Wick and the Cricket

[austintorn@aol.com]

“Chrip, chirp. Did that elder-younger selfsame stuff really just happen, Wick?”

“It seemed like a dream.”

“Do dreams count toward our experiences?”

“You mean, are they an input to what we become?”

“I thought I might have said that or such.”

“Well, I guess they would, but, not so much, I’d say, since they tend to fade away from memory. I suppose that what we go through in them remains in us in some way.”

“We wrote it down and so now it will come fully back to us when we read it again someday.”

“Yes, and so it must still be in there.”

“Do you think the felling of deja vu is from having been somewhere similar in a dream?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“What if a dream came true?”

“Well, that might be likely since perhaps dreams are of what we wish for, sometimes, except for nightmares, of course.”

“I have a dream of figuring out resting light.”

“Sleep on it and it may come to you.”

“Thanks. Of what was your life made, Crick? What was the turning point?”

“When I was young and unlearned, I ran breathless through the meadows and forests, fast pursued by the stings of wind and rain. On and on I wandered, lost, wild without rest, searching for a haven from life’s dull pain. The storms chased me till I could go no more; I stood helpless, backed up against a door, but, I fell through it before any harm could reach me, cushioned by all of the dreams supporting me. I had found the library.”

“I take it this was before the internet,” noted Wick.

“Yes. It was a secret garden, one half as old as time, and had a courtyard in which poets and writers could live and write their words and rhyme—while the nightingale created the rose by moonlight magic from their thoughts sublime. The literary scenes unfolded before me, such as music often approaches one and surrounds, and then builds on the vibrance which in one is—to fill with beautiful sounds and visions.”

“The library became your home away from home.”

“It did, and such I brushed aside the webs of gossamer—life’s rites and rituals, as came to life in me all that mankind should remember: my quick thoughts fell, condensing into dew, while living dreams unveiled much more than I knew. I wandered down memory’s path, aglow in the soft beauty that it hath. I saw Johnny Keats kissing Fanny Brawne, as he spoke more than words but less than song, and Byron, endowing form with fancy, and Wordsworth, penning his thoughts to Lucy, and Shelley, my favorite poet, plumbing the depths of mystery; I read them all—now they’re a part of me.”

“The romantic poets of our England!”

“Yes, indeed, but deeper still I probed, looking in on it, and heard Mrs. Browning reading a sonnet. Poetically, I took them all in, even the shadowy Emily Dickenson. So there I rested, near the Library, up against a tree, savoring the feeling of their poetry, in another garden where all the flowers used in Shakespeare’s plays grew together in a living bouquet. And there before me, beneath the rose tree, Old Khayyàm, yet alive through his quatrains, yet wrote his verse, looking younger than I am, and lived the proof of his philosophy of life, the writing of which was but secondary. All this I remember, and much more. I began to write my own poems.”

[austintorn@aol.com]

Crick and his girlfriend hopped and flew down to the waterside. Warm breezes were blowing from the west. The sun was low and so there was a wealth of diamonds sparkling on the water—a glitter path. They filled their cups and raised a toast to the zephyr: “To nature! May it ever run through us and we on through it! Life’s love runs deep on a summer afternoon. May we ever float on its currents.”

For dinner they ate the grass and leaves, along with some rhubarb and guavas. Night was falling. Soon the planets came out, just ahead of the stars, as they always did. “There’s Mars and Venus!” she exclaimed, pointing. “Mars is the fourth planet from the sun and Venus is the second.”

“What a pair they are, he answered, “for Mars represents war and Venus represents love.”

“And here we are on the Earth, the third planet, situated right between those two opposites of love and war.”

“Here on Earth we live in a perfect state of balance, although it is a rather delicate thing. We’re a blend of war and peace, passion and reason, sobriety and drunkenness, adventurousness and foolishness, violence and forgiveness. That is our life! Oh, it is such a tenuous state of awareness.”

“We must walk the tightrope, balancing there between the foolish and the reckless. It’s the point between up and down, the point between night and day, like that of half light dusk or dawn.”

