This Sand is as Old as the Cosmos

this sand is as old as the cosmos; well, the particles in its atomic nuclei are.

ibn arabi says all entities are æternal: their existence is encompassed in god's knowledge, a quiddity extrinsic to time. muslim eschatologies come in nested orders of infinity; all is dying except the face of your lord.

i put some stuff i won't rewrite or chop and change to fit in another tweet. i think a lot about four dimensional 'objects', the world tracks of entities moving along through this cosmos, each entity a composite of atoms moving into and out of its field;

as far as we know, a finite number of atoms came into existence at the big bang, bashed into bigger and more pretentious atoms inside stars and during their death tantrums. subatomic particles pop in and out of existence in the quantum foam, but they don't get above themselves and turn into hydrogen atoms.

or cats, like the stray i buried yesterday.

i saw him on a bleak, busy little road along the train tracks, and went back after my errand to retrieve the little body.

he was somebody's cat, big and beefy, thick glossy coat, and he'd died on a horrible road in a horrible town in a horrible empire. he died alone and frightened and far from any house that had loved him.

now he's a meter down, where his atoms, older than the most distant observable galaxy, will enrich the lifeless sugar sand for a while, moving out through the entities of bacteria and fungus into plants and animals.

in a few decades, the sea will probably cover this peninsula again,

and what was a cat, and was chickens and beans, and was sunlight and carbon dioxide, and was simple hydrogen and helium in the void, may become some other living thing for a while, on their way to wherever this cosmos is going, deep in the future; we are all upon the face.

— 23 march '23

wheelbarrow full of a cat's grave-sand 

that on top is the white sand found half a meter down everywhere in florida, 'sugar sand' from millions of years of north american rivers flowing over silicate rocks and carrying the erosiate out to sea, where it lodges on every bit of the seaboard sticking out into the atlantic and making turbulence. thus the whole east coast gets grey and white sandy beaches. enough keeps trundling along in the current to escape the jersey shore and virginia beach and the gullah islands, escape the ancient rock altogether and trail off into the gulf . the current, an engine driven by the sun and the rotation of the earth, has dumped enough sand on the shallow continental plate for it to break the surface in a peninsula 721 klicks long, utterly flat and apparently perfect for the erection of america's homunculus, our self-image, where everything banal and soulless in our empire has turned into $4 trillion in real estate wealth.