Log 1? Upon the surprise

Richard East

I arranged near
hungry river
in gasps consume.
I cannot win.

I arranged like
drops on finger - spray
move salt and sweat:
transportation
deposition.

I, arranged familiar,
with memories
lost and gained
irreversibly.

I, effectively,
watch a drop split and split and spilt
identically composed.
Which is me?

I?
Reversible change
is not.
The truly immortal die.
Collapse in deep shame: Ubi sunt?

The Science

The poem expresses Hericlitean thoughts of 'someone' as an ever-changing arrangement of particles, touching upon the concepts of entropy, and Parfit’s fission problem in ethics. This in turn loosens the importance of identity leading us to consider that we may be nothing but the present approximate configuration and that a human being then could be seen as multiple people over a lifetime. Meaningful continued existence requires change; only irreversible change is meaningful else everything could be undone. Entropy, as an arrow of time, then is the only thing that makes things matter. But, perhaps, due to the fission issue this is irrelevant, as the person of the future may not be me.

The last stanza concludes that the concrete notion of personal identity may be suspect; a fixed person being contrary to entropic necessity. In the words of Eddington “...if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics [increase in entropy] I can offer you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation”. With this, the notion of identity is left wanting, we arrive at the end, but the end of what? The poem ends on 'ubi sunt?', a medieval motif signifying life’s transience and mortality – but what is death here?

The Poet

Richard East is a freshly unemployed PhD living in France. While his speciality is in fact mathematical physics, he occasionally writes poetry.

Next poem: Meetings at Light Speed by Oisín Breen