Indeed, yesterday, I felt that I might overheat, so, after painting, for the rest of the afternoon, I put my clock away. I could still hear the clock on the wall if I listened for it, but it was in the background and I didn’t pay much attention to it. But I’m listening to my clock now, and, I think I will, throughout the morning, unless I change my mind, and decide to listen to it for half the morning, and part of the afternoon. Yesterday, I had just two teaspoons of coffee and one Dr. Pepper, and I got to sleep okay, although I woke up early, couldn’t go back to sleep, and decided to take another bath. The fist sixteen stanzas of “Chevy Chase” are getting a little tiresome, so I’m thinking of adding the first however many stanzas of “Tam Lin” back into my repertoire. But that would take a little time—and, if all goes well, I won’t be waking up at 6:00 am and getting in the bath at 6:30 or so. I’ll be sleeping until 7:30 or 8:00, and reciting my lines, and, if I feel like it, saying my prayers, every so often, from my bed. I felt a little impatient in the bath today—in part because “Chevy Chase” had gotten tiresome, and, in part, because I didn’t have a lot of daydreams passing through my mind. I ended up mainly just wondering how, if the next life was, is, and will be eternal, when, exactly, the speed of light, or special relativity was tested, for example, and how that worked.
I thought, at first, that it must have always been tested—that it had been tested before, in our minds, the parts of our minds that reached back into the past—but that still suggested that a test, at some beginning point, took place, and, in my universe, there are no beginning points, so I had to think about it for a while, which was a little annoying. I concluded, then, that we are always going to the knowledge that we seek—and that, when we don’t use it, we forget it, and have to go back to it, and, even, when learning something all over again, we sometimes have to prove it for ourselves—which meant that the speed of light, and special relativity, had been tested in the past, and would be tested in the future, infinitely, so long as people were learning, for the first time, about the speed of light, and special relativity, after have been separated, for a time, from modern technology, or someone that was involved with that kind of thing. But how, then, did these experiments take place?
You can’t tell me that a bunch of painstaking, expensive, manual labor was taking place—to build a particle accelerator, or whatever. I believed, instead, that all our needs were provided for. So it seemed to me that, having thought out our experiment, and how to employ it, the means, the machinery, etc. would appear—it would shift into existence in the same way that food appears in our refrigerators, that the landscape changes before our eyes, that a hammer, if we don’t have one, and need one, is suddenly there. We would only be limited by our knowledge of how the experiment, and the machinery, worked—so, essentially, then, we would only be limited by our imaginations. Everything else would be provided for: the speed of light, and special relativity, would be tested as if for the first time, and everybody would proceed to the next event, and the knowledge that comes with that event, from there. So, it seemed to me that every theory we ever have about the universe is potentially infinitely discovered, by a potentially infinite number of people, since there is no beginning, in my world—there are only events that we go to, and things that we learn, and relearn, in slightly different ways, and time goes on forever.
It felt good not to be working on physics all the time—especially getting off the AI. I think we have good, usable, AI in heaven, but I don’t think it can provide us with answers that we’re not ready for—that we wouldn’t be able to understand. For example, if we’d been living, for a period, a more primitive lifestyle, which, in and of itself, is an event that we would go to, eventually, if, for no other reason, than to see life from a different angle, we wouldn’t have computers, or AI, at all. We would have to go to that—we wouldn’t necessarily be starting from scratch in a linear way, but we would have to relearn, as a people, how computers work, and then, once again, they would appear, for us—as our lifestyle, perhaps a lot, perhaps a little, changed. Suppose, however, our lifestyles only change a little, and we have computers, and we have AI, but nobody in our circle has any knowledge of general relativity. If that were the case, then AI wouldn’t be able to tell us about it. We would have to rediscover it—or go in a direction that led us to someone that had discovered it, and could teach us. But redefining general relativity in our own way, and going to someone that already had their own knowledge of general relativity, might, in fact, involve the same amount work.
Now, getting off the physics—not entirely, I was still working on a paper, but in incremental amounts, as opposed to trying to arrive at something all at once—meant that I had more time on my hands. So what was I supposed to do with myself? An installment to this book, an installment to my book length poem book, a painting, etc., didn’t take all day, and, besides, I couldn’t just make stuff up—i had to allow my subconscious to develop the ideas I expressed—and those ideas did not take hours at a time for me to develop. That wasn’t how I operated. Furthermore, when it came to painting, one painting a day was about all I could afford, and, in the long run, store, so that left me with two options: more TV or music. So I’d gone back to working on songs—even though writing music required me to use my mouse a lot, which put my neck in a tense position, which led to stiffness and a little pain, just like constantly scrolling through all the garbage AI throws at me, so that was a problem. But what was I going to do? I had to hope that my neck, eventually, would get better, would adapt, and that writing music would be less hard on it than all that constant AI scrolling. I had to make a conscious effort, all throughout the day, to keep from tensing up my neck, to remain relaxed, so I would be able to work until around 5, without the unacceptable discomfort.
Was I, then, going to go back to working on my jazz album, and my classical album? I wasn’t particularly fascinated by it, but many worthwhile things aren’t always particularly fascinating, and, because, on the one hand, there wasn’t a great deal to watch on TV, and, on the other, using my talents, and my mind, would seem, in the long run, to make me feel better both about myself and the meaning of my life, I decided that, if I had the extra time, up until about 5, anyhow, then I should, and would, get back to writing music—music that didn’t involve words. But, I figured, songs would remain my priority, since I’m a poet, and I’ve been a poet for a long time, whereas I don’t necessarily consider myself a musician, at least not strictly a musician, and, however talented, with music, I might or might not turn out to be, it didn’t help me integrate my emotions, at this time, in the same way that writing did—and no, it didn’t really seem, at his point, to bolster my faith, or lead me to a better understanding of the universe. Now, you might say—does painting do that? And maybe, if I wasn’t a painter, I would be a musician—since my interest in beauty, and expressing beauty, evolves, for me, primarily through painting—that is to say that painting, and music, in some ways, would be two sides of the same coin. Add that to the fact that people can look at my paintings without investing a great deal of time—that I can reach people, and express myself to people more easily, and it goes to follow that music, for me, barring an audience, will probably be the last thing I go about doing at the end of the day—it’s just not as meaningful to me, for me, as everything else.