A Pocket Introduction to Our Universe

Speculative Friction

By Claire Bateman

“A Pocket Introduction to Our Universe”

What does our universe most like to do?
To contort without any warning
into nothing but corners,
an awkward though not unbeautiful
configuration.

Of what elements is our universe composed?

The first is distance,
of which there are innumerable varieties,
such as the chromatic stutter between
forethought and aftertaste,
and the measureless span between
the transparent and the merely translucent.

The second is otherness,
that of the other
and that of the self,
reciprocal and ever-escalating glories.

What holds things together and apart?

The strong and weak gravitational forces.
Scar tissue.
The Great Universal Loneliness,
from which not even the material realm
has been excluded.

What are some of the forces that pass through flesh and bone?

Neutrinos.
X-Rays.
Invisibility itself passes through the body
in immense, inarticulate storms.

What are some of the anomalies of our universe?

Holes may be filled but never undug,
and may perish by suffocation or drowning,
but never suicide.

A small sadness may easily dislodge
a larger one.

We have fireproof gloves,
but not gloves of flame,
which surely could be of use.

What in our universe can be trusted?

The perpetual transformation
of inside into outside,
and vice versa.

Anything so damaged
it can suffer
no further harm.

Anything so far fallen
it has nowhere deeper
to go.

What is the primary mode of light and matter?

Unappeasable deference and displacement:
“After you!”
“No, no, I insist; after you!”

What was time contemplating as it sprang into existence?

Thirst and the water of drinking fountains,
their common surge—

ever too much
before it becomes enough.

© by Claire Bateman

 

GREENVILLE, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—3/14/11—From Charles Yu’s brilliant novel, How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Yu):

“This is how the protagonist breaks out of a time loop:

 

Instead of just passively allowing the events of my life to continue to happen to me, I could see what it might be like to be the main character in my own story. The event: I have to confront myself. The truth: it is going to be painful. It will end in death, for me, it will not change anything. These are the givens. These are the received truths. I can go through the motions of being myself, ceding responsibility for my actions to fate, to my personal historical record, to what I know is already going to happen. My arms and legs will not change in their movements. I can’t change any of that. Nor can I change the path of my body, the words from my lips, not even the focus of my eyes. I have no control over any of it. What I do have control over is my own intention. In the space between free will and determinism are these imperceptible gaps, these lacunae, the volitional interstices, the holes and the nodes, the material and the æther, the something and the nothing that, at once, separate and bind the moments together, the story together, my actions together, and it’s in these gaps, in these pauses where the fictional science breaks down, where neither the science nor the fiction can penetrate, where the fiction that we call the present moment exists.

This, then, is my choice:

I can allow the events of my life to happen to me.

Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, and be assured of failure.

From the outside, these two choices would look identical. Would be identical, in fact. Either way, my life will turn out the same. Either way, there will come a time when I will lose everything. The difference is, I can choose to do that, I can choose to live that way, to live on purpose, live with intention . . .

. . . A total superimposition of the universal wave function still occurs, but its ultimate fate remains an interpretational issue.”