The average person takes a lot of things for granted in this world. They look at the moon shining brightly in the night, nod at its aesthetic beauty, and move on to other things. The pedantic scientist does the same, differently: they analyse the mechanism by which the moon reflects the light of the sun and marvel at its rigourness, but never really bother to look at the light itself. Both of these attributes alone are not enough to appreciate the wondrous universe around us. One has to feel the aesthetic and live the machination to experience the sublime. And so I present this exercise in self-indulgence...
I want to be the sun's light reflected off of the moon falling on the earth. I want to be the moon feeling the sun's light reflected off of me on to the earth, and I want to feel the same light reflected off of the earth on me. I want to be the sun sending my light out to the far corners of solar system, feeling solar flares erupt from me the same way instances of righteous anger does, and feeling sunspots the way a dog licks its injuries. I want to send out comets into the far reaches of space and be the comet that burns itself out before I touch the sun. I want to be Jupiter experiencing the collision of comet Shoemaker and I want to be the one perturbing the great giant, disturbing the tranquility of the galaxy. I want to be the spiral galaxy that is the milky way and I want to be a lone star on the edge of the spiral, spinning away until it is time to explode and become a neutron star. I want to be a grain of matter feeling the immense pressure of the gravitational collapse, amalgamating with other like grains until I vanish into the nothingness that is a black hole. I want to be sucked into a black hole and I want to be the Hawking radiation that is emitted when I am absorbed by the black hole, contributing to the entropy of the universe. I want to be the universe, feeling every star and planetary object all at one instant, the same way I feel goose bumps on my skin.
I want to be a blade of grass, shining in the sun with dew drops glittering all over me until the lawnmower man cometh and my meaningless existence is ended. I want to be the lawnmover scythe with a single-minded purpose, that of pointlessly showing the acquiesing blades of grass who the master is. I want to feel the entrails of freshly cut grass on my blades. I want to be a soulless butterfly being buffetted about in the winds, without a care in the world for the state of the children in Rwanda, whose pain and suffering I want to be all at once. I want to be everyone who is responsible for the pain and suffering. I want to be a fetus being born and I want to be the mother giving birth. I want to be sexless, male, and female, and I want to be homosexual and heterosexual. I want to be a seahorse carrying impregnated eggs in my pouch and I want to be the eggs carried by me.
I want to be the notes of music that come out of distortion effects of my guitar, or the notes of music twisted and turned in every way in Bach's Crab Canon, striking my eardrum and I want to be my eardrum feeling the same notes, transmitting them in the form of electrochemical signals to the brain. I want to be all the neurons that fire on the signal, leaving a wake of neurotransmitters in my path, which I want to be, shouting to every other neuron that will listen to me. I want to be the antigen eliciting a immune response from the body's defense mechanisms and I want to be the entire response to the foreign antigen, fastly mutating and evolving to make sure I destroy the infidel with finality. I want to be the protein that is transcribing DNA to make the neurotransmitters and the antibodies, and I want to be the same protein being translated by RNA. I want to be the alpha carbon bonding with another carbon and a nitrogen, in an amino acid, and I want to be all the electrons and the protons and the neutrons holding the carbon atom together, in my mini-atomic-universe. I want to be the positron searching and finding an electron that I can collide with. I want to be the electron being annihilated in a flash of electromagnetic radiation and I want to be the photon that is emitted. I want to be the wriggly 10-dimensional infinitely-thin superstring whose existence people spend their lives debating over and about whom hundredss of equations have been written. I want to be each and all of those equations.
I want to be Escher's waterfall, following an infinite course and I want to be the statement that is Gödel's Incompleness Theorem. I want to be the proof of this very theorem which requires me again to be a statement. I want to be Plato as he writes his Apology and I want to be the surface that feels the ink stain soak into me and I want to be the pen that is weilded by Plato pressing deep into what I am. I want to be the computer feeling every keystroke I make and I want to be this message, travelling first through the buffers of my editor, the system memories, and out on the network, hopping from one machine to another, being broken up and reassembled, until I appear on your screen to become the words you are reading. I want to be your eyes glancing the very words that I am and I want to be you, perceiving what is read. I want to be the Internet, throbbing and pulsating, with millions of people using and abusing me.
I want to experience every moment in time, the past, present, and future, and every moment in space, in the 4-dimensional construct that is spacetime. I want to feel, and I want to live, but that is not meant to be for Quantum Chaos has decreed that I be nothing more than a member of a species, a puny insignificant human one, doomed to spend their lives trying to frantically come up with ways to lend meaning to their lives. And so I shake myself out of this reverie...
I wrote this in a 33-minute brainstorming session. A few parts of it were edited for correctness and clarity. Check out the song I did based on this reverie. And in response to those who've asked and those who may be wondering, I was a teetotaler when I wrote this (as I still am today).
I want to be the complex dynamic system that is the Universe, living on the edge of Chaos.