Today over at dVerse Poets Pub – dorahak in Prosery has posted a prompt taken from a poem by Amy Woolard. From her poem, “Laura Palmer Graduates” based on director David Lynch’s surrealistic Twin Peaks, she has chosen this line for you to use creatively in your prose composition:
What does it matter
That the stars we see are already dead.
What does it matter that the stars we see are already dead? What anyway, does it mean to be alive, for stars or human beings? We all swim through the one way river of time temporarily fighting the tide of entropy.
The Big Bang inflated a world of chaos to which everything must return but meantime stars form – according to laws of physics and live and with their death make ever more complex elements which finally pave the way for us – living beings…
If stars flow counter to entropy then so too do we – garnering sustenance in seed and womb and creating order from our genetic blueprint. Growing up to have our brief moment gazing at the light from stars already dead before our own demise and deliquescing back into the disorder of death… Alive or dead the river is never the same again.
A philosophical and scientific piece of Prosery pondering, which resonates with me, Andrew. I love the idea of us all swimming ‘through the one way river of time temporarily fighting the tide of entropy’.
Thanks Kim, I wasn’t sure whether it should be a piece of fiction or just prose – but that’s what came to me anyway…
Love the ruminative tack you took, Andrew, posing questions and answers in your eloquent and persuasive way, so much so that the closing line seemed a natural conclusion. Something Heraclitus, for one, would be in perfect accord with. Love the speaker’s forward looking gaze, as in “If stars flow counter to entropy then so too do we …” Much to rejoice in that!
Thank you for your kind comment Dora, it was a great choice of prompt…
Love the direction you journeyed with this challenge … deeply satisfying.
Writing to 144 words is very fraught at the time, like writing to a strict poetic form but as you say Helen, deeply satisfying on completion…
I like your thoughts, so much to ponder, but certainly we are all thermodynamically doomed to chaos unless we find a source of energy to create an order keeping us alive.
Does life defy the Laws of Thermodynamics – if only temporarily – is there a scientist in the house?
A very philosophical musing–wonderful final line, Andrew.
Thanks Merril…
Andrew I enjoyed your waxing and waning existential essay. That last line is the cherry on top of the cake.
Thanks Lisa – perhaps see you tomorrow…
I see what you mean Andrew – there indeed some touch points between us 🙂 I enjoyed your take, and probably because there is resonance in our choice as much as in the story itself. I have been captivated by Dr. Brian Simme’s cosmogenesis and have been an avid reader of quantum physics for years, so enjoyed your story.
Thanks Paul and it was good to hear you read on Saturday…