New Quatrains

Some of these were put in appropriate threads at ThePhilsophyForum.

The can also go into Rubaiyat II and Rubaiyat II+1.

(4. 10 q1-9)

10
— Another Day in the Tavern —

In this lost haunt, out on the Orion arm
Of the Milky Way—where safe from the core’s harm;
The philosophers gather in the tavern,
As new sleuth-hounds unweaving the Cosmic yarn.

Push forward, and deeper, beyond your fears;
We guide thee, we lift thee, we dry your tears;
We’re illumination beside thee—of
The Spirits Of Unconditional Love.

‘Magic’ has fallen by the wayside, it
As trancendence an intangible writ,
Unable to be distinct from matter,
Having to talk/walk the talk/walk of it.

The Fundamental Eterne of the causeless,
Whose state cannot have inputs to its mess,
Dooms ‘God’, along with any specifics—
The bedrock of All must be randomness.

Of the random base, some small parts endure,
And code as quarks, which code for atoms pure,
As at each new realm new laws determine—
But for when bedrock’s touched—effects for sure.

Conscious qualia reflect the just past,
Decisions and thoughts produced, though it’s fast,
The mechanizations not apparent,
Their constancy such that on Earth we’ll last.

The will is not free when it random is.
Though we’re determined to survive each quiz,
A spanner might get thrown into the works,
Preventing the fixed will from being a wiz.

The Eternal has to be everything,
Superimposed, not a certain pathing;
It can’t have inputs, with no beginning;
So, what chose the song our universe sings?

The Eternal is as a multiverse,
Potentially, with no information,
As in Bable’s Library of all books,
Being as useless as Nothing’s zero.

(4. 10 q10-17)

The universes might all spring forth, somehow,
Most inert or not going far enough,
With some reaching life after a long time,
Such as ours, precarious as it is.

Or, a Programmer sets if-then switches,
Like eight-way 3D Rubic Cube intercepts,
After having set the quarks and leptons
And coding stars to generate atoms.

Then more precise tweaks, to dark energy,
To umpteen decimal places so rare,
And the forming of the DNA code
To stir life’s ingredients stirring slow.

Darn, the n-body problem is so tough,
For unforeseen side-effects e’er arise,
Among branches of the would-be life-tree,
A zillion variables overlapping.

The Programmer sat up at his terminal,
Brought up his 1,000,000,000 line program,
And opened the patient for surgery.
Working swiftly from a red inked printout
Marked up during a long coffee hour.

He clamped off the bleeding capillaries,
Redid most of their interfaces,
And bloodlessly sealed them shut again,
Although these were only preparatory
And minor repairs in auxiliary areas.

Next, the main arteries had to be incised,
And therefore it was no longer possible
To open and unblock the incursions in sequence,
Since indirect ramifications and side concerns
Concerns quickly arose and wildly flared,
As fleeting thoughts, when one thing led to another,

Thereby requiring immediate attendance,
Lest, they, in the formless impressionism
Of the art of computer programming,
Fade to vague remembrance, and reappear later,
Always at an inopportune time, as defects known as bugs.

(4. 10 q18-36)

The phone rang while he was juggling
These evaporating images and so he had to ignore it;
But, no matter, for PhoneMail would record the call.

Twenty minutes later,
He had sutured the incisions and readied
A compile and regression test which would
Either attest to the quality of the operation
Or reveal its fatal errors and necessitate

The revitalization of the patient or, at worst,
Require a restoration to
Preoperative health from a backup file.
…

Finally, after some fourteen billion years,
Proto-man and then homo Sapiens
Arrives, after seven million more years
Of tinkering with monkey chromosomes.

Extinctions swept away many a kind;
Chromosomes fused, leaving the chimps behind;
RNA remembered all survivors;
‘Good fortune’ smiled on the Sapiens mind.

Unintelligently programmed, many climbs
Were the off-the-shelf reach of nature’s grimes,
A dickering Rube Goldberg ‘invention’,
Our nervous system now ruled by ancient times.

But yet it worked; here we are!

Oh Man! What a piece of work—the mind;
What noble deeds done and undone in kind.
What coding updates programmed all upon—
In the layers of brains the mind is made upon.

What is this sapiens mammal animal?
Still made from slime but of a higher call!

The Permanent is all that there is,
It’s transmutations the temporary fizz.
It can’t have direction, with no inputs,
So, it multi verses, seeming as a Wiz.

(4. 10 q27-35)

Believers tremble in fear of the Big Bad Boss,
His immorality untrusted not to cause loss—
Insanity hidden in ‘mysterious ways’;
They accept, so He them into Hell doesn’t toss.

