Day Appears
Day begins above the sea
As a white slash in the air,
A wound ripped in infinity
Through which our futures flare.
Pink creeps along the edges
Of the brightening sight,
As the world hedges
From a germ of light.
Coconuts develop into trees,
Seeds unfold to beach plum,
All things amplified by the breeze,
By the irritant of flow, the hum
Of time. Clouds do not fall,
Drowned by gravity, but move,
Rearrange and crystallize
A world you cannot prove,
Its blowing, moving gears,
Not shrinking in despair,
But fired up by mirrors
In the emerging glare,
Dazzled by the chaos in the skies
Through which translucent mornings rise.
July 7th, 2024, Kaiholu
Explanation
The tropical dawn always brings with it, for me, a god cobbled together out of old mythologies, a new mechanics beyond the mathematical data set of everything we observe. It is the way a snowflake emerges, not from a limited universe, but from wild and flexible interactions that coalesce to create new forms. A world that comes to accept Beethoven, despite the traditions of Haydn and Mozart.
Experiencing the sun rising in the tropics each morning brings to me not Pynchon’s sense of entropy, of stasis, but of a moving sea, an unfolding plot, palms alive in the ocean wind.
From merely mechanical systems arises something that can’t be described from the data in those systems.
Aphanipoiesis is an unseen, unnoticed thing which leads to poetry.
The concept of God is a complex system arising from simpler, mechanistic forms of social thought: a deus ex machina.
There is a “collective behavior” of complex systems, which is often said to be an emergent process, in which the properties of a system cannot be fully described in terms of the properties of its constituents. Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Julian Huxley believed in such laws.
Johannes Peter Müller around 1840 claimed that the behavior of light and sound waves showed that living organisms possessed an energy for which physical laws could never fully account. These older philosophies have morphed into more recent theories of strong and weak emergence. Although science has retreated behind a more obtuse semantic screen, there remains the suspicion that chaotic, unpredictable behavior, unseen contributors, wild interactions, coalesce to create new forms, known as emergences.
The sun rising creates new worlds that transcend the standard postcard ingredients of tropical beauty. That pulsing infusion of life brings new chances into old formulas, into routine sunrises, creates in me an excitement, a hope that humanity can transcend itself, a hope for a second chance.
Outside of matter is a metaphysics, a poetry of matter, a lyricism beyond the more mechanistic world of facts.
I’ve always been dazzled by how Yeats would turn his complex metaphysical philosophies of gyres into the most simple and lucid of poems. In my case, I may be closer to Donne than to Yeats.