‘Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered into the hood of the car. They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.’
Grief does strange things to time. It opens up a wormhole between past, present and future, making lived time fall backwards and forwards into both, confusing the sense of being located in the present and making you feel dizzy. At the Observatory, the Astronomer told me that the ‘hole’ in ‘black holes’ is a misnomer. There is no hole, just a concretion of dense matter towards which other matter gravitates. A celestial hoover, with no dust bag, just an ever increasing density.
‘At a conference in Dublin… Dr. Hawking said that he had been wrong thirty years before when he asserted that information swallowed by a black hole could never be retrieved from it. This change of mind was of great consequence to science… because is Dr. Hawking has been right, it would have violated a basic tenet of modern physics: that is, it is always possible to reverse time, run the proverbial film backwards and reconstruct what happened in say, the collision of two cars or the collapse of a dead star into a black hole.’
Narrative is a panacea: to be unable to proscribe a story, and therefore a neat rendering of cause and effect to suffering is close to intolerable.
Emergent Causality: “Many causal relations are not susceptible to either efficient or mechanical modes of analysis. There are efficient causes, as when, to take a classic example, one billiard ball moves another in a specific direction. But emergent causality- the dicey process by which new entities and processes periodically surge into being- is irreducible to efficient causality. It is a mode in which new forces can trigger novel patterns of self-organisation in a thing, species, system, or being, sometimes allowing something new to emerge from the swirl back and forth between them.” A rupture in the expected order of things causes waves of effect to ripple outwards across bodies and communities, altering flows, reconfiguring various structures and ruining others.
"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
I am lost, but not in the sense of mislaying a bunch of keys, which might easily be found again, or forgetting you owned something at the back of a cupboard. I am lost in the sense of losing my bearings, the map no longer makes sense and I’m really in need of a new one. It is my own fault though, because I came to stop trusting not only in the map, but the form of navigation and the ground on which I stood. A coherent navigational system is not just useful, being in a body necessitates it. This system was conjured into sight by an appeal to my need to have my feet planted on firm ground, a need felt in my guts, my chest and across my forehead. But the writing on the map became obscure and nonsensical, and the magnet in the compass stopped working. The loss comes at the price of confusion first, then grief, and a haunting. His spectre rolls around in my consciousness as I go about my day, calling to me and asking me to return, like a stray who whines and paws at the doorway. But I am wise to His manipulations. The weight of this grief is heavy and stings the back of my eyelids. Perhaps I am the stray.
Yotta
Zetta
Exa
Peta
Tera
Giga
Mega
Kilo
Hecto
Deka
One, a perfect whole one formed inside my mouth by the shape of my tounge.
Deci
Centi
Milli
Micro
Nano
Pico
Femto
Atto
Zetto
Yocto
You are a straight line, a plumb line, set in the midst of His people. The straighter you are the more influence you’ll exert, like a magnet, and all their lines will converge to yours. You are travelling forwards, drawing them in with you, along the straight and narrow road, towards the certainty that that makes all lines straight. The same line that straightens the crooked back, that holds the lamp unto your feet, the voice tells you: ‘This is the way: walk in it’. The alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. The measure of measures, both the axis and the graph. Parallel lines which converge at a point on the horizon, the point we all travel towards. You are on a one way road to Heaven, travelling to that land on God’s celestial shore.
Once you put those Holy Spirit glasses on it was like seeing everything in four dimensions when once you only saw them in three, now you could see where the lines had been distorted, where falleness had messed with the correct order of things. Like living with shortsightedness and not realizing the fault until suddenly the blurred boundaries coalesced into clear lines of vision. You are as weightless as a thought, light with the clarity of clear sightedness. Everything within your purview will come under the authority of this vision, predestined to submit and transform. You were ordained to make right the wrongs.
Today, you awoke and the possibilities arrayed themselves before you.
In the beginning was planck time. A plank unit, also known as God’s Unit, is so small as to be a theoretical fiction, a speculative measure that no current instrument can access. Imagine a particle or dot 0.1 mm in size magnified to be as large as the observable universe. Inside that dot universe, Planck length would be a 0.1 mm dot. Equivalent to around a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a cm across (a decimal point followed by thirty four zeroes and a one), this is the scale at which the laws of quantum physics apply and quantum foam is believed to exist: where minute wormholes open and close constantly, giving space a rapidly-changing, foam-like structure. In the beginning was Planck time, in which convolutions, pressures and densities were so high that the multiplicity of singularities and event horizons disallowed matter and causality. The time of enveloping and meshing. The time of a vital fundament, a fulsome tumescence.
You are an eye-thought, enclosed in the warm lullabies of flesh.
You can see and think but cannot fathom where you begin and end.
