Hurricane House

We are never predicting the future.
We use our past to predict our next past,
The new past, a better, worthier past.

The future has nothing in it, always
Had nothing in it, and always will have.
Awareness of that nothing carves our past.

“What matters is not the past history . . .
But what might happen in remaining rounds.”
That’s only true if the past determines

The exact number of rounds remaining.
Determination stays trapped in the past.
There is, to borrow from Anthony Lane,

Who only meant to review a movie,
Something small at the core of human time,
For all the power imagination vaunts,

“The smallness of cramped and dissatisfied
Souls, who don’t like where they came from and aren’t
Sure how far they should go.” Not for nothing

Does Mr. Lane end his essay crisply,
“Darkness is their home.” Darkness is something,
However lost, however frightening,

And the future, which is not human time,
Is not, like spacetime, filled with echoing
Waves of nothing much, bright, dim, dense, or thin,

Is nothing to do with any something
We, frequentists and Bayesians, predict,
Is not what might happen to what remains,

But is what isn’t and will never be,
The same, the Zeno in Parmenides.