2 posts tagged “things that may or may not change everything”
According to the global society of astronomists, we are here, frankly, because we have not yet split apart. An unidentified substance known as"dark matter," which currently takes about about a 1/4 of the solar system has been the sole entity keeping us together for all these years (Captain & Tennille will disagree with this). Trouble is no one knows what dark matter looks like, or how long it will stick around.
"Well, it's like a sort of glue." shrugged one scientist interviewed by the seattle post today.
Not content to sit around and awe over this new diety, The astronomists of the world have taken to chasing it down. They are in a universal race for the answer. The U.S., Europe and Japan in the lead. They've all got different methods and machines that they think will be the link to this epoxy. Weary of looking up and seeing nothing. NASA recently comondeered a defunct mine shaft In South Dakota. Because, maybe looking down will start to do us some good. The mine has been deepened to astonishing ends. It is now the length of 6 empire state buildings tip to tip from gravel to core. Once, in Italy, three scientists claimed to have heard the traces of it in a sonar instrument they had developed. They were never able to replicate it. A frustration, I think, only the most faithful of believers can understand.
"You're what the autumn knew would happen
After the collapse of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
You could begin."
(Adrienne Rich | November 1969)
Sitting, on the last symbolic day of summer, waiting for the rain to start. Weather dot com has called for rain. CNN has called for rain. But the skys are blue, and though the air in Boston has begun to taste like fall, I'm thinking we've all been fooled again.
September has become such a strange month. Once home only to my birthday and the start of school, it has juxtaposed two of our largest national catastrophes. Both unimaginable: one because of how terrifyingly unnatural it was, how blanketly man-made and hellish, and the other because out of nowhere, something as simple as water became a WMD.
It's remarkable, the absolute ordinariness of some of the things that can level us. It's surprising, even now, how you can feel things changing in a vague and prodigeous way.
