We begin where we end
"We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion year-old carbon"
Joni Mitchell - 1969
It is said that every bit of matter and energy that is anywhere in this universe was once resident in an infinitely dense speck of something positioned nowhere when there were no such things as time or space. But, the nominal moment of infinite temperature occurs and - BANG - the clock begins. No going back. A few billion years later - here we are.
How has our species accounted for these beginnings? Every culture in every time has had their stories and it is here that Before begins. However the myth writers expressed the mysterious images of before that nominal moment of infinite temperature, physics and chemistry did occur, biology emerged and the evolutionary ordeal did it's work...
...but there was a time when it was new.
To listen to a 400K sound file of Before/New (1:40)
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Part I
Before/New
words - Dennis Bidney
music - Chris Baszczynski, Jono, Rick Condon, Dennis Bidney
We are like the butterfly that floats for a day dreaming it's forever
In the very beginning everything was resting in perpetual darkness
Darkness
Night oppressed everything like an impenetrable thicket
Before creation a presence existed
Self-contained
Complete
Formless
Voiceless
Mateless
Changeless
Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud floats in nothingness
He slept not, for there was no sleep
He hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger
So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind
He said to himself
I will make something
And when God created
All was at first a shapeless, chaotic mass
With the spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors
Then God said
'Let there be light,' and the light appeared
Implications and signs
Indications and clues
Origins clues
Organic chemistry front-page news
Awash in the primordial pool
Lighting flashing and waves crashing
In methane skies and caustic tides
On a world congealed
Compressed
From cosmic star dust
Distillation
Condensation
Bioreactor fermentation
Complexity abounds in the violent turbulence
Molecular jumbling
Dead end tumbling
Few combinations make it through
But helical structures
Nucleic acid partners
Hit the macromolecule jackpot
These are visions
Genesis visions
In the midst of meteor collisions
And slowly, order emerges from loose entropy
Back in the time when it was new
Self replication
Recombination,
Darwinian adaptable mutation
The dance to the species is begun
Dramatic events on the 3rd planet from a sun
For 4,000 million years the changes have been going on
The systems have emerged fine tuned
But we cannot conceive
...or even wish to believe
The powers and the time that have been at work
For we are as butterflies floating for a day
Dreaming it's forever
But there was a time when it was new
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