Was there a Beginning?

Musings. 

Sometimes the yearning for an understanding of the full expanse of existence, the Sein, almost hurts. 

The sense of the immensity of what there is hurts in all it's infinite aspects: The earth, the universe, the presence, past and future. The own existence, whose beginning is nothing but fog to all but the parents who now vanish with this, their unique knowledge of my first days. Even the tiny splinter in the grand scheme of things, of our own history is largely unexplored. So many paths not taken, so much love not given, so much not seen, even though it was in plain sight, so much not understood in spite of all efforts. 

All this comes into focus here in the cabin's own forest, my forest as it were, here where the silence is so loud that the ears are ringing from the voices of the past and the choir of desires. Only the sudden stillness allows these to be heard. 

Subconsciously the eyes rise to see the distance, the deep blue sky, or, later in the evening, the stars that shine here as bright as they shone everywhere before industrialization. In German the word for heaven and sky is the same. Makes so much sense when the eyes drift up to gauge scale. 

Humans do this, stare at the moon and conjure up deep thoughts or even deeper longings. Think of love, a lover and the heart becomes heavy. This is never fully explained anywhere but the heart is always heavier with the moon in sight, no matter what cardiologists may think or why dogs howl at the moon. 

For perspective I like to look at the stars. While the moon makes one feel heavy, the stars give the thoughts wings. They make earthly heaviness appear so laughably small to become  ridiculous. Of course in the month of darkness, in December, we string stars to trees and to rooftops to ensure ourselves their enjoyment even when it is cloudy.  

Stars open the view into the past, so far beyond the own small fog of birth that, with a stiff neck from staring straight up, the enormity of what is in view of the bare eye escapes any grasp. All this is supposed to  once have come out of a singularity smaller than an atom? And  has been expanding ever since and getting colder with stars and galaxies being swallowed and others born? The upheaval is so slow, though, that seafarers even now could  use celestial maps from Columbus' time and would still find their route through the night with reasonable accuracy. 

At the cabin I am torn between contemplation and basic direct action: Chopping wood, making a fire in the stove, cooking, love, clearing trails or hiking. Sitting on the porch or on a stump observing the sun rise or set, gazing at the mountain ridge barely visible through the trees. Both, contemplation and action, elevate the urge to read, to understand and to write.  Act, contemplate and report, a trifecta so hard to bring into the right balance. 

Writing is the art of taming wildly tumbling thoughts, emotions and yearnings into an abstract of symbols, domesticating them to being words, nailing down what resists grounding. Making permanent what is fleeting. Giving order to what is chaos, making communicable what is locked deep inside. All that is what it means to find words, to write them down and to string them together.  

But that act is also a terrible reduction, an injustice to reality, words are not even a shadow of the real things; furthermore, writing stops or slows the onslaught of new thoughts and turns treacherous torrents into tame trickles and placid and navigable waters. 

The letters, whether on a screen or on paper, are incarnations of failure. But the failure to match reality also spells success because the reduction of complexity is a condition of understanding, a necessity for finding patterns, laws and meaning in the chaos. 

Maybe that is what is meant with the famous opening statement in the gospel of John "in the beginning was the word". He continues, "The word became flesh" per the King James Bible and per Luther's German translation,  flesh instead of Theon, god, an interesting choice of words. 

This puts the symbol and the abstract in front of and before the objects that they describe: idealism in pure form. God, then, is a principle that humans derive from the overwhelming complexity that surrounds them and of which they are part. God as logos and logos as god. No god without logos and no logos without god, which, of course makes an anthroprocentric god who cannot be thought without humans who think. This is a tautological trap but the concept of the word first makes it eternal, timeless and god-like. It is easier to think of mathematics that way, since they don't need or describe objects. The word is harder to see as the beginning than numbers, unless we say that numbers are words. And why not?  Was the word or math there  before the Big Bang, before singularity? Physicists would not object, they wouldn't allow the question of what there was before the Big Bang, for there was no time before the beginning.