As a youngster growing up in New Jersey I was constantly surrounded by a warm ring of security. At the time I was growing up everyone was well aware that E=Mc.
As Einstein worked at
Princeton University nearby, his genius was apparent everywhere you
went. Even on the doors to the bathrooms in the schools the girls'
room had an 'E' printed on it, and the boys' room had a 'M'.
By age 12 or so, we all knew they equalized each
other.
In my hometown it was like: "Hi Joe, Hi Ed,
E=Mc, all's right in the world, God's in Heaven, and all children
are happy."
If ever a child would cry out for help,
there was always someone there to grasp his hand and say: "Relax,
E=Mc".
Immediately the child would be pacified,
having lost his footing for only a moment.
In my own
household it was evident that my mom was E and my dad the Mc.
He'd get up at 5:30 in the morning, drive 2 hours to
work, spend the whole day selling, renting, and promoting computers
for the IBM Computer Company in White Plains, New York, then drive 2
hours home again.
He never could of done this day in
and day out for 35 years without E.
My parents would kiss
each other at sunrise before work and at sundown afterwards to
equalize each other.
My town was the perfect picture
postcard town, just the type you'd want to make a T.V. series from,
except you can't, 'cause they made this town from the T.V. series.
You could just look at
people's faces and rest assured that all was right in the world.
Everyone had that 'certain type of grin' on their face, like - they
knew - they knew the secret
- it was inside of them - crystallized forever. Everyone was just
'pregnant and glowing with the truth' - veritable walking 'Arks of
the Covenants' - constant beacons of security in this ever changing
world we live in. . .
Everything was going fine, just
fine, until my 21st birthday rolled around.
Then one
day I was out for a walk, just walking long you know, and I get this
thought: "Yeah - everyone knows that E=Mc, but what does = equal?"
"What a stupid thought!" I said to myself. I decided
that it'd be better to take a dog along with me than to smoke that
stuff!
Well, I put the thought out of my head, but
then a week or so later I was sitting on the toilet, just minding my
own business you know, and again the thought returns to me: "Yeah -
any little punk knows that E=Mc, but what does = equal?"
I thought it was plain ridiculous and decided to adopt
an Arabic stance towards the issue in the future.
Well, I put the thought out of my head, but then a
week or so later I was laying in the bathtub, just minding my own
business you know, when again the thought returns to me: "Yeah - any
little 2 year old girl knows that E=Mc, but what does = equal?"
Well, what do I do this time? Cold showers were out of
the question. Maybe I should go back to high school to reform
myself, or get a job teaching kids how great Einstein was? As I
languished in the bathtub I imagined myself on a traveling
promotional tour. . .with buttons. . .and slogans. . .But! What does
= equal ! ! !
I jumped out of the bathtub, put on my clothes
as fast as I could, ran down to the local drugstore soda fountain
counter to see Joe and Ed, bursting through the swinging doors that
were placed there just for this paragraph and panting heavily with
loss of breath I gasp out: "Ed! Ed! Tell me again! How does it go?
E=???"
"Mc" he replied.
"Oh Ed!" We
embraced, hugged, slapped each other on the back, shook hands,
consolidated our solidarity, and promised to meet again at the same
time tomorrow. I paid for all the cokes and returned home.
Whew! That was a close one. I almost forgot. Ed's a real
regular guy he is.
Maybe one day he'll need me. .
.yeah. . .one day he'll come begging to me on his knees: "Mc. .
.Mc???" and I'll pause a moment for effect, then calmly tell him: "=
E". . .as he lies sobbing at my feet, I'll touch him gently on
the shoulder and say: " Ed, don't worry about paying for the
cokes, we didn't have any."
Well. . .my bravado kept
up until my friend returned to take his swinging doors back. He's
writing the script for THE LAST WESTERN, where Top Gun says to The
Kid: "Well - we've got all the bad guys - now we're looking for the
good guys."
It's lines like those that get me through tough
times.