“Indeed, the greatest blunder in this life is to continually fear that you might make one.”

“I love it! Your passion is so reasonable in this state of awareness.”

“And your reasoning is so passionate!”

“That reminds me of a poetic joke I heard, from the poet Byron, though I’ve extended it slightly” she said, “but, as you know, there is some truth behind all jokes. This is sort of how it goes:”

Let us have wine, lovers, song, and laughter;
Water, chastity, prayer the day after.
Such, we’ll alternate the rest of our days—
On the average, we’ll make Hereafter!

“It’s funny, but true—a real golden mean.”

“By our nature we’re all a mixture of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’.”

“Yes, there is a beast within us, but it helps us to survive. It is the reason that we dance and dream, the reason that we feel and live with zest. It makes us push and try and climb. Without this beast within us, life would be so boring.”

“We’d be perfect angels.”

“But—we wouldn’t be us.”

“So—all’s right with the world—just the way it is.”

They laid back and looked up at the night sky again. “Look there,” he pointed, “the moon is in a conjunction with Venus.”

“I can hear them speaking. Listen.”

The moon, representing cold chaste reason, said to Venus, with logic cool “Quench thy inner fire, fool, lest it destroy us and all the heavens with it.”

Venus, the goddess of love and passion, answered, “I only know WHAT I feel, not WHY! So—I must be the one to rule!”

“Don’t confuse me with feelings,” said the moon.

“And don’t you confuse me with facts,” said Venus.

“I guess we can’t always understand each other,” the moon finally admitted after a long pause, having reasoned it out. You have feelings that I could never understand. I have reasons that you could never feel. Let us try our best to temper each other, and then let’s take it from there.”

“Otherwise, some of your decisions would be heartless,” said Venus.

“And sometimes your actions will be illogical,” answered the moon.

“But I’ll still do WHAT I feel is right,” said Venus, “and sometimes you can tell me WHY, although it may not always matter.”

“OK,” said the moon, “we’ll try to work together. Peace to you. Perhaps I am beginning to understand this thing called feeling. Perhaps, emotions play a large role in making decisions.”

All now became so very quiet. Starlight stabbed the utter darkness of night, causing new ideas to wink in their joined mind as sparkling thoughts from the eternal flame, as all the while the Cosmos played rhythm to their merged and singing souls. The night winds began to blow, so the lovers nestled deeper into the leaves. “Hold me, it’s getting cool,” she said when they were underneath. He held her snug, his front against her back, until they were warm. Then she turned and kissed him. “As long as love’s kisses can live,” she said, “neither age nor wear on our life will show.”

He sighed, growing younger, for their love was very beautiful. “We are wealthier than the richest Sultans,” she said. “I pity the poor Sultan. Even with his power and status he’s not as free to live as we are.”

“Yes, we are poor but rich, free yet home, famous but unknown.”

“And the poor Sultan is stuck on his throne.”

“And I am immersed in the boundless stream of your love, whereas the Sultan has only his paid-for-love harem.”

“I’m realizing you now with my whole body, mind, heart, and soul.”

“They work well together, don’t they?”

“Of course, they were built together and so they weren’t meant to operate separately.”

“Love is reason enough for all that we do.”

“Through love, all things are possible.”

[labelwench]

.....Caramel was standing with her sister, Madelaine. Their bodies were just touching, winter guard hairs aloft, the snow several inches above their knees. They stood still and silent, twin sentinels in the moonlight, columns of mist wafting regularly from their frost-rimmed nostrils, condensing into refractory crystals where it contacted their bodies.

The neighbouring Eskimo dogs howled a serenade to the shimmering lights; the log cabin popped loudly in the -30F air, while the banked wood fire inside released the stored energy of summers gone by.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx

Caramel awakened, to the sound of the love-struck cricket wooing his significant other. The horse was still bedded on the soft grass in this strange place of debating humans and insects.

Actually, the debate seemed to have come to a sudden end about the time the cricket fell in love.... and they say that houseflies have a short attention span.

And what was this, wrapped in paper and leaned gently against her neck? Caramel nosed it gently, surmising that it might be fragile from the sound of liquid contents.

