There and Back Again, .. Again: Resonances as March turns into April
Streams of time flow in multiple directions, hard to surf, hard to find, still he continues to seek the one flowing backwards but finding the perfect anti-stream is difficult, probably impossible given the probability that if anti-temporal streams exist, they do so in infinite directions and are probably somehow tied to infinite gradations in matter/antimatter associations. Matter/antimatter are (not is, although it does sound a bit strange) omni-polar rather than bipolar, each with their own universe, their own laws of physics and chemistry and biology and divinity and who knows what, infinity tending towards infinite complexity. The associations are much more like an omni-dimensional globe than a merely two dimensional line. That may well be the secret neutrinos playing in quanta where the macro and the micro meet work so hard to keep.
This particular being surfing this particular time stream in this particular version of reality still apparently linked to chaos by a single tendril — filament, needed to get back to undo something that had not worked out correctly, an extremely common desire, perhaps in the entire omniversal — multiversal sort-of-continuum although really not, which is very different than not really. He’d elected, at the past point now in question, to make a decision assuming identified and evaluated risks and it had gone as expected, which was not what he’d hoped for, an all too common situation everywhere, the common thread in all alternate realities populated by cognizant beings. Now dreams of eating cakes without consuming them consumed him instead.
Physics and mathematics can be romantic to the right person under the right circumstances, perhaps intrinsically poetic (were one capable of understanding the metaphoric core at the heart of poetry). Some are. He hoped he was one. But even were he somehow successful on his quest he had to admit that in linear analogies, he’d made virtually the same mistake every time the scenario was posited, with the same virtually identical results. He’d not been all that good with second chances, or third or fourth. He wondered why he intuited that riding the reverse time stream might change that.
Somewhere out of time and space an entity or force some referred to as Murphy snickered and the echoes of a philosopher once known in some places as Hegel laughed, and of course, as echoes, laughed and laughed and laughed.
But back on point, somewhat ….
This particular individual felt the answer, for some reason, was floating in a bubble of ether high in the Himalayas, or perhaps the Andes, accessible only through profound meditation and rigid psychosocial discipline, the kind local shamans were rumored to attain every once in a very great while. Unfortunately there was no evidence supporting that hypothesis, explicable because success required disappearance. Hence if it existed, it was a bootstrap discipline without masters or teachers or proofs or techniques that might be taught although they might be learned. Physicists tended to disagree. Spiritualists were a bit more open, intellectually inhabiting a virtual realm much closer to the sole remaining tendril touching the inchoate source of everything (the aforementioned chaos); you know, that place before “In the Beginning” (reverb, tremolo and echoes sounding as the phrase is pronounced in a very deep and booming voice), the aforementioned bubble of ether being rumored to be the sole tether to the single remaining tendril linking us from here to there and perhaps, back again.
The summit of the Himalayas is very, very cold, and very, very windy, and very, very lonely. Not the place to be if vertigo was a problem. Which explains why he’d elected the Andes, above Aconcagua, it was much closer than Chomolungma if almost as cold, almost as windy and just as lonely. He floated there, albeit metaphorically (he considered himself a poet after all) and wondered where quantum theory fit in.
“Damn her” he thought, not for the first time, but as always, knowing he really didn’t mean it, the reality being as different as different could be. Echoing his sentiments in an anti-sort-of way, she thought much the same thing.
_______
© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2018; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen). Until recently he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at www.guillermocalvo.com.