"Let it be" - John Lennon
"I
can't, I've got a job to do." - John Wayne
"Give peace
a chance" - John Lennon
"Then what happens?" -
Interested Reader
"Wait and see" - Innocent Bystander
"Who's John Galt?" - Ayn Rand
"I'm
sitting on the dock of the bay" - Otis Redding
"I left
my heart in San Francisco" - [call in if you know the answer]
"I'm waiting for dialing for dollars to call" - Martin
Mull
"The buck stops here!" - The President
Then it swung back and hit me harder than ever - Even
dolphins and Hollywood dogs know that E=Mc, I think even Mr. Ed
mentioned it once - but what does = equal?!
By now the cozy harmony
of my life was thoroughly destroyed, I couldn't sleep at night
anymore. I tossed and turned, twisted and squirmed, until one night
HE appeared before me. He - Einstein - hovering over my bed, all
impartial and just, just as much hair growing out of his right ear
as his left, and he says to me: "E=Mc - It's a fact! Pure reason -
got it! Stop your foolish thoughts!"
But I couldn't,
and I tossed and turned, twisted and squirmed for many a more night
until HE appeared before me. HE - God - hovering over my bed. [I'm
not allowed to call this a nightmare because he was just 'All Love']
And he says to me: "E or M, you must choose, if you don't, you know
what'll happen to you, you know how weird you'll end up." Calmly
threatening the hell out of me that it was: E or M.
This kept up for weeks, it felt something like
sunbathing without a bathing suit, on another planet, with another
son. . .
Maybe I was getting used to it ,
or maybe I was becoming purified, because gradually the Lord's face
was turning into something more like W.C. Field's face. The carnival
- vaudeville type. Bigger nose - funnier hat - more polka dots on
the shirt.
And the voice was
sounding more like: "Pick one - you must - they're both very
attractive - everybody makes a wise choice - and everybody's glad
they did. . ." Until you walk away with a cigar, a cross-eyed koala
bear, or a free coupon to try again. . .
The point is, that
underneath all of this, there was something in me telling me that I
was being taken for a sucker, the greenhorn at the fair, the country
bumpkin first time in the city. . .Like it was a big con - everyone
had to love E and M and agree to be blind to =.
I
tried to get out of the jam by laughing it away, but found that
something more like anger, or self-righteous indignation was my best
- or only defense.
Then I started to worry that people
around town were beginning to suspect that something was askew in
me. I tried my best to keep up appearances, but felt that at any
moment my shell would crack, and I'd yell out at the top of my lungs
in the middle of the town square on the finest Sunday morning God
ever created: [or Saturday - depending on time zones]
"Yeah-Yeah-Yeah! But what does =
equal?"
So - I packed my bags
and left town, leaving behind me all the security that was driving
me crazy. I went far out into the woods, high up a mountain, to
think it over, for a long, long time.
"Many moons
passed, and then in the month of the She-Elk"
[Screaming
Eaglestein - current chief of the Jewish Indians]
"Billions of months passed, and 28 days
later"
[Firesign Theater]
"You're late"
[my mother]
The battle raged for many a season and when I awoke it
was Spring. Then I remembered the other thing Einstein was famous
for saying: "Time is relative". In a flash I 'knew' that time is
relative to a fixed point and
the fixed point must be = !
I jumped out of bed, made
myself some coffee, and even before I'd finished my first cup I had
the rest down on my notepad.
Providing that '=' and 'impartial' are one and the same thing, and using a universal calculator, I thus calculated the equivalent of = to 66 decimals:
* For more information read the: I Ching. It's a book consisting of 64 'hexgrams'. Numbers: 64 and 1 correspond to 'Here'. It's about 750 pages long, and in Chinese, but worth the effort.
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A feeling of wholeness prevailed.The coffee, [my second cup] tasted just as good and rich as the Columbian Coffee Commercials said it did when -
'Elexagente' [the coffee
taster] is sitting at a small table in the town square at dusk,
surrounded by hundreds of sacks of freshly harvested coffee beans
and an entire village awaiting his judgment.
