not smart enough to understand the universe but that they are too smart... and instead of seeking to understand they instead apply their nervous creativity to dreaming up overly-clever (and ultimately purely imaginative) illusions--an accomplishment which may be the glory of literary fiction, but is forever the bane of science. The purpose of science is to explain the inevitability of the process--nothing more, nothing less, nothing else: And not merely/only to seek/to find that inevitability but to explain it (in effect, to usefully demonstrate it). And any endeavor which does not do this is only pastime, merely an entertainment, a private diversion... but certainly not science.

Now: It is no great novelty to suggest a relationship between gravity and thermodynamics nowadays [as with the thermodynamics analogy of a lightning bolt's "path of least resistance" later on in my text]. But, to my knowledge, this is the first ever comprehensive explanation of the universe in terms of the inevitability of thermodynamics--or, why and exactly how it is that "gravity" (the "flow" of energy) is the inevitable (and therefore perfectly natural) phenomenon it is in the universe.

Since I am not here going to give merely one more description of the visible universe but am actually going to show the causes behind its observed effects, there will be no resorting here either to supernatural interpretations (uninformed guessing and other leaps of faith) or to the "usual" mathematical obfuscations (the mere reduction of manifest observations to exacting measurements) behind which the absence of actual basic knowledge has habitually been veiled.

There are no mysteries in nature, there is only the mystified.

The first problem to be solved is the prohibition against the creation/destruction of "energy," as embodied in the question of what could have "been there" before there was a universe of visible matter. And the preferred tool for accomplishing this is the one which allows us to inquire into levels of existence outside our physical reach: Namely, an abiding conviction that the laws of physics apply across ALL levels of existence and not merely at some of them while not at others [including the statistical research of probability & quantum theory].

But, motion without matter...? Our brains evolved to "believe" that only "concretely material" or "solid" objects have existence. Yet our prejudiced sanction of "matter" alone as the only "solid material" that "exists" is in conflict with what the universe keeps telling us "really exists" (or, has real "permanent" existence). For, insist as we may (to the universe) that "matter" is "what exists," the universe always insists to us that "what really exists" (in fact, "the only thing which really exists") is "momentary" matter's truly "permanent" constituent: "energy." ["Matter" can be taken apart, but not so "energy."] Moreover, now we know that the "solidness" of matter is an "illusion" created by interactions between the electro-magnetic, the weak, and the strong "nuclear forces."

WE: If it's not "matter" it doesn't exist.

THE UNIVERSE: The "reality" of matter is no different than the reality of all those "forms" you "recognize" sketched in the passing clouds by the power of your own imagination alone: Just as those "cloud forms" are in no way fundamental (insoluble & indivisible) and the least breeze tears them to shreds (into some other "forms")... none of which has any relevance to the question of the continuing existence of clouds, so too ALL "the forms of matter" are but "fortuitous forms" (so-called "gravitational systems") which can also be torn to shreds (into other just as "fortuitous forms") without this having any bearing whatsoever on the question of the continuing existence of "energy" (or, the "clouds" from which the "forms of matter" are made). And this holds true even if the forms are imposed on you by the universe rather than your imagination imposing them on the universe.

This has been the one hurdle that has kept previous theorists from following the line of inquiry we are taking here: Just as it was only after mankind finally accepted the fact that the earth moved (and was not the fixed center around which orbited the rest of the universe) that mankind was finally able to achieve the greater perspective we've enjoyed since... so too, it is only when we finally give up the human prejudice that "the forms of matter are absolute" (that they are the fundamental, immutable & indivisible objects with whose destruction "existence" itself ceases to be--or that there are even such things), that it then becomes possible for us to achieve the next great perspective.

This notion that there exist "immutable and indivisible objects with whose destruction existence itself ceases to be" is an ancient human superstition which should have been dropped once it was clear that the Greek proposal for just such an indivisible particulate (the "atom") was no longer tenable. Yet to this day we're still drowning in quite unforgivable proposals for exactly such indivisible "particulates" (or "strings" now).

However, had Einstein (at the moment when he was mulling why it might be that, given the existence of gravity, the universe had not collapsed into a pile of "fundamental matter")... had Einstein been able to consider that such a "collapse" (implosion) would not produce anything other than the "forms of matter" always continuing to adjust to the implosion of the universe in some relativistic natural process [whereby "larger and slower" forms forever continue to evolve (or, "conserve" themselves, their angular momentum) into "smaller/ faster" ones], perhaps modern physics might have been spared the last hundred years' nonsensical excursions into the theatre of the absurd (with its "time-travel" and "alternate dimensions" science fiction scripts). And then the unexpected discovery of Hubble's Constant (that the galaxies are receding from each other at an everywhere uniform rate depending on their distances) could have been understood for what it really is --a clear reflection on the grand scale of that process of "larger/slower forms" evolving "smaller but faster" ones which is necessarily creating distance (or, "space") between themselves. [As well as hinting that there might indeed yet be at least one state "at absolute rest" in the universe... by which (against which) all eternally shifting local effects might be measured.]

Energy vs. Matter... or, Something vs. Nothing?

Too late for Einstein, we begin here from the specific proposition that there is no fundamental difference between "matter" and the "primordial material" (some may term "scalar mass" or simply "energy") and that they are but merely two levels of the same single process of "matter-organization" (simply many orders of magnitude distant from each other). That ultimately there are only "relative differences" in "densities" (or "energy values"), and certainly not a fundamental shift from "energy" to "matter" as profound as that from "non-existence" to "existence."

Existence cannot be created or destroyed (exactly the same as with "energy" since that's exactly what it is). Existence/energy is all there is, all that ever was, and all that there will ever be. And only the laws of thermodynamics convert/conserve/move it from one form/value/concentration to another "equality."

Certainly "the primordial state of existence" (the primordial "scalar mass" or "temperature" in the sense of "a given energy value") can never have been an all-or-nothing (absolute) one, but must have instead always been an entirely relativistic "state") because otherwise the outbreak of (to) "existence" requires a "leap" to "something" from "nothing" (in effect: it has to be the result of magic). And this is not only a clear violation of the laws of physics, but consequently not even a proper subject for science.

The question of "a mathematical infinity" never
comes into what is essentially a choice offered by
the laws of physics (whether or not "something"
can come out of "nothing")... and not the sort of
mathematical game exemplified when, say, a new
guest shows up at, "Hilbert's Hotel Infinity" and
the clerk claims that all rooms are full--forcing
the new guest to explain that if the hotel is
"full but infinite" the clerk can simply make the
guest in room 1 move into room 2, move the
original guest in room 2 into room 3, and the
guest in room 3 into room 4, and so on...
depriving no guest of a room but vacating room 1
into which any new guest can then move. i.e. The
supposed paradox (like all paradoxes) is
artificially created when the clerk erroneously
claims that "Hilbert's Hotel Infinity" can ever be
"full." [There are no paradoxes in nature, only in
the mind.]

Acknowledging that "the process of existence itself" is one of evolution (or, that "existence has always existed," as it were) eliminates once & for all the strictly human (mental) "paradox" that existence must "originate" with/as some supernatural Big Bang (special creation) miracle.

