However you look at it, the sense that humanity

is now facing its evolutionary moment of truth

is almost tangible. We are living through the most

exciting, challenging, and critical times in human

history – possibly the most critical time in the history

of life on earth.

–   Peter Russell, Waking Up in Time, p. ix
 
(Explanatory Note from the Editor)
 
Suburban Sin City, Christmas holidays,

early sixties. To top up my pocket money,

keep me out of mischief, dad

gets me my first job, a temporary

postman helping out with the card glut.
The many worlds concept takes 

literally quantum theory's idea

that a quantum entity like an

atom can exist in many states at

once,
In the gloom of the backroom sorting office

my mentor a weird old postie, white beard,

black brush eyebrows, toes like the roots

of a Moreton Bay fig squeezed into sandals,

who never looks you in the eye and rambles.
and posits the existence of

parallel universes
One heatwave day he throws me a sack

marked RetSenAdUn, tells me,

sideways with a snigger, to sift out

the ones with senders and chuck the bigger

bloody rest in the bin out the back.
containing infinite copies of

you 
Six letters and an ‘exordium',

whatever that is, with no senders

but black borders and weird stamps

from a country I'd never heard of

called Glossalia. Bin them, no way,

nor burn. Curious, took them with me
 
with different histories
when I left at Chrissie and tried

to read them on the tram. Gobbeldy gook,

neither head nor tail, some silly scam.

Chucked them in the bottom drawer

with the false base next to the Playboys
and   futures.
and forgot all about them for fifty years

till my father died the other day

of old age and boredom. Taking the old

drawers to the tip, these letters fell out.

So here they are for your bemusement.
 
Exordium & the Argument
 

We seem to be in a bit of pickle.

The old story is up shit creek

without a paddle. Every schoolchild

knows it. When we press the gas pedal,

Greenland melts. When we eat

our vegan tofu, the Amazon burns.

Old hat: bombs kill babies

even before they explode, WMD,

melting poles now our Buddha reminding us

we'd better wise up. Meanwhile,

we watch television. Time

to grow up. Into a new story. Fast.

 
Let us (since Life can little more supply

Than just to look about us and to die)

Expiate free o'er all this scene of Man;

A mighty maze! But not without a plan;
And here's the argument:
The joke is

this is

no joke
(only joking)
& a pretty dicey

theodicy

of sorts I s'pose.
– The Post-Man
 
Letter 1: The Wanting
 

Dear Kidman,
You ask me

how it all started.
First, in absolute silence,

a wanting.

I am the Post-Man.

I say: I'm lonely.

I want an Other.
A bit like sperm sighing

for an egg, thought

for word. So, split, fusing,

there's an awfully big

bang or low moan, and

hey presto: the post office

is the universe, the hiss

of its wanting

suffusing stars.
 
 
The universe began not with a bang

but with a low moan, building into a

roar that gave way to a deafening

hiss. And those first sounds gave

birth to the first stars. Translating

the observed frequency spectrum

directly to sound yields tones far too

low for ears to hear – some 50

octaves below middle A – but

transpose the score up all those

octaves and you can listen to it.
Since then it's all gone double,

everything married to its opposite,

downhill and up, outwards

and inwards. Light, galaxies,

gravity, dark matter, black

holes, singularities, you name it

you got it. I'm all entrained & tangled,

strings attached. Quite a dance,

lots of splits and funny moves.

Hold your hats.
As for volume, the intensity of the

variations corresponds to about 110

decibels, as loud as a rock concert.

Hear it for yourself at www.astro.virginia.edu/~dmw8f

under ‘AAS presentation'. 
Lila, the Vedantists called it, or her.

Play. Trying it on. A million

zillion masks, charming,

terrifying, depending

on the velocity of your mind space.

