The astrophysical
1. A young galaxy starts out bright
blue, when its resources of gas to form stars are at their peak, and then dims
as the stars age and die.[1]
The moon has been rising larger since Thursday, towards full. After you leave on Saturday I look it up, sitting by the window through which the moon continues to be large. The Angle of Regard hypothesis, where the impression of scale is produced by the position of the eyes and head, is the explanation I’ll remember, although – perhaps because – ‘This is in fact not the case’ says Wikipedia imperiously; ‘The moon illusion remains intact independent of the position of the viewer's head relative to the position of the moon.’ The taste in my mouth, chewing-gum after the sugar’s spent, makes me realise I was looking for facts.
I collect them still like stones, line them up in the window light to see if any of the contours meet. You have to believe in them first, stones and facts, otherwise it’s just geology in pieces, on the slowest way to becoming something else. Sometimes the facts and the stones look very alike: the shape of lightning bolts, thrown from strata on a diagonal lean, because the earth in Canterbury was tilting with the planet. The shape of the braided Waimakariri River, because they are the pieces of its bed. The shape of your palm because you picked up what you could and this was the stone that rested most heavily. Continues to be that shape on the sill after you’ve gone, a fact without the place it last made sense.
The moon has been rising larger since Thursday, towards full. After you leave on Saturday I look it up, sitting by the window through which the moon continues to be large. The Angle of Regard hypothesis, where the impression of scale is produced by the position of the eyes and head, is the explanation I’ll remember, although – perhaps because – ‘This is in fact not the case’ says Wikipedia imperiously; ‘The moon illusion remains intact independent of the position of the viewer's head relative to the position of the moon.’ The taste in my mouth, chewing-gum after the sugar’s spent, makes me realise I was looking for facts.
I collect them still like stones, line them up in the window light to see if any of the contours meet. You have to believe in them first, stones and facts, otherwise it’s just geology in pieces, on the slowest way to becoming something else. Sometimes the facts and the stones look very alike: the shape of lightning bolts, thrown from strata on a diagonal lean, because the earth in Canterbury was tilting with the planet. The shape of the braided Waimakariri River, because they are the pieces of its bed. The shape of your palm because you picked up what you could and this was the stone that rested most heavily. Continues to be that shape on the sill after you’ve gone, a fact without the place it last made sense.
2. Some galaxies move slowly through
the cosmos, evolving internally; many can also change more recklessly.
Heather said your heart actually breaks, like an egg. I know she’s right because we’re not talking about hearts, we’re talking about eggs. A man called Nature sold her parents a refrigerator and after talking about that we are talking about eggs. The heart part is incidental. Today I watched a video of how they insert a pacemaker. Cold titanium – the size of a wristwatch – into a two-inch insertion beneath the collarbone of a blue translucent man, and there was the arythmic heart, and it seemed to be suspended in air empty of gravity.
Then I’m sitting in a bar watching screensavers of a cosmological field, or it’s a video show, or it’s something that looks like a screensaver projected on a wall in bar where the music sounds better in the bathroom and you think about not going back. It’s dark mainly, punctuated by this projection, and it’s better that it’s dark because since you’ve gone everything makes the blood rise to my skin, like I’m blushing, but it’s really that my circulation has gone mad and all day there’s metal on my mind.
Everybody is studying atmospheres and flows, not structures says the architect, and I can hear in his voice that it makes him feel old, like a structure not an atmosphere.
If I wasn’t eavesdropping, I’d tell him about the asteroid 2013 TX68 that passed by earth a day ago at three o'clock according to the Minor Planet Centre. It has been too close to the sun for the last few months for astronomers to see it properly, and passed by 24,000 kilometres away at the closest, probably 34 and a half million kilometres. It won’t hit the earth for a century, though it will pass by again in a year. I want to tell him they use ceramic tiles, silicon dioxide and alumina, on space shuttles to shield the aluminium skin of the body in its ascent and re-entry through the earth’s atmosphere.