Let us posit instead a "given volume of space" ("the void"), its "absolute" energy value (the absolute density of "its whatever material") being irrelevant because as long as that density is purely/solely "relativistic" there can be no "lowest limit" to how tenuous/sparse it can be and still "exist." And this then is the "spatial volume" or, more properly, the "scalar mass" [traditionally termed "the void"]. From our perspective: about as close to infinitely immense as such a thought is humanly possible; that is... without ever permitting time to bring to an end the process of continuing to imagine its immensity.

It quickly becomes clear how unusual (provided such a "volume of space" has ANY "energy value" or "density" at all), how unusual it would be if such an infinitely vast spatial volume could maintain the same identical "density" or "energy value" across the entirety of its unlimited [not to mention: eternally increasing] vastness... regardless how low that energy value or density may be "in absolute terms" which do not apply, remember, because an "absolute" condition of existence demands some absolute lower limit dropping below which "the thing" no longer exists. And, since we exist, it behooves us to assume that the density/energy value of the scalar mass always had to have been "relativistic" and never "all-or-nothing" or "absolute." [Not to mention the fact that to measure anything one must measure it against "something else," and "existence" is all that exists, or obviously "the only thing" that exists.]

In an exclusively "relativistic" context then (one in which the "density" of any given "volume of space" is always merely "relatively" higher or lower than those of "other" volumes of space, and NOT "absolutely" EITHER existent OR nonexistent): there will always be "enough" energy (if you will: "a difference" in "pressures" or "temperatures") already present in "even such primordial" a condition to literally "fuel" everything which may "proportionally" evolve from it --because it's in the nature of "energy" as we have come to understand it (and no less in the cosmic relativity of existence we are discussing here), it is in the nature of "energy" to be (to also "hold") purely a thermodynamic "potential" for "work."

More aptly: "for motion" ... replacing the term
"work" with "motion" since we are certainly not
going to speak here of "motion without matter."
[Energy being "what matter does." Remember:
"existence = energy"] Therefore... "if matter is
merely energy, matter is also merely motion" (so
that: "there has always been motion" is what we
really mean when we say that "existence has always
existed"). Again: All "the forms of matter" are
merely "larger/slower" forms becoming/evolving/
conserving themselves into "smaller/faster ones."
Or, from the diametrically opposite perspective
(not an entirely unreasonable one, so we'll be
discussing it later)... all the "forms of energy"
can be thought of as the (denser) faster/smaller
forms of energy conserving themselves into
larger/slower (more dispersed) ones.

As far as the requirements of "motion" go... the direction of "flow" is irrelevant ("into" will "work" just as well as "out of"). It's a mistake to belive that what's thermodynamically required for "energy" to "perform work" [the term "work" from classical mechanics' "product of force/distance"], that what is thermodynamically required for "energy" to "perform work" is, say, "a boiler-full of heated water" when the sole requirement (for the universe to "work") is that a thermodynamic current "flows" (the sole origin/source of "motion"). Therefore the singular objection to existence is that it not be absolute (or, "all-or-nothing") given that "absolute stillness" has no way of "pushing off" itself, as it were.

In the primordial condition of existence, in which one single elementary (homogeneous) principle constitutes the sum total of "everything/the material" from which all subsequent diversity arises (the evolution of more complex forms from simpler ones, or even a single one) existence can only "flow" [note the always inescapable definition of "existence" as "motion"], existence can only "flow" from this clearly singularly relativistic state rather than from being arbitrarily forced by a human superstition to "flow" from some impossible (magical) "boiler" [or "Big Bang" furnace/mixture] of many already complex primordial states (independent settings) clearly violating creation/destruction laws of energy in some impossible all-or-nothing universe.

With respect to this principle of evolution: If one considers the present universe just in light of the proposed "string" theories: one can hardly help noticing that the present universe is in many, many ways a very elegantly simple concept compared to the notorious complexity of string theories from which it is supposed to "originate" (from which it "subsequently evolves"). Something which is clearly a logical violation of the principle of evolution.

As difficult as it may be to "find" in the primordial "void" a "volume of space" with a density lower than that of the rest of existence, in the first place... that much more difficult is it to even imagine where and how one might possibly (necessarily) "create" a volume with an even higher density, to begin with (or, the infamous Big Bang "boiler" of inflationary models). So the universe (everything that "follows" from "the primordial state") is a lot more likely to begin with the former (or "an evolution" from/of simpler forms) rather than with the latter (some "special creation" Big Bang already complex from its start). And keep in mind that even if one such "Big Bang boiler" could somehow be "produced" (at the "onset of it all")... its destiny surely would be dilution and dissipation, and certainly NOT the concentration and amalgamation which obviously goes into the organization of ever more & more complex forms of matter.]

It is irrelevant whether "the void" comes upon a
bubble/area ("hollow") of lesser density (the
"egg" that incubates our universe of matter) or
such a "hollow" comes into being somewhere within
"the void" (my own preference because this makes
for a balanced/stable universe in which matter and
anti-matter regions balance out each other, making
it easier to understand why it is that one form
predominates in a given "side" of the universe
even as the other form may be the most common one
in the "opposite" side of the same universe.

We will always return to this same point of departure: All that is required for the homogeneous "primordial medium" to (perform) "work" [i.e. for "the void" to produce an already perfect/complete machine] is for "the void" (no matter how unimaginably tenuous and sparse its "density") to come into contact with another volume of space "region" or "hollow" (as we shall term it here) having an even lower density.

And, for the purpose of illustrating more easily the "gravitational" evolution of the visible universe, we will "assume" in this text that "our" lesser density "hollow" was more or less completely and entirely (and perhaps even perfectly) encompassed by the greater density "the void." Though common sense rules this out (just as, given their origin, its "discrete bits" could never have been perfectly equidistant from each other). But we will still speak of it this way so we may refer to the universe as having a perfectly spherical shape it can't in fact possibly have.

As the primordial medium of the "the void" encounters our "hollow" of lesser density, its greater density "collapses" our lesser density hollow (collapses into it, that is), sending (crucially for the creation of our universe of visible matter at its center), sending a "shockwave" of higher density "material" into our "hollow" from every point around it. [This "shockwave" of inrushing material effectively represents pretty much the sum total of all the "energy" our visible universe is ever destined to have, by the way.] This imploding pressure wave eventually "condensing" into what we call matter somewhere along the way.

There still being people who think the earth is "flat" (and many who believe it is the universe that orbits the earth--and perhaps there are always going to be such people): somewhere around here advocates of inflationary models "may be tempted to think" that the cosmic collapse of the void's primordial material (energy) into our lower- density "hollow" may well be describing a rationale for their cherished Big Bang model... as "matter" crashes against a pinpoint quantum center and then erupts/echoes back out like 3-dimensional ripples following the dropping of a pebble into a lake... rescuing the ancient superstition that there can be, after all, some fundamental particle from which everything else is made... never mind the fact that this idea leaves us forever unable to explain how a necessarily mythological fundamental object like "matter" could have possibly come into being (out of non-being) in the first place--and "necessarily mythological" because we can never describe a particulate of matter in our universe we can with any degree of certainly assure ourselves is forever immutable and indivisible (even strings' own theory places them neither altogether in our universe nor altogether outside it). But as antidote to this Big Bang superstition, keep in mind that all the forms of matter will condense for a brief time and then "just as quickly" dematerialize. [It's rather likely that we are at the only point along the shifting phases of matter-organization from beginning to end of our universe where life is possible.]

By definition, an indivisible body or object is hardly likely to be made up of two or more bodies or objects... as this would "by definition" make such a body or object, at least theoretically, really already very divisible indeed.

