Why do we care about creation?

A flaw at the heart of the argument for truth

Wherever I go I take my camera with me, to record the visible reality, a digital imprint of the visible light reflected from objects in the world.

An objective registration of visual phenomena is no more the truth of the world than a dead body is the truth of the deceased person.

A person is not a flat image, not even a three-dimensional thing, but a subject with whom you must engage as another subject.

The same is true of trees and plants

and even of inanimate things such as mountains and bodies of water.

The painter can not copy a pictorial imprint of the scene, but must try to capture and re-enact its life, he has to feel its 'breath'.

You have to know the place to feel its 'breath'.

Otherwise it is just a lonely place, a vacancy, a passive angst in the ambiguious light.

It matters to go and explore, to find out where we come from so we can find out where we are heading....

WE ARE WHAT WE BELIEVE CAN BE...so if you believe in our own limitations, it is reality, and with it comes really difficult and uncomfortable things we have to raise...

both about society around us and ourselves, how we have to confront our own prejudices, the idea of identity.

When we think we have a clear idea of how the world works and all of a sudden we find ourselves completely out of our elements.

We hate the loss of control, we are victims, yes, but we don't realise we are also complicits in our own downfall.

What matters is not our ideological balance or even our historical truth but the perception of our vision, how we see the world through the shared prism of knowledge and hope, it is all about where we have been and where we plan to go....

The very essence of everything

in a manner as primal

as the particles

that make us

we all

struggle

to grasp

that.

Despite

our fleeting

attention

span,

our unhappy

acknowledgement

there will never be

much return

on inverstment

at least

in the traditional sense,

and yet

every new scientific discovery

stops us

for a moment

to contemplate

something far,

far bigger

than ourselves.

And when that happens,

faith and physics

which don't often

shake hands,

share an embrace.

It happened this year

again

a wonderfully named

God particle

had been found,

the breaking news

from the physics world,

a team of scientists

for Nuclear Research

had proved the existence

of a particle

that helps explain

nothing less

than why our existence

is possible.

"We are nothing but quarks

and electrons

and a lot of empty space",

says physicist Fabiola Gianotti,

who headed one of the teams

using the Large Hadron Collider

a $10 billion particle accelerator

that crashes protons

into one another

in a speed of light.

People ask,

why it is so important

to discover the particle

that gives mass.

But without mass

planets, suns,

galaxies,

moons,

comets,

dogs and people

would not exist.

A cold and soulless cosmos

may not care either way,

but we do,

don't we?

But why do we care?

You ask.

The universe began with a big bang,

so what?

It's filled with wormholes

and superstrings,

dark matter

and galactic bubbles

and assembled from little specs of stuff

called fermions and leptons,

top quarks and cham quarks,

all of it glued together by gluons,

that's the trouble with particle physics,

it exists on a plane

that the brain

doesn't visit

and whole defies

our intiutive sense

of order and reason,

of cause and effect,

of the very upness and downdness

of up and down.

But energy and matter

are like steam and ice,

two different states of the same thing.

The particle may help

physicists

crack some ot the other great cosmological mysteries:

the nature of gravity,

the invisible dark matter

that makes up 80 %

of the universe,

the dark energy

that is forever pulling

the cosmos apart...

Galaxies are large enough

and spin fast

to fly apart

and yet

they don't,

the gravity from dark matter

is holding them together.

Dark energy is a different matter,

a force the apulls the universe apart

rather than holds it together.

The most of particles

that transmit light

have mass,

and mass needs something

to coax it into existence...

There is so much we don't know,

there is so much we need to learn,

I hope we never loose

our thirst for knowing it all

because we are much more

than lost souls

living in our inner worlds

in the society

from which we come

and the landscape

through which we move...

"Do not look up to stars,"

one old man said to me,

"because the best you can hope for

is to die in your sleep..."

I know he is right,

and yet,

I know deep down,

I will not stop looking up,

none of us will....

What author or book had the most impact on your life and how?

A exclusive interview with the murderer

Shots of tearful aftermath, the piles of flowers outside the school, the memorial service, 'Never Again' town meetings...

shots of Kevin as a baby, as a toddler, as a child... and a preview by a commentator as to give a loose explanation of what and why....

"It's very difficult for kids these days, the country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end.

Everything works, at least if you are white and middle class.

So it must often seem to young people that they are not needed.

In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do.

Except tear it apart. And you see the same cycles in history. It's not only children.

All the kids in these school shootings have been middles class boys looking at a life with a mortgage, and a car and job in management with yearly holiday to Bali..."

And then you see Kevin, in his dormitory cubicle basking under the camera's eye as if under sunlamp.

"Everything Americans do that doesn't work out too great has to be somebody else's fault. Me, I stand by what I done,

it wasn't abybody's idea but mine," he smiled.