Everyone's there; mothers with babes at their breasts,
youngsters acting as grown up as possible, plantation workers with
straw hats in their hands, revolutionary soldiers with machine guns
standing at attention, foreign gentlemen in expensive suits with
portable phones and airs, cackling hens, game cocks, wild turkeys,
and tethered goats adding to the local color and filling in for the
writer's lack of imagination, the crooked mayor posing for the
press, the straight faced priest beyond the cares of the world -
Elexagente lifts the small espresso sized cup to his
lips, the sun gives a final glance off his accurately tilted
sombrero and highlights the coffee that glistens on his exquisitely
black 'Made In Mexico' moustache, and as one of his eyes has already
been promised to his 'bride to be' and the other one 'serves no man'
- the sun reaches the mid-way point on the horizon - marking the
Autumn Equinox and last day of Summer, and by the precise laws that
govern the solstices and equinoxes, and by time honored tradition,
he must then pronounce his judgment -
BUT! At exactly
this minute - a furious young woman from the village pushes her way
through the crowd and snatches the 'SURE' cordless microphone out of
his hands!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NO REALLY, IT WAS
INCREDIBLE
by Edith
Einstein
No really, it was
incredible, absolutely beyond the realm of words, it just can't be
explained!
How dare you ask me to degrade the highest,
most sacred of all experiences into base language! Words, symbols,
mere trinkets compared to what I felt!
It was
like everything I ever did or ever will do compressed into one
single crystal like moment and then -
Really! Must I
explain? If you don't understand me you never will, why do you
persist?
No, definitely not, it's out of the question.
It was the highest possible experience someone could
feel and yet live. No words can convey the essence of it.
You sit there expecting something from words. . .
Ha! Empty symbols, soulless and stagnant with no other
power than to fool one into accepting a dummy, a replacement, in
exchange for ultimate reality experienced in tri-dimensional space
together with acceptance and acknowledgement of the parallel
universe in unity with and supported by everything existing all at
once outside the realm of time.
And you think you can
understand? Ha! Those that talk don't know, and those that know
don't talk. There! that ought to prove it.
Go ahead if
you want you pervert - divide eternity by desire thus deriving the
simple quotient of 'time' call it a 'life' and use this cheap device
as a fixed reference point to perceive reality from. It won't
help - many have tried.
What are you trying to do?
Sneak in the back door of eternity using words for a key?
No way - it's impossible - you can't jimmy the lock of
the Lord. God does not play dice with Stephen Hawking!
Why you swine! You dog! By what right?
No! Really! It was incredible. . .I've never felt
anything like it before, and I don't think I'll feel anything like
it ever again, and yet. . .I remain in this state. . .beyond the
realm of words. . .beyond the grasp of ordinary
mortals...
You. . .you worshipper of
false idols! Away with you!
One can no more expect to derive
something from words than one can expect a donkey to sing. It's
patently absurd.
Leave your old and petrified
professors, your dry and lifeless books, your empty and fruitless
words, and listen to me: words will never help - it's a foolish
cul-de-sac.
Really. . .it was
incredible, so incredible that when I felt it I was sure that the
whole universe was also simultaneously aware of it, and that anyone
who spoke afterwards would certainly be branded as a liar and a
fraud.
Can't you learn to be silent? Can't you accept
that the truth cannot be told? Won't you ever learn?
I
mean...after all that is the secret. You can have it, you
can be it, but it can't be used for anything. In fact it's
absolutely useless! In fact the whole universe is created by that
which is useless! The whole universe depends on that which is
unnecessary! There is no necessity. It all comes from -
Forget it! Just forget it! It just can't be explained!
Go home, go out to your own backyard, go for a walk in nature.
There you'll be free from the chain of words that binds you. Maybe
then you'll feel it - 'The Silent Moment', and when you do - I hope
you'll remember everything I've said.
*The exact translation of 'E=Mc'as found in the dictionary is: E [Einstein] = [is] M [the smartest man] c [that ever] ˛ [lived].
