| PART IV OF VI AUGUST 22, 2005
THAWING OUT NORTHERN MAMMALS. | POEMS. By Rhea Tregebov The Big Picture* The man on the radio is speaking of his specialty and passion, theoretical astrophysics. The interviewer frets the big ones, wants to know what is there, on the other side of the end of the universe. Wants to know what it was was then before the Big Bang happened. I've heard these questions before; heard my son, at seven, brood over them, though not so much now as when he was five. You try, at some point, to place yourself in the here and now. The astronomer has kept his mind open to these wide questions, the ones we don't want to think of, the ones that make us dizzy. I imagine him lying sleepless, restless in the stars' old light, the sheets furrowed anxiously around him, not listening for a child's cry or cough, not making grocery lists or emotional agendas but insomniac with worry over the big picture. On the radio his voice is eager: before the Big Bang, everything that we are now was already all there, compressed in some inexplicable form. (And inside the ovum in every girl child, I think, compressed in some inexplicable form.) What is there, on the other side of the end of the universe, is before time began. Though in the universe itself, the stuff we are made of constitutes only ten percent of what is there. The rest is either void or (again) inexplicable. As yet. Meaning, I suppose, that here is now. I knew that. It feels like life, the little bit you can grab onto. At or Above the Earth’s Surface** Saturday at dinner, as we spoon into dessert (crème anglaise with raspberry sauce on one side chocolate on the other), our friend, who is a physicist, speaks to us of time as yet another human fallacy. That it’s only through the usual egotism of our species that we imagine its existence; that looked at properly it may well have no beginning or end to it. I probably don’t understand him fully, despite my ignorant love for physics. But I have experienced something like the a-chronological, standing for brief seconds not in time, absorbed in some moody perception, shop window; caught in stasis, being – how glad I am of the forsythia today, for instance, how it keeps coming back and coming back – if that’s what he means. And I have felt the elasticity of time, especially its slowness in those moments when I was moving at or above the earth’s surface, the news of someone’s death the event that splits time into before and after. As though in those moments in between my grief for someone else left me perhaps immortal, not part of time. I link this with the desire I feel sometimes for death; the wanting it all to stop, to stop, to step outside of it all, outside of everything the mind frets over busily, all the questions that are for me anything but philosophical. The questions I call suffering; the question, I guess, of time, of trailing the long long freight train of our lives: the accumulated memories of this bit of light striking that plane, smell of decayed oak-leaves a resonance in the primitive brain. All these things packed in electrical circuits in the walnut our bony skulls protect, synapses flickering like the prettiest Christmas lights so that if surgeons stimulate that bunch of cells we taste our mother’s breast milk; this bunch and it’s pale red tulips by the concrete steps at Matheson Avenue. That the transparency we imagine of ghosts is the transparency of memory. A collision of times. And who can tell me why it is that often when we make love I am among the arches under the New Sacristy in Florence where we went up, eighteen and nineteen years old, to see for the first time Michelangelo’s tomb for the Medicis? What does lovemaking have to do with Renaissance art? Or is it arches, is it the caves down there, is it that the trigger this moment is just death, that I’m thinking of how, making love, we go into it, the great current of procreation, time? The Dinner Table, the Tulip** So what do we do with this, this world, this uncertain spring, the tulips still holding, things green and cold. Take the tulips, composed, driven to yellow or rose from their chilly green, given to order, unfolding. The colour they move towards held for a day, or a week, contingent on the weather, accident. Then paling or darkening into other shades, then the quick or slow decomposing. Coming to grief. To being not tulips. Does rot have its own order? I think not. Theorists see things moving to degeneration, some, and looking down, I might be inclined to agree, skidding down to an agreement since more than the weather this spring is uncertain. Systems large and small are flawed, disintegrating. Think of anything: my respiratory system, the world’s. Today I run along the cul-de-sac in the swanky end of our neighbourhood. As always, there are vans parked in the driveways. Things are being taken care of, expensive systems in need of maintenance. The rest of us are short on money, time, love. And you so careless, the roof needing repair, plaster crumbling from the living-room ceiling, faith battered, struck by dilemma. Ah you. It’s a good thing it is spring, my faith still holding, in me, this body running along concrete, however the lungs rasp. Spring inclines me elsewhere, to lean towards other theories – anti-chaos, the universal yearning towards order. Setting the table just so. The tulips in the right vase. Yearning, yes, the scientist on tv wanting it to be the case that we are at home in the universe, that life is inevitable, “the consequence of broad avenues of possibility, not back lanes of improbability.” Although, agnostic, I might settle for back lanes. I’ve loved their rough edges, seamy sides: rusted garbage cans overturned, the opportunity for scrounging, the possibility of unexpected plenty. A clump of fat white violets beside the garage and beside them, blue ones, their pansy faces attentive. Not an aberration but a plan. Agnostic, I bless those looking for “a science of emergence, of complexity,” looking for a way to model complicated systems like the dinner table, the tulip. And I agree. The ultimate question not only of science, but ours why is there something rather than nothing.
Rhea Tregebov is a recently appointed (January 2004) Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at UBC. She has published six books of poetry, most recently (alive): Selected and new poems, and still worships her high school physics teacher. | Issue One For those that prefer a print version, please download our beautiful pdf file. (part i pdf) (part ii pdf) (part iii pdf) home (again) about (us) archive (of stuff) submissions (or suggest) notes (on masthead) bioteach (.ubc.ca)  PROKARYOTES OF AMERICA UNITE. |
