Project Description

Indeterminate Hikes + (IH+) is a mobile phone app that transforms everyday landscapes into sites of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings. Generally devices of rapid communication and consumerism, smartphones are re-appropriated by IH+ as tools of environmental imagination and meditative wonder, renewing awareness of intertwining biological, cultural, and media ecologies and slowing us down at the same time.

The app works by importing the rhetoric of wilderness into virtually any place accessible by Google Maps and encouraging its users to treat these locales as spaces worthy of the attention accorded to sublime landscapes, such as canyons and gorges. This project extends from ecoarttech’s belief that ecological awareness must be based in the places that humans actually live, not just in relatively uninhabited natural spaces. We also believe it is essential that conversations about environmental sustainability and ecological management be democratized through the arts, and not only considered within a scientific context.

IH+ is currently available on Android. The iPhone version will be released in summer 2012.

How IH+ Works

IH can be performed in two ways: (1) as an interactive public event led by artist-guides (e.g., at festivals/exhibitions), or (2) as a self-guided excursion taken by a hiker equipped with an IH+-enabled smartphone. After identifying participants’ location, IH+ provides a “hiking trail” with a series of randomly designated “Scenic Vistas,” where users are: (1) asked to contemplate “spectacular” views, much as they would on a mountaintop or at a waterfall, (2) encouraged to take 30 mindful breaths or a 5-minute break, while (3) contemplating a directive, such as “Follow the path of falling water,” “Wander the caverns on the surface of the earth, “Discover humans’ primal etchings.” On city streets, where most IH+ performances take place, these directions inspire participants to slow down and notice the sublimity of seemingly anti-spectacular spaces. Rather than encountering a stereotypically breathtaking panorama, participants are confronted with the notion that “falling water” may be the trickle of water dripping into a gutter; “caverns” may include the depths of basements or skyscrapers; and “primitive etchings” may be graffiti. Thus the ecological wonder usually associated with “natural” spaces, such as national parks, is re-appropriated here to renew awareness of the often-disregarded spaces in our culture that also need attention, such as alleyways, highways, and garbage dumps. IH+ hikers take away from our performances a sense that they see the world anew; they have treated the usually mundane act of walking through their home-city as wilderness excursion.

About ecoarttech

We, Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint, founded ecoarttech in 2005 to explore environmental issues and convergent media from an interdisciplinary perspective. Leila earned her PhD in literature from Columbia University in 2009 and was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College in 2010-2011. Cary is Assistant Professor of Digital Art at University of Rochester and has created new media art for over twenty years. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, and Computer Fine Arts.

Our collaborative explores what it means to be a modern ecological being amidst networked environments, including biological systems, global cultural exchanges, international commerce, industrial grids, digital networks, and the world wide web. Merging primitive with emergent technologies, we investigate the overlapping terrain between “nature,” built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. Our recent work includes commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Turbulence.org, and University of North Texas and exhibitions/performances at MIT Media Lab, Smackmellon Gallery, European Media Art Festival, Exit Art Gallery, and Neuberger Museum of Art.

As former New Yorkers living upstate but with continual contact with NYC, we are intrigued by the effects of city-country relationships on the artistic imagination, especially with rural spaces becoming increasingly networked. In 2011, we will be “off-the-grid” artist-residents at Joya: Arte+Ecología, in an Eastern-Andalusian national park. We are also at work launching our own residency program in the Maine mountains where new media practitioners will be invited to make art in networked treehouses.

Thank you to everyone that submitted to the contest. We look forward to hearing from you again next year!

Kent MacCarter, expatriate of Minnesota, Montana and New Mexico, former resident of Florence and Sienna, Italy, is now a permanent resident in Melbourne, Australia with his wife, son and two cats. MacCarter came to Australia in 2004 to study poetry and writing. In the Hungry Middle of Here, his first collection of poetry, is published by Transit Lounge Press. In 2012, another poetry collection, Ribosome Spreadsheet, will be released as well as a non-fiction anthology he is currently co-editing on expatriate writers now living and writing from Australia. His career in Australia has chiefly been in educational and academic publishing as a developmental editor for multimedia, online resources, and ebooks. He currently sits on the executive board of The Small Press Network, an advocate association for small presses as they meet challenges of the digital revolution in publishing. MacCarter is Managing Editor for Cordite Poetry Journal and an active member in Melbourne PEN.

