(This essay was written for Critical Animals, a research symposium held during This Is Not Art, Newcastle Australia, October 2009. The title comes from a poem by Aleksandr Skidan. Photograph of fireflies by Akihiro.)

Everything we need is here, nothing is missing. No omission, no repetition. It is rare, it is miraculous, that we may read openly, in a syntax as transparent as the work of mathematics, the coherent semantics of a universe already constructed. Yet nonetheless this is true.
– (Michel Serres)

Events are produced in chaos.
– (Gilles Deleuze)

Susan Howe says, “The selection of particular examples from a large group is always a social act.” This paper is a social act. I am interested in constellations beyond the usefulness of a rhetorical trope. If we can look to the stars and find a goat’s head, we can enact a similarly creative poesis when looking to the material of our experience. I am in Philadelphia, falling into an opposite weather pattern to Newcastle. In the northeast of America, the sky is pale and silvery, like the flanks of herring. Weather gets caught between the Appalachians – a curious ribcage – and the Atlantic. Three nights ago there was a thunderstorm that cracked through the air and woke me from a fever. You will find connections here in my language, you will sketch your own goat’s head.

Earlier in the year I taught a first year writing and cultural studies subject, Text and Context. In a week’s lesson titled ‘Subject/ivity,’ I had a hard time explicating why ‘we’ (we being the highly problematic collective ‘lens’ of the cultural studies discipline, as though culture is something outside to be observed from inside the classroom – that is, something apart from ourselves) might say ‘subject’ rather than, for example, ‘you,’ ‘Americans,’ ‘women,’ or ‘salmon’. After class, disturbed by the lack of resolution, I asked my friend Ben to help me come up with a useful metaphor, something that I could send to my students as an afterthought. It’s worth mentioning that my back-and-forth with Ben occurred entirely via Twitter, in a sequence of ‘@’ replies to each other. Ben’s desk is next to mine at UTS, but he always works from home, so we largely perform our friendship via ultra-nerdy one-liners during the day while we’re working on our theses. It’s as if the gassy excess of our studies – common in their lust for pseudo-science – discharge as small offerings, items of exchange, links or citations, attempts at a chaotic synthesis, a kind of live-action indexing of thinking-and-writing.

Ben began by saying, “Tell your students that some abstractions are really ways of being more specific, in ways that pointing to objects can’t be,” followed by an example: “‘Capital’ is an abstract model that arises from specific material relationships. It’s not simply money, or bosses.” Three minutes later, he added this: “Subjectivity is the emergent effect of experiencing the world, arising from complex storms in the cultural landscape.” From here, his response bloomed and vectored. The metonymic relationship (pathogenic, contiguous, parasitic) of his ideas-in-language, occurring in and as an event of thinking, was traceable.

Caught in the storm-trope, Ben composed an improvised, partly tongue-in-cheek prose poetic of the storm-as-subject. I have collated the offerings in one passage, even though each has its own self-contained attractiveness.

“Storms are not sovereign. Their complexity and consistency are indebted to (and can’t be separated from) all kinds of flow. Meteorologists probably have some abstract model of “autonomic stormness” that can’t be achieved by pointing at Katrina. Aspects of storm autonomy can be located in ocean temperature. The ocean is not a storm. We can also describe stormness via the wreckage that storms leave behind. But the wreckage isn’t the storm.”

Tuning and framing. The mercurial scholarship of weather patterns. Probability that a storm will crack open any particular night, during sleep. The ‘ness’ of Ben’s ‘stormness’ is the kind of prepositional ontology I’m attempting. Here and in other places.

*

In my first few days in Philadelphia, I walked up a cobbled sidestreet in Mt Airy to get to the food co-op. It was dusk, and the first day I had needed to wear a jumper. Late summer was becoming early autumn, the same impossible transition that Guy Davenport describes when a ripening capsicum moves its green into reds. During my walk, I saw a baby snake and a firefly. Later, I looked up fireflies on Wikipedia. The entry referred to their ‘crepuscular bioluminescence’ that attracts mates during the highly-sexed summer courtship period. What a seductive combination of erotics and chemistry! I reported my sighting and my research findings to a friend in an email, who replied, “When I was in Virginia there were so many that the trees looked like they were reflecting the sky. I remembering looking up at them moving around above my head like those bugs that skim over water and thinking they were tracing the constellations.”

There is a curious glitch here. My friend thinks of stars by remembering one insect by another; on seeing the fireflies in the sunset-ish sky he thinks of patterns traced on water, and how these patterns cite constellations. He gets from the sky to the sky via water, from stars to stars via insects. He uses a sequence of self-similar metaphors to compose an analogue for light. It’s as if he has layered a series of transparencies on top of each other, each referring to the others, and has projected a composite image of sameness and alterity.