Then again, gravity itself would continue to remain the inexplicable (seemingly magical) "force" we've thought it until now--And the purpose of this very text is to explain how gravity is not some magical unfathomable "force" (of attraction or of anything else) but really only the mistaken description of a perfectly inevitable and natural effect which up to now remained impossible to interpret perfectly.

What Is The Universe REALLY Doing?

The imploding universe is undertaking two crucial motions at the same time: an absolute motion and a relativistic one. We can actually "see" these two motions in action if we but know from where (from which perspective) to look:

Imagine the universe to be an earth-size globe. If
we then abstract "ourselves" from it, from now on
forever remaining unaffected by its shifting
sizes, we can "see" both the absolute and the
relativistic motions the universe is undertaking
by considering two men standing on opposite sides
of this imploding/shrinking globe universe.

The globe is shrinking in an absolute sense, so in an absolute sense the two men are always moving towards each other. [This absolute motion is very much apparent to us all because it's the effect we have come to know as gravity.] However, because they and everything else in their globe universe is shrinking everywhere at a constant rate... in the normal course of events neither of the two men standing on opposite sides of the globe universe will ever notice that they are moving towards each other absolutely. Instead they will forever marvel how/why they seem to "stick" to the globe as if by magic and not "float" away into space. [And if they happen to be scientists and understand the Standard Model they might assume that gravity must be mediated by gravitons & then they will waste their lives trying to make up a Unified Field Theory encompassing gravity and particle forces. But you can see why the geometry of Einstein relativity describes gravity better than the forces of Newton.]

The shrinking of everything at an universally
constant rate (so that everything appears to
remain relativistically frozen in place/size) is
itself the second motion: It is nearly impossible
to notice at very close proximities (least of all
by two such beings standing across a common lump
of matter)... but it can certainly be "seen" when
glancing across astronomical distances (and we
call this very visible effect the Hubble Constant,
which makes it appear as if the galaxies are
receding faster from each other the more distant
from each other they are). [Although one can
substitute "time" for "distance" and "witness" it
in practically every object that orbits another
body.]

To understand this purely relativistic effect (of course in reality all the galaxies necessarily must be "absolutely" getting closer and closer inside an imploding universe)... one has only to consider the nature of space (in other words, all ones has to do is consider it) as the distance between bodies of matter: Where does it come from? How can there be any "spaces" at all in the single ("solid") body which the universe of matter must be from the very first instants of its "massing" in its cosmic hollow?

Well, our universe is very large, and the same laws of thermodynamics which inevitably create the "hollow" into which the higher densities of "the voids" flows now literally tear the "solid" universe into "bits." And it is at the level of these bits that the body of the universe continues to implode... so that from here on out every one of these "bits" begins to implode away from all the other bits about it forever FASTER than the single body of the universe itself can "stuff" those opening spaces: At first there is very little "space" between the numberless bits, but given enough time and whatever form the "bits" of the imploding universe eventually take as they evolve & revolve in ever more complex interactions (galaxies in our epoch of the universe)... you can see how the distances between them can grow to unimaginably astronomical distances (into a "lot" of space indeed).

At first, the "absolute" (viewed from outside our "cosmic hollow")... the "absolute" motion of this thermodynamic "penetrating shockwave" (flow/current) is undoubtedly always "moving" only in the direction of our cosmic hollow's logical center [a "center" which can probably only be "pinpointed" by quantum theory, since obviously anything introduced into the "hollow" to measure the position of its "absolute center" would necessarily shift it---thereby finally making it clear that the world of the very big(gest, really) behaves exactly like the world of the very smal(lest) except perhaps in small minds]. But now you understand how without a particle interaction between them two objects can establish an "orbital" relationship about a so-called "center of gravity."

To say "the world of the very small" is to say "the world of the very near." In a universe undergoing implosion the human perspective stares out both to a much bigger/distant world and to a much smaller/nearer one from somewhere in the middle: The more distant/bigger world always appears to be growing bigger and more distant relativistically; while the smaller/nearer world always appears to be growing ever smaller and nearer in an absolute sense (gravity).

This holds true across the full spectrum of possible perspectives (the view from within the universe is also always relativistic, while seen from outside it the universe would appear to be absolutely "shrinking" in isolation).

As the observer is also imploding, when he looks at "the world he's leaving behind" it appears to him to be big (and the farther away he looks at it the bigger it appears to always be growing), while when he looks at "the world into which he is moving" it appears to him to be small (and the closer he looks into it the smaller it appears).

Counterintuitively, it appears to us as if the world of the very small is a chaotic one (forever shifting its geometric centers), while in reality it is the one behaving in an absolute way: The world of the very big may appear to be stable as it grows bigger and more distant... but in reality it is growing neither bigger nor more distant at all.

Three very specific basic "motions" will describe the nature of the universe from the instant "the void" encounters (one of) these cosmic "hollows" of lesser density which "nurse" entire universes of matter at their core. But I do not include one of these three Basic Motions of Matter (the "pressure shock" of the general void's greater density "falling" into our cosmic "hollow" as it is strictly a 3-dimensional motion towards the "center of "our hollow" up until such material fully saturates it). Essentially, all the "falling" primordial material pressurizing itself "solidly" in place. I leave out this "motion" because I don't see it playing any further role in the processes that keep our universe in its continuing present equilibrium.

At its point (of "highest saturation") this singular homogeneous "solid" mass (call it a "cloud" or call it a "body" of energy) destined to become our universe of visible matter, now finds it has no place to go from here other than to be (literally forever) squeezed into an always smaller & smaller volume of space (for the very reason that, exactly like every other "thing" that exists... it too is neither fundamentally solid nor immutable and therefore can not refuse to be so squeezed)... effectively causing it to "implode" in an "absolute" sense: forever to grow "smaller & smaller" as it is forced to occupy an ever diminishing volume of space--the originally homogeneous "solid" mass now very much literally tearing itself to bits--that is... into "discrete bits" (each a self-contained system forever "winding itself up" in a lifelong strategy designed by the laws of physics to "conserve" its eternally increasing angular momentum--which must from now on always increase, as said before, as larger-but- slower systems "conserve themselves" into smaller-but- faster ones)... until they all eventually pay the ultimate price of dissolution. (But that's far off in the future at this point.)

Nonetheless: note the origin of "space" as merely the "distance" between these primordial discrete bits: A process (of space-creation) which has not stopped to this day; and which at the topmost level of matter- organization (that of stars and galaxies) is "easily" observable by us as the Hubble Constant. But a process which is forever on-going at ALL levels of matter- organization.

"A" given level of matter-organization is one which reflects a stage (or state) at which the "local gatherings of interacting "bits" or "clusters of them" (or "gravitational systems") nevertheless begin to behave (or to be thought of) as if they were one single object (giving the impression of having no individual constituent parts within it).

We may begin to trace the history of these matter- organization "levels" from a point where the entire mass of the "visible universe" could be thought of as one single homogeneous mass (or "cloud") which has just completely saturated the "center" of the cosmic hollow into which the primordial material of the higher-density "the void" surrounding it has fallen. (And it's not important for us here whether the "saturation" fills the cosmic hollow completely of merely a given area about its center.)

