Text and Photography by Harvey Lloyd
This blog is part of a series entitled Secrets of Eternal Youth.
Secrets of Eternal Youth
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From a Globe Circling Forever Youthful Adventurer, Artist/Photographer
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Secrets of Eternal Youth is a Kerouacian road trip through the mental universe with a merry prankster at the wheel. Lloyd is Coyote, the Trickster, who brings us the fire of imagination that is able to see the quantum foam of the universe in the dancing of Jackson Pollack—that allows us to feel the wild excitement of being alive. Secrets is an explosion of metaphor that reprograms our synapses, stretches our minds, and reminds us that we are all youthful poets.
All photographs by Harvey Lloyd, Copyright © 2016
Quantum Meetings
God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.
—GIORDANA BRUNO (1548-1600)
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his heresy as stated above and in other writings. Eternal youths, brothers and sisters, we fortunately live in a different time. We are free to state our views in this American democracy. Politically incorrect is just another term for the Inquisition. We must seek and proclaim whatever truths we can discover knowing that in the end truth is elusive. Todauy’s truths may vanish in the haze of new scientific theories or the proclamations of politicians eager to be elected. We eternal youths may well echo scientist and atheist Richard Dawkin’s cry, “Where’s the evidence?
Ruled by quantum physics, metaphysics, spacetime and the TAO, infinity will ensure we eternal youths shall not only be born again many times, but we may meet many who we admired or studied or listened to who lived at a different time and in a different place. We keep open our magical Internet door to all of evolution, human and the earth’s history; the results astonish and delight. Why not meet Bach or Mozart, Beethoven or the Beatles if that’s your desire, Furtwangler, Bernstein, Verdi and Puccini, add Leonardo, Michelangelo, Aristotle, Plato, Newton’s gravity and Einstein, the genius who transformed our views and understanding of space time and gravity, and light (E=mc2) and we’ve begun a long list. Include the enigmas of quantum physics and metaphysics and Heisenberg’s indeterminacy to baffle you. A baffled mind is the terrain for new ideas.
As an artist and a sometimes curmudgeon. I’d love to meet Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Van Gogh, Moore, Rodin, Calder, De Kooning, Pollock. Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Mendieta, Bourgeoise, Basquiat and Dubuffet to name just a few. Add Weston, Newton, Avedon, Munkasi, Steiglitz and O’Keeffe, La Chappelle, Watson (Cyclops) and Adams. Add the doyen of the fashion photographers, the magazine design genius Alexei Brodovitch, and the great fashion editor Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazarr and the list goes on and on. It will not and cannot end!
The world of sports bursts with the many we’ve seen and we’d love to meet, from the current heroes to the legions of great athletes. Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Jesse Owens, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Babe Didrikson, Wilt Chamberlain, Hank Aaron, Joe Louis, Roger Federer, the Williams sisters, and that’s the tip of the icebergs, plus the great coaches from Vince Lombardi and Phil Jackson to Bear Bryant and dozens more. Add the many Olympic gold medal winners and their coaches, so many we’d admired and learned from.
It’s not the will to win that matters—everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.
–PAUL “BEAR” BRYANT
That will to prepare hides in every one of us. It is given to us through billions of years of evolution. Shall we mention the many great movie stars, great actors and actresses and Oscar winners? I’ll leave that to everyone’s imagination.
In the world of business and politics, Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers, and Roosevelts, Churchill, Golda Meir who wrote: “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.”
The Clintons are still around with Hillary on track in 2016, and so are Buffet, Krugman, Gates, Page and Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs memory of course. The quantum physicists for sure — Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Dirac, Planck, Feynman who famously said many times that nobody including himself understands quantum physics. For the arts of war, Sun Tzu, Musashi, Patton, Eisenhower,Napoleon, Alexander, Hannibal and Caesar, and the honor roll goes on for the good and bad.
Look again at that dot (the earth). That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever and suffering, thousands of was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinnerin the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
— CARL SAGAN
Eternal youths, guys and gals, that mote is the cradle of all knowledge, the crucible of elan vital, the life force ever moving upward. It is no fantasy to believe that immortality is possible, certain, immoveable, according to the many worlds of quantum physics and metaphysics,the TAO. Zen and Eastern philosophy. Infinity knows no boundaries, and anything that has happened will happen again and again. It is a profound thesis of Secrets of Eternal Youth that we will return uncountable times.
It is an astonishing idea that not only will we return, but in the midst and chaos of the power of quantum uncertainty and indeterminacy, we may meet all those who we have encountered in our studies and in our lives. I have left our loved ones for the end, because that is not a list for publication. Our fondest memories are our love and tribute to those we care about who are gone and our certain hopes of meeting again is our solace.
If there be one truth that we need more than another,to steady us
and keep us cheerful in the midst of accidents,dangers, fears, and deaths, it is this truth of immortality. God cannot work out His plan for us on this narrow platform, and in these few years. The stage is much too small for the drama of life . . . So much begins here–the lives of babes, of little children–with such promise in them, and no room for performance. And what are we all but children of a larger growth–infants crying for a light, and with no language but
a cry? The one imperious necessity seems to be immortality.
—REUBEN THOMAS, Thoughts for the Thoughtful