When will the future happen?

NOW 

Stephen Hawking informs us 

nothing existed before the Big Bang. 

I have not heard whether he believed 

“nothing” existed after the Bang. 

In my own life as a space-time traveler 

exploring this one blue world, 

I once upon a time found myself

at a happily noisy cocktail party 

in a neighborhood of North America 

the natives called “Coconut Grove, Florida.” 

It was a lovely summer evening, they said 

it happened to be the 15th day of June 

in their year 1965. But I knew better, 

I heard the Voices clearly calmly saying 

 Everything that has ever happened, 

 or ever could happen, 

 is happening right here, right now. 

Fellow travelers, here is your take-home message 

take it to heart and share with all – 

 Be cheerful, fear not, and be assured 

 there is no such thing as nothing. 

We breathe the world in 

the world breathes us out 

and nothing is lost. 

Take a deep breath, smiling, 

now. 

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

You may be wondering, what is this weird “poem” doing in the Slowdown blog? Well, I’ve recently been participating with others in zoomed discussion of a book, What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill. I don’t like the book (see https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo) but it does raise interesting and important questions about the future of humans, and our possible extinction, coming either very soon or in some eventual future. But MacAskill also invites us to consider what he calls “the best possible future” – Civilisation is full of beings with long, blissful, and flourishing lives, full of artistic and scientific accomplishment, expanded across the cosmos. An absurd vision, total fantasy. So I decided to post my own take on the future – as expressed recently in this something like a poem. Also absurd, but in another sense and I think closer to our here-and-now reality.

I saw Stephen Hawking’s “nothing before the bang” statement in an internet headline not long before he died, and pondering that led to this poem, my most direct presentation of a very fuzzy intuition of the essential connectedness of everything I recall entertaining as early as my first two years of college when my roommate was a physics grad student and I took a comparative religions course. The particular formulation of that intuition, Everything that has ever happened occurred to me at that Coconut Grove cocktail party, and the Hawking thing/no thing gave me a way to work it into something like a poem. 

Can a poem proclaiming such absurdities as “there is no such thing as nothing” be taken seriously? Well, so many of the findings of modern sciences, especially physics, seem to lead us into the realm of absurdity – which seems to be the realm of ultimate reality. Consider the case of quantum entanglement. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” Maybe there is no such thing as “distance?” In a recent Krista Tippet On Being interview, Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek says “Relativity teaches us to think of spacetime as a whole and that it’s very unnatural to divide them. So it leads, I think, very much to the world-view that the world — that is, spacetime — simply is. It does not happen. It already encompasses all times.” 

I’m happy to report also finding affirmation of “essential connectedness” by my favorite theologian, Walter Wink. In a chapter of his autobiography (My Struggle to Become Human) titled “The New Physics,” he characterizes the Big Bang as the “Big Breath:” 

“We are all one matter. Our bodies are virtually all water, and every drop of water in our bodies has been in every spring, every river, every lake, and every ocean during the last 4.5 billion years on earth. Each breath we breathe contains a quadrillion atoms, and more than a million of these atoms have been breathed personally sometime by each and every person on earth. We are all one breath. We are all one body, for good or ill. Likewise, attraction is characteristic of everything, from gravity to love. We are all one embrace. If ever a creature should feel at home in our universe, it is human beings.” 

(And I’m especially happy to report that I wrote the “breathe in, breathe out” part of the poem well before I had come across Wink’s beautiful statement.) 

So I say be cheerful and fear not: Although our lives may seem insignificantly transient, those quantum-entangled particles making up our bodies are stardust, making our every here-and-now moment part of a vast cosmic drama. That happily noisy cocktail party I am so grateful for having been invited to. 

Now I have to add that the line “Nothing is lost” included itself in the first draft of this poem. But then was taken out, then put back in in further drafts. What is ultimate reality does not spare us our lived experience of losses – in my case most recently the death of a teenage granddaughter, killed in a freak, totally unlikely accident. Yet Claire’s amazing loveliness, expressed in so many beautiful ways in her lifetime, also still remains. Is still happening right here, right now. 

PS – I chose to make “Everything that has ever happened” the title of my Jim Allen: Selected Poems, 1972-2022 chapbook. Homemade one-off editions available (for free) only by snailmail, by request.