The crucial thing is that it is at this point that this once "one" solid body begins to "tear itself apart" (or, more to the point, to "bits"). More specifically still: necessarily into fully discrete "bits" (and "necessary" because it's the simplest way that the resulting sum of all such "bits" [once one solid body, and before that a "shockwave" of primordial material falling from "the void" surrounding our cosmic hollow]... can "squeeze" into the eternally diminishing area available to it as it continues its journey toward the center of our cosmic hollow--And since there is literally nothing in its way towards that "center" against which to crash (to stop its journey) except itself (its own nonexistent refusal to permit itself to be squeezed any further)... that journey is one which can only end in/with the utter dissolution of the falling body ("cloud" or "sum of discrete bits").

Crucially, all of those "fully discrete bits" are tearing themselves away from all the other discrete bits in the cosmic body (creating "space" between themselves) as they "implode."

To begin with, once the entire mass (body, cloud) of our universe consists only (or even mostly) of these (same-sized or same-wherever) discrete bits, by definition they will effectively collectively constitute our universe's first ever "perfected" or finished" level of matter-organization (the first generation of matter-organization).

Because of the natural chaos which characterizes any active thermodynamic system (since evolution never stands still, in effect): eventually those "individual" discrete bits will begin to "fall" into local interactions (systems of "orbits" and/or crashes) each made up of perhaps only a few discrete bits (in ever continuing interactions) and perhaps each of them made up of many and many handfuls of the "original" first-generation discrete bits... which will, no doubt chaotically at first (until they "fall" into whatever "level of stability" is most "natural" for their "whatever-numbered" interactions) will, after "the chaos of transition" lifts, will then create across most of the cosmos a "second generation" of "gravitational systems" (or "particles") everywhere of a "similar nature/size/structure or number" (perhaps, but) all or most of them interacting in some similarly (in some related) "stable" way.

And note that it is always from this (transitional) "chaos" that everything in the universe is built (by/from the interactions this "chaos" sets into motion... producing "orbits" and/or "crashes"). [There is no "chaos" in nature, there is only our inability to understand its laws.] "Chaos" here is only our convenient description of a nevertheless absolutely determinate process in which there can never be any effect without a cause--otherwise "chaos" would remain eternal, forever precluding our very existence.]

Now: This "quest for stability" also tends to be characterized by a "scarcity" of free-roaming "component particles" (of the previous generation) as these are everywhere quickly incorporated (as the current generation's "preferred" building blocks (of the forms of matter "now seeking" their own "gravitational stability." SEE Standard Model).

Arbitrarily defined as they may be, it is nevertheless "around" a given "perfected" or "finished" level (or levels) of matter-organization that we define "similar forms" interacting 3-dimensionally according to Newton's laws of motion & universal gravitation. [We tend to describe "systems" such as atoms, stars, and galaxies as "objects."] For example: the five or more of these "perfected" or "finished" levels of matter-organization straddled by our own existence (or... that of quarks & gluons, atoms & electrons, stars & planets, and supermassive black holes & the galaxies from which they seem to be evolving at the present moment). Regardless how brief or long their reign, once these similar "systems" of interacting discrete bits achieve their whatever measure of "stability" as "gravitational systems" across the cosmos... they de facto become the next "perfected" or "finished" level of matter-organization.

At this point in this narrative we are at the "second generation" level of matter-organization ---where it's now the turn of this generation of "perfected" or "finished" gravitational "systems" to build their own local interactions... as either a few or a great many of these second generation "systems" begin to combine (no doubt chaotically at first, until they too find their whatever "level of stability is most natural for their interactions" and) combine into super-systems... which, once they too manage to achieve cosmos-wide stability, also de facto become the (third generation) "perfected" or "finished" level of matter-organization.

And so on, forever, and so on until the ceaseless evolution of generation after generation self- organization of the forms of matter into stable levels reaches our own "finished" (stable) level(s) of matter-organization (those of our atoms, stars, and galaxies). Which is not to say that there might not be just as stable "finished" levels of matter- organization "higher" than ours, of course--And quite entirely unsuspected by us as well.

For now, if only to understand the earliest condition of our universe of matter, the important thing here is a realization that fission/fusion "nuclear processes" only take place at our topmost "finished" level(s) of matter-organization (that of the Standard Model "nuclear" particles). At more fundamental levels of matter-organization (than that of our "particles") the "decay of energy" does not produce what we would recognize as "our" heat, light, or any of "our" other familiar processes of atomic (radio)activity.

Note: Because it does not explain the inevitability of its "strings" ... string theory only really has one function: to supplant the Standard Model. And since that is an unnecessary function by definition string theory itself is unnecessary. (Gravity is not a force, therefore there is no need for it to be "unified" with the 3 forces.)

To continue: if this "hypothesis of eternity" seems to suggest that the overall density of "the void" is constantly being "thinned out" by its incorporation of lower-density regions (like empty "hollows" in some viscous goo) such as the "hollow" of lesser density which produces our own universe of matter at its core (meaning that the bigger "the void" gets, the lower its overall absolute density value falls)... this is because that is exactly what must be occurring. Remember larger/slower "forms of matter" eternally conserving themselves into smaller/faster ones... Well, in this sense: motion in one direction by one part of a body is balanced by another of its parts moving in the opposite direction. [Newton's Third Law.] Essentially this is the process of the greater density "the void" erasing our lesser density "hollow."

While matter itself is concentrating into "rock hard" imploding discrete bits (ever tighter, harder, hotter, and charged up)... "the void" is itself dissipating into a general inertia as it "grows" (ever larger, and more tenuous, stiller, colder). The two "different" parts of the same "one body" (system) are pushing out from/to exactly opposite directions at once--and we can think of these two opposite "motions" as really in the same direction (having the same energy-conservation objective).

At the end of the process, matter is but motion. So all the "matter" of the visible universe must eventually "slow down" (unwind again) and dissolve.

Moreover, just as our hollow of lesser density is very probably "nothing special" in nature, even our own local "the void" is proportionally almost certainly itself also but some likewise pinprick-size "object" no doubt embedded in the fabric of an even "higher" level "the void." Although likely this must remain as hard for us to distinguish, local from general, as it's hard for us now to distinguish "a" part of eternity from the whole of it.

And yet, however this line of inquiry may remain closed to us: the implication remains that vast regions of "our" local "the void" may be\are very probably everywhere pockmarked with similar "hollows of lesser density" (each probably destined to give rise at its core to a universe not unlike ours... as they are one by one "collapsed" by the higher density of "the void" encircling them).

A thought which, by the way, ought to bestow some measure of respect upon even our humblest virtual particle. And certainly illustrates the very persistent "absolute relativity" of existence at any level... as higher level "the void(s)" balance out ever-thinner-and-thinner absolute densities with ever-greater-and-greater absolute expanses--canceling out everywhere all possible breaches of the law against energy creation/destruction.

"Nature abhors a vacuum."

The crucial thing is that the absolute energy value (density) of "the void" always remains an eternally irrelevant (purely absolutely relativistic) number: The strictly human question of where/how this "primordial material" arose "to begin with" is therefore made moot by its always relativistic nature. Or: "If in order to exist Existence would have had to have had a beginning--it could not exist. We exist, therefore it behooves us to assume that there never could have been a state of non-existence" (however one may wish to define such terms as being & non-being).