Heather said your heart actually breaks, like an egg. I know she’s right because we’re not talking about hearts, we’re talking about eggs. A man called Nature sold her parents a refrigerator and after talking about that we are talking about eggs. The heart part is incidental. Today I watched a video of how they insert a pacemaker. Cold titanium – the size of a wristwatch – into a two-inch insertion beneath the collarbone of a blue translucent man, and there was the arythmic heart, and it seemed to be suspended in air empty of gravity.
Then I’m sitting in a bar watching screensavers of a cosmological field, or it’s a video show, or it’s something that looks like a screensaver projected on a wall in bar where the music sounds better in the bathroom and you think about not going back. It’s dark mainly, punctuated by this projection, and it’s better that it’s dark because since you’ve gone everything makes the blood rise to my skin, like I’m blushing, but it’s really that my circulation has gone mad and all day there’s metal on my mind.
Everybody is studying atmospheres and flows, not structures says the architect, and I can hear in his voice that it makes him feel old, like a structure not an atmosphere.
If I wasn’t eavesdropping, I’d tell him about the asteroid 2013 TX68 that passed by earth a day ago at three o'clock according to the Minor Planet Centre. It has been too close to the sun for the last few months for astronomers to see it properly, and passed by 24,000 kilometres away at the closest, probably 34 and a half million kilometres. It won’t hit the earth for a century, though it will pass by again in a year. I want to tell him they use ceramic tiles, silicon dioxide and alumina, on space shuttles to shield the aluminium skin of the body in its ascent and re-entry through the earth’s atmosphere.
3.
Galaxies may collide, merge, sideswipe one another, or engulf matter passing.
I change my bike lock, not because the code is your birthday but because I can’t bear to think of you getting old while I’m just locking and unlocking my bike. I’ve got a year to change all my passwords and stop reading about metals on my phone while I wait all night to go to sleep. In astronomy, a metal is any element other than hydrogen or helium; when I read this it makes me think of all the world’s atoms as metallic forms colliding.[2]Bicycles clashing with thumb tacks with churchbells with teeth-braces.
In bodies, metals are necessary for metabolism and biochemical processes – there are trace amounts of iron, zinc, copper, manganese, chromium, molydenum and selenium. I remember the green that the cheap bracelets we bought over summer would leave on our wrists. The iron in the bore water that would make the bath rust brown. And manganese dioxide black as mushroom soil in May. I can look at things more closely now, from here where you usually are but without you, by the window which my mother designed for seeing the moon before the avocado tree got so tall.
Because I wrote I think I am in gulf, Jeremy emails back about the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. There is the Gulf Coast of the United States; there’s Mexico, and there are Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to the north, a ‘Third Coast’. Neither of us have been to any of these places, we use them like metaphors and it feels natural. When I read about dolomite, which is from magnesium replacing calcium in limestone, and that magnesium ions are abundant in sea water, so dolomite is likely the result of chemical reactions on ocean beds[3], it is natural to me that this occurs in the metaphorical gulf that Jeremy knew was also the Gulf of Mexico.
I wash all the stones, the sill. While I wash them I think about getting a terrarium or a fish tank to make sense of the stones, and about celebrity footballers who have aquariums underfloor. Recently I read a chapter in a book about the future, about asteroid aquariums: ‘Obviously it is also possible to make interiors that are all liquid. Some of these aquaria or oceanaria include archipeligo; others are entirely water, even their walls. Which are sometimes refrozen transparently so that in the end when you approach them, they look like diamonds or water droplets floating in space. Some aquaria have no air space in their middles.’[4]
Obviously is the best part, a room full of people in agreement. Like there’s nothing slowing down the possibility of another rock in space being habitable, like there’s not a rock holding down everything else from flying up, ecstatic with its own energy.
'Before measurement, there was air and ground, but not space as we know it. Ground is not a static support, any more than air is an empty container. The ground is full of movement, as full as the air is with weather, just at a different rhythm from most perceptible movements co-occurring with it.'[5] Maybe the moon is just larger when it’s close to the horizon.[6] Maybe it’s the size of my chest, the horizon as wide as my brow, and I breathe as clear as that old gold disc, while its high.
