The Sameness And Differentness Of Life

[Onyx]

The Sameness and Differentness of Life

 

by Onyx

 

All things change, one can always go lucretian or heraclitian. Lucretius thinks things flow; Hercalitus thinks things mutates.

Vivamus vivum; Mundi mutantis.

We who live lives; the world changes.

It's far more reasonable to assume nothing is fixed than it is to assume things are fixed because both bad and good can change in form.

What was once, turns into a new thing entirely.

 

The temples were imposing, they dwarfed the person, their pillars a martial red, their facades masks a slaughter of bulls.

Then came the barbarians, the Christians, the swirl of the world and the times converging upon them.

There were tears, screams; there were smiles, laughter.

But the temples are not the same, they cracked, they were ruined, their pillars are a dignified grey marble, their facades shows death,

not only of the bulls but the people who was once there.

Yet the temples are still there, still imposing in the age of skyscrapers, now assuming a rare nobility that comes with age

and they now sigh under the flashbulbs of the little and unborn when built.

 

What philosophy can stand up to Time? What can possibly explain the circumstances of everchanging yet constant history?

Who can explain the stars that hang from the sky, a dewy streak across the regal night?

When we will get used to all of our circumstances?

Why do we assume anything?

 

Venus reveals her pearly skin in the martial morning, bathing in her opposite lover's glow.

Mercury fleet-footed unseen across the fiery sky.

Jupiter smiles upon his paramours, no Juno to harry him; Ganymede bears him drinks, Europa luxuriating in golden sprinkles.

Saturn tired, upstaged by Jupiter, he has rings around him, he is gagged.

And antediluvian Uranus is surprised at the Shakespearian newcomers, oh lord, is Puck cheeky and that wonderful Miranda and her grumpy father!

Neptune is the sea in space, buttressed by mystifying Proteus, fishy Triton and the babbling naiads; they all gurgle, slosh and storm.

Mournful Pluto, brooding and shrunken by consensus of the mortals, his friend Charon cheers Pluto by ferrying the dead regardless of Pluto's shrinkage,

Hydra will kill with one of its ten heads, Nix will darken the mortals' eye with blackened joy.

But Ceres beyond, watches upon the atoms of the mortals with love and care while trying to counteract

Spiteful Eris who causes chaos upon Pluto's visage, saying he is no god and no world.

Makemake and Haumea hidden, standing beyond all of these silly gods of the sky, their faces to the distant spark.

 

Now we must follow our paths, drink Dionysian wine, watch the electronic box that Pandora unleashed upon us in a myth long ago,

dance like the maenads in clubs, read the hyperlinked webs of Arachne, go to the altars of Zeus nailed to a cross,

fight in an ekklesia full of discontented and misread tea leaves cast off by the oracles.

In a way, we have seen the old world play a part in the new world,

commanding the agendas and actions yet to come,

but a mere memory. Of that, we can only wonder.

 

But sarcastic Lucian could not have thought that his joke resulted in rockets, nor the frenzied Sibyl of Cumae have foreseen the apocalyptic sandwich pastors,

Hero would not have thought that his steam toy would be the car, Momus would not know that we have telescopes into the soul of the sky,

Solon would not have known that his Athenian democracy become the tool that Hitler cynically manipulated,

Plato would not have known that he is considered a Christian by desperate apologists,

Least of all, that we have seen ourselves on the blue planet.

No amounts of gods and ancients would have seen that coming.

 

Life is a swirl of interaction between all eras.

The Greeks had their infrastructure from cities like Ur,

Schopenhauer reached across centuries to meet his opposite and fellow soul Leibniz,

Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens kissed,

We read Shakespeare's magical words,

Ovid's metamorphoses becomes Kafka's Metamorphosis,

Confucius and Mussolini would shake hands,

Lenny Bruce puts wings on The Simpsons,

The first mother tens of millions of years ago

gave birth to the latest baby only a second ago.

 

Now we must stop reading, we must get up from the chair to do what we must.

But time reading will give us information we would not have known,

much as standing up would have given us.

Information is life and life learns.

We live and learn.

We learn to laugh and love.

And that's reflected in the first leaf that grows upon a tree.

We are green and light

then we are grey and heavy.

But in all of that time, we can still have greenness and lightness when we are at our ends.

 

In the end, isn't life important?