An Engineer's Literary Notebook

Falling asleep under the sun is not an overrated experience as you’d think even if you don’t live in Seattle.  Receding, the minutiae in the dreams you had under the sun’s influence  left a peculiar disorientation as you surfaced out of the heat back to everyday life.  Admittedly, it is not the same as being alive twice. For that, you will have to come back from inhabiting certain images, like Van Gogh’s field of poppies, in  a not-quite-still life fanned by the quivering wind, the red flowers indelible once imprinted by the cones of your retina.  Burns’s love, Kayyam’s rose and the dress Kim Addonizio desired are red too.  Would I be able to create the experience of seeing those shades of red if I have the exact size of their wavelengths, knowing that red has the longest, 780-620 nanometers? To be exact is necessary in engineering. In recreating the field of red flowers as they move gently in the wind in high resolution, the clock of the video circuitry that sends the images to the monitor needs to be at a definite range of frequency. Predictability and precision are virtues in engineering whereas the usefulness of poetry is inexact. Far from repelling, this tension can be inordinately attractive when I work to remove the last pico second in a setup path to close timing in an FPGA. It is a relief to be able to let go of certainty to return later. The sleepwalkers are always able to return.

So by sleeping they can literally “walk through the skin of another life” and return with their hearts intact even after that feat of flying, figuratively though it may be. Such adventures they had in the dark!  No poetic license was taken to recreate that well-being feeling upon awaken after such deep sleep.  The price of consuming darkness in exchange for that is paltry, especially as that other life comes with it. The resonance in the last line of the poem makes me feel grateful because of the self-sufficiency it induces. All is within our reach. Surely there are mornings when you start anew, brimming with energy so much that if you walk faster it will spill over. Never mind that this well will be depleted, for some by day’s end, for others sooner because  some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal (1) . There is always tomorrow.  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Time to stop before the ricochet starts.

Thank you for the seeds, dear muse.

Acknowledgement:

1) Albert Camus

2) The painting of the sun landscape is from adrishta.com

3) The Van Gogh’s Field of Poppies image is from http://www.vangoghgallery.com

4) The color spectrum is from o2mc.net