A spontaneous poem I once wrote went:
How can I know
who I am,
or what,
if I don’t even know
whether I exist,
or not?
Well – I suppose that I do exist – in the one or the other form, but the nature of reality has been called into question since the first human thought arose. We drift along, somewhere between a zen-master dreaming he is a butterfly, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Dream within a Dream” and the modern pop culture takes on the theme like “The Matrix” or, more recently, “Inception”. The hard sciences are perceived as definite, but all scientists worth their money know their limitations. There is the point where science fails, where it fades into chaos and uncertainty and where the realms of metaphysics and philosophy begin. Knowledge does not, most importantly, provide a sense of meaning and purpose. If not bound back to meaning, to the subjective human condition, it remains empty. We ourselves have to create this meaning. As I wrote once, paraphrasing an oft used cliché:
“In this our self created night we have to be our self created light.”
My all time favorite author, the rather enlightened (and certainly delightful) Kurt Vonnegut Jr., wrote, quoting his brother:
“We are here to help each other getting through this thing – whatever it is.”
I’m a fiction, non-fiction, technical and science writer and photographer, with more than 35 years of R&D and publishing experience (that is if we are to count the photography and student newspaper working groups in middle school). Along the road I picked up a Ph.D. in Astronomy and the one or the other additional undergraduate and postgraduate degree. Also I took advanced creative writing at Oxford, among many, many other things. I’m a split soul, never could decide whether I’m a sober technologically minded scientist or a creative artist, so I ended up an eternal in-between. I have to admit I feel comfortable here, in this place between places, my very own world between worlds, building bridges — or at least attempting to — between both of them.