lumrant
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Lum the Poet, circa 1989
The Berlin Wall would fall later that year, and I didn't give a damn. But for a brief moment in Mrs. uh...Mrs. Someone's English class in my Junior year in high school, I turned philosopher for a few days! We had just learned about consonance and assonance (huh-huh), meter, rhyme, etc, and our assignment was to write a poem. Here's what I wrote:
Smaller and smaller it all is pulled
by gravitational jolts,
and from the expanse of matter culled
an undimensional point results.
The inconceivable then occurs
and hurls existence out;
a world is born that calls life hers
and brings human beings about.
And civilizations may live and die,
or find other worlds to woo,
but a ball can only bounce so high,
and collapse will begin anew.
This unending process results in
stranger things than can be believed;
watching and wondering soon begin,
and God is again conceived.
-- John Lum 2/20/1989
It's still sad to me that the latest cosmological research has supposedly put the nail in the coffin of the Closed Universe, but back then science hadn't conclusively shown that the rate of expansion was increasing. Back then it seems that I was a big fan of science, but not a fan of thinking about the implications of science. Either that, or I was far-sighted enough to realize that an MIT-trained engineer would have a better chance of getting a decent job than an MIT-trained philosopher...
