By Thomas H. Cannon
Like the blank page the universe is infinitely empty, and yet filled with invisible boundaries, fundamental laws, and incomprehensible restrictions. Each aspect of this infinity will eventually be engaged, because life fills every emptiness it can, as water fills any cup to the brim before running over.
If the boundaries of a cage are so distant that you cannot see them then are you actually contained? What is the difference between containment and confinement? Freedom does not only mean freedom from walls external to myself, but also those constraints imposed by my own inherent weaknesses.
By some incredible good fortune, for which I am either truly lucky or indebted to my past good deeds, I was born in the United States, and even more choice among cuts, I also find myself a citizen of Colorado. By nearly any standard, I exist in one of the freest places in all of humanity’s civilized existence. Land is plentiful, capital abundant, food and water are cheap, and we are even cultivating a new green liberty, but I have yet to generate that true freedom, like having all the pieces to a puzzle but being still unable to fit them together. Turns out liberty requires a bit more work than freedom alone. Liberty must be nurtured in order to be enjoyed. Damned if this true freedom does not harvest naturally but must be cultivated hardily, in the sun and in the snow.
To begin with let us look more closely at the freedom I enjoy. Perhaps nine tenths of my day is spent simply getting through the day. My efforts and energies burned and consumed on the very acts of living. Sadly, I must admit five, possibly six, of any average ten is truly wasted on my own selfishness, insecurities, slothfulness, and literal wastedness, but the rest of my day’s works is spent earning the day’s expenses. Working on the tasks of living, and living to attend the tasks of work.
Have I spent more time scrubbing my dirty self in the warm shower than I have washing the gold in the cold and muddy river water? Surely, and despicably, for I was not given this opportunity to spend it lavishly. Luckily, however, it is not to say such is a complete waste of time for all these majority efforts, both vainglorious and honest, allow for that golden fraction that remains. That precious solitary tenth, which can tip the scale against the rest. Is it, perhaps, heavy enough to tip Peter’s scale such?
Of all the years, and days, and minutes of my life, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and the smallest fraction of this, numbering perhaps in the millions of seconds, is spent cultivating the flower and her golden pollen to be spread and shared with the world making all wealthier as a result.
The great creations of man, which are lifted out of the waters of the soul and brain, are like the heavy particles of gold drifting in the sands of a long river. The density of this bullion product, these golden moments of mastery, as Einstein understood, make them much greater in time and memory than appearances suggest. All that time and space, and energy, drawn down into a mass of fat atoms to form a brick of the purest substance. How long must the master’s lives have seemed to themselves, if each of their masterpieces represents the most concentrated gravity of divine life humanly possible. For a master’s work is years of a man’s life refined, smelted, cast, rejected, melted and smelted again, poured and finally hammered into shape, and those purest swords do not tarnish but remain as sharp as they molecular moment they were cast.
Alas, these years’ accumulation, bathed in the heat and smoke of the fires, the stretching and pulling me apart working the bellows, and bending and hammering the red hot metal, is not yet enough. The truth clearly is that though my time is long, it is but a flicker and not nearly sufficient to make me a wealthy man, not today, and certainly not by the measure of the history and future of man.
If I could but wash away all my inefficiencies, perhaps I could be more productive. Sadly, however, this clam can only spin a pearl in time kept by the rotating tick of the moon’s orbit, which, though massively slow is proportionately reliable.
No matter the wealth one accumulates, the erosion of life, the passing of time, extracts its toll on our body, if not the products of our mastery. The bell clangs against the curve of its shape. Is nine tenths of my life really just spent generating enough life to deal with the death that the laws of thermodynamics, the cost of admission into existence in this universe, require? We are born owing a bill, which is coming due with every exhalation.
Yet, if we manage to hone our productivity, and live in a time and place free of devastation, with the space of freedom in which to practice and grow liberty, we can for we shall have a portion of pure gold by which to pay for it. There are those who catch their density in terrific quantities and thereby build great glimmering castles. Others run it out into the finest filament of silk for the spinning of a web of shimmering beauty and frightful intelligence. Others place that density into their crucible and burn it down to be poured into weapons of war or faith. Still others spread their weight too thin, leaving only a foil sheet to protect against the radiating stress leading to fatigue and fracture, thereby these must see the wealth of their life rust, and blow away as autumn leaves in the wind.
But perhaps more sad than this are those who strip mine the entirety of their own being of this precious element in exchange for the promise of a rich golden age, giving the best of themselves to the consumption of a larger organism, like a bee working all the day storing honey, being reassured by the magnificent queen, all of which are refusing to acknowledge the transient, but obviously benevolent beekeeper’s true intentions and level in the hierarchy. I save my last lament for those who are so pressed, and for reasons mostly beyond their control, have not the time, knowledge, nor the tools to access their birthright in any meaningful portion, nor any proportion at all; for these are the victims of a profound poverty and make the rest of my babbling of less value than a gallon of clean water.