In imagining a cosmos, we must also imagine ourselves; we are of the cosmos at the same time that we actively produce and reproduce its conditions. When my friend looks to a sequence of metaphors in order to understand seeing fireflies, he is writing himself in the sequence, he is the attentive aperture placing the experience in the event of becoming or being meaningful. Through his language, a firefly indexes other things in order to be a thing. To paraphrase Isabelle Stengers paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, it is not that there is a relativity of truth, but a truth of the relative. Steven Shaviro says, “the practices and processes that produce truth involve such “actors” as animals, viruses, rocks, weather systems, and neutrinos, as well as human beings.” My friend as attentive aperture is an example of one perceptive and cognitive event. The complex geometries of romancing fireflies is another. The imaginative histories of the constellations—narratives of sex, harvest or war—is another.

*

Constellations are things seen from earth. The appearance of flatness and cluster is a matter of positioning. Elaborate cartographies of the stars emerge from the collaborative impulses of poesis. To map a centaur drawing a bow, to map a saucepan, scorpion, willow, to map narratives of genesis. This is a poetics of fantastic eccentricity. From another position, the stars comprising a constellation move away from each other. Flatness turns into unthinkable topologies: elastic band, wrinkled handkerchief. Saucepans mutate. Stargazing is a pleasant time-travel. How relaxing to look into unfathomable histories and to have no genealogy. Lemon pie, warm with tea. Patterns of milk. Long-exposure shots reveal perfect curvatures. All the astronomers at the observatory in Coonabarrabran were divorced, my brother decided he’d become an astrophysicist instead. Years later, at a public lecture in Sydney, I sat in an auditorium full of astrophysicists to hear about dark matter. Wedding rings glinted in constellations.

*

In Lyn Hejinian’s book-length poem, My Life, she writes:

“Overhead a small plane drags a banner, it is summer, its engines revving and whining – for years I suffered nightmares in which just such a plane would lose control and plunge spinning through the roof of the schoolroom, blazing the cobalt, red, green, and yellow of the Hammond World Atlas. I in my chronic ideas return. Stalin medallions dangle at the windshield in trucks throughout the republics – why do they do this. The language of inquiry, pedagogy of poetry. One doesn’t want to be seduced by the sheer wonder of it all, whereby everything is transformed by beauty. There is a bulging lake and sunlight juts from it like a rock, as laughter for its practitioners. Past midnight, exhausted, fainting, and very old, the gray ice – Halley’s beaver – was swimming in the sky toward the deep forest on the distant ridge, its tail partially submerged. The flow of thoughts – impossible!”

Heraclitus was a process philosopher, all things in flow. Christian mythology imagines two Euclidean points, Genesis and Apocalypse. Coastlines are fractal. Alfred North Whitehead says, “no language can be anything other than elliptical, requiring a leap of the imagination to understand its meaning in its relevance to immediate experience.” Coastlines are immeasurable. Map a coastline. Find the centre of a melody. The story goes like this: sitting on a cliff, it was noticed that air touching the surface of the ocean produced ripples. Air is thingly. Atomism refers to the smallest data of experience. On a car trip with my father, he told me that since atoms are mostly empty space, we are mostly empty space. This idea pleases me, it makes the sensations of intimacy and encounter seem like impossible accidents. Over summer, in Camperdown park, I read Lucretius’s epic poem, De rerum natura. At the beginning of the poem, he says: “I will reveal those atoms from which nature creates all things and increases and feeds them and into which, when they perish, nature again resolves them. To these in my discourse I commonly give such names as ‘raw material’, or ‘generative bodies’, or ‘seeds’ of things. Or I may call them ‘primary particles’, because they come first and everything else is composed of them.” Lucretius was writing some time before 54 BC. Bread, cheese, a tomato. The raw materials of lunch. A single James Squire stubbie, cracked on a rug in the slanted angle sun of late afternoon. Dust motes. Jean-Luc Nancy gestures towards Lucretius. “[I]t is necessary to reread,” he says, “in the work of the Democriteans, the fall of the atoms into the void and the clinamen: as the distance, contact, assembling, separation, tangency, interval, and the interference of the singular, diffracted there is.”