What is important for us (strictly a concern for the sentient beings of this one particular universe, that is) is that the primordial medium ("energy") of "the void" has come across the next relatively less dense "hollow" and has given rise here (at the core of this one particular lesser density "hollow") to the "next" universe of visible matter... ours, namely.

I know of no requirement that "a" given universe "has to be" of any specific (purely arbitrary) size: Here, in this one "cosmic hollow" at whose core our visible universe resides, it is only necessary that its volume be "large enough" to produce the observed effects (the requirements of other universes can be entirely different, larger or smaller). So we might as well forget about trying to impose any purely arbitrary limits upon the "size" of our universe on that account. And since now we know that there are no "gravitational limitations," about the only thing we may say for sure is that our visible universe is many orders of magnitude larger than what we can "see" of it (or, that the "size ratio" of our "hollow" to that of its "universe of matter" was already hinted at by Einstein's infamous [E=MC^2] approximation).

In any case: Into a "large-enough" lower density volume (our "relatively empty" cosmic hollow) "falls" (in quite a "shockwave") a thermodynamic "current" not all that different in essence from that of a lightning bolt: More slowly at first and then faster and faster (an acceleration destined never to end) as it "falls" in a 3-dimensional direction towards the center of our cosmic hollow like some unimaginably rarefied molasses.

It is when we can speak of "matter" as "energy" (or "motion") that we can finally define existence as "not either/or" (matter/energy); since obviously anything "flowing" can only be described in terms of "a" higher or "a" lower flow, and never as "not flowing." Even at this our level of matter-organization (so many & many orders of magnitude removed from that of "energy"), this in a very real sense "reduction" of matter to "motion" (i.e. the acceptance of matter as energy) is what makes it possible to think of "matter" in almost exactly the same way that we've popularly come to think of "electric energy" as a "current" or "flow." Thus it is just as possible to speak of matter as only a "thermodynamic" current/flow... whose seemingly permanent "structures" (shaped by the interactions of the EM/weak and strong "nuclear forces") are, every last one them, from top to bottom, really only temporary "eddies" within what is essentially also only a thermodynamic "current" or "flow" and, consequently, never can be fundamental, indivisible (unqueezeable) objects and/or singularities.

We mortals, understandably ever in love with just about any ideal of permanence, will undoubtedly be emotionally anguished to have to acknowledge that every last bit of matter (yes, to the very last one) in our universe is destined to "fade away" without the least hope of there surviving even the most forlorn memory of "our having been." But that's the way it is (and, frankly, I think it rather poetic... this "so very human" tragedy): The process I am explaining in this text does describe the eventual "dissipation" of all the universe's "matter" (if matter is but "motion" it must eventually, as it were, "come to a stop").

If this continuing process (this eternal evolution) of matter-organization can be described as "winding up" (larger/slower forms forever "imploding" into smaller/faster ones)... what else can its ultimate consequence be--if not its winding down at last (T.S. Eliot's "whimper").

And what would the end of a universe in which its forms of matter had completely "wound up" to the full extent of their "energy potential" (to do so) be like?

Well, we might consider the one factor which is evidently "increasing" even as the other two are "decreasing" in the process described above: The "matter-making machine" (larger/slower forms of matter evolving or "winding up" into smaller/faster ones) "is" of course THE mechanism by which the finite amount of energy (of the original shockwave) which has "fallen" into our cosmic hollow conserves its density (or "energy value") literally into the forms of matter (and their whatever discrete bits).

So, conversely, this same process by which "the universe of matter" travels toward the center of the cosmic hollow (its "singular body" imploding like a shrinking baseball in front of our eyes) can also be described as one in which at every step of that journey "a" volume of space is also growing (out of it) from a smaller/denser energy/pressure into a larger/sparser one (or, volume of space) as if the imploding universe of matter were a pressure wave after the passage of which the lower density of "our" hollow of lesser density will be left with a pressure --an energy value-- equal to the rest of "the void" surrounding it... thereby also making our cosmic hollow indistinguishable from/in it:

It will be as if our lower density "hollow" had never existed at all: So in a very real sense there is a (thermodynamic) "purpose" to (in) the reason for all that "space" which is continuously being "created" inside matter itself: to finally defeat the instability created by there being such a "lower density" hollow "out there" to being with:

It remains axiomatic that all motion takes (uses up) energy. So it is inevitable that "the forms of matter" should literally consume themselves right up (even unto nothingness): It obviously takes energy for the forms of matter to "wind up" into "being" in the first place--and energy/motion is what matter is "made of."

Although it may appear that (in its journey towards the center of the cosmic hollow) the higher density "shockwave" that has fallen into our hollow of lesser density (to become the universe of visible matter)... though it may appear that the higher density "shockwave" is racing against distances, the fact is that in reality its "forms of matter" are really racing against time (racing toward their own dissolution) as they "implode" (or "wind themselves up")... literally "shrinking" themselves "right out of existence" with all the irony of the runner in the so-called paradox who, although running a finite length, nevertheless can never finish his run because he keeps switching to running half as fast every time he gets half way to the finish line: Our universe is also "speeding up" even as it "shrinks" (so that, like the runner above, it too finds himself eternally just as far away from its "finish line" as it ever is). Even though very few of us until now have ever even suspected that "we" were either "shrinking" or "speeding up."

But this is why only when observed from outside itself (from outside the universe itself) does the universe implode in a "brief" and "finite" length of time right down to "nothingness" (as "timed" by clocks which being outside the universe never vary during the implosion from its "slower" beginning to its "faster" ending).

Observed from inside the universe itself (that is: "timed" by clocks which "in here" are forever adjusting as "time" itself is changing, i.e. "speeding up")... the implosion of the universe (like the "run" of the "eternally running" runner) is about as close as something can come to seeming to be eternal without actually being so. As our clocks here inside the universe "speed up" it makes the universe appear to us to be "lasting longer" ("longer lasting"). So that, almost nearly as perversely as is the case with the "eternal runner" of the story above, although the universe may also always be running faster & faster, it is also always growing smaller and smaller... in a quite fiendishly proportional agreement that forever cancels out what would otherwise be an all too obvious ever increasing requirement for more & more energy, for example, just to feed its same unchanging appearance (speed). Absent which "missing energy," the universe would very unambiguously be seen to be "slowing down" ("imploding" more and more slowly with time --or, since for years we've misinterpreted the universe as "expanding," we would have interpreted that misinterpreted "expansion" as slowing down with time).

Instead the universe (its misinterpreted expansion only as of very recently now correctly interpreted as "speeding up") will forever be perceived to always be "speeding up" (from our more recently well-informed perspective, as over astronomical distances, the farther away we look the farther back in time we're seeing)... The universe, in reality imploding faster and faster with time (as measured also by the Hubble Constant), will "forever" continue to do so... until the moment of dissolution when matter runs out of matter, and "its forms" can no longer "hold their forms."

Note that this is not the same phenomenon of relativistic time-dilation described by Einstein in the "twins paradox" where (clocks inside the universe not being synchronized) the faster any given bit of matter (the twin riding his rocket) "moves" the slower his clock (its inner motions) "runs" and therefore the faster the clocks of the "slower moving" universe (of the twin left behind) will run. This being caused by the disruption which velocity imparts to matter's "inner motions."

Until matter's moment of dissolution, as with the "eternal" runner (above) who will seem to keep running almost forever: the universe also will be able to continue its own "run" seemingly long, long after the "discernible" limits of its "fuel tank" (almost as if by magic)... as our unsuspectingly accelerating clocks continue to unsuspectingly lengthen the "same" stretch of time they measure.