Wick seemed to have wandered off for the present.

Delighted to find that her present surrounds were considerably warmer and more pleasing than circumstances at home, Caramel breathed deeply and closed her eyes once more. Either the cricket's paramour was blind to his wardrobe deficiencies, or perhaps, as was commonly said, love is indeed blind.

[Wick]

Once again, Wick fell off the stump, but this time he didn't wake up. He nestled up in the columbine and dreamed.

In his dream, he was at the Pub, playing pool. Oddly, all the balls were white, and every time Wick would hit a ball, it would turn into a point particle that went waving across the table until it came to rest at which point it would pop back into the shape of a white ball.

"I wonder," Wick thought, "does the ball choose to become a point particle when it is struck, or is this some new law of nature that we have heretofore never observed.

The cricket, who by the way was brandishing a very small cue stick and was standing on the wooden rail of the table, struck out at a nearby ball and sure enough, the ball transformed into a point particle, but this time the particle traced a line of astonishing complexity as it moved across the table and came to rest near one of the center pockets.

Caramel was sitting a table, just like any human would do and was drinking Austrailian Shiraz with her rider. Snow was blowing through an open window and the crack of wood contracting in the bitter cold outside snapped Wick to his senses.

He looked in a mirror on wall near the pool table and as he saw his reflection he suddenly understood that he was dreaming.

Softly he took his leave of the Cricket and his consort, who were now transforming billiard balls into point particles with abandon. Watching the Cricket's beloved strike the balls was mildly humorous. Wick was certain that the felt would be rags by morning. Robert was not going to be happy about the state of his table.

He opened the door and stole into the snowy landscape, surprised that the cold didn't bother him. Though he wore only sandals, the snow seemed somehow only a feathery texture with no real warmth or cold associated with it. Dreams are strange indeed.

He could smell horses and had a vague feeling that he was looking for someone. And it was then he realized that someone had followed him into the snow. It was Caramel's rider. The pub was gone. Snow was everywhere. A cabin in the distance cracked again beneath the cold, its windows looked like summer hiding behind glass. The smell of wood laced its way into his nostrils...

[labelwench]

.....Caramel couldn't recall when she had last been in a pub, but it seemed perfectly normal to be seated in the Many Worlds Pub amongst friends. She and her rider were enjoying a delightful Australian Shiraz, compliments of Wick.

Cricket and his love were knocking back Grasshoppers and alternating with shooters of Tequila while challenging Wick and all comers over the billiards table, a most unusual game with particle theory, resting light theory and the Cricket putting his spin on the cue ball. Meanwhile Wick was trying to add some English of his own, each leaving the other tough.

At one point, Caramel and the lady cricket found themselves together in the powder room.

"Hey Sweetie", she chirped, "I see that Robert has a Karaoke machine behind the bar. Let's you and me bill ourselves as the 'Agents of Chaos' and have a blast!"

And so it came to pass that Caramel and Viola (a stage name) ended up performing an unforgetable and likely unrepeatable rendition of "Girls just want to have fun".

With Viola perched on her shoulder, Caramel crooned and cavorted while practicing her dressage moves on stage, daintily trotting in place, somewhat in time to the music. My goodness, but that lady cricket had a voice!

Crick just had to join in, he was that proud of his lady! He started to play air guitar on his pool cue, while promenading along the edge of the table, which was situated conveniently in front of the small stage. Soon he was dancing the cancan as well, proudly displaying his legs, all three pairs, while flipping his air guitar solo to an alternate set.

Wick was finding it hard to maintain his academic demeanor, and a smile was definitely in the works. He was also tapping the fingers of his right hand, tucked nonchalantly under the opposite elbow and Caramel, from her vantage point, could see that his toes were soundlessly keeping time under the table as well. At the point that Crick was trying to entice him into line-dancing, Wick politely excused hmself and headed out the door.