*

At a conference in Canberra, my friend Duncan said, “poetry is our dirty ontology.” While reading my paper, the day before, I overheated. I was producing excess heat. The kinetics of nervousness and highly engaged attention. During question time, I spoke of the erotic circumstances of language. I feverishly tore off my duffel coat as I said the word “intercourse.” I was temporarily deeply embarrassed. One event overlapped another. The durational overlap was meaningful in a way I had not intended. In Greek mythology, Eros orders cosmos from chaos. Cosmos refers to a process of ornamentation, a meaningful composition of things alongside other things.

*

Earlier in the year I was involved in the re-enactment of Allan Kaprow’s 1965 work ‘Push and Pull’ at the Locksmith gallery in Alexandria. Kaprow set out the basic conditions for the event to take place. To take up these conditions is to both produce and reproduce the work. All things happening. Basic frame for the event of an artwork being, existing. Here is a frame, use it. In ‘Push and Pull’, a room is made available and things are brought to the space. Loosely speaking, these things are domestic miscellany. Furniture, etc. Participants are invited to engage with the space in whatever manner they choose. Rearrange, tidy, destroy, tinker, sleep, draw, stretch. Patterns emerge and are erased. Social complexes form. Networks arrange themselves. Nick wrote an essay about the eventhood, relationality and complexity of Push and Pull. He says: “Complexity is not chaos or anarchy in the usually (and wrongly) understood sense of the terms. Chaos and anarchy are not total disorder, complete lack of relations, but are rather the order of relations themselves, just as in ecological systems. And Push and Pull is an ecological system. Ecological systems are not just what happens in the wilderness, untouched by the evil hands of humans, they are everywhere, where humans and non-humans exist side-by-side, in complex relations.” In a series of notes taken during this time, I wrote: “Nonmetric concepts of neighbourhood, like ‘infinitesimal closeness’.” I was reading Manuel DeLanda. Last week, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I walked through the Duchamp collection, and was reminded of his wonderful trope, infra thin. “The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin” Duchamp says, in one of countless definitions.
“Velvet trousers–/ their whistling sound (in walking) by/ brushing of the 2 legs is an/ infra thin separation signalled /by sound. (it is not an infra thin sound) … When the tobacco smoke smells also of the /mouth which exhales it, the 2 odors / marry by infra thin (olfactory / in thin) … Difference between the contact / of water and that of/ molten lead for ex,/or of cream./ with the walls of its / own container moved around the liquid …. This difference between two contacts is infra thin.”

*

On September 5 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched. As of June this year, it is about 16.555 billion kilometres from the sun. If it is still functioning when it moves through the heliopause—the known limits of our solar system—it will be the first human-made object to leave the Milky Way. Inside the spacecraft is a golden phonograph record, an offering to any extraterrestrial life forms (or to humans in an inconceivable future). The record’s content, compiled by Carl Sagan and a group of researchers, includes sound recordings of animals, surf, wind and storms, tractors, tools, music, greetings in 55 languages and a message from President Jimmy Carter. Carter’s statement begins: “We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

Also included on the record is an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, one of the researchers and selectors of the project. At the time of recording, Druyan and Carl Sagan were experiencing the intense shared event of falling in love. She says: “I entered a laboratory at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and was hooked up to a computer that turned all the data from my brain and heart into sound. I had a one-hour mental itinerary of the information I wished to convey. I began by thinking about the history of Earth and the life it sustains. To the best of my abilities I tried to think something of the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.”

*

Mulled wine and lentil soup. Sydney winter. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, co-written with Druyan. Projected onto the living room wall, Sagan speaks of primordial earthly life forms, including the upsetting sounding ‘hollow living tube’. We didn’t evolve from the hollow living tube, but from another complex of data.

*

In the opening to his wonderful book, The Parasite, Michel Serres says: “[W]hat is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations … The parasitic relation is intersubjective. It is the atomic form of our relations. Let us try to face it head-on, like death, like the sun. We are all attacked, together.” In the beginning there was the fall, inclination, the difference of all things. “Reciprocal alterity,” is what Joan Retallack calls it. Gertrude Stein says, “the difference is spreading.” Muzzy ontology. Constellating is a method of inquiry. Attuned to the drift. The fall as generative mode, producing all things. I am serious about playtime.