I become a love letter.
Probably the cosmic dark matter is a

cocktail of many things, some of them

as yet undreamed of. Whatever it

may be, it seems that ordinary atoms

of the sort we are made of represent

a tiny impurity in a universe

dominated by Something Else.
Anyway, eventually I'm a blue planet

curdled out of a very milky galaxy

and there we are, almost.
 
Dr Lewis said the gas had taken so

long to find because it was so thin –

close to what would normally be

considered a vacuum. He speculated

that dark matter could become a

resource of the future. ‘It will be an

exciting day when we can say what it

is. It may seem esoteric today, but in

50 years it may have uses we never

thought of.'
Give or take a few billion

eons of shifting star dust

and the unknowable

magic of water and I'm the first

little critters we call bacteria,

the fellows who still direct our cells

and pleasure our stomachs

when we're nice.
 
In theory, inflation could still be

happening, with bubbles of space-

time suddenly blowing up to create

new pocket universes.
You know the rest:

bacteria eat up the CO2, fart out

the oxygen and turn into plants

who breathe out even more oxygen

and help fish land and go four-legged,

apes and then, alarums,

I, Post-Man, is us.
 
Approximately 45 billion light years

away lies the cosmic horizon, the

ultimate barrier because light

beyond it has not had time to reach

us. So here we are, stuck inside our

patch of universe, wondering what

lies beyond and resigned to the fact

we may never know. The best we can

hope for, through some combination

of luck and vigilance, is to spot a

crack in the structure of things, a

possible window to that hidden place

beyond the edge of the universe. Now

Sasha Kashlinsky believes he has

stumbled upon such a window.
The whole shabam drawn by desire,

attraction, fire for an other, the gravity

of Love, delusion, mirror tricks.

What a way to go.

As we're doing, and always have been.

What a wanting.
If universes really are crashing into

us willy-nilly, should we be worrying

about a fatal collision? ‘It's true,

there is always a chance we will be

hit by a lethal bubble, which would

come without warning,' says

Vilenkin. ‘But since we'll just

evaporate in an instant and there's

nothing we can do to stop it, there's

really no use in worrying.'
Yours, truly,
The Post-Man
 
Letter 2: About Time Two
 

Dear Kidman,
It's about time

for some Time.

Ding dong. Tick tock.

So the Post-Man falls some more.

For us, again, for chrissake.
No longer can we think lazily of time

as a constantly flowing, uniform

background entity. Optical clocks

confront us with the difficult realities

of general relativity.
Think Eden without God:
An ape looks up.

The spine straightens a little.

It looks at its hands.

It looks at that stick.

It looks at this fruit.

It looks at its hands.
In your home, time is not the same

upstairs as downstairs.
Its fattest finger twitches, adjusts

in opposition to the rest.

A mind leaps across light years

between now and: possible.
A gesture, imagined,

collapses stick, hand, mind

into a marriage that lifts him

for ever out of instinct into head.
Soon, if you were to have one of the

future ultra-precise atomic-

synchronised clocks in your home,

the time it told would be different

according to how far up the wall it

was fixed.
Urge slowly segues into word

like star dust into plant into animal.

His mouth and tongue begin to dance

more deftly around vague feelings

in his bones. Suddenly: breath is shaped

into the first wet clay of ‘stick',

‘fruit', ‘get', ‘eat', ‘me'.
GPS already takes into account such

effects, which (assuming you spend

most of your life upright) cause your

scalp to age a few nanoseconds a

year more than the soles of your feet.
Horizons are collapsing,

widening like a new savannah,

desire pushing his mind

into language, tool, poetry.
He has imagined. Then does it.

The sexy poem that is ‘fruit'

is in his hand, that digital outgrowth

of his budding mind

attuned to sugar, pleasure,

bacteria happy in his stomach's walls.

Hunger stilled, he sees the world is good.

Song arises, wild celebration

of all that is, Mother. Eve.
 
By tossing caesium clouds upwards

over the course of a day and

averaging the resulting frequency,

the most accurate caesium-fountain

clocks can now keep time with an

accuracy of 1 second in around 80

million years.
Yet no gain, no pain.

