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Listen To
“Listen,” she said, “to the non-human sounds around you. Decide to listen to them, not just to hear them.”
Not just to hear them. One of my favourite things in the whole wide world is hearing the birds in our garden. I look up when I hear the Blackbird’s flute, the Kite’s screech, the Magpie’s staccato, or the five-note ditty of the Cushy Doo. I look around for the sound’s source and smile at it, thanking it for its song.
But listen to it? What would that entail?
Stopping, for one thing. Intentionality, for another. Sitting down, settling in, taking a long moment and listening to it? Would I really hear something different?
I tried it.
I heard context.
It was heavenly.
Hiroshi Sugimoto
NO
In the beginning there was no beginning.
Before the beginning there was no nothing.
So if you were raised with the Bible or the Qur’an or the Rig Veda, forget about creation, forget about “without form and void.” There was no form, and there was no without form. There was no void, and there was no without void. That is because the first things to “become” were the twins of time and space, or more accurately, the singleton of “spacetime.” So there couldn’t be a time-related thing like “before” because there was no time before to be before.
I used to go mad thinking about this.
Nowadays, in my ancient lady wisdom, I have decided just to enjoy it, the way I did the first time I saw “The David.” I just stood there and surrendered. I had no idea how Michelangelo did that, not even how he knew where to place the chisel first. He said he “saw" the figure of David and just chiselled away what wasn’t it. Sure.
Or, maybe. Maybe that’s like what mathematicians and physicists do when they contemplate the non-before-ness of the non-beginning-non-always-was-ness of the universe. They “see” only the math inside it. And they chisel away what isn’t it. Things like logic and imagination and the physical experience of sequence. Human life’s actual stuff. They let it fall away. The math says there was no before before the no-beginning, and that is good enough for them. So they relax.
But they tell me they don’t really understand it, not tangibly, not in any way that occupies real human life. Not as in, “Oh, now I get it.”
Not like we get “The David.” When Michelangelo finished that wonder of the world, we all could see it and walk around it. We didn’t need a hundred years at MIT or Cambridge to experience it. We just had to look up. Our brains could take it in and give it a place forever in its gracious neuronic home. All of us could. We could not have produced it ourselves, But we could understand it.
And that’s the point. When it comes to no-before-ness, the human brain is the problem. I think it is just not up to the job. It can represent no-before-ness, but it cannot know it. It cannot experience it. And as incomprehensibly, incontrovertibly, indigestibly majestic as the human brain is (and it is); it cannot “do” no-before-ness. It cannot not do no-time.
But maybe down the long, creeping (and slightly creepy) evolutionary road there will emerge a brain that will have all the necessary neurons (or no-neurons) to experience no-time. It will be the new actual stuff of human (or no-human) life.
But actually, no. If there is no “before,” there is no “after;” so there is no down-the-road, creepy or not. There is no road, period.
I need to take my time with this.
If there is any.