Today’s interview is with Paul Levine. Philip Levine received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his collection The Simple Truth. He has authored fifteen other collections of poetry as well as translations, essays, and criticism. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O’Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. For two years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000.

Interview with Philip Levine, 21 November 2005, revised 29 April 2011

KM: As precursor to this interview, you mentioned how Hugo, “once said to me (Levine) that the two of us and Jim Wright were aiming at the same poem or were driven by the same concerns” and that you “felt a kinship with him (Hugo) since we shared a common goal.” Can you explain a bit more how that kinship formed and what it developed into regarding yours and his work in contemporary American poetry?

PL: The kinship is obvious. It seems to me the three of us went about our work with encouragement from the other two but with that alone. (Dick wrote a glowing review of my work for APR, I believe. A letter Jim wrote me praising one of my poems is in the new collection of his letters. Alas, I never praised either in print though I must have in letters.) I can find no Hugo or Wright in my work and none of my work in theirs. Nor did either ever help me with a poem nor did they ask for my help. Our meetings were not frequent enough to suit me, but they were invariably warm and rewarding. I did work hard to get Dick an NBA nomination with the knowledge he wouldn’t win. The prize was split that year between Rich and Ginsberg (Allen got half only because of my stubbornness).

KM: What do you remember Hugo embracing as the same concerns fueling the drive to a similar goal as yours?

PL: You must have read our work.

KM: The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir was reprinted in 1999. Aside from this, it’s been a mostly quiet twenty years regarding interest in Hugo’s contribution to poetry. Do you feel that Hugo’s poetic project is strong enough (or resonates enough, now, thirty years past what he considered to be his prime) to instigate a renaissance in interest in his poems?

PL: Of course it’s strong enough. The job will either be completed by his former students and his surviving friends or it won’t happen. He NEVER got his due, but I know first-hand that there were many who loved his work. Loved and used by younger poets of the Northwest.

KM: Can you recall of any town or particular place, recently, where something in the manner of ‘This would have triggered Richard’ occurred to you? If so, what? Where?

PL: Oddly enough, the outskirts of Como, Italy is the first place that comes to mind: an abandoned industrial area and slum half a mile from one of the most gorgeous places in the world. Right behind that comes the small farms of the Hudson Valley which are no longer farmed & where the city folks have yet to arrive. Whenever I go to Seattle, I think of Dick; about 18 months ago I witnessed a man of 40 picking on a small kid of 16 or so, and I wondered what Dick would have done had he been there—this was in a seedy area near the Pike Street Market. Fortunately, the kid was too quick for this jerk & escaped unharmed. That simple case of injustice, bullying, would have roiled Dick’s heart.

KM: I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, but David Plowden’s photographs move me in directions that many poems do. When I see Plowden’s prints of cantilever bridges over the Ohio River, my knee-jerk sensation is that I have been transported to James Wright Country; Plowden’s photographs of an empty, straight-as-an-arrow by-way in Montana teleport me into Richard Hugo Country; countries that exist at the intersection of word and image. What do you think the dangers and rewards are for a poem being a written photograph of place?

PL: The risks are the same as a poem not written to be “a photograph of place”.

KM: Hugo labeled himself a regionalist poet (going so far as to attest he didn’t much care for those who weren’t). Do you agree? Or did he manage to transcend many of the shackles that label feeds upon with his successful Italy and Scotland books?

PL: I always though he meant he didn’t care for abstract work, or work that took place largely in the mind. He was—as am I—for “a local habitation.” I know he said regional, but he was writing for anyone who could read.

KM: Autobiographical or not, your poem “At Bessemer”, in A Walk with Tom Jefferson, very much affords me the opportunity, and rather believably at that, to place Hugo as the narrator even though the region and its specifics are quite different to his early environs. Can you think of any Hugo poems that would fit your experience in the same manner without too much tailoring?

PL: “White Center” comes immediately to mind, though I don’t have it here. My sense is my version would have been much shorter. I don’t honestly think I have that many details stored in my memory of those years; this may be due to the fact I’m now 77 & Dick was probably in his fifties when he wrote the poem. Even if I had that many details, my poem would be shorter. Mine would probably be constructed around a narrative of some sort. Different, but very similar in aim and in feeling. Maybe one day I’ll write it.

