WHY?

I believe this

as firmly as a righteous Christian believes in Christ, that some twenty-five billion years from now the universe will collapse back upon itself, will congeal and compact and become again the speck from which the Big Bang erupted, and everything that we know, everything that we have cherished, will be lost. That I have lived will mean nothing then. Nothing I have written will survive. Both the good I have done and the pain I have caused will have evaporated as surely as the wind blows away my spoken words, blows away the scent of the decaying world.

That we have wondered about good and evil, that we have debated the existence of God, that we have prayed for redemption – these will mean nothing.

That Christ or Mohammed or Buddha walked upon the earth will mean – at the moment all creation is a mere spot of primal ooze – nothing.

You may be furious about what I believe or don't believe. Yet your anger will mean nothing when the universe has gone dark.

By the time our sun dies and our solar system gets pulled into its collapse, some of humankind may have found refuge in some far distant galaxy. This will be only a temporary respite. By the time the universe disappears into its black speck of nothingness, there will be no refuge. Count on it. Even God, if you have a God, will be crushed in the physic of the great ending. None of us get out of this world alive, neither we mortals nor our deities. Not even the universe gets out of this world alive.

All the universe will be a cinder-speck. I don't know what becomes of time and space. I cannot imagine the primal speck without time and space around it. I have to believe that the end of time is the beginning of time. That the heat of all that darkness will create light. I have to believe that the compression of the end will create another Big Bang, another seven days of creation, another roll of the die and another shot at getting it right.

Why, then, do I not kill myself and get it over with? Why do I not steal and cheat and walk on the bones of those who cross me? Why, if it all means nothing in the end, do I strive to choose good rather than evil?

I'm a funny fellow, full of contradictions. Yes, I believe we are stardust, on the one hand; on the other hand, I believe we are noble creatures and I strive to live according to that nobility. Indeed the Sermon on the Mount will be a cinder-crisp in the end but in the meantime it represents, for me, a lovely way to embrace the world. So too with that line from the musical "Hair" – "Kids, be free. Do what you want to do so long as you don't hurt anybody."

Life is short and brutish, as they say, yet it is all we've got. There is only this moment of the eternal now, and each living and breathing collection of stardust means to make the best of it. It is a poet's argument I make, that good is more lovely than evil. Ultimately, of course, loveliness won't make a whit of difference; yet in the eternal now, the beautiful is always preferable to the brutish. This world around us is full of things that charm and glow, full of roses we should stop to smell. The alternative to embracing life's loveliness is misery soup, and I simply prefer the loveliness. My poet's sensibility would not have it any other way, just as my wife's response to a meaningless universe is to mother and nurse and care for, as if we are all refugees. This poet's argument is the same one I used in my memoir Curlew: Home, when explaining why I don't hunt: once, after I'd shot, I saw a pheasant fall off its arc of flight; I recognized that something beautiful was broken forever; and I was the cause of it.

In short, I guess I believe that it doesn't matter that everything means nothing; I have to live as if it does.

I guess I believe that the wondrous instant of the eternal now trumps nothingness. That the stardust we are pushes us to live nobly, to noble deeds.

I believe I am made of illogic and contradiction and love and desire and mud and greatness and stardust all. Made of words and ache and experience all searching for lovely expression.

I believe that this moment of eternal now, which is all we have, is wondrous and beautiful.

And I believe that when the light of the universe goes out forever, that will be beautiful too.

Comments

[Jean]

So beautiful. Having read this, I have to say what I often think: I wish your blog included a little more of what you're thinking and writing right now. Anyway, I shall keep this, in my heart and in my drawer. thank you.

[Jean M Domel]

Wish I had some pithy comments or observations but I'm one of those "babbling brooks" as opposed to "still waters". All I can say is "wow!", I loved it!,and I have to agree. Thanks.

[Ross]

Tom,

This was beautiful, such an encapsulation of so much that I feel and think as well. Profound. It was something I am very glad to have read, something I will keep near me.

[Marja-Leena]

I also found this very profound, beautiful, moving and putting into words what I've never quite been able to say myself. Thank you for this, Tom - it's a real keeper.

[Tom Montag]

Hello, Jean--thanks for the good words. Yeah, I wish my blog had more of what I'm currently thinking and doing too. I took part of my time on the trip to Montana to think about the blog. Conclusions: #1 I will continue to do it for the foreseeable future; #2 I will try to use it to help me get my work done; and #3 I will use it to help me write new stuff. So this is a piece of new stuff. I drafted it in my notebook on the plane ride home, but putting it up on the blog made sure I finished it and tidied it up. So you *might* see more....

[Tom Montag]

Hi, JMD--and thanks for stopping. I appreciate your good words. I checked out your blog. You are a VERY BUSY creature! As you live in Chicago, you should know that there is some "tongue in cheek" in my poem at my Vagabond site casting Chicago out of the middlewest....

[Tom Montag]

Thanks for the good words, Ross. I appreciate hearing them - and appreciate hearing from you. I'll e-mail you soon....

[Tom Montag]

Hi, M-L--Thanks for your good words. I have been trying to dig myself out of the "dark night," and saying this did help.

[Dave]

Glad to hear you're considering putting more stuff like this in your blog, Tom. That'd be great.

