Honestly, you mention anyone’s name and if they farted in my presence I’ll remember it. I still remember sitting at a long table in the cavernous, hushed reading room at Widener Library, at Harvard, when a poor ‘Cliffie let one loose you could hear in the next county. Situation like that the human fight or flight response kicks in, right? Everyone at the table has to get up and leave holding their noses. Or the perpetrator has to pull out an AK-47 and order everyone to lie flat on the floor with their hands behind their backs. I mean, you can’t just leave it – pardon the expression – hanging in the air!
Somewhere in Japan there’s a super-computer calculating the value of Pi, the mathematical constant defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. There’s another computer doing the same thing somewhere in Manhattan. They’re both on a fool’s errand, of course, because the value of Pi will never resolve to a whole number. On the other hand, I think they’re on to something incredibly important. I think they’re confirming with one calculation what might be the controlling condition of all thought, all possibility, and all creation. That would be the condition that none of it can ever come to rest.
If we think about what energy is all about, where it came from and what it’s up to, my answer would be that there are lots of explanations, but the source that these idiots calculating the value of Pi are pointing to is restlessness. Energy is force born of philosophical-ontological questions that can’t be resolved, questions that involve conflicting answers and the tensions between them. Energy fueled by titanic tensions then goes off on a tear looking for some way to come to rest.
We are part of a construct of “reality” – our real Parents and their real Child, not us noodniks making fools of ourselves in our pathetic bodies and world of material weirdness – that’s an experiment, to see if “creation” can achieve resolution and peace. And it can in theory if the Child stays out of trouble, but of course we and that poor ‘Cliffie are proof that things can go horribly wrong. How can energy come to rest when someone just farted?