*

Serres will remind us that in French, temps is time as well as temperature and weather. This is useful to remember

opening out some office-tones hushy-grey
hard/soft metaphors & back-to-ham radios
, thwarting military commands glitching
some new masculine intimacies or love-talks
I’d order less milk for more tea and insist on
‘or’ as a consequential joining word suspending
two things in lateral flow attuning and framed

your code metaphor is very late-nineties
we’re yoking an idea of the body with one of
not-the-body, as if we ever got rid of ourselves
as if we ever felt that the body’s betrayal
was other than us. knitting circles aside newness
clots and curds, nouns set up suggestively as some-
thing more interesting, less servile

meta-sex talk tsk-tsk-ing, the chills / pink frost:
to collaborate is always already evident crumbing
against an Auckland dusk-light. it’s girlfriend in
a coma but without the irony. across the street cats
lope into themselves, into liquid ambers, as though
their limbs were patterning an ominous index
the easy analogy is this – there are bones in a

battlefield, settled into the seams of the soil &
all the conscientious post-bloodshed grasscover
– and the bones tell us a list of things about the
battle or any number of potential battles. brownian
motion (the path of a drunken bird; measured in
units of exquisite likeliness) and ordering peking
duck (quantities jotted on the underside of a napkin)

come to mind. our love, to put it crassly, is indexical.

Photo by Katie Spence

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All the moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”

Imagine a very small bit of radioactive substance in a Geiger counter. In the course of an hour, a single atom of this radioactive miscellany either will or will not decay. If it does, the counter will detect the ionisation and a mechanism will relay movement so that a hammer smashes a flask of poison. If it doesn’t, no change will be detected and the flask of poison will remain intact.

Imagine that the radioactive miscellany, the Geiger counter and the poison are all securely arranged in a box with a cat. At the end of the hour, the cat will either be dead or alive, depending on whether an atom has decayed and a flask has shattered.

According to the early 20th Century Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system only transforms from a superposition of states, simultaneously one and the other, to a single state, either one or the other, when the act of observation takes place. So according to the interpretation, before the lid of the box is removed, the cat is both alive and dead. Imagine a cat smeared across parallel planes of dead and not-dead; trapped in some vibration until our gaze pulls it into stasis. After the lid comes off, you will look inside and the cat is either alive or dead. Your engagement returns smeared cat back to stable cat.

Now imagine that you have a gun to your head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. When the trigger is pulled, the particle is measured. If the particle spins in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If it is spinning anticlockwise, the gun will not fire.

You sit in a chair and pull the trigger. The gun does not fire. You continue to pull the trigger for eternity and the gun never fires. You continue to live. If you travel back in time to the beginning of the experiment, you pull the trigger and the gun discharges. You are dead. In the first case you lived and in the second you died. Every time you pull the trigger the world splits and the two possibilities occur side-by-side. Every time you pull the trigger, the chance of surviving decreases by half but never reaches a non-zero number. There will always be a small subset of unlikely worlds in which you survive. A conscious ability to observe your own creaturely sensation – in other words, to feel your own pleasure – may have ceased in the first gunfire, but you have achieved a state of quantum immortality by committing quantum suicide.

These two thought experiments, the cat and the gun, are variants of the same paradox. Schrödinger’s Cat interrogates a popular interpretation of quantum activity that runs the risk of separating experienced reality from hypothetical mechanics. The quantum suicide paradox explores the potential non-conscious selves existing across infinite universes. In the sense that dead-undead states in the second experiment are versions of the observant self, this quantum suicide model imagines Schrödinger’s paradox from the perspective of the cat.

Both experiments radicalise the time of death. We might say that we are constantly moving towards the event of our death and therefore we are always in an intimate relation with being dead. Yet this idea supposes that we are travelling on a timeline with some anticipated horizon as a limit. The rim of our experience is death and time is tugging us along. A dead-alive paradox in this idea is a fantasy. In the two thought experiments, alive and dead are two textural qualities in a complex field of potentials.

In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is able to experience events in his life – including his birth and his death – simultaneously and non-linearly. I’ll avoid the use of the phrase ‘time-travel’ here (though it is used in the novel) for two reasons. Firstly, when Billy moves through different temporal zones, his material body stays in the present, albeit in a kind of dumb, anaesthetic state. It is his consciousness and his memory of experience that moves. Secondly, the words ‘time-travel’ imply that any radical temporal movements occur on a stable x-axis, as Vonnegut writes, like beads on a string. To anchor Billy in the present and imagine that his extratemporal experiences are simply back-and-forth deviations to hallucinogenic other-times mean that we are stuck in a simple, unimaginative geometry.

If we must represent Billy’s time-experience spatially, let’s imagine it as fractal, or vortical, the texture of toffee as it cools from syrup to brittle. Constant difference and unending self-sameness. To map it would be to map a bowl of porridge. All experience is remembered, all memories are constant, all time is in flux, all chaos is sensual, all moments are stretched across spastic durations. If you want to talk about a centre of a now-time, the real Billy Pilgrim in the centre of his living, you have to first find the centre of a milkshake, a wormhole, a clusterbomb in the split-seconds after detonation. Find the centre of a melody, a toothache, a pile of shavings from a wood-carving.

