Emerence had been rather brusque when asked to call round for a chat, so I tracked her down in the courtyard of the villa where she was caretaker. It was close by—so close I could see her flat from our balcony. She was washing a mountain of laundry with the most antiquated equipment, boiling bedlinen in a cauldron over a naked flame, in the already agonizing heat, and lifting the sheets out with an immense wooden spoon. Fire glowed all around her…. She radiated strength like a Valkyrie…. She had agreed to call, and so now we were standing here, in the garden…
I know now, what I didn’t then, that affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.
She also demanded of me that, in my art, it should be real passion and not machinery that moved the branches. That was a major gift, the greatest of her bequests.
Emerence was spontaneously good, unthinkingly generous, able to reveal her orphaned condition only to another orphan, but never giving voice to her utter loneliness.
Once again her face changed. She was like someone standing in strong sunlight on a mountain top, looking back down the valley from which she had emerged and trembling with the memory still in her bones of the length and nature of the road she had travelled, the glaciers and forded rivers, the weariness and danger, and conscious of how far she still had to go.
The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice — as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings.
Above all she hated the idle, lying gentry. Priests were liars; doctors ignorant and money-grabbing; lawyers didn’t care who they represented, victim or criminal; engineers calculated in advance how to keep back a pile of bricks for their own houses; and the huge plants, factories and institutes of learning were all filled with crooks.
... whoever happened to be in power gave the orders, and anyone giving orders, whoever it was, whenever, and whatever the order, did it in the name of some incomprehensible gobbledygook. Whoever was on top, however promising, and whether he was on top in her own interests or not, they were all the same, all oppressors. In Emerence’s world, there were two kinds of people, those who swept and those who didn’t….
As I listened I felt a dull numbness, like the effect of chloroform, rather than the primal, anarchic agony you usually feel when you encounter someone you have loved now turned to dust, in some object like a little bowl, and you are required to believe that it is still the same person who once smiled at you.
“They want peace. Do you believe that? I don’t, because who then will buy the guns, and what pretext will they have for hanging and looting? And anyway, if there’s never been world peace before, why should it happen now?"
The glass cage enclosed an immense musical instrument comprising brass horns, strings, circular bows, mechanical keyboards of every kind, and an extensive percussion section.
Against the cage, at the front of the platform, a large space was reserved for two huge cylinders, one red and one white; these communicated with the atmosphere sealed inside the transparent walls through a metal tube.
The fragile stem of an exceedingly tall thermometer, on which each degree was divided into tenths, rose from the cage, into which only its narrow reservoir dipped, filled with a sparkling purple liquid. No mounting held the thin diaphanous tube, placed a few centimeters from the edge that the two cylinders lightly touched.
With all eyes fixed on the curious machine, Bex offered a series of precise, lucid, and informed explanations.
We learned that the instrument before us would soon function thanks to an electric motor hidden in its sides.
Also powered by electricity, the cylinders pursued their two contrary objectives: the red one contained an infinitely powerful heat source, while the white constantly produced an intense cold capable of liquefying any gas.
It happened that the various components of the automated orchestra were made of bexium, a new metal that Bex had chemically endowed with phenomenal thermal sensitivity. Indeed, the entire musical apparatus was intended solely to highlight, in the most striking way possible, the properties of the strange substance that the able inventor had discovered.
A block of bexium subjected to various temperatures changed volume in proportions that could be quantified from one to ten.
The apparatus’s entire mechanism was based on this single fact.
At the top of each cylinder, a smoothly turning knob regulated the opening of an inner spigot that communicated via the metal conduit with the glass cage; Bex could thus change the temperature of the interior atmosphere at will. As a result of these constant disturbances, the fragments of bexium, powerfully depressing certain springs, alternately activated or deactivated a given keyboard or group of pistons, which were moved at the correct moment by ordinary notched disks.
Despite these fluctuations in temperature, the strings invariably remained in tune, thanks to a certain preparation Bex had created to render them especially stiff.
The crystal used for the cage walls was at once marvelously thin and impenetrably resistant, and consequently the sound was scarcely muffled by this delicate, vibrating obstacle.
I do not access hyperobjects across a distance, through some transparent medium. Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space. Like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly: their very nearness is what menaces. From the center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole impinges on my awareness, as if it were sitting in the car next to me at the traffic lights. Every day, global warming burns the skin on the back of my neck, making me itch with physical discomfort and inner anxiety. Evolution unfolds in my genome as my cells divide and mutate, as my body clones itself, as one of my sperm cells mixes it up with an egg. As I reach for the iPhone charger plugged into the dashboard, I reach into evolution, into the extended phenotype that doesn’t stop at the edge of my skin but continues into all the spaces my humanness has colonized.
On every right side mirror of every American car is engraved an ontological slogan that is highly appropriate for our time: objects in
mirror are closer than they appear. Not only do I fail to access hyperobjects at a distance, but it also becomes clearer with every passing day that “distance” is only a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things.
When I look at Untitled 2011 by the Aboriginal artist Yukultji Napangati, I am gripped immediately in the tractor beam of the painting, which seems to be gazing at me as much as or more than I am looking at it. A simple JPEG of the painting doesn’t look like much. It’s a larg ish square of thin brown waving lines, hand drawn. Yet as I approach it, it seems to surge toward me, locking onto my optic nerve and holding me in its force field. Napangati’s painting strafes me with layer upon layer of interference patterns. Her work makes Bridget Riley’s op art look simple by comparison, though I find both painters astonishing. I don’t experience Napangati’s painting as a series of lines that I resolve into a whole. The whole painting leaps at me, as a unit. The painting is a slice of the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal hyperobject, and a map of desert sand hills where a small group of women gathered food and performed rituals. Even though Untitled 2011 is a piece about a larger space, both cosmic and earthly, the painting is a quantum all to itself, not an incomplete part. In no sense do I assemble the painting. Nothing about the painting is passive, inert, waiting to be interpreted or completed. I find it impossible to leave the painting. Hairs standing up on my body, tears streaming down my face, slowly I tear myself away, only to return an hour later to be drenched in its resonance.
When I look at the sun gleaming on the solar panels on my roof, I am watching global warming unfold. Carbon compounds and other molecules in the upper atmosphere magnify the burning intensity of the sun in the Great Central Valley of California. Yet I do not see global warming as such. I see this brilliant blade of sunlight, burning the top of my head as I watch it with half-closed eyes reflecting off the burnished, sapphire surface of the solar panels.
In 2002 three wandering woodcutters in a north Georgian forest near the village of Liya discovered two small cylinders of radioactive strontium-90 that kept them warm for a few hours’ sleep before they succumbed to radiation sickness and burning. Strontium-90 emits beta rays, quanta that can pass through skin; beta rays release a great deal of heat when they strike other quanta. The exposed Strontium-90 sources emitted thirty-five thousand curies each, giving a fatal dose of radiation in two minutes.
In the final episode of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper enters the demonic Black Lodge. He is offered a cup of coffee, his favorite beverage, the drink with which we often mark time (as with the coffee break or morning coffee). Yet when he tries to drink it, he finds that the coffee has frozen into a solid plastic lump of darkness. It is as if time has stopped. Then he tries to pour it again, and it spills on his legs, burning him. Time flows at a human speed. Then when he pours it once again, it oozes out of the cup like the “burnt engine oil” whose smell coats the surface of the entrance to the Black Lodge. What is real? It is as if we are seeing the same events
happening from the points of view of different beings, with very different temporalities.