KM: Your poem “Soul” from A Simple Truth utilises the social and economic environment of your youth in the greater Detroit area. Hugo’s poem, “Duwamish Head”, does the same for him. Do you think that being enveloped in working-middle-class environs at such a young age provides a poet with any truer (or heightened might be more apt) sense of being and writing about being part of the human condition?

PL: No.

KM: It can be argued that Philip Levine was to Larry Levis as Richard Hugo was to James Welch: established poets unearthing unlikely writers haling from unlikely locales writing extraordinary poetry; Fresno and Missoula vs. Princeton and New Haven, say. Can you proffer a guess as to what Hugo might think of the current state of creative writing, where the gems lay hidden, and how to mine (then nurture) them in the ever growing list of available university programs today?

PL: Dick was on one level a practical man, and he would have understood that the spread of MFA programs throughout the country had given his former students jobs. What comes from those programs can be amazing & can be hopeless, but it was always that way. Also, he might have been thrilled by the success of someone like Levis, a major talent from Sanger, CA, “The Raisin Capital of the World.” Are all the people teaching poetry writing in MFA programs as good at it & as dedicated as Dick was? No, but they weren’t when there were only ten or fewer programs. I team taught for a week at Emory with Dick, and later I inherited a few of his students; I know how good he was. He wanted very badly to teach well, he truly cared about that. I think our backgrounds had taught us that if you took a job, you gave it your all and that way kept your self-respect.

Colin Post reading
David Gates reading

Shawn Haggerty reading
Prageeta Sharma reading

Kent MacCarter, expatriate of Minnesota, Montana and New Mexico, former resident of Florence and Sienna, Italy, is now a permanent resident in Melbourne, Australia with his wife, son and two cats. MacCarter came to Australia in 2004 to study poetry and writing. In the Hungry Middle of Here, his first collection of poetry, is published by Transit Lounge Press. In 2012, another poetry collection, Ribosome Spreadsheet, will be released as well as a non-fiction anthology he is currently co-editing on expatriate writers now living and writing from Australia. His career in Australia has chiefly been in educational and academic publishing as a developmental editor for multimedia, online resources, and ebooks. He currently sits on the executive board of The Small Press Network, an advocate association for small presses as they meet challenges of the digital revolution in publishing. MacCarter is Managing Editor for Cordite Poetry Journal and an active member in Melbourne PEN.

Today’s interview is with Paul Mariani, one of the preeminent academic scholars of working class literature in the United States. His honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author of six poetry collections as well as five biographies and several volumes of literary criticism publications. He currently holds a Chair in Poetry at Boston College.

Interview with Paul Mariani, 18 January 2006, revised 8 May 2011

KM: In a recent correspondence I had with Philip Levine, he remarked that Richard Hugo once said to him that he “felt a kinship with him (Levine) since we shared a common goal” and that, “he (Hugo) once said to me that the two of us & Jim Wright were aiming at the same poem or were driven by the same concerns.” What do think that common goal was?

PM: James Wright of Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, Philip Levine from Detroit, Richard Hugo from Seattle and the West Coast: all with many of the same preoccupations, and haunted by working-class backgrounds. Levine I know the best of the three, though I’ve followed the career of the other two and am reading Wright’s letters at the moment. Franz Wright, I had dinner with last May, and you can see the man has been through a lot, and that he’s somehow squeezed it on to the page. I am going to send you by attachment an essay on class I wrote back in mid-1992. It may tell you where I am coming from. Also, in the last issue but one of Image, an interview I did with another working-class poet, B.H. Fairchild. Let me tell you a story. Years ago—when I was just starting out as a poet—around 1975—I sent a manuscript to UMass Press, because they’d published some of my stuff. They sent it to an academic who not only misunderstood the poems, but wrote back anonymously, of course, asking why anyone would even be interested in such a working-class family. That person, I assume, is now roasting nicely in the 9th circle of hell or thereabouts.

KM: What might have been the concerns driving these poets in whatever commonality they had?

PM: The desire to be given a chance to be heard, to lift from anonymity so many of the dead who would otherwise go under earth’s lid without so much as a nod. The desire too to raise to the level of the imagination (thank you, Dr. Williams) the language as it is spoken about us every day. To sing the inherent dignity of such people, while keeping an eye on the weasels and the foxes and the others. To carry on the work of Wordsworth and Whitman and Frost and Larkin and Langston Hughes—yes—Dylan Thomas—and others. To employ the language of Polish mothers, to hear those internal speech rhythms, and lift them to the level of music, where they belong.

