The Curvaceous Universe

Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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mnaz
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The Curvaceous Universe

Post by mnaz » September 22nd, 2016, 10:14 pm

The red cliffs were astonishing, but the great arcs can curve space. So I head out again, down across and up the far slope of Death Valley, and climb a long canyon into a rounded valley with a striped butte, where I can't tell up from down. How high are you on a roundscape between mountainsides?

How high are points in space that curves due to effects of mass? How high are chakras ascending the spine to a crown of light, billions at once and all different speeds and orbits? How high does it escalate? Or does it undulate, modulate and spike? How high were Prices X or Y on the damned scrolling tickers under those CNN screens as they beamed in the latest war from the center of the universe at the middle of careening axes?

The rounded valley curves slowly and branches off to others through gaps in massive granite walls. Halfway across, two burros stand and watch, no longer ridden by jackass prospectors yet on the same timeless wander. And the curve always shoots up at the end, exponentially, this time up a boulder-crowded path atop a spine of rock, where the end of the next valley lies far beyond an incalculable maze of ridges, and crouched low inside one of those ripples are the burned ruins of Manson's last hideout.

Expanding cosmos is in my face again, so I set up camp. The trail behind falls sharply away; usually I don't push the truck that hard, but the curve always gets steeper at the end, into canyons, or maybe a ridge where you see the end of the next roundscape, and the end of sky somewhere beyond, and it's a long way out, where even the instantaneous takes millions of years to cross what a Hubble Eye sees, and in that never-ending span there were bound to be spikes, troughs and aliens writing weird equations where space curves and time can reverse.

And that's it! The curvaceous universe. How long was rock flat? Is fabric really vibrating strings, ten million billion to a quark, and do they live in 26 dimensions curled inside three? And how do subatomics influence each other regardless of their location, as the radio claimed? And why did geniuses try to solve a universe with math? All these weird physics on frontiers of non-physical, where arcs of energy, matter, fields, particles, waves, belief, science, spirit, sense and logic are curving into themselves.

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sasha
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Re: The Curvaceous Universe

Post by sasha » September 30th, 2016, 1:14 pm

the immediate, the unimaginably distant, ruminations of the bizarre inner worlds of strings and gluons and time reversal, all whipped into a lyrical froth of words from a man in a truck - fine stuff, sir. Strong brew.
.
"Falsehood flies, the Truth comes limping after it." - Jonathan Swift, ca. 1710

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mnaz
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Joined: August 15th, 2004, 10:02 pm
Location: north of south

Re: The Curvaceous Universe

Post by mnaz » October 3rd, 2016, 3:34 pm

Thanks for the reply, sasha. It's tricky to post these "snippets" from larger chapters I've written and spliced together that have a lot of interwoven bits-- such as "the curve always shoots up at the end, exponentially ..." here-- shades of earlier musins' about Terrence McKenna's novelty theory stuff and the exponential explosion of, well ... pretty much everything human-related, for example ...

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