PureSchmaltz

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Entrope

entrope
"I could swear that an early summer morning is more eternal and more designed than a statistically accidental convergence …"

Things fall apart. More than ninety percent of stuff purchased today will be discarded as garbage within a month. Everything displayed within the BIG box store has the same destination. Energy, while conserved, is also more or less continuously disbursed into higher forms of entropy: heat, wind, tidal motion, photosynthesis; each further disbursing energy until indistinguishable, unmeasurable. We retain memories of lower forms of entropy and hardly sense the higher forms. What's here today continues its inexorable run, each tree temporarily suspended between seedling and dust. Nothing ever stays the same.

We speak of change as though it were the exception rather than the continuous norm.
We think of ourselves as somehow masters of a universe we're deeply imbedded within, a position from which we cannot reliably sense what constitutes the universe of which we suspect we're masters. The physicists insist that this universe, our universe, this world, our world, is comprised of events rather than things, things being configurations resulting from reverberating confluences of events. Even I seem rather insubstantial, dependent more upon probabilistic emergences of context than dedication or will. Reality can be a genuine buzzkill.

Suspended as I am between somewhere and some relative where-else, degrading the energy entering me, I pause to consider the entropy of creating, in my case, of writing. From my naive position within this unimaginably vast system, I sense that I'm employed creating novel forms of energy, aggregating into lower forms of entropy the buzzy sensations between my ears. I suspect that I'm diluting those more pure sensations into a shareable form, increasing entropy in the process, dutifully if unconsciously fulfilling my ordained role. I don't know what I'm doing and I wonder just how much that matters, or should matter, to me, my readers, or the universe, which seems fully engaged in increasing entropy, anyway. The egg holds less entropy, more potential, than the chicken will, though the chicken holds the ability to produce many eggs. Knowledge, especially self-knowledge, seems grossly over-rated. Both chicken and writer merely do what their nature insists that they should, with little volition involved.

Time seems no more than a persistent illusion, an accidental result of memory encountering an ever-unfolding present to speculate on the future. In fact, it's present all the way through, lower forms of entropy ever disbursing into higher forms, every joule of energy conserved though eventually degraded. I learned this week that space, that apparently empty territory separating celestial bodies, is saturated with a substance scientists have labeled Space Grease. It's a byproduct of entropy, no doubt, as hydrogen clouds precipitate into suns and suns burn into swarms of highly-charged photons, entropy leaves gunk behind.

This world is most definitely not as it appears, but as a writer, I deal exclusively in appearances. I genuinely struggle to comprehend the true nature of this place and with my proper place within it. It's a fool's mission, one destined to highlight superficialities. Sometimes, though, I could swear that an early summer morning is more eternal and more designed than a statistically accidental convergence between unseen forces puttering away in the entropy mines extracting the same damned thing over and over and over again.

©2018 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved









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