Modern Love

An Epithalamium

This is not about Bowie, though I do love his music and - I admit - I just pinched his title…. but let me give a brief explanation.

An Epithalamium is a poem or song written in celebration of a marriage. The term comes to us from ancient Greece and the form has had a long history since then - evolving over time, though less common now.

Concepts of love have evolved too, along with our understanding of the forces which hold our universe together and which might even explain the inexplicable - like love.

More recently, technology has started to change how we meet, how we communicate and how we connect. The fact that you are reading this - here on Substack - in whatever now you now inhabit, is proof enough of that.

So I wrote this particular Epithalamium to celebrate the wedding of two wonderful people who first met online, and whose relationship first grew through their communication with one another in this strange electronic unreality we currently call “the Internet.”

And love is the Singularity mentioned - the point at which all laws of physics no longer apply….

Ridiculously romantic sunset from our home in Brushgrove.

Aether -
was the word for it back then - 
that thing which filled space; 
transmitter of light, gravity, maybe 
even love. Unseen, unknown,
but always there and everywhere 
around us and above, occupying
the interstices of imperfect knowledge, 
the gaps of our flawed existence - 
metaphysical filler of the heart
without which everything - 
people, planets, stars -
might … simply fall apart.

Quintessence -
another word for this
the Alchemists theorised; 
substance of the infinite shared
in minute proportions with our 
physical selves - our base matter
trapped in this earthly realm while
the stars sang with it, saturated in it
and our souls echoed that song, 
yearning for transcendence, 
striving to hear the music
of the spheres, the constant
cosmic chatter.

Daedomena -
or Data, we call it now 
and generate it, venerate it, making it 
the medium in which we marinate -
electromagnetically - wified
and wonderfully - basking in the glow 
of the waves which bind us together
constantly and eternally
and somehow, somewhere, that 
beating binary code becomes 
suffused with something else - 
transmitted but transmuted -
transubstantiated.

Adynaton -
I call it; exquisite 
impossibility, that thoughts translated to numbers
should meet - sequence of ones and noughts -
and joining, exchanging, become complete, become
something more than what was sent - a synergy, a sharing
in this digital metaphysical unreality, this Aether
of the mind, this post post-modern peculiarity we create
where art meets aura, where romance recreates itself
outside of ourselves, out in the electronic void
where our virtual hearts hang
beating, beating,
becoming, and still becoming…

Singularity.

Fern frond unfurling - Styx Valley, Lutruwita (Tasmania)