_____________________________________________________________________
. . . .I don't expect any of you listened to that gibberish, but used your time wisely as I did, to grab a bite to eat, or to visit the E and M rooms.
WHEN WE LAST LEFT OUR HERO: He was just about to voice his judgment - but was stopped by the audacity of a young village woman.
He spent a sleepless
night in a low rate motel on the outskirts of town. Near dawn he'd
received a call from police headquarters saying that they'd
recovered his microphone.
He immediately hailed a cab
and flew down to the station house.
The police had
found the woman 500 years ago in a Spanish town burning books in the
village square. They brought her down to the station house for
interrogation, asking her why she hated words so much, but she had
refused to talk.
I thanked the policemen and left with my microphone - but I stopped at the door - hearing the cries of the raging woman thrashing behind the bars. I asked the policemen if I could have a word with her?
They readily agreed,
hoping I'd have some kind of calmative effect on
her.
Stepping up to her cell I said. "Look, I've got to
ask you one thing. . .O.K.?. . .Did you really understand what I
said? Enough to get flaming mad about it?"
She calmed
down a bit then said: "Yes I understand, but I'm a good woman, I'm
Albert's wife, and with us it's always been E and M, none of this
'=' business!"
Understanding her, my voice softened. I
touched her gently on the shoulder and said: "Sorry Edith, but the
times they are a changin."
"Oh - you're Mr. Big are
you? Bigger than Albert - and here you are using someone else's
words!" She sneered.
"O.K! I was just trying to be
kind, but I see it doesn't work, so I'll put it to you straight -
It's the end of time - there's no time left - and if people like you
keep stealing my microphone I just might not start it again!"
"Ha-Ha! I'm not worried. In the beginning was the word
- and there's no chance of you shutting up!"
"Did, I
ever tell you, that I once, very seriously, considered taking, an
oath, of silence?"
"I don't believe you
"It's - true."
"What happened?"
"The glacier period in pre-history. After a while I
just couldn't stand the
cold, so I went to a town hall meeting and spoke up about it."
I said good-bye to her [after putting in a word with
the policemen to go easy on her] then I walked out of the station.
Then I went back to my own headquarters on top of the
mountain to make some quiet deductions. . . . . . . going back to
the thought I awoke with 2 days ago: 'Time is relative to a fixed
point and the fixed point is = , I thus deduced:
Seeing as I'm impartial - time is now relative to me.
For the last 2000 years
time has been relative to Jesus Christ.
But it's time
for the New Age, it's got to be started, it can't 'just
happen'.
Time will be counted from this
point.<---
They'll
be 'before this point' and 'after this point'.
The
purpose of marking the beginning point or New Year's point is the
same as locating magnetic north on a compass. It's a guide and
relocation point in case anybody gets lost.
And I've got to think of
something other than B.C. and A.D.
And I don't feel
like just calling it the New Age or The Age Of Aquarius. No, I'm far
too proud to let it go at that. . .
So I guess it's about time I introduced myself: I AM
HE WHO WAS - DIDN'T -THOUGHT BETTER OF IT - AND DID SOMETHING ELSE.
I AM THE END - I NEVER STARTED - AMEN!
. . .oh sure. .
.that's a great guide. . .as good as a boy scout's compass. NEXT -
Well. . .I could state
the exact date. . .
Or time could be marked from 'THE
STORY'. . .hmm. . .sounds warmer, at least it's back in the cultural
department. How would that sound. . .'before his story and after his
story'?
A: "Oh man, that
happened before his story!"
B: "You mean, it's not
valid?"
A: "No, only what happened after his story is
valid. Only historic
things."
B: "Why's that?"
A: "Well, it's obvious isn't it? Because he's the guy
that made his story.
Before that his story didn't exist. History's a relatively new
concept."
B: "Oh - I see."
Well. . .I see plenty of
fresh talent there, and I'm glad you all could make it. . . but. .
.I think I'll shelve it for the moment and get back to the other big
point: That this creation will be conscious, and everything will be
wanted, will come from love, 'will be'.