That is to say: from our perspective, here within it, the universe's continuing "implosion" will "seem" to defy definition itself, appearing "never" to reach that theoretical "smallest-possible size" beyond which anything must "vanish" completely out of existence--because, trapped here inside it as we are, we can not so easily detect either the quickening of "absolute time" (kept only by clocks outside the universe itself), or our own dwindling "size" alongside the ceaseless lessening of everything about us... the eternal speeding up of the clocks here within it making it appear to us as if it is the time that the universe has left that is lengthening, as we "time" the brief instant left to the universe with our unimaginably accelerated and eternally accelerating clocks:

And so "forever" is really only relative to the clock against which it is being timed, and not an absolute term: Our "forever" is someone else's brief instant in time, just as our own "brief instant in time" can be someone else's "forever." [And so no one need put himself in place of someone outside the universe and, from that position, think that all we amount to in here is but a brief few seconds. Rather, it's far closer to our reality to think that "clocks" outside our universe run so slowly that they but measure a few brief seconds during our billions of years.]

Our sole real triumph perhaps being that power of the intellect to hurdle even the dissolution of all being itself: here, taking in the entirely of the universe's lifespan (and knowing how it is only when we set it against the brief span of our own mortality that the universe seems "almost eternal")... we can marvel at last how even the span of the universe is something not all that different from the so abrupt lifespan of even the least "virtual particle" in it.

If nothing else: still one more vindication of the proposition that existence does consistently work by "one single simple principle" evolving all the subsequent complexity... after which all such boundlessly evolved complexities eventually must decay back to the same "one single simple principle" from which all came. That is to say: This is yet one more hint that the laws of physics work everywhere exactly as they do anywhere.

What is obvious is that to understand the structure of their cosmos human beings have to divorce themselves from their however cherished (so exclusively human) prejudices. And that science really begins with the quest to identify all such prejudices... because the human perspective obviously is NOT the most universal but one produced strictly by the requirements of/for our existence (required solely for us to survive here where we happen to live... within the bosom of the "artificial nature" which is the human condition we've conspired with the universe to construct for ourselves). Something which is true for all scientific considerations (human endeavors), as we continue to "make" our entire planet into a larger and that much more fatal a version of what we made of Easter Island.

What all this means is that, for example, the "speed of light" is NOT "fast" (an absolute term, from our perspective)... and is only/merely "faster" (or "slower") in absolutely relativistic terms: In relation to the size of a man, the speed of light may indeed be quite "fast." But in relation to the size of the universe, that same speed is so monstrously slow as to almost escape the very description of motion!

While considered from here inside it our "virtual particle" universe may give all the appearance of being something almost approaching the eternal (and thereby making it so difficult for some of us to "understand" how an "object" can shrink "forever" unless they first understand that it is their "sense of time" that is quickening with the ever quickening universe about them--giving them the mistaken "feeling" that the measured span of time that is in reality forever growing shorter & shorter nevertheless always remains exactly as "long" as it has ever been), considered from without: the lifespan of our visible universe may "pop" in/out of existence before even perception itself may be able to take note of it (were there "someone" outside the visible universe to "see" it, of course--and capable of noticing it).

Yet it is only once we grasp such things as how truly slow "our" speed of light is in "astronomical" terms, that we might permit ourselves to imagine timing the orbits even of electrons in terms of our hours, years, and centuries. And then might we countenance the idea of all those "material" structures about us (which have all of our lives convinced us of their unchanging solidity across untold ages) possibly really being as "fluid" as is the "flow" of electrons coursing within the "bolt of lightning."

Then might we grasp how, in the same way that a brief sweep of sixteenth notes might seem, to some level of consciousness outside the human, to outlast even the lengthiest passage of "their" whatever centuries... even those motions which seem to us to be "the fastest possible" may to some other level of consciousness outside the human also seem to outlast the lengthiest passage of "their" whatever centuries: The quick wave of one of our hands may "really" seem so "slow" to them that to their quicker consciousness all of its "motion" ceases to be motion at all... and turns into the same "notion" of solidness a bar of iron suggests to us. Then might we divine "the frozen monsters" that are all living things in our human perception (including us, yes)... and recognize at last exactly how truly solid even our greatest notion of fluidity really is & fluid even our most unyielding solidness.

In this thermodynamic analogy, then, there is no real distinction between the thermodynamic current that is a bolt of lightning and the thermodynamic current that is our visible universe's "matter." [Matter is energy and energy is motion, reducing matter to pure motion.]

Keep this in mind (in light of our human notions and prejudices about the nature of time). By "our human clocks" the bolt of lightning happens "very quickly," while the universe seems to be almost eternal. But this is strictly a "real" distinction only in our own minds--stemming from our historically mistaken idea that "fast" and "slow" are absolute values. They are not. And in the universe there is no such thing as "fast" or "slow" or "big" or "small" (only "faster than..." or "slower than..." or "bigger than..." or "smaller than...").

Living as we are inside the universe, a given rock's whatever odd shape may seem to us to be almost immutable to change... even if in reality that rock's shape (as well as the shape of every other "form" in which matter happens to exist "at the moment" here inside our universe) is merely describing the passing (momentary) state in which "its flow of matter" finds itself... the ongoing, never-ceasing change through which it is passing, one shape/form to the next one --something indeed very much analogous to a current's eddies as the sum total of the universe of matter "flows" (not 3-dimensionally, but) in the direction of implosion.

This is the reason all 3-dimensional acceleration results in an increase in mass... as matter is "forced" to move "against" its own singularly natural direction of motion: the direction of motion in which it is already moving (or, "implosion").

Note that it's possible for an object to accelerate while moving at a constant speed... since "speed" refers only to the magnitude of the velocity, and not to the direction in which it's moving. So that an object can also accelerate solely by changing its direction (even as it maintains a constant speed).

So: Matter's "singularly natural direction of motion" is "the direction of motion in which all matter in the universe is already moving." And in which it has been moving ever since the instant at which "our cosmic hollow of lesser density" became fully saturated with the higher density material that had fallen into it from "the void" ... at which instant the "energy" of that "shockwave" began to "conserve" itself (its "energy") into/by its implosion ("larger but slower forms forever evolving into smaller but faster ones").

"Mass" being a description of the "unwillingness" of any discrete bit of matter to be "unnaturally" moved in any 3-dimensional direction (against a direction of motion in which it already finds itself moving even absent all 3-dimensional motion ... since all the matter in the universe is already and always will be "moving in the direction of implosion"). Which is the explanation for inertia.

Also: all subsequently even greater (proportional to its 3-dimensional velocity... since it's now compounded: 3-dimensional + implosive motion) "unwillingness" of any object/body moving 3-dimensionally to be moved "against" its "additional to implosion" direction of motion being the explanation for all additional force (proportional to how fast the object/body is moving 3-dimensionally, of course) required to "move" an object which is "already" moving 3-dimensionally.

And note that Newton's laws of motion do not explain the cause of inertia (now explained here) and only use inertia as a point of departure--That is: Newton confines his famous laws of motion to 3-dimensional motion alone... since he could not have known that everything in the universe is "already" (eternally) moving in the direction of implosion (leaving inertia an unexplained mystery).

The One Particle That Reveals It All.

