Lucidus Terminus

The problem with our understanding of light begins with our insistence to treat outer space like water or any other elemental cocktail for that matter.  

Scientists have been asking about the medium that this electromagnetic wavelength would travel through  for ages yet have they considered their vacuum to be that condition without medium and therefore concluded indefatigably that the light crosses the void?  

It appears they have not for they are yet seeking to understand cosmic truths on their own terms.  

That is all well and good but we must ask ourselves have they sought to understand themselves as of yet?  

I'm afraid not,  otherwise they would know we are of the stars.  

Of this one thing I can remain certain due to an inescapable chain of perfect logical association.  

For what are the stars we see magnified when we peer through our most powerful telescopes but the images reaching us projected from before their long ago demise?  

But what does that even mean?  

The answer is simple and has been staring us in the face all of our lives. 

It means we are still alive.   

We are right now that one Sun out there blazing bright throughout the eternal night that are yet alive to experience the incredible rush of our headlong flight.  

As to another world and another time, "So what!" I exclaim.  

Our world here now still burns in its familiar glow.  

As humans our sight is granted in part by the presence of light itself which is picked up on (through our eyes) as the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  

Light is thought to be emitted and absorbed in tiny "packets" referred to as photons.  

Many photons are referred to as quanta. 

Photons are sort of imaginary particles we've devised in order to help us comprehend the nature of light and radiation itself.   

Non-ionizing radiation includes radio waves, heat and the visible light that reaches us from our Sun  (as opposed to ionizing radiation which is ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma-rays reaching us from way beyond our lone isolated star).

Nestled in between the invisible shorter ultraviolet and the longer invisible infrared wavelengths we are comfortably placed in a cradle of visible light.   

Light exhibits wave-particle duality like any form of electromagnetic radiation.   

The spectrum goes something like this:  

|radio, microwave, infrared...
visible light 
...ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma-rays|

This spectrum should offer us a clue as to the property of our existence out here circling this lone star gracing a spiral arm of our slowly rotating galaxy.   

We emerged from an old radio broadcast that overheated and squeezed us out of the infrared zone until after another period of cooling off which we are all enjoying very much we will ultimately overheat once again going supernova and beyond into the ultraviolet as gamma-rays ourselves.  

We are not yet stardust. 

page in a note book

When using language it is pre-eminent that we first understand our definitions are only relative to the unique conditions inherent to the specific situation involved in our discussion; however, rarely are we conscious of this golden rule.  

The limitations imposed by our definitions cage us, rather than liberate us, when we fail to acknowledge the transmutability of language.  

It is a matter of perspective.  Perhaps humanity as a collective prefers to believe in an absolute truth—we gain a subconscious feeling of comfort from this—knowing the knowledgeable ground we maneuver through remains solid and consistent.  

Words themselves are a simplification of much more complex concepts.  A boulder is a chunk of a mountain; a rock a chunk from a boulder; a stone has an implication all its own; a pebble is generally seen as a smaller version of the preceding.  

However, the line is drawn arbitrarily by us, and is usually sufficient for the purposes we intend to convey.  These examples belong in a rudimentary subcategory of tangible concepts, and hence provide very minor, if any, stumbling blocks toward our successful communication of the ideas we are trying to get across.  

These words might be relegated to a category labelled "safe".  There exists another category which might be labelled "unsafe": those words are either describing much larger physical concepts (such as "world" or "universe") or may address more abstract concepts (such as "reality" or "truth"). 

After all, is not the word "mountain" but a subsection of the word "world"-?  In this gradation of physical concepts one can easily see the lines of meaning be erased by the discerning Escapist who wishes to take any of these available avenues into the shelter of anonymity in which to hide.   

viricon: Searching for word origins

viricon: Searching for word origins: Viridis means green in Latin, and around the late fourteenth century the word virus was introduced as meaning a "venomous substance", from the Latin virus "poison, sap of plants, slimy liquid". It was not until the early eighteenth century that the word virus came to signify an agent causing infectious disease. The computer sense of the term dates from 1972.

Although the prefix "con-" indicates being "together, with" something, I want to try to think of the various meanings of the word "con", as well as what it might mean as a suffix.  As a noun, the first sense is that of meaning "negation". Contrary to something...the pros and cons of it all. But it also means "study", from Old English cunnan "to know, know how". As an adjective, a con is a swindle. It's why I try to avoid adjectives (adverbs are outright banished). That was just a little joke. Back to the origins of the word I invented today, viricon.

 See, I looked it up and nothing really came up. I want to take this time to say that I dedicate the word to the writing energies of M.John Harrison, the wonderful British author of strangely wrought and intricately detailed fantasies, whether they be on earth or in space. I dropped the -ium suffix and attained the word viricon, I make no claim to it whatsoever, when we invent anything there's a good chance we're simply rediscovering something buried long ago that not a soul has since bothered to dust off. I feel relatively certain that my word can most likely be found in a proper unabridged Oxford Dictionary, for instance.

 The word viricon with its virile associations through its inherently viridian prefix must not be confused entirely with the viral aspect, and the latter half of the word in particular must not be mis-understood, for the condition of context is crucial to know the real content of any word. Remember, words are consensual entities that we long ago were to have broken off from yet somehow we remain in their service to this day, instruments by which words transform themselves via the inoculation of language...it is a virus.

 Laurie Anderson sang that William Burroughs quote. But I'm staying on track here, pardon me momentarily for expanding the frequency.   Where were we ? Oh yes, a new word I captured today, because there are no discoveries, really, for all we know, if you stop and try to think about it, and succeed, you'll see this idea applies to all things and why shouldn't it, exactly?

That's really all I'd like to know...how could there be any such thing as a real INVENTION when everything's been here since the beginning and it's been proven the very fabric of creation itself is merely recycled stuff?

You are the only invention in the realm of creation and it was you who helped create this word, thank yourself the next time you open a dictionary because it was you who wrote it, every last word from the beginning of the alphabet including all those words that are now extinct in order to make room in the limited size dictionaries so that common people like you and me could keep up with the times!

 I told my brother today that I invented a new form of poetry, and I only want to lay claim to having uncovered it once again, the oldest form of poetry known to our species: one word. That's it.

A new form of poetry limited to being expressed in one word.

And the best part is this form never excels quite as well as it could until it invents a new word, then the form is being exercised. Any one-word poems utilizing words already found in the dictionary are perfectly acceptable yet akin to keeping the horse leashed to his post.

 Only when the poet invents a new word which is to say, rediscovers an ancient lost word and re-introduces it can it be said that this ancient form is being expressed.  And should he truly catch the wind of inspiration and introduce or that is uncover for the very first time a brand new word never before heard or seen in the world, then he is riding this ancient form at an easy gallop.

This is also meant to resemble a test which sets up a standard by which this ancient form of poetry, the one word poem poised at a potential communication as yet unexplored by any member of the human race, may achieve its unique form; this form in deed being a word excavated by the poet that had been a part of the old original language all along, of course because that is the meaning of our race--nothing more than the code script which has been hyper marked up from the below and down from the above in order to facilitate the ancient chaos of the living ecosystem of words.

 Try to think of it this way. We are not the protagonists in the unfolding drama of creation, we are merely the script. Words themselves are in fact the alien sentient beings from which our own species was inexorably derived. Welcome to Viricon, a condition of being, an estate, an empire.

 The negation of viridian, the viral context. The process which sterilizes organic development by committing the perfectly innocent sin of self awareness.  Welcome to Viricon.