Longing for permanent sustenance

For the obligatory image, I found in my local newspaper this photo of manned vehicles.

Dear diary,

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The first sentence of the Book of Genesis, from the King James Bible. The first sentence of the Gospel of John, from the same. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Heaven and earth. Sky and land. Created by Word, which was God and with God at that moment.

I am Bryan the Scientist. I made the Big Bang. And I was also with myself while I was me. And I still am.

Are you OK with what I wrote above, when I equated heaven with sky and earth with land? Or should I have said “vacuum” and “matter”? I haven’t learned much since my infancy. The earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I was in my rocket ship, in outer space, watching all this from a distance. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

I can’t remember if I made anything smaller than atoms. When my Big Bang happened, everything exploded; and by “everything” I mean all the building blocks of reality. Oh, now I remember: quarks are smaller than atoms. By “smaller,” I think I mean “more essential.” I’d like to remember what the key, fundamental, primary parts of reality are, because the lastingness of anything that is built (which means literally everything) depends on the durability of these most basic blocks. And my goals are long-term.

Say that you fashion a cabin from wooden logs. The logs are either indestructible or prone to evaporate. If the former, the cabin may fall apart but the logs will remain: you can cause the cabin to die, but you can’t kill its wood. Now consider the opposite case: The most sturdily constructed cabin is bound to collapse when its logs dry up. It shall surely die. It will not matter that Abraham Lincoln is with you, and that you are Abraham Lincoln. Even if, before Abraham was, you remain.

Presumably you can instill something with longevity by way of an ingenious construction. But that’s just longevity; a structure can only be permanent if it’s born that way. (By which phrase, I mean something more like “not ever born,” if that makes sense.) What goes up must come down; what was begun must end; all bodies decay: so every structure, however long-lived, is yet impermanent. Tho I’m questioning whether its parts may possess permanence. Were the building blocks created? Did they have a “made on” date, like cattle or Adam? Or was the stuff that comprises us always here, floating around in one form or another? Did God slay the Chaos Dragon that is the Universe and then rearrange its members to make the present World? Or are those elements from which reality is constructed smithereens of the eternal mind, and thus impervious to entropy? In the sense that “nothing is got for nothing,” do thoughts have a “cost” to produce? – are thoughts exempt from Emerson’s law of compensation, or can we say that thoughts are truly nothing? What springs from nothing is free to do as it likes, and to stay as long as it wants? But if the ultimate ground of physicality is thought, then how does something that is, at heart, nothing, become so worried about its survival? And if change had a birthday, then when will it stop? Maybe cyclic repetition is change’s way of dying. And then the Spirit of God devising reality from nada (chaos or divine thought) is like a corpse reminiscing.

Creatio ex nihilo. In the 2013 film Wrong Cops, written by Quentin Dupieux, after delivering an impromptu eulogy at his colleague’s funeral, Officer Duke is approached by the wife of the deceased, who says “[your speech] was beautiful – I loved listening to you.” Duke answers: “Well, I’m glad you liked it, ma’am – I just made it up.” Then, in section 7 from the first lecture of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem says

[Take] the idea of “creation out of nothing.” . . . This Nothing from which everything has sprung is by no means a mere negation; only to us does it present no attributes because it is beyond the reach of intellectual knowledge. In truth, however, this Nothing—to quote one of the Kabbalists—is infinitely more real than all other reality. . . . In a word, it signifies the Divine itself, in its most impenetrable guise. And, in fact, creation out of nothing means to many mystics just creation out of God.

Is that important? Does that do anything for you? To think of the creation as coming out of a blob of stuff or non-stuff, and to call the whatness God or Word or Nothing – does this get us any closer to our desire?

And what is it that we desire? . . .

[NOTE. I’m adding these bracketed statements as a postscript. You can stop reading here; the entry fell flat. Not even halfway thru its projected term, it proved itself an abortion. From this point on, what I wrote descended into quibbling over the meeting of basic needs. I will leave the remainder of text for anyone who’s curious – I like to provide the example of “What not to do,” so as to help fellow journalists avoid the same pitfalls – but I advise you to save yourself the time: press the “eject” button and fly from your seat in the reader’s jet out into the wild blue yonder, and dream up your own heaven and earth from the everything-ness of thought.]

And what is it that we desire? Consider our shortfall: We lack food, clothing, and shelter. Those are the basics. But we hanker after booze, better bodies, and environs so favorable that one need not protect oneself from them. My earthly father (cursed be he), in his role as our family’s provider, used to fix a great gulf between the concepts of “want” and “need.”

The solution to hunger? Manna: they tell me that the name means “what is it!” Tradition claims it’s the food of angels, “a light, pale sponge cake made of flour, egg whites, and no fat, typically baked in a ring shape and covered with soft icing.” Though the Bible says

. . . behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat. (Exodus 16:14-15)

“The LORD” is Yahweh: he’s the boss from another planet who came to Earth and attempted wrangling the Israelites. He fills our feedbag, but we prefer drugs.

The next need is clothing, and the solution is white robes:

. . . a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither . . . and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number . . . stood before the throne of God . . . clothed with white robes . . . And one of the elders said . . . These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. . . . They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. (Revelation 4:1 and 7:9-17)

So this divine Lamb is made of manna; and our robes are white because they’ve been dipped in Lamb’s Blood – one might think that this would dye them red or pink, but it’s probably a lighter sauce with a base of cream. The robes fit well; we enjoy wearing them because it’s good to be pure, and all your needs are met when you stand next to God. Though it would be better if the shape of our flesh were so naturally beautiful that it would render fine raiment superfluous; and if our physicality were so well-adapted to its surroundings that it would need no covering.

To find shelter, let’s look at some info about the housing market. In the first few verses of chapter 14 of his Gospel, John’s Jesus says:

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.

I think of mansions as being standalone residences that are even bigger than houses – so it seems strange that a house would contain multiple mansions; but that’s fine, if that’s how they’re made in heaven. We’ll accept whatever you have. Now John’s Jesus assures us:

I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

So he will be with us. Does that mean he’ll live with us? (Is he included with the house, like a davenport or mother-in-law?) “I will receive you unto myself” – what does that mean, exactly? You are what you eat: Perhaps he will be us, as the Word was with God and was God. . . . Somewhere in Paul’s mad letters he talks about God being in Christ, and Christ in us, and we in Christ and God, etc., etc. . . . Everything is inside everything else, as well as encompassed by it. Directionality has gone topsy-turvy: left is right, black is white, to is fro, and up is down in the void-formlessness. But it’s nice because it’s warm here. The crisis of homelessness has been postponed.

So those are the basic necessities. They’re all constructed from the building blocks that I mentioned. That’s why I hope to figure out how long these quarks can last. For if the quarks that make up the atoms of the Blood of God’s Lamb are prone to fizz away like the logs of Lincoln’s cabin, then I’ll either need to come up with a new name for whatever proves tinier than quarks, or else we’ll have reached the great Nothing again, and another Big Bang might be called for.

And if we left the Nothing alone, without creating anything from it or detonating it, what then? Probably some type of unpleasantness would suggest itself. Most likely it would be another aspect that has always existed but which one never notices until everything that surrounds it has been amended.