Her rider almost aspirated the Shiraz when Caramel decided to add a flourish by flicking her mane and tail, forgetting in her exuberence, that Crick had now joined them on the stage. Her long tail swept the cricket off the stage and he landed lightly and unharmed in one of the pockets of the billiard table, all six legs waving in the air, definitely not in time to their song. The girls were professional. They didn't skip a beat as they wound their way through one more chorus of the song.

As Caramel and Viola held the final note, the rider was heading out the front door, sputtering and giggling alternately....

[austintorn@aol.com]

(LW, your descriptions of animal behavior are superbly exquisite, and Wick, you are very cool, too, to go along with the dream. As I was gone most of the weekend, I'll have to take some time to go find the cricket and and see what's up with the little guy. This story sure seems undetermined. Maybe we will even get back to "light" eventually. I wonder why dark matter doesn't emit or absorb any light…)

[austintorn@aol.com]

Crick’s billiards’ coach, analog, showed up, just getting out of the way of the horse and asked “Crick, how’s it going?”

“I’m making some impossible shots.”

“I noticed. How did you get past that ball that was in the way while I was off getting a drink of ‘HIJHLMNO’”?

“Well, during your H2O break, I launched the point particle cue ball, and then quickly looked away, during which time it turned into a smear of an interference pattern and…”

“… it went right through the blocking ball. Do you think that I was born yesterday?”

“Darn, I missed your birthday!”

“Dudly enough, there is no birthday on one’s birth day. I was but zero year’s old.”

“OK, I’ll mark my calendar to celebrate your next birthday.”

“OK, but that would only be an anniversary of my birth day.”

“Jeeez… what a goofy scheme, but I still made the shot.”

“You hit low on he cue ball and jumped it over the intervening ball, didn’t you?”

“Well, yes, if you must know, but I made a triple bank shot using the angles that you taught me.”

“Those are just luck, as they are outside of the precision that we can apply.”

“Oh, well, but at least dame fortune has smiled upon me.”

“Good luck with her, but be respectful of your girlfriend. It’s Wick’s turn to watch you; here he is.”

“Hey, Crick, what happened to the felt?”

“It’s now like a golf landscape with many hazards to negotiate. Plain old pool was just too easy.”

“Aye-yi-yi! So, what’s the downfall of modeling point particles to be in nature?”

“I just studied that. It’s that infinities crop up in some really great equations and make them meaningless because some particles end up in the exact same spot.”

“There’s more to it, and I’ll tell you another time since Austin doesn’t know all this stuff. So, how did they get rid of this problem and make some more pointless equations?”

“Ha, ha. They replaced the point with a wiggling string of 9 dimensions, and then added a 10th by proposing p-branes.”

“That seems rather extreme, like the convoluted contorted model that someone actually tried to build to show that the sun and all the planets revolved about the earth.”

“String theory too is quite a contraption. It also has 10**1000 solutions, but of course just one for the pocket universe that we are in.”

“What is it?”

“No one knows, but M-theory includes gravity.”

“Where are these branes?”

“Well, we are in one and there is another brane that collides with ours every trillion years. Only gravity can reach between the branes; nothing else, so, in effect, the branes are nearly totally separate and must ever be.”

“The collision is the big bang?”

“Yes, the big bang has to be from a collision since it couldn’t just come out of nowhere all by itself.”

“Interesting fantasy.”

“Scientists like to have the fun of imagination, too.”

“But I do like the idea that there must be something beyond our universe.”

“The branes are still here, even now, but are not colliding.”

“Well, whatever, but of course you’re right that there was an origin of the universe, although it’s not affecting us presently since a universe is not the same as its origin.”

“Well, I like that word “origin”, for this instance of our universe was not the first creation.”

“Really? Does the universe oscillate, expanding and then contracting back to a crunch?”

“Nope, that theory was killed dead four times over.”

“So, we’re on an escalating one way trip toward oblivion since dark energy is now dominating all else and is even increasing the rate of expansion of the universe?”

“Yes, that’s true, but, nope, no one-way trip, although dark energy is indeed spreading everything out faster and so all will be rather vacuous one day.”

“Crick, have you been drinking again? How does the next incarnation of the universe appear then?”