I change my bike lock, not because the code is your birthday but because I can’t bear to think of you getting old while I’m just locking and unlocking my bike. I’ve got a year to change all my passwords and stop reading about metals on my phone while I wait all night to go to sleep. In astronomy, a metal is any element other than hydrogen or helium; when I read this it makes me think of all the world’s atoms as metallic forms colliding.[2]Bicycles clashing with thumb tacks with churchbells with teeth-braces.
In bodies, metals are necessary for metabolism and biochemical processes – there are trace amounts of iron, zinc, copper, manganese, chromium, molydenum and selenium. I remember the green that the cheap bracelets we bought over summer would leave on our wrists. The iron in the bore water that would make the bath rust brown. And manganese dioxide black as mushroom soil in May. I can look at things more closely now, from here where you usually are but without you, by the window which my mother designed for seeing the moon before the avocado tree got so tall.
Because I wrote I think I am in gulf, Jeremy emails back about the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. There is the Gulf Coast of the United States; there’s Mexico, and there are Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to the north, a ‘Third Coast’. Neither of us have been to any of these places, we use them like metaphors and it feels natural. When I read about dolomite, which is from magnesium replacing calcium in limestone, and that magnesium ions are abundant in sea water, so dolomite is likely the result of chemical reactions on ocean beds[3], it is natural to me that this occurs in the metaphorical gulf that Jeremy knew was also the Gulf of Mexico.
I wash all the stones, the sill. While I wash them I think about getting a terrarium or a fish tank to make sense of the stones, and about celebrity footballers who have aquariums underfloor. Recently I read a chapter in a book about the future, about asteroid aquariums: ‘Obviously it is also possible to make interiors that are all liquid. Some of these aquaria or oceanaria include archipeligo; others are entirely water, even their walls. Which are sometimes refrozen transparently so that in the end when you approach them, they look like diamonds or water droplets floating in space. Some aquaria have no air space in their middles.’[4]
Obviously is the best part, a room full of people in agreement. Like there’s nothing slowing down the possibility of another rock in space being habitable, like there’s not a rock holding down everything else from flying up, ecstatic with its own energy.
'Before measurement, there was air and ground, but not space as we know it. Ground is not a static support, any more than air is an empty container. The ground is full of movement, as full as the air is with weather, just at a different rhythm from most perceptible movements co-occurring with it.'[5] Maybe the moon is just larger when it’s close to the horizon.[6] Maybe it’s the size of my chest, the horizon as wide as my brow, and I breathe as clear as that old gold disc, while its high.
This essay was written for Emma Fitts and Amelia Bywater, Victor & Hestor. A recording of the text was used in I Digress at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington in 2016.
The recording can be heard here.
[1] Beatrice Tinsley was an astrophysicist whose thesis (1968) offered
models for the ageing of galaxies. I started to read a paper she wrote in 1979 called ‘Stellar
Lifetimes and Abundance Ratios in Chemical Evolution.’ It was almost impossible
for an amateur to comprehend, but every time I returned to the title I felt
newly compelled to try. It stays sitting on my desk. I have borrowed the
section headings here from an article on her work written by Marcia Bartusik. (With
thanks to artist Pauline Rhodes, who first told me about Tinsley’s work.)
[2] ‘The atom-smasher that is the mind’ said Jeanette Winterson, speaking in Auckland on Sunday 15 May 2016, which makes collisions seem okay.
[2] ‘The atom-smasher that is the mind’ said Jeanette Winterson, speaking in Auckland on Sunday 15 May 2016, which makes collisions seem okay.
[3] See Ian
Hacking, ‘Rocks’, The social construction
of what? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 186-206.
[4] Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (New York: Hachette, 2012), 40.
[5] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 11.
[6] Maybe the fault lies with the measure; as Massumi continues, ‘Measurement stops the movement in thought, as it empties the air of weather, yielding space understood as a grid of determinate positions.’ Ibid.
[4] Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (New York: Hachette, 2012), 40.
[5] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 11.
[6] Maybe the fault lies with the measure; as Massumi continues, ‘Measurement stops the movement in thought, as it empties the air of weather, yielding space understood as a grid of determinate positions.’ Ibid.