Critics of Slaughterhouse 5 have said that Billy Pilgrim reveals a deeply cynical and nihilistic fatalism in Vonnegut. Billy is seen as a pin-up for every passive non-feeler who has let himself be dragged through the pathological hostilities of modern trauma; the histories of war and holocaust, the banalities of family, the stupid failures of lives and love. Yet what these criticisms assume is that Billy’s experience of loose time, his conscious, sensate, simultaneous memories, represents a passive or disengaged surrender. It assumes that Billy somehow gives up what is known as ‘free will’ in order to move across the textures of time. And yet this idea of ‘free will’ protected by Vonnegut critics falls down at the slightest nudge. Billy Pilgrim was sent to Germany as an eighteen-year-old small-towner, spirited out to the wintry dregs of an inconceivable war. This was the experience of Vonnegut, and the very fact of his service shatters whatever triumphant myths there are about the absolute free will of the individual, carving out his own fate against any odds.

The Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the Earth is the only place in the universe that practices the myth of free will, which relies on the same simple geometry of a straight line. Each moment is a bead on a string and at each moment our experience of time is the experience of choice. Every choice contributes to our sense of final becoming, a catalogue of what we chose and avoided, what we achieved and what we failed to overcome. If all time is all time, as it is to Billy, it is not how we compose our lives in each moment; it is how we negotiate the total sum of all moments. In this sense, an idea of ‘free will’ might become more an idea of attentive encounter with the entirely non-Euclidean shape of experience. The first atomic swerve that produced the smallest something, the slight swoon or dip into another, the intimacy of touch and closeness, the activity of collision.

At every sentence of Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is alive and dead, at war and in his marital bed, on Tralfamadore and in Ilium, New York, a cat and not-a-cat. Every potential Billy lives out each wonderful desire and failure. So it goes.

for michael farrell

opening out onto a floured bench is
the dough, barely kneaded, just held
together with the blunt cuts of a butter
knife – the palms face-up but still
making slender butter. Flo Bjelke-Petersen’s

voice starchy and tea-towelly. the golden
rule of scone-making is to add the milk
gently – “milk me sugar” – “do not be
afraid” to add more if the mixture is dry:
the imperative voice, “soft not sticky”.

given the heat no one is expected to
exist near an oven and not sweat. it is
a simple causal relationship and
generally people are gentle about its
being true, or at least, being evident. when

a scone is brushed with milk – two fingers
miming, more or less effectively, a pastry
brush – it glosses up nicely. spread apart
they rise into each other, the extent can be
micromanaged with simple, kitchen-focused
mathematics:

algorithms hell-bent on decoding the
unknowable curvatures of a cricket ball –
“nice cherry” – and the ecology of baking
scone-nuts, clustered or spaced: “the
difference is spreading.”

Prawns hung like small hooks on the edge of crystal. “Geraniums are an eighties flower,” and “dry-hump” turning up in a poem, then edited out. Macau as the egg-tart capital of the world, a nice in-folding of Chinese and Portuguese imperialisms. When I say composting is not a metaphor I mean it. It is not a metaphor. Yet when Fred says metaphor is a metaphor you ought to believe it is the truth. I am still in agony over whether your couch is the shade of avocado or honeydew. There is always a temptation to say something more abstract, like “mint julep.” “This is a grammatical rule and states a logical impossibility.” There are many things we could do with the book nearest to us – playful or otherwise – but the question of distance and the problem of equidistance means it will never happen. Swimming to edge of the pool, would you crack your nose or not, and if so, does that change physics forever?

an equation’s unusual beauty
borderline tropes and borders
and lines and the curvature and
hooks of glyphs, xs and ys and
the pivots of ‘of’ and ‘and’ or
the equals and equivalences:
a deep feeling for the way we
measure, or don’t measure, and
measure.

ebenezer the ghanaian is contacting the radio broadcaster
to say, ‘there’s too much on islam’, & ‘what else is there?’
then, as though a direct response, a story about a metal-head
monk who praises jesus in front of iron maiden fans in rome.
now, if you still need proof, try measuring the angles of
furniture built into a triangular room—try to prove that there
are angles, firstly, & then try to fit them into a number. & now
say, for example, that there is a need for these three numbers to
be split again or rejoined: what I mean is, if you boil an egg you
can’t unboil it, so who’s to say that a number can be subtracted
or added with no undoable effects? I’m interested to see if you
could find an angle, or if there are numbers, or eggs, or islam.