The flesh sings to you, a quiet song. A song of belonging. A song that promises safety. You are enchanted by the warmth, by the rhythmic waves that lull and comfort. You wake, you sleep, the waves moving you through dream states.
You dream as though seeing through a fish eye lens. You are in a vast room. It is familiar. Rows upon rows of bleachers form a curve towards you to welcome and fold you in. You are held in place by expectant geometries of grids and lines that coalesce around you, by the segments of chairs and rigging, the vertiginous steps and hand rails. The ceiling is studded with lights like the dome of the night sky. The room is filled with people, the stage is filled with people. Multiple screens multiply the faces. All the bodies know their place. They belong to each other, and belong to the room. This is your family, and the belonging is your inheritance. You thought you came here because you willed it, but now you know that it was meant to be. His eyes saw your unformed body; all the days ordained for you were written in His book before a single one of them began. Even the hairs on your head are all numbered.
The waiting bodies are now reaching out, faces upturned, eyes shut, arms straining, fingers splayed towards something high up and out of reach. At intervals, a body becomes a lightning rod for an unseen presence, the body writhes and jabbers or shakes and weeps. This presence in the room is materializing in desiring bodies. There is a laying on of hands. A healing work is taking place. A shout rises up in their mouths: ‘Thirsty! Thirsty! Thirsty! Hungry! Hungry! Hungry!’ Bodies fall in the spirit, crumpling under the saturating weight of His presence. The wave of falling bodies come closer up the stands. You can feel something drawing near in the prickling sensation in your skin, in the raised hairs and blood vessels dilating. Your heart beats quicken. You sweat, your pores producing glistening beads which reflect the auditorium from every angle, the screens and ceiling and banks of seating reflected in curved lines and pin pricks of light. Your head aches a little, you have become dehydrated. Your mouth is dry. You are thirsty. You feel a weight in your chest, you open your arms, you are ready. The anticipation has produced an excess of adrenaline, you move without thought, uninhibited, with the need to join in the writhing mass of bodies. Behind your eyelids you are tumbling through space.
“But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”
I am a backslider.
To be a backslider is worse than being lost - at least the lost can claim ignorance. To live in grace and then deny it seems unspeakable and wrong-footed. I used to feel concerned for the backsliders, feel sorry that we weren’t better at compelling them to stay, feel worried for their inevitable isolation and existential sadness. I am circumspect about my current malaise, wary of it becoming too well known. I don’t want people enquiring after me, offering to pray, talking about me. I’d rather slip away quietly on my own terms, because I am proud. I am also teetering on the brink, and at any point am as likely to fall forwards as fall backwards. I have tried out both several times in the course of a single day.
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
I continually trip myself up. I am fearful of becoming permanently fallen. The term ‘backslider’ connotes a conception of faith as a line of progress, moving steadily forwards towards a divine goal. I imagine myself as a blood cell, in the push pull through veins and arteries, charging forwards. A backsliding blood cell might cause a stroke.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, is that any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, known as complementary variables, such as position x and momentum p, can be known. The uncertainty principle is that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.
The terrain is unfamiliar, the ground undulates, it is dense and lined with fine red roots, endlessly splayed.
You open your mouth to speak but instead bubbles issue forth in a wet spray and disperse.
You are enclosed in a muscular chasm, lit by a projection screen.
I have a wound in the wall of my mouth. I repeatedly bother it with the tip of my tongue. The wound has healed over but formed a small ridge of scar tissue. A keloid scar. An interloper in the thought space of my mouth cavity. My nephew has a keloid scar that runs the length of his chest from between his clavicles to just below his rib cage. It is like a zip where the stuffing has burst forth in the gaps between stitches. He has had his sternum sawn through three times. My scar is a result of idiocy, of passing out and crashing my face into the bathroom sink, at which point my bottom teeth were forced through the skin under my lip, right through to the outside of my face. My teeth rang with the impact for hours after. My nephew’s scar is the result of our failure to heed the warning signs. My sister lives each day within a world where nothing is certain. It makes her tired.
The walls glisten.
Wetness trickles.
The walls move in waves.
The largest unit is a Yotta, and is equivalent to a septillion or 10 to the power of 24. From this high point, one can descend through sextillions, quintillions, quadrillions, trillions and billions, down to the seeming insignificance of a mere million, the prefix for which is a Mega.
confirmation bias,
noun
The tendency to interpret
new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.
God's
Units
Didion, J. (2009) The Year of Magical Thinking London: Fourth Estate p. 153
Overbye, D (2004) About Those Fearsome Black Holes? Never Mind (http://www.nytimes.com/ 3 2004/07/22/world/about-those-fearsome-black-holes-nevermind.html.ref=dennisoverbye) July 22nd 2004
Connolly, W (2010) ‘Materialities of Experience’. In Coole, D & Frost, S (eds) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics Duke University Press p. 179