Tales From the Third Lobe - Kennelly-Heaviside Prayer

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

Daytime solar blow scarce eight minutes old
Compresses the lightside plasticine ionosphere and
Billows out the nightside, heaviside
With corresponding interstellar suck.


Thus daytime curses are localized,
Traveling mostly by groundwave, while nighttime prayers
Bounce and bend and scatter
To be picked up at math-concentrated nodes
Many thousands of miles away, the skywave
Endlessly refracted and reflected in the e-lair.


But what messages make it out to the Heaven
Where God lives? When is it best to pray?
Does it really matter?


Habituating fever of altitude and debilitating chill of descent
Warp our cantos upside-down, left-to-right, back-to-front.
Our mental images are distorted with
Density gradients, inversion layers, and
Good old redshift drag—
All of which can be corrected for
By integrating seven billion overlapping images,
Each apart of something bigger,
With freckle interferometry.


But God has laid down the trap,
Loose and unbinding as it might seem at night.
We hear each other, maybe, sometimes even
Over large distances, but do we hear God?
Are his sentences likewise mangled,
Shifted, bounced, and distorted
When He speaks to us?
Who counts and maps His freckles?


Ludicrously the only prayers that make it to Heaven are
Giftwrapped in parti-colored foils,
Powered by the longhaired frizzy decay
Of heavy metals.


Remember when we used to make our skyships
Out of wood and cloth and lacquer?
How silly our tin-canned prayers will seem
In a decade or two after we go back to
Wrapping them in seasoned woods and
Bricks of mud and dung and
Paper and cotton and linen and silks and
Ribbons and string and pitch and wattle and daub,
Lifted by steam and wind and helium and hydrogen
And, finally, once again,
Hot air: the smoke of burning spices and sacrificed animals.

Australopithecus escaped to space in steamships,
Under sail, via hot-air balloon. The technology
Has not much improved.
It never needed to.


Still we try to cry upwards, yet only cry sideways.

A mockingbird in my neighborhood
Has learned to sing
The nine-part car alarm song.


His eye is on the sparrow, so they sing,
But how are His ears? Does He appreciate
The Lament of the Vehicle that has been Carelessly Brushed
As much as I? Can He sing along? When He hears it,
Does he feel more for the bird or the car?


I'm no God, but I feel more for the bird.


I wonder if the fireflies likewise
Mimic the patterns of the traffic lights or
The sequences of streetlights and porchlights
Turning on and off. Likely they miss those patterns
Just like we miss the lowing of the pines,
Sped up too fast for us to hear
When the lightning cracks them open to the core.
He sucks the vaporous sap of smoking conifers
Like we suck the green juice from a stalk of grass.
Do we ignore the squeak the haystalk makes
When we pull it apart
Like God ignores the riflecrack pop
Of a lightning-struck pine?
Do we similarly concentrate on
The apprehension of the upcoming flavor?


Or are we both in it for the pop, in effect
Singing (singeing?) to ourselves?

What would I fry if I could fling the lightning?
Would I smoke the earth? Would I write
These words in dancing elves and sprites
On the other side of the sky?
Would I still be talking to myself? Or
Would I be talking to the other double-dozen
With their oscillators tuned to the
Skybounce-groundbounce chanting of numbers?


It's amazing what we encode when we don't encode anything.
There is only one speed for the massless.
It is only that with no substance that is unstoppable.
One speed, all directions, until math itself collapses.


Where's the point in that?


The cathedrals advocate mass with substance—
As if there were a choice.
The mass of the casket drags downwards on us all,
Accelerating without moving in the slightest apparently.


It's bullshit. The relative generality reflects a broken mirror—
The downward slide of the outward-flung. Fling flang flung.
It's the push-pull of weighty nonsense, this gravity of the grave,
Inches from breakthrough, angstroms from breakdown.
Or maybe vice versa.


A foamy head obscures the depth of this dark beer.

Sometimes the only way we know something is there
Is how it pulls on us. Sometimes
Even paying close attention does nothing to reveal
The sources of attraction and repulsion that affect us
So completely and so strongly that we feel
Utterly motionless while everything around us
Recedes at top speed.


The more distant things are, the faster they escape us.