“I can’t tell you exactly until I read more of the ‘Endless Universe’ book, but the oscillating universe does come back from the dead in a big way.”

“I’ve got to hear this one, but of course I’ll have to wait. How is it that our universe was made with everything in the right proportion, even some stuff like dark energy and matter which don’t even come into play until some time afterwards?”

“The universe knew what it was doing since it is cyclical and keeps coming back in the same guaranteed workable way, while other not quite right universes failed and flopped or expanded forever in a way from which they could not return.”

“A cyclical universe is similar to a oscillating universe, but there is a distinction that makes a difference?”

“I have to go now.”

“Crick…!”

[Wick]

The deep stillness of snow rested still up Wick and the rider, punctuated only by the smell of burning juniper and the sound of the house.

"You're not her, are you?" Wick asked

The rider was still and steady. Her eyes were kind. An air of mystery drifted around her like the warm breath of horses.

"I'm not the rider I appear to be. But whether I'm her or not depends on a great many things. I've come to help you find a conjunction."

"A conjunction of what?" Wick asked.

"Of dreams. You are here in the snow. Caramel is drinking Shiraz in the Pub waiting for her rider to return. And Crick is at the pool table having a conversation with you. All of you are dreaming something near conjunction, but not quite. If your dreams converge, you'll have done something most unusual."

"I suppose things like that don't happen very often."

"Almost never," said the rider who was not a rider.

"How do we manage such a thing?"

"You choose to," there was somethiing playful in the riders eyes, something deeper than a mere look, that reached into Wicks soul and caused him to wonder what creature this rider really was.

"But how can free people choose to have the same dreams?"

"Perhaps that is the greatest mystery of all. It is not merely to dream, but to choose. Sometimes we choose what we want at the moment, but at other times we choose the things we really want...the things that mean something...the thing worth sacrificing for. When free people choose to sacrifice the joy of the moment in order to usher in the joy for all time, then they achieve a conjunction of dreams."

"Yes. I've felt that." Wick whispered. Freedom of the moment can quickly become a prison like no other. Choices made without this conjunction of dreams you speak of bring only sorrow and suffering into the world--the price of freedom untempered by wisdom. There is no freedom in the moment. Freedom is born out of pure thought and out of a perfect understanding of the laws that govern all things."

"Yes, Wick, thats why I came to you in the winter two years past."

"You did that?" Wick dropped to his knees in the snow. The countenance of the rider shifted a bit, and suddenly in air was a swirl of snow so bright that all the other snows seemed to ignite sympathetically and the whole landscape melted away into a sea of light.

"Light is at rest, Wick. It was then and it will ever remain at rest. The universe is on the move. Time is an illusion. The conjunction is coming, Wick, but it doesn't depend upon the universe...it depends upon people...they must choose to work for more than themselves, to usher in a conjunction of dreams."

No rider remained. All that remained was a bright, warm enveloping light.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Crick and his girlfiend, Kit, were as the splendour in the grass when a living poem arrived that they must have conjured up.

“What are you?” Crick asked of the living poem.

“I deal with ever enduring themes, those which are universal to everyone. As you can see, I am structured, intense, rhythmic, and melodic. I am a unified body of sensation, thoughts, and passions. I translate all that is felt, though often only very roughly.”

“Are you essence or existence?” Kit asked of the living poem.

“I am both—I am the form and the idea. I am an object that is born from one’s profoundest visions. I am the image in the diction of feeling. I am, at once, both the container and the contained.”

“You’re an expression of all that is difficult to express,” Crick added.

“I am truth fleshed in living words. I express thoughts that would otherwise go unapprehended. I lift the veil that separates mind from soul—and thereby show the proof of the hidden beauty. I am life’s image drawn in eternal truth.”

“You are immortal then?” Kit asked.

“Poetry makes immortal what is best in life by freeing the images in our spirits that are deeply impressed. I arrest the shimmering notions, clothe them in words, then send them forth, fully dressed.”

“How do I know if I’ve written a poem?” Crick asked.

