I am a monad, a unit, an entity;
Seed of myself, unrelated to time.
Nomadic monad, a watery sea
Who happens to breed and bleed
By an enzyme collection that passes
For me.
Don’t be duped.
Kinetically energized, I can make sounds,
Make the rounds, still alone.
I am a monad, a unit, a clone
From an ancestor I’ve never seen;
An ancestor I’ve only
Heard about, read about, known
About all of the life that I’ve been.
So I sit waiting for something to happen,
Knowing that I am a monad
Waiting in silence, expecting
The trappings of clappings from heavenly
Creatures unsown.
In a note that accompanied this poem, Arlene wrote, "We'll have to talk sometime about the fact that I am, at bottom and in fact, a mystic. Very important word. Here's something I was reading to Kent this morning because he quite suddenly, one afternoon had the experience of being alone in the universe. This morning therefore, I felt he was ready for this concept. Here it is: If you 'get it' fine! If you don't, that's ok too. I think one really has to have the experience to appreciate the concept. All great truths should be experienced and not just intellectualized. Aside from that, I think it's a good poem (maybe even a great one)."
ReplyDeleteMonad means divinity, the first being, or the totality of all beings, referring in cosmogony (creation theories) to a source acting alone and/or an indivisible origin and equivalent comparators. The Pythagoreans called the first thing that came into existence the "monad;" according to Diogenes Laertius, from the monad evolved the dyad; from the dyad came numbers; from numbers, points; then lines, two-dimensional entities, three-dimensional entities, and then bodies, culminating in the four elements (earth, water, fire and air) which comprise existence. In some gnostic systems the Supreme Being is known as the Monad, the One, the high source of the pleroma, the region of light. (The various emanations of The One are called Aeons.). Gbostics also referred to the monad as the Absolute or Perfect Aeon, Bythos (Depth or Profundity), Proarchē and Hē Archē (Before The Beginning and The Beginning), and The ineffable parent. Monoimus claimed the world was created from the Monad (or iota, or Yod, "one horn"), that brought forth the duad, triad, tetrad, pentad, hexad, heptad, ogdoad, ennead, and, finally, decad, thus equating the gnostic aeons with the first elements of the Pythagorean cosmology. He identified these divisions of different entities with the description of creation in Genesis. Monoimus also postulated the unity of God and man: "Omitting to seek after God, and creation, and things similar to these, seek for Him from (out of) thyself, and learn who it is that absolutely appropriates (unto Himself) all things in thee, and says, "My God my mind, my understanding, my soul, my body." And learn from whence are sorrow, and joy, and love, and hatred, and involuntary wakefulness, and involuntary drowsiness, and involuntary anger, and involuntary affection; and if you accurately investigate these (points), you will discover (God) Himself, unity and plurality, in thyself, according to that tittle, and that He finds the outlet (for Deity) to be from thyself." Other Christian gnostics, especially those deriving their thought from Valentinius, claimed that a lesser deity known as the Demiurge had a role in the creation of the material world in addition to the role of the Monad; the God of the Old Testament, then, is often considered to have been the Demiurge. In the 18th century Gottfried Leibniz re-introduced the term to modern philosophy; he surmised that there are indefinitely many substances individually organized to act in a predetermined way, with each coordinated with all the others. Any interaction between substances was an apparition, and space itself which was a mere appearance since in his system there was no need to distinguish inside from outside. True substances were explained as metaphysical points which are both real and exact; mathematical points are exact but not real, and physical ones are real but not exact. In computer programming, a monad is a structure that represents computations defined as sequences of steps: a type with a monad structure defines what it means to chain operations, or nest functions of that type together. This allows the programmer to build pipelines that process data in steps, in which each action is decorated with additional processing rules provided by the monad. As such, monads have been described as "programmable semicolons"( a semicolon is the operator used to chain together individual statements in many imperative programming languages).
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