KM: Do you think Hugo has been overlooked in the study of working-class poetics? Or perhaps given more credence than he deserves?

PM: What is immortality these days? Twenty years of posthumous fame? Dick Hugo, Charles Olsen, even Jim Wright—all seem to have suffered the loss of stalwart audiences in the years since their death. I have spent my life devoted to poetry and poets and the lives of poets. But even my best friends aren’t interested in poetry or poems, except when deep seriousness somehow strikes them. A few students and readers here and there, and that’s it. Or at least that seems to be the case. Thank God for seminars and classes in poetry where this all-important manner of speech still has breathing room.

0.           A point

I remember the strange feeling of fascination that gripped me when I first learned there are ten dimensions. A feeling like being drawn to the warmth of a fire, but at the same time made uncomfortable by its heat, an itch under the skin. A weight all around me. Fascination like Rudolf Otto spoke of as mysterium tremendum et fascinans: attraction to, but at the same time repulsion from, the ineffable otherness of the unknown and the unknowable. Otto pondered God, or gods; he described the human experience of the holy as one of terror and wonder triggered by the overwhelming mystery of the divine.

Everything starts with a point. A point, such as one graphed on a coordinate plane, has no dimension. It has neither length nor width. It cannot be measured.

There’s mystery there, in the immeasurable.

1.          Two points connected.

A line has no width or depth, only length. It is one-dimensional. Lines are named for the points they comprise. A line spanning the gap between points A and B is given the name Line AB. Essentially, points give a line purpose—after all, what is a line but the points it connects?

I feel that there are two of me, linked but held separate by the line that connects them. One goes about his business, understands that there are things he needs to do to keep things running smoothly. He accomplishes short-term goals, makes and plans to make long-term ones. He gets lost in books, in television shows, in the eyes of a woman. He plays video games and browses the Web, laughing at photos of cats with slapstick captions.
The other thinks only of dying.

These two strangers—one immortal in his inability to comprehend death, the other in a prolonged state of dying—occasionally meet. They brush against one another in my mind. Each becomes aware of what is known by the other, if only briefly. There is a rending kind of collision; I panic.

2.           Divergence

A second line branching out from the first toward a third point creates a figure in the second dimension. The second dimension is governed by length and width.

In his 1884 novella, Flatland, Edwin Abbott imagines a world existing on a single plane, like a sheet of paper. Its inhabitants—lines, triangles, squares, and circles—are divided and ranked by shape in a mockery of Victorian social hierarchy. They “move freely about, on or in the surface” of the world, Abbott says, “but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows.”

Abbott’s protagonist, a square, is goaded into a metaphysical mind-fuck by a curious three-dimensional visitor: a sphere. The sphere is visible to the square only as a circle that appears from thin air and can grow and shrink in size. This is because those living in Flatland can only see three-dimensional objects as a series of two-dimensional cross-sections—what the square is actually seeing is the sphere passing through his world. To a Flatlander, a person passing through Flatland would resemble more closely slices of lunch meat than a human being.

3.           Folding a crucifix into a cube

There’s a hefty paperback on my bookshelf called A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe that I’ve never read. It was given to me eight years ago by the man my mother was dating: a blue-blooded, born-again, Rastafarian architect named Ian Rutherford. Inside the book’s front cover is his inscription, taken from The First Epistle to the Thessalonians:

PROVE ALL THINGS;
HOLD FAST THAT
WHICH IS GOOD.
i • THE • 2i

He was convinced God was an architect—The Architect—and tried to concretize a trinity of Jesus, Haile Selassie, and himself into my life for the five years or so he and my mother were involved. He wanted to adopt me, wanted to be my father.

I page through the book, written by Michael S. Schneider. Chapter three: “Three-Part Harmony.” In the margin, illustrations of cross-sectioned fruits and vegetables show “internal three-corner structure.” On the page opposite are diagrams of butterflies, flowers, and cucumber slices. The book is full of references to religion, philosophy, and pop-culture. Schneider quotes Carl Jung: “There is an unfolding of the One to a condition where it can be known—unity becomes recognizable.” He quotes Homer: “All was divided into three.” He compares Shinto symbols to the Citgo logo, a piano’s keyboard to the cathedral of Notre Dame.

