"MOVINGNESS"
I believe in motion, in movement, because my job in the state's job service forces me to. More exactly I believe in "movingness," the quality that becomes movement the same way that "object-ness" becomes stuff.
Employment service compelled me to look for some kind of fundamental action. All the work OF work comes from smaller kinds of work, and then smaller, and so on. I applied good, old scientific reductionism. It led me to breathing, which happens in every living thing inside the mitochondria of cells. But even deeper, I found that action has a defining characteristic that objects lack.
At the bottom of it all, below the atomic and the quantum, I realized that particles are born of “object-ness;” and they’re just factory goods of motion’s “movingness.” Stuff has movability, but only movingness can become motion then compound into employment making, using, or moving stuff.
I believe in movingness because of how it differs from particleness. It can become a universe, not just BE one. Movingness precedes objects and motion itself. Movingness, to me, precedes every deity that people have named and blamed for creation. Those names themselves actually began as verbs anyway, but morphed over time into names, just like fighting to free ourselves from royal control has mutated into a mythical Uncle Sam and his autocratic and real (anti-)Patriot Act. Every saint and prophet in history strove to reject the reigning divinities because gods were just shorthand, convenient substitutes for movingness living. Like politicians, deities obscure the truth.
But now I also have to believe that physicists – my dream job in junior high school ‑ will never find the Higgs boson, the piece that completes their Standard Model of 16 ultimate bits of matter: movingness only yields events, not a boson particle, even if it looks like one.
Movingness precedes livingness which, in turn, precedes life and form. Life-forms only prove that living occurs while making a living.
Now my job in the job service annoys me because movingness at the core of reality prefers its own choices. Jobs are actions that somebody ELSE chooses. Movingness eludes, defies, or rebels against control and imposition. It WILL win because jobs, like stuff, are the leftovers of movingness. I believe that movingness will prevail if only I can find its silent pulse. It's the flow with which we're supposed to go. The right work allows it, indeed movingness becomes "right livelihood."
Until I get a publisher for my book, my employment service job must, then, be to free YOUR inner movingness … if they let me get away with it. Lucky for me, deities and particle physicists already have jobs. Mine must advocate the rhythm of movingness moving and resting.
-Dennis R. Mannisto, Nov. 30, 2005, rev. Jan 6, 2006
also see my corresponding poem at the "Iambs Cinq" link, and the (old vers.) proposal (page or .doc) for my book.