'Hopes and Dreams'...explores the limitations of perception in more than three dimensions plus time.


I

Uncoupling hopes from truth sometimes reveals reality
Which is hard to bear
According to Eliot.
The difference between hope and what is real
Is sometimes the basis for laughter
Or tears…..
In equal measure
Depending on the deficit
Between reality, and the reality of hoping.
Two sides of the same coin
The masks of theatre,
Comedy and tragedy.

Yet reality is what we face day to day
Uncoupled from hope
An atheistic vision of what is true
In which dreams expire.

Hopes, dreams and reality
Congregate in theistic minds
As a woven integrity
But is the congress true?

Atheist and theist in perpetual conflict
One offering only truth,
The other hoping that belief is true
But, to what ….?
In this world caught in three dimensions
But do not forget time that marks when
We are born and when we die
According to Ecclesiastes.

The atheism of truths of a certain kind
Confined by the question asked
And who is asking, and the way of asking,
Atheist and theist talking at each other
But not in conversation
A dialogue of deafness to other points of view
An unbridged chasm for all of human history.

The certainty of truth is one problem,
Because certainty brooks no other view
But remember the constraints of truth’s
discovery and then assertion
In three dimensions, and do not forget time.

Unwittingly Carl Sagan made the point in flatland
A place of two dimensions,
Breadth and width, but no height
Infinitesimally flat, thin
Flat and thin, so that an apple
In its plump three dimensional roundness
Made its visit, announced its presence
But left only an infinitesimally flat, thin
Impression of its visitation,
With its announcement seemingly coming from wherever,
Infinite confusion.
For flatlanders who perceived a visitation
Without explanation
A mystery within which we experience
The determinism of truth
Not qualified by the dimensions
In which it’s made
Or defined
To the confusion of those who question truth,
If truth means the assertion of certainty.

Was it for flatlanders first cause?
Just like Paley’s watchmaker of the watch
found on the heath,
Each trapped in their respective
Two dimensions and three dimensions
Limited by their dimensionality
Of what they could see or imagine.
Not yet liberated by many dimensions
That liberated Tennyson to understand
That more is achieved by dreaming without limits.

Tennyson said…
That more things are achieved by prayer
Than this world dreams of,
But what are dreams?
Visions of hope, or the darkness of damnation?
But can we imagine these visions
In many dimensions?
And find new truths which we cannot perceive
In the day to day.

II

Dreams can be suspension
Between what is real and what we hope for,
Or ……
A plunge into an abyss of horrors
The nightmare’s nightcrusher
That reflects the fears of our experience,
The fears of Fuseli’s nights
Of grotesque creatures that taunt the hopes
Of our tomorrows
By revealing the layers of yesterday’s experience,
A past that haunts the future
In the day to day.

Yet redeemed by intentions
For the good,
And honourable to the nature of humankind,
And lifekind with which we share organic ancestry.

Dreams release the mind to find another place,
Another dimension, where what happens
Can happen and more than we can suppose
According to Haldane.

Limitless possibilities that dreamtimes
Expose what we do not own
But instead we are a part of.
Land, sea and air fused with the spirit
Of peoples that inhabit distant shores
Where they are one with the place
Where they are, were and will be
For all time.
The dreamtime of Australia’s
Original peoples.

And so the plump apple
Becomes a part of the experience
Of those who live in two dimensions,
Carl’s flatlanders experience their
Dreamtime of first causes
Because the missing dimension disallows
Their understanding of what is real.

So conflate the idea to many dimensions
And you can see what I mean.
Imagine the unimaginable
That cannot be seen
Because of the constraints of three dimensions.

And do not forget time
Perhaps the portal for imagining
What cannot be experienced
In spacetime warped and curved
By the embrace of gravity.

We sail in this cosmic sea
Not seeing its possibilities
Because we are not equipped
To see through a glass darkly
Or so Corinthians says
But to half see, dimly see
Love
And the truth of black holes
Where physics is sundered
Perhaps allowing passage to other creations
To us mere visions of what we aspire to be
And understand
Just as Blake saw heaven in a wild flower.

III

To perceive the possibility of many dimensions
Is to free the mind
From superstition
From the prejudices
That blight the landscape of our thinking,
And the landscape of dreams
When we perceive self
As if disembodied
Floating on the ceiling looking down
Detachedly on what we do
And what others do in the day to day.

Doings driven by the limited framework
Of width, breadth and height.
Width and breadth and height
And do not forget the passage of time
In which our doings take place.

One is singular in mind and body
Meaning self in the day to day.
To be beside oneself is joy and anger
The Janus faced self
Somewhat like the masks of comedy and tragedy
But of emotion and not theatrical circumstance.

How many multiples of
Space and time
Are needed to be beside oneself
In a quantum universe?
Or universes where to touch would be
Annihilation of self
Tracked as energy pure, and as simple
As the dreams of our disembodied self
Looking down from the ceiling.

IV

Is hope the delusion of optimism,
Dreams its manifestation of unreality?
Who can say because analysis
Is limited within the context of our perception.
Perception influenced by prejudice and misunderstanding
Because we are limited by what
Can be understood
In three dimensions,
And do not forget time
And gravity
And the failure of its resolution with dimension
and time
Limiting understanding.



But……
If we acknowledge the limitations
Even if not understanding the quantum context
Then, given we are prepared to accept the
uncertainty
Described by Heisenberg,
Then we are mentally equipped
To understand that truth is provisional
But with verity according to experience
Accumulated through the continuity of history.

