My Jupiter Dream

Have you ever wondered who you are,
Kissed with life, and of a verdant planet sustained by a star?
Or how you share that planet with hapless others,
A myriad creatures, each sisters and brothers?
And oh what manner of diversity!
Elephants and trees, armadillos and HIV.
Or why events should unfold so?
A Nature that is balanced and without a care for friend or foe,
Just a synergy, a state of being,
And its antithesis, all knowing, all seeing.
Saints and sinners – none of us true,
Little starmen me and you.
And in the stars our inheritance and our destiny intertwine;
Fast forward and rewind through time:
A symmetry that begins and ends in cataclysm,
That pervades the fabric of religion and mysticism.
Where science and intuition meet:
Is that where man falls at God’s feet?
A place called bliss;
During waking hours we are sure to miss,
That which is ours by design,
Thanks to a sum so divine.
When relativity and quantum mechanics,
Confound our understanding of mathematics;
When Schrödinger’s cat exists in superposition,
Who can blame our ancestors for turning to superstition?
Have those dark days departed?
Banished by our meat computers that have imparted,
A frail sense of order so gossamer thin,
No wonder that a troubled Aristotle would rest his chin:
The best of man’s theories never truly proven;
But accepted until brute fact reveals fictive invention.
From modern city types to the cave dwelling hirsute,
Forcing meaning and order is man’s relentless pursuit.
So, did man’s tree dwelling ancestors look to the sky,
Pause, and wonder why,
The stars and planets don’t fall from upon high?
Or perhaps, pondering their own fate, they would cry.
Thinking themselves to change,
Possessing intelligence enough to rearrange,
The neural networks and synaptic paths that interlace,
The mind, body and soul interface.
A billion billion neural nodes, pulsing star like bright,
Forcing ides to evolve with black hole might!
Does this seem as strange to you as it does to me?
Why does mind engulf physics, math and chemistry?
The physics of our reality: of space and time,
Is ubiquitous in our reason and even our rhyme.
Yet we still struggle with Simian fear,
When confronted with the dark expanse of the vacuum that is ever near.
The impossible stretching of the universe,
After fifteen billion years stills seems somehow perverse,
As does the fact that that velvet darkness betrays an entropy,
That will devour you and me,
At a time when God-like giants and the spastic meek,
Lie side by side awaiting their final sleep.
Perchance to dream that dream we all share – a vision,
A union, a marriage, a blissful collision
Of mind and the cosmos brought together as one;
Each of us stars orbiting a far wiser sun.
Maybe mind has been here before,
Perhaps all that we perceive, is an elaborate metaphor:
A picture on canvas, an artist’s expression
Of eternal hope that belies an oppression.
Despite distances so vast, so exponential,
There’s precious little time to explore human potential.
It seems to me that life is lived at a velocity
At least equal to the square of C.
And we live our lives my Nature’s rules,
The holy writs inspired by a mischievous muse.
Life and death are facets of the same cycle,
That binds man and the stars like the one he calls Rigel.
When energies are spent and Nature’s done;
Leaving a fissure in space-time where once there was a sun:
What mind might still exist to mourn
The passing of that final searing dawn?
Time must have a stop,
And lava recreated from solid rock.
Creation has its own dynamic, and how dare we suppose,
That our fate will be any different to that of the Victorian rose.
Shattered dreams are the fallen petals,
And paranoia pollutes the soil on which no seedling dreams can settle.
How is man to rid himself of such despair?
After all, history unfurls without a care
For us, we amorphous bundles of emotion,
Dressed in the simple chemicals of creation’s potion.
Why does mind exist given such a simple brew,
And what makes me as unique as you?
I tell you now of my Jupiter dream,
In which such questions are not as impossible as they seem.
Consider our planets, one through nine;
Each subtly distorting the ether of space-time.
And of those ten minus one,
Each are a little too close to or too far from the sun;
Except of course number three,
As geometry would have it for you and me!
For there, from that protective hive,
We gaze in awe at number five.
Thank Digges for the refractor
That gives sight of the great satellite collector.
A huge swirling orb of gaseous clouds,
And her attendant daughters orbiting proud,
Bound by gravity’s duress,
Cloaked in Cinderlla’s beautiful dress.
Mother and daughters all at the Prince’ ball,
They left behind mathematics’ slipper that would lead to the Vatican’s downfall: 
From the sulphuric and scorched landscapes of volcanic Io,
To the frozen depths of Europa, and who knows what below?
This planetary arrangement in microcosm,
Helped give lie to Aristotlean mysticism.
Galileo waited four hundred years for absolution,
And all the while the planet’s continued their quiet revolution,
Mirrored in the best of man’s endeavours
To understand his place amongst the heavens.
And still Jupiter remains a source of fascination,
To scientists and artists alike a world of great fixation.
Those eternal bands of swirling hues,
Adorned by a great ruby jewel:
A storm that has raged for countless lifetimes,
That we modern types share Newtonian pastimes.
And who among us – we modern types,
With our hang-ups, and our daily gripes
Could have failed to taken time out from our daily chore and plunder
To pause, think and wonder,
What creatures might lie,
In what passes for the Jovian sky?
Our minds reach out to other planets,
(Even if our bodies have a chronic oxygen habit).
Our intelligence will prevail,
And our endeavour will avail
Chaotic systems with a semblance of order
Until we meet the black hole’s border
Beyond the event horizon, at the point of singularity,
Mind might truly know with cosmic clarity
The meaning of creation,
And man’s infant mind might at last conclude its probation.