Imagining can't stop at angling fruit.

Now Post-Man dreams of death.

The outside is like a skin

he's one with but must shed

like a snake when his time has come,

for Time has come.

(As the walrus said.)
In 1967, the base unit of time was

officially redefined as ‘the duration

of 9,192,631,770 periods of the

radiation corresponding to the

transition between the two hyperfine

levels of the ground state of the

caesium-133 atom'.
With time and possibility

the world livens up with dream

trees, rocks, rivers, mountains

all teeming with spirits that may help

or kill, like witches, stepmothers,

infanticidal parents in the night.

This first oneness is also paranoia.

Abracadabra.
Does it make a difference if a clock

drifts by 1 second in a billion years

or in 10 billion? Yes, says Gill. For

one thing, a clock accurate to a

second over the age of the cosmos

would allow tests of whether physical

laws and constants have varied over

the universe's history.
When you're on your knees

with helplessness, the mountains

booming, the earth cracking open,

lightning throwing atom bombs,

your woman, child dying without cause,

the night alive with spine-chilling sounds,

your dreams and the world itself

one river, one law

 
‘If they have, that would be pretty

Earth-shattering,' says Gill.
all Post-Man can now do is rock

like a foetus and hope Mum hears,

pray, hum, beat a drum, chant,

sacrifice four- or two-legged ones,

invent religion and some gods,

start singing the poems his shamans sing

when they do battle with the unknown

that is without and in.
Time, gentlemen, please.
Time to be

moving on.
Yours, truly,
The Post-Man.
 
Letter 3: The Emerging
 

Dear Kidman,
One fine day in Mesopotamia,

the Indus Valley, the Nile Delta,

history begins like a textbook.

Maybe with an abacus, writing tablet,

potter's wheel, smithy's forge, baskets

or a perhaps whip: all these proud insignia

of differentiation and class. Post-Man

is now really rolling with his roles.
To be a scientist you have to be an

optimist. We've tied down a huge

proportion of the universe, from

today and the near future right back

to a fraction of a second after the big

bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Definitely with patriarchs lording it

like lions, peacocks over the women,

kids, granaries, shopping lists.

Village big men crown themselves

into kinghood, set up their state

protection rackets, put their shaky

egos and erections still fearful

of big old Mama's monster teeth

into stone, swords, empires,

texts they think will last.
Of course people want to go back

further – past God if you like.
Traders find coins sexier than

pots or produce, and the mind

gets used to abstracting like money

from the feel and taste of things.
My extreme optimism is that the

universe can ultimately be reduced to

something simple. It has been a

powerful business model so far.
You can't eat money but

you can think like it: no more

bogeymen in the bushes, but

first principles like air, water, fire,

philosophy, finally no more gods

but One Principle or God above it all

a tyrant like the belief in gold, reason

limitless, omnipotent, invisible

caller of the all-dance tune.
We have to live for a kind of

performance art, to get civilisation

as far and as high as we can before it

disappears – unless we discover

some kind of Douglas Adams-esque

escape hatch such as a portal to

extra dimensions.
Post-Man's now a spark of brainy ego

emerging from the dark Mothers,

Medusas, Gorgons, dragons

you have to kill like Heracles,

Perseus, Theseus or Saint George,

like the night-conquering sun

this little ego puts on its shields

and crowns, greedy for spotlight

and plunder.
 
