no beginning, no end—just this continuous stretch of churnings, continuously stretching, giving rise now to this, which was something else less than a moment ago, and is already dying to be born another next—no birth, no death, just our ways of trying to measure what’s beyond measure, separating events inseparable from one another, with signs each with its direct opposite—beginning and end, birth and death—just our ways of naming the unfathomable arisings out of the fathomless and the passage back to it
a wave, another,
fish leaping out—
the ocean
I wrote this poem after reading about the recent death (on May 20, 2025) of Jayant Narlikar, an Indian astrophysicist, who, along with Fred Hoyle, his PhD guide in Cambridge, had challenged the Big Bang theory, proposing, instead, a model of an infinite universe, one without a beginning. They called it the quasi-steady-state model. According to their theory, the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravitation, gravity arises from the interaction of matter in the universe. It seems to me that this and the idea of an infinite universe dovetail with the notion of emptiness, according to which all phenomena are interconnected and arise dependently.
Bio: Eugene Datta