God thought of, planned, designed, and implemented
Human Nature—angelic to demented,
And in His recipe’s span those expressed
Unsurprisingly had to be reinvented.

Shirking responsibility, the Blamer
Cited humans as the culprits of his err,
And cast them out of Eden, to this day—
This evil being God’s own Original Sin.

The Great Flood killed all but Noah’s near clan,
God acting against His own sixth Command,
Those dead being of God’s intended nature—
Yet another myth-take in rainbow land.

Yet, there was no Genesis of Man, as is,
In modern form, so recently, by a Wiz,
Nor a separate animal life line,
For He flunked out of evolution’s quiz.

We search for ‘God’, high and low, here and there,
Far and wide—He’s said to be ev’ry where;
But no omens are found: quasars abound;
So, He hides out or He’s truly nowhere.

Invisibles can neither be shown nor not,
So, one’s ‘agnostic’ toward the belief or not,
No matter the ‘sure things’ dishonestly said;
Thus, none can teach the belief as true or not.

Using anger to thwart an opposing belief
Does nothing positive to provide a relief
But negatively shows the inability
To directly and completely counter the plea.

‘God’ can’t be shown such that all would believe—
It’s all idle chatter that hopes conceive,
A blah, blah of what can’t even be preached,
Honestly, without a shred to retrieve.(4. 10 q36-44)

Maybe this, maybe that, of a ‘God’,
On and on, of worn ideas long trod,
Trying to show nature’s not what it does,
Spouting this and that—dust into the sod.

Oh, where is the Loving One, the All-Might?
Why just the power of what natures does?
What benevolence makes for living in fright?
Where’s the Knowing of His Is and ne’er was?

Why the heck do we exist here on Earth?
What mysterious origin gave birth?
What purpose the madness amid the mirth?
Why the heck would a Person be the first?

The invisibility disorder spreads;
“Might be’s” and “maybe’s” clog the fora threads,
Naturally, from meaning’s search in heads,
Ever trying to raise ‘God’ from the dead.

‘God’, Divine Human, and Spirit, to boot,
All structured on wishes—what a hoot!
Angels added, too, and Devils haunting.
All as supposed, so, their doings are moot.

‘God’ changed His mind, so it would work better,
From err of His deluge wet and wetter,
Ne’er to kill again by water His kin,
Plus gave Redemption from Original Sin.

Versus
‘God’ is unchanging, as ever Perfect,
Knowing and Being all with no defect,
As in all at once and everywhere,
His Self mirrored in us as a Reflect.

But either way
Reflections of ‘God’ we would have to be,
As the very thoughts imagined in He—
Naught else could exist independently;
This One Effect runs continuously.

But really how it turned out…
Myth-Takes of Unconditional Love
And the freedom to be from the Above
And Goodness didn’t fill human natura—
Our follies broadcast His soap opera.

(4. 10 q45-54)

God, alone in His Power, had no fun,
So He made Sapiens out of His One,
Our image reflecting His Love’s Knowing,
As His mirror of Divine Perfection.

‘God’s image reflects the mottled colors
Painted by human artists upon the air
Where the wormed apple was before the fall
That rotted away truth’s tree of knowledge.

Eden’s fresh market carried everything;
The shiny red apples called from the Tree,
“Touch me, take me, eat me”, and soon trouble
Was at hand, although it was crispy, sweet.

Eden’s sinful Apple, causing our shit,
Made for harsh apple cider, but when it
Was heated with sulfurous brimstone it
Soon turned smooth, the Hell taken out of it!

I found the Garden in the Amazon’s heart,
Wherein lie massive fields of Lady’s Slippers
And all of the rare flowers of Paradise…
And there I put the apple back on the tree.

Be happy! For the moon of thy festival will come,
The means of mirth will all be propitious;
This moon has become lean, bent-figured, and thin,
Thou may’st say that it will sink under this trouble.

The unborn future is inherent in the past,
It’s ‘will be’ is real, with no unreal contrast class,
As there’s no opposite to existence—no Nil;
It’s not just that future is going to exist.

The present now undergoes an updating,
In a fleeting swoosh that passes it away,
For the ‘now’ fades, consumed, as future becomes,
Yet, what will become past can’t just non-exist.

The pyramid of the will bears nested dancers,
Each an expert in their field of laws and causers—
Through the land’s contours of memory’s sands of what was;
The King doesn’t decide, but his repertoire does.

The philosophical strides leap and bound,
For the causelessness of All must be found,
Along with the unfree will that dooms a Mind;
Staggering: The All goes round and round!