"Dad the dumper was into some Little League fantasy stuck in the 1950s, he loved some kid in 'Happy Days', not me," he frowned.

"My mum has been all over the world, started her own company,

look, I could be kind of a creep, and she could be kind of a creep too, so we are even," he closes his eyes and continues:

"She always wanted to go somewhere else, well I have introduced her to a real foreign country,

since the definition of the truly foreign locale is one that fosters a piercing and perpetual yearning to go home," He opens his eyes and they shine coldly into the camera.

"My teachers diagnosed me as one more fashionable victim of attention disorder," he crackles:

"They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with me because broken machines can be fixed, but not my crackling disinterest."

Kevin's briliant, emotion free mind works like cloakwork, patiently blocking the life pulsing arteries, manipulating their free flow just to see how they work.

As he keeps destroying everything around him, he is amused to watch 'that big theatre of human emotions', that he can not understand.

He will never join that human aimless chase for those tangibles of life, the really good but really elusive stuff that makes life worth living. Only if, his mother's late but final love shows him the way...

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by Lionel Shriver

BUT WHAT ABOUT HIS MOTHER?

Driving through the dark streets

of my well known town

walkers hurrying past

they don't even see me

moving

going who knows where

everything I know

I am not going there...

Shadow of his mother

crosses through my mind

lonely in a crowd

people staring

judging her

and then just hurrying along

they all have someone

and a place to go....

So I stop my car and read her story,

one more time....

Just like any modern version

of those ancient Greek tragedies

this simple tale

of unthinkable suffering

and parental love

make us feel

so uncomfortable

and yet

we are so confident

so happy in ourselves

that nothing like this

will ever

happen to us.

We live in cynical times.

Can you sympathize

with an anguished mother

who struggles

to connect

with her son?

Can you feel

for a successful

businesswoman

who resents

to put

her ambition and career

aside

to bring to this world

an apathic son

with floppy limbs

and a grave disinterest

in life?

Can you relate to

a frustrated

inexperienced

mother

who finds her son

difficult

from the very start?

You wanted to

and you tried

but thinking

about her son,

who commits

an unthinkable

irredeemable crime,

you can't.

As I said, we live in cynical times.

His mother knows,

she doesn't expect

your understanding,

your forgiveness

or your superficial christian love.

Alone,

she grapples

with her failings

as a parent

while attempting

to rebuild her life

the part of which

are her weekly visits

to the prison for juveniles.

She has been sued in civil court

for being a negligent parent,

just like it happens

in many school shooting incidents

so maybe now,

is the time to have your opinion,

if you were the judge in that case,

what ruling would you have handed down?

She has come full circle,

making a journey much like

her son's own.

In asking petulantly

whether those senseless murders

are her fault.

She went backwards

so many times.

At the end of the day

she has no idea

and that pure ignorance

has become itself

a kind of solace.

Guilty or innocent,

what difference would it make

right now?

It is time for her visit,

one more time....

Mother stands in front of her son,

once again

and suddenly she realizes

he looks exhausted

confused

and lonely

just like her.

And if only out of desperation

she realizes

she loves her son.

"It's been two years,"

she said quietly,

"I miss your father,

I miss your sister,

too badly.

And so many other families

are still so sad.

You have never told me.

So please

look me in the eye.

You killed your fellow students,

teachers,

my husband,

my daughter.

Look me in the eye,

and tell me

what was the point,

why?"

He looks her straight into her eyes,

for the first time:

"That is the point,

there is no point.

That is the reason,

there is no reason.

Don't ask me: Why

I can mislead you

just out of spite.

But maybe,

just maybe,

today I tell you,

that before

I knew,

but now

I am not sure anymore."

Kevin for the first time in his life

bows his head

suddenly unsure of himself

and the senseless murders

committed by his hand

fall so heavy

on his thin shoulders

that he is barely able to stand.

The mother looks at the son,

remembering the time

when he was born

and she felt nothing.

Since that moment

they have fought one another

with an unrelenting ferocity

that she can almost admire.

But it must be possible

to earn a devotion

by testing an antagonism

to its very limit,

to bring people closer

through the very act

of pushing them away.

She opens her arms

and he huggs her tightly

for the first time in his life,

he is nearly eighteen years old.

We live in cynical times,

and yet,

no one asks,

why people do have children,

when kids are expensive

and exhausting,

and the risks

of something

going wrong

are so high....

This tale doesn't explain

if Kevin was just born that way

or his cold heart

is a product

of his mother's mechanical care

without love...

We are often most repelled

by other people

who share our own flaws

and we all have them

but what if that other person

is our own child?

The story just confirms

the truth from the ancient Greek legends,

the times are changing

but not us,

we are still capable

of unimaginable cruelty

and unconditional love.