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The Poet: John Updike, "Ode to Entropy"

Saturday, August 24, 2019 17:25

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“The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics”

by Chet Raymo

“Let me share these lines from “Ode to Entropy”:

    “Death exists nowhere in nature, not
    In the minds of birds or the consciousness of flowers,
    Not even in the numb brain of the wildebeest calf
    Gone under to the grinning crocodile, nowhere
    In the mesh of woods or the tons of sea, only
    In our forebodings, our formulae.”

Can that be true? That no other creature than ourselves anticipates non-existence? Surely, other animals experience danger. The wildebeest calf darts to avoid the lunging crocodile. The rabbit in my neighbor’s yard watches warily as I pass. The fearful infant chimp clings in its mother’s protective embrace. Is this a threat response without awareness of fatal consequence? Is obliviousness of death the default condition of non-human nature?

I suppose, in the absence of a common language, there is no way to know for certain what goes on in a chimpanzee’s or gorilla’s brain. Nor do we know when and how the idea of personal immortality arose in the minds of humans. Funerary evidence would seem to suggest that a belief in immortality was universal among our ancestors. It is, however, a belief that flies in the face of everything modern science has learned about the nature of a human self.

For the great majority of humans, faith in an afterlife remains firmly entrenched. For myself, I have no greater expectation than that – like Updike’s tossed banana peel – I might nourish the roadside chicory.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

◆

“Ode to Entropy”

“Some day – can it be believed? -

In the year 10-70th or so,

single electrons and positrons will orbit

one another to form atoms bonded

across regions of space

greater than the present observable universe.

‘Heat death’ will prevail.

The stars long since will have burnt their hydrogen

and turned to iron.

Even the black holes will have decayed.

Entropy!

thou seal on extinction,

thou curse on Creation.

All change distributes energy,

spills what cannot be gathered again.

Each meal, each smile,

Each foot-race to the well by Jack and Jill

scatters treasure, lets fall

gold straws once woven from the resurgent dust.

The night sky blazes with Byzantine waste.

The bird’s throbbling is expenditure,

and the tide’s soughing,

and the tungsten filament illumining my hand.

A ramp has been built into probability

the universe cannot re-ascend.

For our small span,

the sun has fuel, the moon lifts the lulling sea,

the highway shudders with stolen hydrocarbons.

How measure these inequalities

so massive and luminous

in which one’s self is secreted

like a jewel mislaid in mountains of garbage?

Or like that bright infant Prince William,

with his whorled nostrils and blank blue eyes,

to whom empire and all its estates are already assigned.

Does its final diffusion

deny a miracle?

The future voids are scrims of the mind,

pedagogic as blackboards.

Did you know

that four-fifths of the body’s intake goes merely

to maintain our temperature of 98.6°?

Or that Karl Barth, addressing prisoners, said

the prayer for stronger faith is the one prayer

that has never been denied?

Death exists nowhere in nature, not

in the minds of birds or the consciousness of flowers,

not even in the numb brain of the wildebeest calf

gone under to the grinning crocodile, nowhere

in the mesh of woods or tons of sea, only

in our forebodings, our formulae.

There is still enough energy in one overlooked star

to power all the heavens madmen have ever proposed.”

- John Updike

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-poet-john-updike-ode-to-entropy.html

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