“Well,” said the living poem, “use the highest powers of language and wit to translate your soul’s nature into the poem’s words. The reader will translate the words back into spirit; and then, if the reader’s soul responds, you’ve written a poem!”

Crick and Kit tried to write a poem about love, for that was the greatest thing, but they couldn’t get it to rhyme, due to a shortage of good words that rhymed with “love”. Finally, in desperation, they came up with the following:

The Trouble with “Love”

Only a few words rhyme with the above,
Like the overflown “dove”, the heartless “shove”,
And the ill-fitting “glove”. Alas, “love’s” rhymes
Remain unheard of, or aren’t well thought of.

[austintorn@aol.com]

An Escalating One Way Trip From a Fluke To Oblivion?

The majority of the energy of the universe is dark today,
Although everything else passes through it in every way.
It’s everywhere and has a component that repels its own state,
Which causes the expansion of the universe to much accelerate.

The discussions continued in the confluence of the field of dreams where all things were possible…


“I’m back, Wick. I had to take Robert’s pool table to the doctor.”

“How’s it doing now?”

“It’s recovered.”

“Ha.”

“Only one ‘ha’.”

“Yes. What else are you up to, Crick?”

“Nothing less that saving the entire universe from going away forever.”

“Wow! So, the oscillatory universe model has many lives, and it doesn’t work, but it rises from the dead?”

“True, true, and true. After many people thought that the CMBR showed that the universe had an original beginning from the big bang, they eventually began to realize that this point was far from settled, so they began to think of it more as the big bounce.”

“But, entropy always increases for an isolated system and a machine can’t be perfectly efficient…”

“And so the universe cannot be 100% recycled since…”

“…it must release heat and energy unevenly, in a disordered form.”

“Perpetual motion strikes out again. The universe cannot be restored back to the way it was an an earlier time because the total entropy must increase from cycle to cycle.”

“The entropy, mostly in the form of radiation, increases as stars and galaxies form during the expanding phase, but then this new radiation, along with any from the previous cycles, is compressed into a tiny volume of space at the big crunch.”

“And, as a result, the subsequent big bang begins with a more radiation and a greater concentration of entropy than the previous one, making the next expansion start off faster, taking longer before it halts.”

“Then, Crick, there would have been an actual beginning, early on, as the previous cycles were shorter and shorter.”

“Yes, and so that was the first death of the theory. We held a wake and there was no dead ringer tolling the bell. Then the next fatal blow to the already dead was delivered when it was showed that tiny differences in the rate of contraction become greatly magnified, sending the big-crunch-bound universe into wild gyrations.”

“Instead of contracting equally in all directions, space contracted along two random directions and expanded along the third into a kind of a cigar shape. It then became an exploding cigar.”

“Yes, Wick, a cigar but no cigar for the smooth universe observed today, for it then contracted and expanded all over the place, like donut dough. They call it the ‘chaotic mixmaster’.”

“Let it rest in peace.”

“Yes, it rested in many mangled pieces, and the proposed singularity made Einstein’s fine equation into an infinite mush of meaninglessness.”

“And then the oscillatory theory that was twice dead was killed twice more again?”

“Yes, sad to say, for many loved it dearly. It was found that the expansion rate doesn’t slow down due to the gravitational self-attraction of matter; in fact, the expansion is accelerating, as we discussed previously. The funeral was quite glorious; there were lots of flowers.”

“Plus, the concentration of matter is too low and the universe is not closed.”

“WMAP showed a flat universe. We then tried CPR on the model that had been killed four times over.”

“And so the four fatal blows were somehow fended off and the concept of a repeating universe was revived? I’m amazed, Crick.”

“The four horsemen of the near apocalypse came to the rescue. They were extra dimensions, branes, dark energy, and dark energy decay. They saved the day, making way for the newly named cyclic model.”

“What the heck? Hey, Crick, where did you go? Crick? What then of this tale of death and resurrection?”

A voice railed off into the distance. “I just received a telegramed text message from my girlfriend. The heck with all this science stuff…”

Although this was all just a dream, Wick had a pencil with him and had written it all down on a pad laying on his chest as he slept.