They'll be no
test-tube babies, abortions, miscarriages, bastards, or son of a
bitches this time.
And since the beginning will be
conscious - the end will be conscious. Meaning: the end will not be
unconscious.
And since I'm the beginning and the end -
I'll now read all your palms, look in my christall ball, read you
the astrology forecast for the next 2000 years, tell you the fate of
a spark of the sun, a chip off the 'ole block -
You will all come 'HERE' in a wooden box or with
your boots on. Everyone's fate is to 'be human' one way or the
other. For those that make it there's free will.
You may ask at this point: "By what right?. . ."
and: "Who the hell does he think he is to go imposing his will on
poor innocent people who have their own wills and own lives to live
etc. etc.?"
So, I'll tell you - For me it's
pre-history, the glacier period, the desert period, primal element
time, and I see nothing out there at all except a perfectly clean
white artist's canvas, and if I see anything at all it's 10 zillion
suckers saying: "Do everything for me", and I reply as any self
respecting artist would in front of a popcorn and tomato throwing
audience - with the best 'Ed Sullivan'
diplomacy I can muster I say: "What an exciting package we've put
together for you kids tonight!"
Now. . .I'll tell you
a little more how it is to be out in the desert for 40 years, or to
be locked into the ice age for an eternity -
At 1st -
it takes forever just trying to calm yourself down to the point you
see no evil and have no complaints.
Then - it takes forever
figuring out a way to be cheerful and optimistic - when there's
nothing out there at all.
And after taking forever and
ever you finally figure it out - since there's nothing out there -
then it must be all inside of you.
Then one fine
Spring morning you wake up feeling like a ripe tomato, you go
outside, you see heat waves radiating off the desert floor, light
rays glinting and gleaming off the glacial peaks, reflecting,
deflecting, criss-crossing this way and that, and because you're in
the 'best of spirits' you imagine that it's a 'Welcome To Hollywood'
sign, or the World throwing a welcome home party for you. [of course
you're suffering from severe delusions of grandeur and it's just the
archetypical desert mirage - therefore you must take it seriously]
And there - dead ahead - standing on the horizon
waiting for the sun to go down - you see a neon sign lit up and it
says: 'Last Chance Saloon'.
You search yourself to
discover that you've just 1 last silver dollar. It's always been
with you - through all the years in the desert, a momento, a charm,
a piece of the world. You don't even know whether it's accepted as
legal currency anymore.
You rub it up to a dull shine
on your faded jeans and devise a plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then -
after 40 years [plus 1 eternity] you stumble out of the desert and
through the swinging doors of the Last Chance Saloon - a thin cigar
smoking out of the side of your mouth -
You see before
you an ongoing poker game, 5 card straight - nothing wild -
You pay your 1 silver dollar ante - the game begins -
your hand is dealt -
You don't even look at your cards
- because you know already what they say. They're the only cards
that you've ever been dealt - time and time again.
And besides - your mind is made up - you've decided to bluff your way through to eternity -
And just as the game
reaches it's peak, and there's as much money on the table as
possible and as many players in the game as can be - YOU TURN THE
TABLES ON THEM AND YOU SAY: "As there happen to be 10 zillion
suckers out there saying: 'Do everything for me' - all right - I
call your hands!"
"I AM - RELAX - EVERYTHING'S UNDER
CONTROL - ONLY MY WILL EXISTS . WHEW! - I'M - RELIEVED - I'M MYSELF
AGAIN - EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON ME. I'M HAPPY I'M YOUR KID - I'M THE
BEGINNING AND THE END - ALL MY SUFFERING'S BEHIND
ME."
So. . . . . . .thus constating to myself that I now knew everything - I poured myself my 3rd and final cup of coffee and packed my bags for the descent.
I was now ready to return to my hometown a reformed citizen, and sit next to Joe and Ed at the drugstore soda fountain counter, have a coke, and smirk along with them that: 'E=Mc - all's right in the world - God's in Heaven - and all children are happy'.
