76 Plus 4

One possible answer to the Fermi Paradox (if there is life elsewhere in the universe, where are they already?) is that microbes turn into cells which turn into civilizations that, like ours, inevitably develop the means to destroy themselves, and inevitably they do just that well before they’ve developed a knack for navigating wormholes or simply, you know, getting along with one another. And we’re doing an awful job of getting along with one another. Everybody’s got a gun, everybody’s got launch codes. Our allies are befuddled and our enemies are even more befuddled. On an encouraging note, everybody has a novel in the desk drawer, and everybody wrote a poem in the 5^th grade. So let nothing you dismay.

My wife, who is baking my birthday cake, combines flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla extract in the electric mixer, which is pulsing like, well, a pulsar. She’s helping the ingredients along toward maximum entropy. When the batter is ready, and after it’s been poured into baking forms, I’ll get to lick the spoon. For the moment, the KitchenAid is whirring this particular evolutionary process along. Speeding it up. Because I’m an idiot, I tell her, you know, Baby, those ingredients will mix themselves if you just leave them alone, because the molecules in each of your ingredients are already in motion. They’ll do a fine job of combining themselves without biting into our electricity budget or making a sound like the whirring of the planets.

Giving me a meaningful glance (I say “meaningful glance,” because everybody knows what that means and yet nobody knows what that means, as we poets are big fans of ambiguity), she points out to the dolt she married why this is a bad idea. The eggs will go bad, the milk will sour, the sugar and flour will attract ants, and, also, do you want the cake now, or sometime in the very distant future? But, Sweetheart, I persist, what is “time”? How do we know that the laws of nature aren’t mere postulates? Maybe I’ll be a year younger in twelve months, or maybe even tomorrow. Show me the mathematics, she says, knowing that, for both of us, our understanding of “mathematics” ended with long division. Some of us still count on our fingers.

We soi disant humans, created out of of photons and neutrinos, are here only because of an astonishing, singular accident, an impossible, chaotic mash-up of chance occurrences, having to do with carbon and sunlight, hydrogen and star dust, our existence no more understandable than trying to get out heads around the number of numberless, infinity of infinite galaxies. That indigestible vastness. We mean nothing and yet we mean everything, because this is what there is. We are, as Hamlet says, the quintessence of dust, and that dust (see above) belonged to the stars made 14 billion years ago, and in time, we will collapse into to them again and they, into each other, and then, mirablile dictu, into the dark.