[Newspoetry] Designer Science

[Donald L Emerick]

Designer Science
If you believe in Science, you must also believe in Numbers, for He that created Science also created Numbers.  Science without Numbers is dead.  No one comes to a Science without numbers – for Numbers are the Way, the Truth, the Life of Science.  If you say that you believe in Science and have not Numbers, your Faith is dead, indeed.  You would then be like a braying ass, full of resonance that has no harmony to softly fall into poetry, to be hummed as the music of the spheres.  (Rest-o.ration-al: restating St. Paul’s corrupting restatement of the much corrupted texts purloined from the Pythagorean Creed.)

In the Beginning, there was nothing but Chaos – as it had no reason for being nor for continuing to be as it was.  And God looked upon all this Chaos and smiled at the idea of Pattern and its presumed predecessor activity, Design.  Design will always fool them, He thought.  Even if it happens by chance, they will always think it was My Design.  Bad things will happen to good people, yet they will still insist that they live in the best of all possible worlds.

Who is anyone to say what Chance is? –for God spoke here, as if there were a Void, into which an aside could be harmlessly diverted, for no reason except the Beauty of its own self expression, in wry Paradox of the very Idea of speaking to One’s Self.  Chance is the less formidable name for Chaos – the state of affairs that always prevails before anything is done.  Only true doing actually has the possibility of altering Chaos – but most shall simply never think their random rearrangements are mere permutations of the pre-existing Chaos – and thus shall they constantly believe that there is nothing to the difference between doing something and true doing.  Nietzsche shall have preached in vain against the inevitable, much dreaded return to the same – Derrida shall not have taught anyone to exceed Kant’s transcendental limits, if the inexhaustible fall ever awaits all, like destiny, in the rise of any trajectory, parabolic to its end.

Nonetheless, undaunted – for God is Dauntlessness personified – God spoke, which is to say God engaged in the Act of True Doing, making a Mark on Chaos, slicing it, splitting it, differentiating its mass, its whole into parts, making a Distinction useful is a True Making, a true doing.  And, what did God say-do-make?  Why, just this: “One shall cleave into Two, et cetera, et cetera.”  (It’s useful to know that recursion finishes every impossible task in the only way that open-ended, never-ending tasks could be finished, by keeping them going, allowing for comparisons, when the Cycle is there, when a Pattern is to be (pro)founded.)

So, Chaos reduced itself, spread itself out over a larger region.  If you scatter even a large pile of dust over a much larger area, the place will not look as dirty afterwards.  (Scatter, of course, implies a chance event.)

God looked in on the recursive process – and the sub-processes that it spawned, from time to time – humming to HymnSelf, all the while, “Oh, that Algorithm’s gonna be the Death of Me.  In the blink of an eye, there was an Evening and a Morning -- a time of darkness, when Chaos returns, and a time of brightness, when Chaos retreats.  I think I’ll call this two-stroke-engineering a ‘Day’.  Yes, Yes, what I’ve done is pleasing to Me, so it is necessarily – could not be otherwise – Good.  (And who would there be to argue with Me, anyway?)”

Now, in this great span of time, there came to be Man and Woman, as a consequence of the running of the Primes, which seeded the Algorithm He made-spoke-did-ran on the Chaos machine.  Chaos can not be overcome, but may be programmed so that it’s oblivion is much less obvious – as in the fact that any spot of true beauty distracts attention from the great deal of ugliness in its environment.  Indeed, perhaps, there is only an inverse relationship between the appearance of beauty and the region that it inhabits – for if it were resembled everything in the noticed environment, then no one would pay particular notice to it.  Art is an ever living revolution when it happens, but ever deadly afterwards, when it morphs into its repetitions.

Man and Woman became Prime-time Players, because it was in the cards, and the deck was stacked – nothing was left to chance, but nothing was truly designed, either.  It seems so hard to believe that one doesn’t know how an Algorithm will turn out, especially when it has to do with Primes.  If I knew what the results of an experiment were going to be, before I ran it, why would I go ahead and do it, anyway?

Ah, well, that’s why the Algorithm runs on Free Will.  God has it.  Everything that is God-like has it – even down to the smallest sub-sub-sub-atomic particle at the bottom of the great Sea of Chaos.  Free will is another name for Chance, another name for Chaos—to explain people hides free will from ur-Chaos.