At our topmost level of matter-organization (that of atoms, stars, and galaxies) the photon is a rather peculiar discrete bit ("unit of mass") whose most salient characteristic is precisely that its "mass" is so minuscule that it has even inspired a heated debate over whether it actually has any mass at all. It has:

"Mass" as a measure of "the inertia of a given unit of matter" means that there is no practical distinction between a unit of matter and "an equivalent" unit of mass--since the force needed to accelerate an equivalent unit of either is one and the same [historically "matter" really only being a dim reflection of how "the structure of its mass" is "packaged" in a greater/lesser volume].

Therein the above explanation for inertia (since by definition: all motion NOT in "the direction of implosion" is 3-dimensional): All 3-dimensional motion is therefore "against" the direction in which all matter is already moving--explaining the "reluctance" of any unit of matter to be moved 3-dimensionally in direct proportion to its "mass."

No matter what the "mass" of the photon is finally determined to be... its "acceleration" is prodigious. Therefore its "mass," or "inertia," is correspondingly prodigiously tiny--although never non-existent, or (to put it in the conventional lingo)... or photons would be absolutely immune to "supermassive gravitational fields" (to which they are obviously not immune).

The structure (or "package") of the photon is very obviously substantially oversized and, compared to the other particles, relatively "unstable." That is: it is "visible" out of all proportion to its mass, and its "material" is closer to the edge of annihilation than even that of the far more massive/stable electron's, for example--though neither electrons nor photons have the legacy of a long enough evolution--long enough to have brought to them, as it has to other particles of matter, enough mass in a "stable enough" structure (neutrinos too are unstable, changing their "flavor").

The crucial thing at this point is that because of its infinitesimal mass the photon is able to free itself almost entirely from one of the two Basic Motions of Matter.

Matter's "two basic motions" as the universe moves in the direction of implosion... one being an "absolute" motion (which we interpret as gravity), the other a strictly "relativistic" motion (which we interpret as the Hubble Constant).

Photons (and other likewise extremely low-mass particles) do "move" exactly like every other form of matter that exists here at our topmost level of matter-organization in one way: They also "shrink" (thereby seeming to remain the "same size as ever" relative to the size of all the other objects in the universe which are also "shrinking" at the same rate). However, as the entirety of the universe "implodes" towards the absolute center of its cosmic hollow of lesser density: the photon seems to be able to escape the "absolute motion" of all the matter in the universe (which we interpret as "gravity")... even if it is true that it does not escape all of that motion and only just most of it. Self-evidently: the photon does not fully obey the absolute law of gravity most of the other forms of matter obey.

Because all matter is everywhere moving in the direction of implosion but there are no fundamental objects/bodies anywhere in the universe to "implode" toward their own "singular" geometric centers as if they were perfect singularities... all the objects/bodies in the universe (with the possible exception of the discrete bits of the theoretical "first generation" of discrete bits ever to evolve from the primordial cloud that "saturated" our hollow of lesser density)... all the objects/bodies (all the forms of matter) in the universe are imploding NOT towards their own geometrical centers but at/toward every and all the smallest-possible coordinate(s) in/of their matter. Again: the overall effect of "gravity" is that (at every smallest-possible coordinate of the matter of every object/body in the universe)... all matter is forever (imploding) moving in the direction of the center of every smallest-possible coordinate of/in its matter.

The result is that what we see at our topmost level of matter-organization is a relativistically "frozen" solid geometry with no easily discernible directionality in which the imploding Planet Earth, for example, does not "implode" ONLY towards its own "singular geometric center" but toward the "geometric center" of every and all possible coordinate(s) of its matter... forever giving us a picture of the eternally always same-sized and same-shaped unchanging sphere we've always known.

But make no mistake about this: the entire universe of matter is absolutely imploding at the level of its every smallest-possible coordinate(s). And, for example, this means that the Earth is "falling" into the Sun and that the Moon is "falling" into the Earth in an absolute sense (exactly as described by Galileo). Even though, relativistically, the Earth is also moving away from the Sun, and the Moon is moving away from the Earth (as described by the Hubble Constant).

To better understand exactly what the photon is up to, let's imagine what a photon (which is after all just one more "form of matter" among those of our level of matter-organization)... what a photon would "look like" if instead of "shrinking" along with all the other "shrinking" forms of matter, a photon were to somehow manage to always retain its size even as the rest of the universe in which it found itself continued "shrinking" all around it (and, further, let's imagine this theoretical photon of ours as a perfectly spherical hollow ball):

From "our" perspective now (unsuspecting as "we" are that it is the universe that is "shrinking") we would undoubtedly interpret this "miraculous spherical photon" as "growing in size" at a quite prodigious speed (really exactly proportional to the speed at which the universe is "shrinking")... so that, for example, in just over eight minutes our spherical photon would be as big around as is the earth's orbit around the Sun; and in a mere 50,000 years or so more it would be the same size as is our entire Milky Way Galaxy (90,000-100,000 light years across). So that if the universe really is [for the purposes of this thought experiment] just under 14 billion light years across, in slightly over 7 billion years our theoretical spherical photon would hold within its "hollow" the entire universe itself).

It is its mass that "drags" matter along (making it "move in the direction of implosion").

Any "form of matter" that lacks sufficient mass is able to (proportional to its mass--or, lack thereof), is able to "resist" being dragged along into engaging in the Second Basic Motion of Matter... the one we interpret as the "pull" of gravity here inside the universe, but from outside the universe would interpret as the entire universe imploding like any other conventional single body might implode (and it is this absolute aspect of the photon's motion which makes it look to us as if it's "moving" so oddly). It is the fact that the photon does not move, or moves very little, that permits it to "behave" both as particle "package" (in isolation) and as wave (when it interacts or is "measured").

As I said, the photon still participates in the First Basic Motion of Matter (implosion at the level of every discrete bit or unit of mass) because while the Second Basic Motion of Matter "seems to an observer" to take place only at "a" fully-constituted (or "finished") level of matter-organization (its well-defined "bodies" literally "appearing to be" interacting among themselves... as with atoms, stars, or galaxies)... the First Basic Motion of Matter is taking place at the level of every "least possible" discrete unit of mass [that is: at the level of the theoretical "first generation" of such discrete bits which were the first ever to "tear themselves" from the "single solid homogeneous cloud" that had fully saturated the center of the cosmic hollow into which "fell" the shockwave of "higher density primordial material" from "the void" surrounding it]. So please note that, regardless how one might arbitrarily define such a primordial "unit" ... we say that the universe is "imploding at every possible coordinate of its matter," rather than only at the level of any given "particulate" (or "finished" level of matter- organization). Therefore the photon, being as much one of the forms of matter at our level of matter- organization as atoms, stars, and galaxies... the photon is also "shrinking" exactly as are all the other forms of matter here.

But if the photon does not retain its size (appearing to grow ever larger), and has as little mass as it does (therefore not being a form of matter which "moves" along with all the other forms of matter that are moving in the Second Basic Motion of Matter) and thereby appearing to us to always remain "where it is" (appearing forever unmoved amid the flow of "everything moving together"), what exactly determines in which direction it will go (or "appear" to go)...?

Well: That "direction" in which a given photon "moves" is determined only by its orientation to its "source" at the moment of its "onset" (creation). And this is a "direction" which can have a completely 3-dimensional orientation with regard to its source because (disengaging as it does from the Second Basic Motion of Matter) the photon's direction of motion instantly becomes 3-dimensional while that of its source forever remains (as it has been) a motion "in the direction of implosion" ... and these are two quite separate and independent from each other directions of motion.