You soon realise that humans will

easily live to 1000 once we've fixed

the errors in DNA replication. But 
Only in his dreams

does he confess: Big Man

is still dancing for Big Mama,

but boy, those pyramids look good

and love of light and wisdom is love

of Sophia, sweet dark Other in the night.
 
we have  to guard against dark ages
Yours, truly,
The Post-Man
 
Letter 4: Things in the Saddle
 

Dear Kidman,
Now it's now, the time we're still in:

capitalism, industry, doing over nature

till she squeals for the greater good

and double entries in our fat accounts.
Outstanding financial derivatives

contracts relating to securitised

debt obligations and credit

default swaps are a major worry.
Post-Man is getting tricky. Why not,

he thinks, let things men made

rule men? Could be fun. It's a potential

that must be explored. Let my greed reign.
These financial instruments are

exceedingly complicated, and

traded on the unregulated over-

the-counter market with no

transparency or disclosure or

counter-parties.
Money becomes a vampire on work

that sucks out life so it can grow

and turn the world into its dead self.

Eaten, people sell themselves to eat.

The world becomes a factory,

all life a proletariat violated

by men who know no dance

but productivity and profit.
The credit crisis was precipitated

when counter-parties failed to

meet insurance covers, setting off

a chain of losses in the banking

and investment world.
And yes, a double entry this bourgeois

sorcerer I also am, powerless to prevent

the powers I set loose:
universal trade breeds universal laws,

greed spawns human rights, science,

printing, the total doubt of reason

that dissolves the flat-earth eye,

shakes the shaky thrones of dogma

and oppression. No big daddies

of tribe, religion, nation

can withstand the limitless freedom

of those young bourgeois twins

Money & Reason.
 
Nonetheless, full details of

outstanding financial

derivatives are not publicly

known and apprehension

persists of another round of

plunging asset values, given the

potential for counter-parties to

fail.
The Post-Man is now too

a huge-hand prole

who wants to read his own Bible

and finds Jesus is a carpenter

who upturned traders' tables

in the temple, no gentry, kings

around when old Adam delved

and Evie spun, old future Eden

the commons of his unenclosed right,

all equal under God and money

that know no race, class, creed,

gender, communism implied

in holy text and basest coin:

the radical abstraction of the brotherhood

of man jingles in the purses, vaults,

banks, scholars' and sectarian tracts

so ferociously guarded from the poor.
All this would suggest distasteful

financial adjustments are

inevitable, possibly leading to

social upheaval, as well as a

decline in the prestige of the

nation.
Will they be up to it though?

Are they ready, strong enough

to see that they are me?

Can they cope

with such singularity?
Yours, truly,
The Post-Man
 
Letter 5: A Singular Spike
 

Dear Kidman,
Wider and wider

faster and faster,

even the rate

of acceleration

accelerating.
 
If you plot the curve of this sort

of acceleration, you find that the

curve soon approaches the

vertical.
Post-Man is getting dizzy.

Everything madly peaking,

all the old debts

being called,

whirlwinds reaped.

Limitless more

hits the wall

of my other, nature's enough.
 
In other words, the rate of

change tends toward the

infinitely rapid. Mathematicians

call such a point a singularity.
Quantity explodes.

Now is so fast

it speeds into future

bending into past

like some dream

always there

beneath the dream

they call

real.
 
Whether or not humanity actually

reaches this point of unimaginably

rapid progress I shall leave for the

moment. 
Utopia is there

for the asking,

global networkman

walks the streets

beyond old warring

tribes, old selves

uplifted

into now.

Remembering the future

past, ice flows, fire

hardens into stars,

the post-man

arrives into ourselves

like a first breath

into the lungs

of a mountain morning

and the world is new

as we understand our

ancient futurity

becoming now
 
What is clear is that a trend that

has been going on for billions of

years is going to come to an end

– and probably fairly soon. 
Yours Truly,
The Post-Man
 
Letter 6: Now No Mountain
 

Dear Post-Man,
Now there is no mountain.

Hey presto.
Back to square one.

Now, ever

beyond square, circle.
The movement

of the universe

motionless, the storm

the eye, the teacup

one.
Evolution inside

now-ever,

infinite grain
all there

already
everyday joke

master game,

timeless
as the heart

singing in the bird
the light word

on the water's paper
the watery word

in the paper light
fading eternally

into birth and death
and dream …
Yours in truth,
The Postman