a certain indefinite number of Petrarchan sonnets: №180
Ordinarily I don’t publish so much poetry at Theoria-press, and instead try to provide mostly essays with an odd poem or sonnet occasionally interspersed among them. But the Muse’s visits have outstripped my ability to keep pace with prose pieces so readers who prefer essays should peruse the archives of this site, which are replete with them. This is more-or-less an actual Petrarchan sonnet so it will not be preceded by my usual exculpatory disclaimer about having departed from the paradigmatic form.
A CLEFT BETWEEN the future and the past the breath between tomorrow and today the lonely isle or sandy, sea-locked cay surrounded, compassed by the ocean vast upon whose shore my soul is stranded, cast marooned and shipwrecked spirit castaway that bounded by horizon of the day until I spy the telltale sail at last a phrase’ term awaits its crowning rhyme causality is intimate relating the watches-of-the-night-denoting chime to signal that the darkness is abating for all good things will come to me in time and I can make the flowers grow by waiting
Beautiful. Shared . Thank you Max
Physicists recognize the mystery that time as a physical parameter contains no sense of a moving "now". Our subjective experience of time as something that moves has no place in Newton's equations that govern motion, and this remains true in quantum physics.
A thought I've entertained of late is to identify what we call "consciousness" with the sense of a moving "now". Observation is the means by which consciousness enters the schema of quantum physics. The Schrodinger equation tells how probabilities evolve between observations, but the human (or animal or plant) choice of what to observe shares with the equations a causal role in brining the past forward to create a future.
We (and all of life) participate in creation by our presence as witness. In choosing the focus of our attention, we are participating in creating the future each moment. This is the physical significance of the "now".