Zero: to Infinity and Back Again
1. The Field
All begins from Zero
What contains everything begins from nothing
From Zero were light and darkness engendered
One chases after the other hoping to contain it
From Zero were chaos and order created
They battle one another to infinity
From Zero were life and death born
Heads and tails they follow each other
On the verge of destruction, creation follows
Never does one element conquer another
The endless wrestle, eternal chase
From the space of Life comes all animals and insects, plants and flowers
Along with Life comes Death
A game of hide and seek
Anti-animals pursue animals
A fleeting dark shadow in thin air
Slowly creeps into breathing beings
Waiting to clutch the beam of light
Zero gazes from outside and above all
At the never-ending game
As life multiplies itself, Zero keenly watches
Lions in the savanna, bathed in sunlight, drenched in blood
Crocodiles in the mud, patient eyes piercing curtains of light
Ants along wooden branches, silent and enduring
The complexity grows as creatures intersect
Sucking in air and burning sunlight
Flowing in water and pounding earth
More intersections Zero awaits
11. Birth and Death
In a far-away valley energy grows dense
A creature infusing elements
Absorbing all that surrounds it and groping for more
A creature is in its creation
Zero watches with eyes of interest
Human, it calls out
Human, Zero whispers, what will you do with my world?
Out of the burning sphere stand three creatures
Who call themselves Hya, Hein, and Ori
Hya, Hein and Ori spend their days strolling on grassland
Picking fruits and catching fishes
When days go dim, they find cozy shelter and sleep
When rains fall, they hum and dance soaked
One day Hein falls into eternal sleep
When breath becomes constant
The fingers of death prevail
Darkness crouches over Hya and Ori
The tip toe of death echoes in minds
Gone are the days of carefree strolling
Hya falls into despair
“We will die too!” she cries
Ori stands by her side.
“No, we will survive.
Light and darkness battle each other.
To survive we consume both life and death, chaos and order.
Containing opposites, harboring balance, we will live on.”
111. The Quest
And so begin Hya and Ori on the quest
To consume earth and air, water and fire, metal and grass
To breathe the night and roam the days
To head on adventures and suffer proudly
To harbor violence, mercy, and kindness
To overflow with love and be ravished by hatred
To take lives and bring out children…
Soon, Hya’s shadow catches up, then Ori’s too
Holding onto the legacy, their children
Grope for life
Build structures out of nature
Yet again, they fail and the shadow takes hold of their life
Relentless their children’s children try and try
They build a civilization, a society
As a species, humans climb to the top
Eyeing the animals down the ladder
As a species, they’ve grown so powerful
They trample on all that had been a burden
In the quest for immortality
Their lifespan doubles and triples
Consuming and housing opposite elements
One day that will be enough, they hope
To wrench free of the struggle, to escape the chase
But again and again the shadows catch up
Swallowed in shadows, one human after another
And again and again they rise up
To stay on the trail to the ultimate destination
In the end the ultimate rule prevails
Everything shall return to zero
From outside, Zero watches and grins
How the complexity blossoms
How the intensity shines
Wonderful world.
Photograph, Night Sky above the city, by Assandruuh, distributed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Comments
Yiming Qi
January 21, 2022this paragraph reminds me of a Chinese traditional saying by Laozi : ‘ the Dao begets one, one begets two, two begets three, three begets all things.’ the Dao is saying a ultimate regular and a law depicting the entire world, or a way( the directly translation of Dao to English is the way) throughout everything. It seems to express a infinity as a singularity where emerges everything, and it appears to be against author’s theory: Everything form the Zero. Nevertheless, the singularity( the Dao or The zero) is inexpressible and indescribable before everything is. Once everything is, to born things are. From perspective of human, before the singularity makes everything and we therefore understand the world or the specific things, we can not feel anything wether it is everything or nothing, infinity or ash. what everything emerges is like to draw a wisp from a ball of yarn, And a wisp twines it self to a ball of yarn, again and again.Everything‘s origin and end are between a inhale and a sigh.
Dev
January 28, 2022This story begins in a way that mimics the biblical beginning, with the first creation being light and darkness, proceeded by the creation of a man. The biblical paraphrasing is interesting to a certain extent, but the beauty in this text is truly held in the use of literary techniques, the first of which is vivid imagery. The writer uses animals in their natural habitat to provide the reader with a clear vision of how the beginning of the universe is seen; “ Lions in the savanna, bathed in sunlight, drenched in blood. Crocodiles in the mud, patient eyes piercing curtains of light. Ants along wooden branches, silent and enduring”(Ho, line 23-27). The writer then dives back into how man is created, which once again greatly resembles the bible, as the first human creations are put into existence in a grassy field, picking fruit; in the bible, the first humans also happen to be born in greenery, with their main source of nutrition being fruits, which held great symbolism. The first humans, Hya Hein and Ori, are faced with the dark reality of death very soon after their creation, with Hein falling into the dark resting place of death. Early loss of life is also seen in the bible when Abel, second son of Adam and Eve, is murdered by his older brother Cain. The ladder deaths of Ori and Hya, to no surprise to the reader, are written in a poetic way as it is said “Hya’s shadow catches up, then Ori’s too” (Ho, line 70). The writer uses personification of one’s shadow to symbolize death, which is poetic in several ways; as it both reinforces the fact that darkness signifies death; and is physically accurate as once you lay in your final resting place, your shadow clings to you as you are in direct contact with the ground that is your death bed.
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