The third dimension, which Abbott’s square calls Spaceland, is measured by length, width, and height. The square becomes aware of it when he is able to lift himself from the plane of Flatland, transforming himself into a cube. His notions of the universe are torn apart. “Behold, I am become as a God,” he says. “For the wise men in our country say that to see all things, or as they express it, omnividence, is the attribute of God alone.”

The third dimension is a way of touching to points on a line together: simply fold the page. The third dimension gives us the leeway to turn paper crosses into cubes, to cover them in dots and make dice like we did in grade school.

In 2004, Ian Rutherford, under the omnivident guidance of his own God, changed his name to John Ru The Ford and traveled to Indonesia to marry a woman he’d met in a Yahoo! chat room.

4.           Time

Draw a line between who you are now and who you were five years ago. Suddenly you become an object defined not only by length, width, and height, but also by duration. That line, time, exists in the fourth dimension. “If you were to see your body in the fourth dimension,” Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension, writes, “you would be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self at one end and your deceased self at the other.”

“Just like that Flatlander who could only see two-dimensional cross-sections of objects from the dimension above,” Bryanton continues, borrowing from Abbott, “we as three-dimensional creatures only see three-dimensional cross-sections of our fourth-dimensional self.”

The cross-sections are like the pages of a flip book. Thumb the edge and watch the little man dance.

At this stage, time is linear. In fact, it exists as a ghostlike streak behind you, like motion blur in a photograph. You can interact with it only via retrospect, which is about as useful as chasing your own tail. Nevertheless, you indulge yourself; everyone’s guilty. For instance, regarding his role in the emergence of nuclear weaponry, Einstein said “If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”

But Einstein didn’t become a watchmaker—nothing can change that. Since we observe only the now, or an endless series of nows strung together, perhaps it’s better to comment solely on the moment, the current cross-section of time. Even so, isn’t that just a type of premature nostalgia—of preemptive retrospect, so to speak? When the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, famously said “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” was he not merely projecting himself into the future and trying to reflect on the present? What does it take to keep ourselves from looking back?

5.           Roads not taken

They’ll soon begin building black holes beneath the mountains along the Franco-Swiss border. Early in September of 2008, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, fired up the machine that will change the way we think about the universe: the Large Hadron Collider. Over sixteen hundred superconducting magnets, most weighing over twenty-seven metric tons, project and stabilize opposing proton beams and send them on a collision course in a subterranean cryogenic facility near Geneva, Switzerland. The subatomic particles crash into one another at just below the speed of light.

The fifth dimension is one of choice. Every second of every day, a new you is created in the fifth dimension. Every time you make a choice, a thousand lines splinter off in the direction of different possible yous that could result from your decision. Time in the fifth dimension moves forward and backward. Sideways. Diagonally.

Over the phone I tell my uncle what they’re doing in Switzerland.
“Is shit gonna blow up?” he says.
“No,” I say. “I don’t know.”
“Are they gonna blow a hole into the side of the earth and suck a bunch of people into another dimension and make contact with aliens?” he says.
“That happened in a video game,” I say.
“Whatever, man. I just want shit to blow up,” he says.

Three months earlier he and I had sat up all night brewing coffee and watching my grandfather sleep. We hung in the pauses between the old man’s breaths as the hospice nurse snoozed beneath a crocheted blanket in a chair across the room.

The next night we’d stood on the porch of my grandfather’s double-wide, smoking cigarettes and staring across the highway at a tobacco field. “Oh my god,” someone was saying, “what the fuck!” Only my grandfather’s wife remained inside. The rest of the family drifted back and forth across the yard like ghosts. My uncle and I muttered clichés about it being his time to go.

“It’s a good thing,” I told him, performing. “All that pain—it needed to happen.”
“Fuck,” he said.

6.           Moving

If we were able to move about the fifth dimension, we could jump backwards, forwards, and sideways through time, creating and observing lives we could be living had we done something differently.

The Large Hadron Collider is encased in a seventeen-mile-long circular concrete tube. According to CERN, a single proton moving at full speed around this circle can complete about eleven thousand revolutions per second. Presently, collisions have been postponed; explosions and coolant leaks have CERN physicists bogged-down in repairs and recalibration. There are some who feel these roadblocks are not accidental. In an essay published October 12, 2009 in The New York Times, Dennis Overbye examines “the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future.” He explains that

a pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Two years before I spoke with him about CERN, my uncle tried to take his own life. He decided he didn’t want to be who he was anymore and ate handfuls of pills.
A month or so before that, he’d sold the Mossberg shotgun he kept in his closet.

