I'm very frustrated. I mean, I was doing something and something made me halt. I mean things are wonderful. I mean I'm learning new skills. I mean I have great things available to me. Maybe it's just the time in the semester. My mind is always preoccupied with my own creative work. I am working on something I love. I think about it all the time. Everything makes me think of it. It's all I want to do. And there are other things I have to do. Things I want to do, but that don't seem so pertinent. For example: I love learning about non-fiction film, but if I died tomorrow, I doubt I'd feel any regret the class went unfinished. For my own work, the work over which I obsess, there would be deep sadness at awareness of my fate and work incomplete. It's strange: My philosophy is a work is never done. And I have to wonder. Careers even.
The second law refers to a wide variety of processes, reversible and irreversible. It is mainly important for explaining irreversibility.
I've been doing this teaching thing. Though, I don't understand what a teacher is fully. This is a disconcerting thing for a teacher to say. I'm concerned over oppositions between my teaching philosophy and my teaching praxis. How do we know what a true teacher is? And then what to do? K believes there is no such thing as teaching, only showing. A teacher of mine said, with his beautiful Indian pause, "There is no teaching, only, learning." And I believed the man on the subway when he said, "I hate when teachers say they're going to get more out of this than their students. I think, hell no, I better get more out of this than the teacher, that's why I'm here." I could live my life abroad. I could stiffen up, chill, set my jaw, get groomed and grow to tenure. I could just say hells bells, eke out some life on the edge of civilization, hear people only ever in planes, scratch rows in the earth, turn compost to dirt, fell, quarter wood, light fire, write until crazy or forgotten or never found. How is light a state of movement? Why can't I just be in the moment without also moving forward?
The second law asserts the existence of the entropy of a system. Entropy is a measure of the tendency of a process. Entropy is an expression of disorder or randomness.
This weekend I visited my grandmother. My aunt took her out of the nursing home to live with her. I'm glad I'm home now. The past nine months I've watched her mind fall to pieces. Maybe it was all the little strokes. Maybe it was because she didn't care for herself when she could. Maybe that's just luck, that's just life. She remembers life differently than she once did. Talks about eight children she never had. She recalls eleven husbands. She thought my mom was adopting a twenty-seven year old boy from China. She got scared for no reason when I was there. She started yelling, "I'm scared! I'm scared!" "Grandma, what's wrong?" "I don't know! I'm scared!" The Xanax didn't calm her. When my Aunt came home she administered morphine, because my grandma was screaming out in pain. I wondered how they were coping with caring for her every day. My aunt and uncle have two young children, and though my aunt is a doctor, caring for my grandma is more than they can handle. They hired a young Mongolian girl as a live-in caretaker. Seeing her, I realize she too is another burden, as much as it helps. Seeing her, I remember myself as a foreigner, working for a family, and I see how much more trapped she is than I was.
Heat will not flow from a colder body to a hotter body without the application of work (the imposition of order).
I think about my future. Ponder decisions I make. Reach where the dead ends. Fall down over and over. Get up over and over. And the sun is rising. And the trucks are moving in the streets. And then loud men's voices. And then children on their way to school. And their fathers are at work. And once the papers on his desk were growing in a forest somewhere. And once that forest was covered in lava. And once it was a cloud. And once it was a mote of dust.
According to the second law, the entropy of any isolated system, such as the entire universe, never decreases. Eventually, universe has no energy to sustain motion. That is if there is an upper bound.
Someday I will end up all broken. I will be tended by medical professionals, and there will be expensive equipment, and I may be dead for days, and I may be dead for moments, and I may be dead for years, and those crafty doctors will know; there will be nothing done. Professionals will know, on the spot, this thing can't be fixed. How soon will it come? Where will I be? Where will I go? What will I leave behind? I heard once of shadows in Hiroshima. I heard about the dead authors of books. I barely know what to make of it. My grandmother said, "In Catholic grade school, they told us to cover ourselves in wet newspaper if there was a nuclear attack." What happens next? We can only postulate dark matter.
"Well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation," Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1927.
What I love about writing is the creation and thought of it. There's nothing fun about it when it's over. First drafts are such a beautiful mess. If any bit of it could be clean. My writing teacher once said that the essay was mimetic, that it mimes. This intersects with something I learned in India: the Universe is mimetic; saturated self-mimesis. Everyone always described enlightenment not as a state, but as an ongoing process.
Now reverse the reversible process, and combine it with the irreversible process.
There is this kind of essay I always find thrilling: the performative essay. Performative essays perform their argument. I once heard someone of caliber say, "Every essay is an essay on the Essay." And in this vein: The performative essay performs the Essay. And the essay is lost. And the essay is wandering. And the essay explores. And then it's all over. And the essay does nothing more. And the essay does nothing less.
The reversible case is used to introduce the state function entropy. For any irreversible process, we can always connect the initial and terminal status with an imaginary reversible process, integrating on that path to calculate the difference in entropy.
I think back to jobs. I think back to work. It is a question of "what I will have done."Television terrifies me for this reason. I begin to feel anxious if I watch too long. My grandma watched a lot of television. It was mostly all she did. And yet I'm okay with watching something on a computer. It doesn't even bother me.
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