What centre hast thou? Where am I?

O whither is it thy fierce onrush drives?

Fight I, or drift; or stand; or fly?

The loud machinery spins, points work in touch;

Wheels whirl in systems, zone in zone.

Myself having sometime moved with such,

Would strike a centre of mine own.

Lend hand, O Fate, for I am down, am lost!

Fainting by violence of the Dance...

Ah thanks, I stand - the floor is crossed,

And I am where but few advance.

I see men far below me where they swarm...

(Haply above me - be it so!

Does space to compass-points conform,

And can we say a star stands high or low?)

Not more complex the millions of the stars

Than are the hearts of mortal brothers;

As far remote as Neptune from small Mars

Is one man's nature from another's.

But all hold course unalterably fixed;

They follow destinies foreplanned:

I envy not these lives in their faith unmixed,

I would not step with such a band.

To be a meteor, fast, eccentric, lone,

Lawless; in passage through all spheres,

Warning the earth of wider ways unknown

And rousing men with heavenly fears...

This is the track reserved for my endeavour;

Spanless the erring way I wend.

Blackness of darkness is my meed for ever?

And barren plunging without end?

O glorious fear! Those other wandering souls

High burning through that outer bourne

Are lights unto themselves. Fair aureoles

Self-radiated these are worn.

And when in after times those stars return

And strike once more earth's horizon,

They gather many satellites astern,

For they are greater than this system's Sun.

translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, 1995

Division of Worlds

this world: split in two, two irreducible, unconnected

spacetimes.

in one of the two halves, all points are joined from arc

to arc; in the other, likewise.

but between them nothing, not even an arrow:

impassable space.

one cannot cross from one sub-world to another, one

cannot cross alive. or dead.

Me here, you there. not together. over there I'm dead

Over there no more than here, we are no longer in the

world together

(you will die there, I here)

In return you are, are there, still. It is the only

consolation. Survival is too big a word.

The word 'dynamic' is relative.

We, as creatures in time, see things as dynamic.

The block universe itself is unchanging and everlasting.

There are many relationships -

in fact, there are all possible relationships.

Everything possible exists.

One relationship is what we call 'time',

which is a relationship between 'snapshots'

in the block universe or 'multiverse'.

As we are creatures in time,

we can do no other

than see this relationship

as a dynamic flow.

Now we get on

to the weak anthropic principle.

We see this 'flow of time' because

and only because it is

a prerequisite for the evolution of consciousness.

Every physical feature of our environment

is uncannily precisely tuned

to the emergence of consciousness.

All environments exist,

so if we find ourselves existing,

then it's pretty bloody obvious

that we will be in a universe

that is capable of supporting us.

And in those universes

which are more finely tuned to support us,

there is a higher incidence of conscious life.

Golly, gosh! so we should expect to find ourselves in an environment

arbitrarily finely-tined to be hospitable to us.

And one that has all these fine features,

such as a dynamic flow of time.

But of course, from the Archimedian perspective,

outside the block universe,

all relationships exist,

they are unchanging and everlasting.

No one environment is to be preferred to another.

The environment that we all inhabit so happily

is infinitely tiny.

The word 'dynamic' is subjective.