Imagine lines in time drawn from the pharmacy to my uncle’s home in South Carolina. From the pill bottle to the palm of his hand. Or, imagine lines drawn from the barrel of the shotgun to the soft spot under his chin, from his toe to the trigger. From my uncle to his grave, or to the place where, instead, he sat with me by the bed of his dying father.

All of these lines could exist, have existed, and do exist—somewhere.

7.           Infinity

We tend to think of infinity as a circle or a figure eight because it has no end, no beginning. This is only a foothold into understanding the nature of the all-inclusive. Infinity is the representation of every possible instance of choice and every resulting outcome across all of time, from the Big Bang onward and outward. Infinity represents, as Bryanton puts it, “all possible timelines which could have or will have occurred from our big bang.”

The seventh dimension is infinite because it cannot be measured. It is, for all intents and purposes, a point.

8.           A line between two everythings

My uncle was six when I was born. I grew up alongside him in my grandfather’s house. My mother was sixteen. I spent the first eight years of my life calling my grandfather “Dad.” Not because I thought he was my father, but in imitation of my uncle. We lived as brothers until my grandmother died. My mother, finally financially stable enough, took me into her home. My grandfather remarried within a year.

My life and the life of my uncle drifted apart. The space between us grew until the months after his attempted suicide. Then, gradually, we began drifted back toward one another.

With each collision within the Large Hadron Collider, the Big Bang will be recreated in miniature. Six detectors sit at the points in the Collider where the proton beams cross and the collisions occur. They’re geared toward measuring the presence of anti-matter, dark matter, quarks, gluons, and the elusive Higgs boson—which physicists call the God particle, as it’s said to be the reason matter has mass. Regarding the Higgs, Overbye quotes Physicist Holger Bech Nielsen, who, along with his colleagues, brought forth the claim that the mysterious particle may be the source of CERN’s woes. Nielsen “said of the theory, ‘Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.’ It is their guess, he went on, ‘that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.’ ”

If infinity is conceivable as a point, then there must be other points—other infinities—for lines to be drawn to, each with its own Big Bang occurring under its own conditions, each infinitely different from ours.

9.           Folding reality into what you will

A two-dimensional plane folded through the third dimension enables two points on different lines to touch. An eight-dimensional plane folded through the ninth dimension enables different realities to touch.

We picture doors that pass through space and the spaces between, and open onto vistas of glassy mountains framed by purple, rippling skies streaked with upward-falling snow. We picture streets of gold, rivers that flow with milk and honey. We picture a place where our dead relatives live on happily and wait for our arrival. We picture the stuff of dreams because who would dare hope to find, on the other side of all that’s possible, something the same as what we’d left behind?

10.           A point

Take enough steps back from anything and it becomes nothing more than a point on the horizon. Imagine the web-work of lines crisscrossing back and forth between all possible infinities as a single point containing everything that could ever possibly be—under any and all circumstances.

Every once in a while, after a period of mentally distancing myself from it, I try to re-approach the idea of death. I snap awake in bed, my face hot. I pace. “Fuck!” I say. “Shit!” No matter how much it terrifies and sickens me, I can’t leave it alone. I pick at it in my mind like a scab, never letting it heal.

I try to collapse my fear of death, fold it in on itself. In vain I attempt to cram the unknown into the tiny confines of rational thought.

I want to stop.

I can’t.

The mind is predisposed to search for meaning, to make parallels, to see patterns. Sometimes this results in revelation; sometimes it results in the creation of a sad fiction. More and more I’m having trouble divining the difference.
Charles Hinton, in “Many Dimensions,” compares the foolhardiness of our endeavors to Egyptian priests worshiping a veiled deity, attempting to bind her with cloth. “So we wrap ‘round space our garments of magnitude and vesture of many dimensions,” he says. “Till [sic] suddenly, to us as to them, as with a forward tilt of the shoulders, the divinity moves, and the raiment and robes fall to the ground, leaving the divinity herself, revealed, but invisible.”

Hinton presents the inner workings of space as a god, as something to be feared, respected—maybe even worshipped. Something we should recognize will always be just beyond reach, wholly apart from us and unable to be understood. Something not seen, but somehow felt to be there.

Clint Garner reading
David Cates reading

Alison Riley reading
Zoey Farber reading