We try to resolve contradictions
Because resolution anchors us into
the certainty of
Our present experience,
And certainty is comfort, allowing us to live
Day to day.

David Applin, May 2013

Copyright David Applin 2015

There's something soothing
about being high,
visiting the crags,
scaling the moraines,
eating tuna
above the cloud-deck.

When you're standing there,
above the valleys
& goggled,
it's like flying
with you feet on the ground.

The only sound is your breath
& the jet stream
passing by you.

It's a beautiful combination,
a melody,
a trance,
unfamiliar to flatlanders.

I could not talk him down, or
listen him up,  though that is
what I was trained to do, tried to do  
he gazed only at the street,
his final resting place, where  
he would soon be
a crushed crimson spectacle
for greedy and empty eyes  
whose mouths would tell
of his demise, but none
even knew his name,
I learned it was Everett, and  
that he had three daughters
lost in suburbia, eons from this ledge
where he stood, and talked to a stranger  
who was stranger than he  
for I looked to the skies
above the humming city, as if
they would be my salvation  
an airy home to spread wings
with angels, and glide endlessly
through blue heavens, but Everett knew  
there were no winged saviors awaiting him  
to grab him before his lonely leap
only the unmovable slab of concrete below
the craned necks of other flatlanders  
who would watch his final descent
and not realize his brief eternal fall
through the invisible place between two worlds  
would be the closest any would ever be  
to freedom

Simple as this..?
As flatlanders experienced
the nonsensical unbelievable
and heretical third dimension..
Are we now evolved
after those eons to be surprised
that the Fourth has been here
all along awaiting each person's
unique discovery...?

They sought to invoke the midas Chassidus
(striving for the most pious behavior possible)
-------------
So, beyond the beanie,
we put loyalty to those who wear it,
holding rude pen from local feathers
or reedy grass,
feel the reason
writing
calls readers, you
can do this, causally becoming aitia,
the blamed doer,
amen,
I said that, so… I suffer… what, waiting
is, suffering only means, wait, or

put up with it. Art intuits recollection
of functional whole systems, means
for prying flat stone, sand stone,
ready to be made ready for use,

usual duty, any
given day, wake up, measure up,
make day mean all of it, as it occurs

around,
bubblewise,
along, riverwise path, ruts
made from graves, with their ends
kicked out.

Ghosts of all we ever wished we knew,
we all, stretch, and taste our teeth,
sniff and scratch,
listen for wind, look for shadows dancing,
seeing the moss gone dark again,
after these past few rainy days
----------------

From inside, within-
without walls, bubblewise,
imperfectly spherical,
no sharp edges,

-in being, not out, not ex-cluded
in-cluded, clouds or clues, referentially?
You know what I mean? Clusion closure.

Boxed-in, floor and roof and walled, inclosed.

Flaw, there
in the gem, a bubble, yes, in the lens.
A blind spot…
minor blemish, or, reaching back to magic,
allowing magical thinking, distant causal agencies,
words intuned to old rythms,

the ump ump song, or the umph umph song,
pigeon strut, or the ****'s walk,

old hawk, old crow, eeee-haw! We saw
we saw, we knew,
we saw clear through, to another side of everything.

Measures demanding means of making them,
seeing things in perspective…
from any perch.

Land and look around, listen to the locals singing.
I could live here,
if I found water and recognized food, waiting,
watching other things eat,

thinking, tongue-wise former of signals, seeing
through my eyes, feels no flow, signaling
that looks good,

witness the little skink nibbling, fugaciously,

THAT is a word, as sudden as she knew, she saw,
that looks good
to eat, for food.

As suddenly as ever, ever dawned on her, of course,
root, branch, seed, harvest, birds, bees, boy oh boy,

what you never learned, all that time,
you and the
{Idea of all we see, and may call, as I call this,
this it is. My highest intuition, top of the reactionary
stack,
vertical order in a linear mind set with neuron-axon,
tactile response teams, responsible for being good,
doing some life-support-level good.

Not to steal and **** and destroy the functionally good
enough, but to steal back stolen idols used to divine.
Put some ****** good ideas to work again.
The ladder has not been needed.
Need being, nothing where some defined thing,
definitely could be put to good use,

we could do with a Babble-undoer. A clear-ifying agent.

If I do not this thing, this thing is never done, aborted
at first kiss, no taste, nothing sweeter than wine,
wine, I spat, at first taste, too,
nasty, not sweet, unless,
due to time and chance,
your first taste of wine comes right from the vine,
where the little foxes play at being little foxes,
as seen from a happy father/mother pair,

there in the vineyard, since sunrise, in the valley.


----------------

From the valley floor, we contain ourselves,
we content ourselves with shorter days
than flatlanders use, our shorter days,
come on slow, so slow, old men,
like me, we can walk to the top,
of this next little trough, and
see, out across the flat bottom,
where the ocean was in mastodon days.

--------------
If you will, some days this trail calls
for more stops to think, than when I ran
with my dogs,
I can not do that now, partly due to
too many people,
and no eating of dogs.

I, yes, if I try, I laugh now, with a fiftyish
riverside family man, laughing as he skinned
some shorthaired pointy muzzle kinda dog,
coulda been a rabbit,
or a pet chicken, or duck. Hand raised for 4-H.