Shutdown as Dark Matter
I’ve finally gotten some time off, well deserved I think. This has meant rest, rest, gardening, rest, building a frame for an art print out of 1 x 4 inch strips of walnut polished to 10,000 grit, reading an Italian phrasebook in bed in the middle of the afternoon, and lazily catching up on subjects that I don’t ordinarily have bandwidth for.
One of my cousins is doing a post-doc in theoretical physics, and is now at a university in China. I attended his dissertation defense about a year and a half ago and understood approximately nothing he said. It might as well have been in Mandarin.
One of the thoughtstreams percolating in the background for awhile, as GROUND releases, has been this notion of shutdown as absence. Shutdown creates interoceptive deficits in the body, so its presence (the presence of cold stress, trauma) is signified by an absence of feeling.
The peculiar thing about this is that it means the more shutdown a person is carrying, the less they feel. They don’t feel worse necessarily- they feel less. This also means that unless they have a clear before and after– and they can remember the before– they often don’t know that they are carrying the shutdown.
The presence of this kind of trauma is actually an absence. At some point it jumped out at me that the book I had written about words missing in the English language (see my essay on All the Words We Cannot Say), Keywords, is similarly, an attempt to map negative space. A portrait of the precise shape of what is missing.
With these thought streams in the background, I came across an article a couple of days ago about a runaway black hole ripping across interstellar space at 2.2 million miles per hour. To make a long story short, I got intrigued by how this might happen, and this led me to a simulation from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, which is basically explaining what happens when two black holes of different sizes collide.
What ended up astounding me are the gravitational waves around the blackholes, which are essentially fluxing space-time.
Although I am taking some profound metaphorical liberties here, we might say that this is a mathematical model of the interference pattern of two absences of varying masses colliding.