Still, there are more concerns even for those who are eagerly engaged, in the water and mud as it were, covered in filth, panning for their gold, for the very rarity and elusiveness of these particles, which make them so valuable, also drain away the hope from a man simply as a matter of physics, as the cold snowmelt water rushes downward taking with it the warmth of the wood and valley is drains, and any warm body along the route, leaving ice as fire leaves ash.
For example, after two decades and more as a dedicated miner I have but particles and a few flakes in my glass jar with the cork in the top, which I tinkle together from time to time holding them close to my eye so, like a captive peering through a keyhole, the expansive proportions of liberty are easier and ever grander to imagine.
Along the way, I went to great lengths to find any short cut. Instead of tending my pan alone, as I was advised, pressured, and even forced to mind with head down and eyes centered, as many others around me I thus refused and placed my tools down, to get a wider view of my prospects, and learning my plot was hardy and good, I thusly got to work building a more effective and efficient sieve, which might help me collect mass enough to form at least a hefty ingot and thereby free me from the heaviest of the workman’s duty. But my amateur contraption proved a leaky affair and presently consumes more resources than it has saved, and I dare not discuss with my elders if it has in the end improved my lot, for their end and mine are not the same, nor our opinion of my diversion.
Clearly I must argue that it was time well spent. In truth, a toss of a coin would tell you if I were better off staying at my pan the entire time. Still, I feel the inkling that it was worth the effort for I learned a great deal from getting a higher view of my situation, and from my mistakes.
Though I worry I no longer have the space ahead, to leave the pan for a second keener attempt at crafting a working sieve which would surely, this time, end my days of miniscule success, and weigh me a mountain. For if I were to accumulate enough particles or maybe even pluck a relatively heavy nugget or two out of my filters, collectively sufficient to smelt into a gleaming bar of liberty, then I would no longer be stuck with a single tenth, but could draw upon the entirety of my life’s resources. Imagine the wealth that could be drawn forth if a man were saved the task of cleaning himself.
These maniacal flights of optimism are the birds in the sky that I sometimes raise my head to watch. They relieve me when there is drought, and the mud is deep in the murky drudgery of repetition, and my back is aching from the efforts, and the are crawfish biting.
That is to say, in an ideal setting, with capital and labor leveraged to a telescopic degree, I might refine half of my day, the other half still spent on the inescapable transfers of heat from biological and physical existence. More likely however, even well supported, I doubt I could manage such levels of activity. Probably what would happen is the equipment and eager young prospectors invited to operate such and provide support, would come into my land and within a short decade would sift through my entire being and capture every atom of the precious specs of sunlight that keep my life illuminated, and once the darkness was all encompassing, signaling their work was complete, they would leave me parched and mummified in the empty sand.
Thus my wish and possibly the best situation would be to refine enough ore to purchase my debt from the universe, with a few shavings left over for enough equipment to allow me healthful and measured employment in my own mines for the rest of my life, and then when I am long dead may my lands be opened to any and all for extraction of every quark if so desired. Unless it will unsettle my deadness, in which case, may all my ore be thrown into the sun to allow me complete darkness for a peaceful sleep at last.
In this case, mayhap my descendants will observe and think me an old, curious, and confused fool, tinkering, diligently to be sure, but pointlessly in end, as a kid building castles on a beach at low tide. That is until I bequeath a chest full of golden coins with which they may fill their pockets and fill their lives with sparkling treasure, and thereby experience the bright light as I have, even, and especially in the deepest depths of my mines. Unless of course I am actually that old fool and the chest I present them is filled with nothing so much as lead tokens hardly good for anything except to note well the expert casting.
If gold or lead, the billions of atoms smashed together, enough to make visible and tangible nuggets, are in reality mostly empty. I am mostly empty. The universe is mostly empty. Nothing I can do, no matter how hard I hammer, nor tight I squeeze, can ever fill it up. Thus more than the dense words sifted into shape out of the infinite sands of this white page, more than the many sparkling flakes of gold, or shimmering stars which exist in the libraries already, the universe and I are made up of emptiness. And that makes me breathe lighter for I am not so much doing nothing, of which I am often accused, if only by the voices in my head, rather I am actively engaged in being empty, which, after all, is quite a task for there is so much of it to be, especially compared to the rather small possibility of being something. Thus, I will argue the rest of my case by saying nothing more.
Colorado 2016
Mind Tree Exponential 