It was good to get a general statement of beliefs, but I beleive I could have extrapolated most of it from eighteen months' worth of Morning Drive Journal entries! Personally, I feel that anyone who seriously believes that the earth will still have multicellular life forms in 300 years is a wild-eyed optimist. But I don't feel the logic of an argument from transience to meaninglessness; on the contrary, I am deeply suspicious of anything with pretensions to immortality. It's only in the flux that true joy can be found, in my experience.

[Tom Montag]

Well, Dave, the very reason I need such a statement as this is that I tend to make the leap from transience to meaninglessness. And so I have to steel myself with the loveliness of the moment.

Hmmm, you could discern much of it in the Morning Drive entries - you would be pulling strands together, no doubt, and yeah this is probably what it comes to. I wrote a short poem series for a dance/drumming company a couple years ago, and that is really where I started giving my clearest voice to this. Then the great tsunami at the end of last year only pushed me farther....

[suzanne]

just lovely Tom
I'm so happy to hear/read
you're going to do more new writing
here

as for the thoughts espressed

of course every femtosecond of it has
just however much meaning you can give to it
by attending to things
micro to macro and all the
in-betweens

meaningless/meaningful
all in the mind

the whole she-bang
is a glorious long display
pyrotechnic

isn't that meaning enough
if you play with it?

Dave____

300 years, eh
to wipe out the terran all?

I think it wiill take longer than that
but
humans might well be gone
by then

or operating
in a revised version
of the Good Life

[beth]

This was wonderful to find and to read here, Tom. I agree with what others have said, about being glad to read more of your current, personal thoughts along with the descriptions of other people and place that you write so well.

[leslee]

Yes, this is wonderful. It's like going through a near-death experience, seeing the light and changing how one lives as a result. Only without all that painful near-death stuff! ;-)

[Tom Montag]

Hi, Suzanne--Thanks for the good words. You're right, it's the whole she-bang of this moment, this right now, micro- macro- and all in between: that's all we've got. Sometimes I forget that I've really got everything. And I have to take a moment to remind myself.

The other part about my use of this blog that you guys maybe didn't pick up on is that I want to use it to help me get my work done, my Vagabond work & whatever else I think belongs on my list. So some of what you see might not be so much "personal thoughts" but outlines of classes I want to teach, etc....

[Tom Montag]

Beth & Leslee--thanks to both of you for your good words. You know how you go along everyday doing your usual good job, but things are quiet and you wonder if anybody is paying attention? Then all of a sudden, an influx like this reminds me that - yeah - we're connected; that I've said something, and someone heard it. So the answer to the question "Is there a listener" is: yes, there is, but the listener speaks only occasionally. Thanks....

[Natalie]

Tom, what they all said.
And also, since I've been struggling with the same thing (trying to decide if I can "blog the gnovel") I do appreciate and admire how you manage to resolve this problem,
And about the credo: what strikes me about any credo (including what I'm saying right now) is that *whatever* we think , however wonderfully we express our beliefs, however much or little our experience/education/religion/culture etc. has influenced us, there is still absolutely no way that we can know whether what we believe is true. I mean "true" in an absolute sense. There, you see, I've just expressed a belief in "absolute truth"! And I have no way of knowing if there is such a thing. Like the Magritte painting, I have to end up showing a picture of a pipe on which is written: Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

[Tom Montag]

Hi, Natalie--if you're going to blog the gnovel, you don't want to give the whole thing away - we have a saying "Why should we buy the cow when we're getting the milk for free?" So I give them a preliminary "journal" version of what I'm doing, hoping to entice interest. You perhaps, would only give episodes, or only early drafts??

Part of the battle for the soul of the world is between those who think truth is (or can be) absolute, and those who think truth is temporary. I am of the latter. I try to be okay with that, though that's not how I was raised to think (there's a lot of absolutes in a Catholic education).

[Natalie]

Tom, good idea about early drafts. I have loads of those, mainly visual of course. I do agree about the cash cow and have come to the conclusion that I don't want to blog the whole gnovel - that would be too grovellish.

Oh I'm not in the camp of the absolutists either! I'm more inclined to be in that story about the elephant. I don't remember how it goes exactly, only that none of the observers sees the whole elephant and from each of their different positions, each gives a completely different report of what "it" is.

[Rachel]

What a glorious post. Thank you for this, Tom. To whatever extent my credo post sparked this, I am glad that it did so.

In short, I guess I believe that it doesn't matter that everything means nothing; I have to live as if it does.

Yes. Beautiful. Thank you.

[Tom Montag]

Natalie--part of the beauty of life, for me, is you can see different things when you stand different places. If you stand by the elephant's leg, you think the eleppant is like a pillar; if you get hold of the tail, you think it is like a rope; if you stand back and see the whole elephant, you really want what you've got. There are some who are frightened by this kind of "relativism" and would tell us there is an absolute elephant we must all accept. I can't accept the idea that there's an absolute elephant that is the same for all of us. Life as I know it is not like that.

[Tom Montag]

Rachel, you said: "it doesn't matter that everything means nothing; I have to live as if it does." That's almost exactly it; and for me, the reason I "have to" is almost esthetic.