In this matter the spherical photon analogy above can serve an important illustrative purpose: Even if, unlike our theoretical spherical photon, the real photon is not growing in size... its position at any given point in time after its "creation" (i.e. after its "separation" from its source) would always still fall exactly where the surface of that growing theoretical spherical photon would fall, given the passage of equal amounts of time... in any direction (which, as I said, is determined solely by the orientation of the photon to its source). Therefore there really is no practical limitation either to which 3-dimensional direction a photon can take... or to its travelling from any point in the universe to any other point within it--or to points outside the universe, for that matter... considering that a photon can move across the universe to (be at) exactly any point in the spherical surface of the theoretical photon which is capable of swallowing the entire universe in our thought experiment.

Think now of the geometrical center of our theoretical spherical photon: If there were an "ether" at absolute rest behind the imploding (and therefore "moving") visible universe... and its "geometrical center" were fixed on that "ether," then our ever growing spherical photon would appear to us to "drift" (as the visible universe imploded towards its absolute center, leaving behind all things, photons included, without enough mass to be dragged along)... so that if, say, the geometrical center of our theoretical spherical photon (where its source was at the instant of its creation) were in the Milky Way Galaxy--our entire spherical photon would seem to us to "take off" now, as it grew, drifting away from the Milky Way Galaxy. And some portions of our galaxy could then travel across two opposing surfaces of this growing spherical photon.

But as there is no "ether" in the real world to which such a theoretical spherical photon might "fix" its geometric center... that geometric center must remain forever fixed to more or less the place where the photon's source was at the time the photon came into existence--Meaning that if its source was somewhere inside the Milky Way Galaxy, our galaxy would always remain inside the growing soap bubble hollow... and no portion of the Milky Way Galaxy would ever be able to cross two of the spherical photon's opposing surfaces --every point in the galaxy will cross one surface of our "growing" sphere, but never more than one.

This is something we must grasp in order to understand why it is that there is no "directionality" to "the speed of light." Our "growing" theoretical spherical photon is in a very real absolute sense "moving" along exactly like (with) the rest of "the entire body" of the universe as it implodes as a whole)... thereby effectively frustrating any attempt we here inside the universe might try to make to establish a directionality for the "speed of light" since no matter in which direction a photon may be travelling it must always "fall" (be) exactly where, in that whatever direction, the surface of our theoretical growing (and "drifting") spherical photon would be. For, remember: the geometric center of our theoretical "expanding" spherical photon is "fixed" not to some background ("ether" or whatever) but to "all the other matter" of the visible universe that is absolutely imploding towards center (fixed to its "point of origin" or "source").

So the "explanation" by G. F. Fitzgerald that matter "contracts in the direction of its motion" [to account for the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment which first established that there was no directionality to "the speed of light"] is now forever exposed as the misinterpretation it is--As well as is the subsequent arbitrary limitation on anything being able to travel faster than the speed of light "because matter can only contract to zero, obviously, and not beyond."

The Michelson-Morley experiment, an attempt to determine the absolute motion of the Earth against an "ether" which was supposed to fill all space and to be at rest was really an attempt to discover in the universe a state at absolute rest (by having it be the result of subtracting all possible motion in every direction).

What Michelson and Morley discovered in fact was the universe's absolute motion in the direction of implosion by discovering that the photon always travels in every 3-dimensional direction at the same speed:

It was an experiment doomed to failure by the fact that it only encompassed 3-dimensional motion in a universe where 3-dimensional motion is essentially motion in an abberrant direction (the normal direction of all matter in our universe being in the direction of implosion). [If one considers that motion in the direction of implosion is the same everywhere then you realize that there is no objection to defining such a "motion" as the one state in the universe at absolute rest (since all 3-dimensional motion is motion with reference to it).

Inspired by Fitzgerald's "uninformed explanation," and knowing that the ratio of an electron's mass to its charge can be determined from its deflection by a magnetic field (as there is no reason to think that as an electron's velocity increases its charge also will increase), H. A. Lorentz suggested that the mass of a particle should increase as the charge of a charged particle is compressed into a smaller volume. And W. Kauffman discovered that, exactly as predicted by the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations, an electron's mass did indeed increase as its velocity increased (an agreement which improved measurements showed to be just about perfect)... strengthening everyone's confidence in the accuracy of Fitzgerald's gross misinterpretation for why the speed of light lacked directionality--and, by the way, lending confidence to one Albert Einstein, for whom this could only mean that "therefore" there could be no states at absolute rest in the universe (a thought which eventually gave birth to some of his relativity explanations). [Never mind that the "absolute" constancy of the speed of light, no less than its "absolute" lack of directionality, should have told Einstein that there "had" to be some state at absolute rest in "the equation of the universe" against which such constancy was being kept constant!

But there it is, of course: the speed itself at which the universe of matter is imploding is absolute across the entire universe (or, I should really say: "is of an equal value where equal conditions (of "pressure") exist")... since one can also state it as everything other than that which is moving as "moving" with respect to it (just as in the description where someone in a passing train is able to imagine it's the train station that's passing by instead).

What is this "pressure" in the absence of particle interaction/mediation (gravitons)...? Well, certainly NOT the "push" of one absolute body (billiard ball?) against another physically. Or, from the geometrically opposing viewpoint: The fact that all the bodies/balls are (and have always been) moving in the same direction is enough--Obviously no individual body/ball moving in such an avalanche of them could possibly suddenly come up with the impetuous impatience to speed up (or with any spontaneous sloth, for that matter).

Naturally, once the reason for inertia (given above) is made clear, it's obvious that all 3-dimensional acceleration of matter produces pressures ("g-forces" as it were, or a very real "stress") against its own inertia (its motion in the direction of implosion)... these "g-forces stress" increasing with acceleration make it clear just how massive a force would be required to "move" even such a trivial "mass" as that of a photon's across the entire universe in, say, a fraction of a second--and the "stress" that photon would consequently be under.

It is this proportional (to 3-dimensional velocity) "stress" which interferes with the regular/normal inner motions of matter (matter itself really being reducible to "motion," which is itself merely another definition of "energy")... causing the very real rise in mass of ALL accelerated matter (not just of charged particles, as Einstein himself showed)... as well as the "slowing of time" for matter traveling at higher 3-dimensional speed, obviously. [Thereby providing the real reason for the also very real "twin" paradox (which like all paradoxes exists only in the human mind, and never in nature)... while separating this very real "relativity of time with respect to 3-dimensional velocity" from any notion that time itself might have accelerated for the twin remaining "at rest" behind in any "real" sense... outside a misinterpretation by the "accelerated" twin, from whose perspective (to whom) the clock in "the passing train station" (the twin remaining behind) will appear to be "moving faster") because the matter of which he (the accelerated twin) himself is made is being "slowed" by the stresses of its acceleration. But "the universe's time" (or, the absolute speed at which the universe is imploding) remains "the time" for the "unmoving" twin left behind--as long as he keeps still (and doesn't try to race across the entire universe in, say, a fraction of a second... because, if he could find the power to do so, it might be a fraction of a second to him, but he may find the rest of the universe aged 14 or more billion years). S D Rodrian [2004] @