Non-Fiction
Sumi/é / Chié Wach
Image by Sesson Shûkei, Honolulu Museum of Art accession 2847
0 seconds from the birth of things: a singularity. Not a speck floating in a blank and empty space. There is no space: space is inside the singularity. So is time.
Little is known. It’s hot. There is no normal continuum of things.
When my mother calls you “cerebral,” it’s a rebuke: Mō, bakamitai, you’re so cerebral. She doesn’t mean you’re smart: she means your being is so shrunken into your own little mind that you’re not in any kind of touch with reality.
[epoch]
At 10⁻⁴³ seconds of the universe, time exists only as a technicality. The best phonetic term I’ve heard to describe the universe at this point is as a quantum foam.
Space, which exists to be filled, now exists as more than a technicality. Picture: hot quantum foam, fresh space.
Aether is the material that fills the heavens, say the ancient Greeks: the medium through which light and gravity travel. Japanese Buddhists say aether is sora, literally sky, or emptiness. Aristotle, who agrees with the Buddhists in classifying aether as the fifth element, says aether moves circularly, in small whirlpools, unlike the straightforward linear lives of the other elements.
[epoch]
At 10⁻³² seconds, what was hot and dense is now cold and distributed thinly across what at this point can be called a universe. It’s not cool enough yet for quarks to connect, so they’re floating loose.
I do not have a physicist’s mind. When I think of quarks I don’t think of string theory but of John Berger’s prologue on translation: True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal, he says. We then gather up what we have found there and take this quivering almost wordless ‘thing’ and place it behind the language into which it needs to be translated.
[epoch]
One second exists now. The universe has reheated after the chill of inflation, and it’s big. All matter exists in a sea of opaque plasma.
Lissa Wolsak’s poetic process is one of immersion, of writing sensory word-fragments onto great big drawing sheets. I pore over these spread out on the floor until the words start to speak to each other, forming affinities.
One hopes there is something behind the surface: behind prayer, for instance; or small talk with an ex; or political debate; or the birth of the universe; or a lyric essay about the birth of the universe.
[epoch]
370,000 years from the start of things: hydrogen is formed and the universe goes transparent. Photons release. All glows orange for three million years.
Opaque plasma; incense smoke; filaments of galaxy clusters; forming affinities; seaweed; milk; ink; dark matter halos; cosmic decoupling; glossolalia; luminiferous quintessence; rather a lush thought; Blake Lively’s 2022 Met Gala dress; charm; whim; womb; Benedict XVI; Erykah Badu’s Green Eyes; Erykah Badu’s green eyes; a copse; a corpse buried in lilies — the insatiable need to smear the page.
The surface does not match what is going on inside, says Anne Carson. The surface (for example) does not / stream with bits of fire.
[epoch]
Light shifts into invisibility and everything is dark for two hundred million years. Running running running particles in a dark dark universe.
My mother is five and her mother is thirty-five when the family moves to California. To accelerate the family’s integration into America, my mother’s parents remove Japanese from their home life. A strange period follows of forgotten Japanese and unknown English, wordless inarticulate months filled only with the feeling, my mother tells me, of being trapped by her own tongue. She says it isn’t just the inability to communicate, but the inability to think, to let sentences form in her mind.
[epoch]
Clouds of hydrogen collapse into stars. These first stars are massive, unsustainably so, and their inevitable deaths are the black holes at the centers of today’s galaxies.
There are tides in the life of a star. It begins with an inwardness, a contractive pulling into its body to make itself a body. Space sinks in, lights bend.
My grandmother, a recent convert from Buddhism, attends a Catholic prayer meeting after first refusing, telling them, I am not a praying person. This is 1970s L.A.
Charismatic worship is difficult to describe. It sounds like gibberish, tears, prophecy, guitars. It looks like people standing with their arms outspread.
When the star starts running out of fuel, it is in danger of cooling down; the tide rises. The push begins as the star collapses outwardly under its own weight. This is a supernova.
The prayer meeting has already begun when she arrives. It’s not like anything she’s encountered in Tokyo. The priest cups his hands around her jaw, asking the Holy Ghost to give her the gift of tongues. She is embarrassed.
Does space, or void, contract about a body whirlpool-like?
With the realization that the priest will not leave until she’s received the gift, something tips and her tongue starts going: akasatana; hamayarawa; akasatana; hamayarawa… This is the Japanese alphabet. The priest spreads out his arms, cries, Praise the Lord! and leaves her alone.
What happens in the supernova depends on the weight of the star. The release creates space at the center of the star, and as space exists to be filled, the body moves back inward. It may just collapse into a denser star, a heavy body bending lightyears towards itself. Or, if it’s too heavy, space will tear. This is a black hole.
I say “tear” but a black hole is not a wormhole. Not an opening-into any alternate reality. When I say “tear” I mean space has given way to a body that takes up no room.
[epoch]
At one billion years, the earliest galaxies start to form.
When she returns to Tokyo, my grandmother receives a prophecy: I see a long line before you, her friend says, a long line of people saying please, please, kudasai, kudasai. I see you busy, busy, handing each of them papers that they take and go away, take and go away, all down the line. I can’t see the end of the line. But I see—here her friend is confused—you’re all black, covered in something black. Is that ash on your face?
At the surface of a black hole is an event horizon. An “event horizon” is so named because if an event were to occur beyond it we’d never know. The horizon is a black-bodied, half-silvered mirror: it admits all things, absorbs all things. I imagine the inside of a black hole must be like the top side of clouds, full of streaming light. But the event horizon emits nothing, unless you count the dark.
My grandmother translates an article from a Catholic devotional magazine and leaves a few copies at the front of her church. In the weeks following, she starts to receive envelopes of cash: I don’t know the price of subscription, their letters read, but I would like to receive the next edition of this magazine. I am including my address and ¥10,000. Please accept.
An event horizon is not a physical surface, though we talk about it like it is. It’s just a distance, a distance that changes things, like borders between countries, or the ceiling of the deep sea. It has to do with escape: the distance at which the spatial riptide is no longer strong enough to prevent light’s breaking free.
My grandmother receives permission from the magazine to found a Japanese chapter. She translates, prints, folds, mails. She is covered daily in ink.
[epoch]
At five billion years the Milky Way begins to form.
My mother shows me my body: atama; kata; hiza; ashi; té. Sakana, by the pond behind our house. Tori, and a duck, spoken into being, splashes onto the water. Tori. Sora.
A black hole may be black, but the surface streams with bits of fire. As space accretes, the drift of matter takes the form of a disk: a flattened whirlpool of dust, plasma, and fragments of bodies. The black hole is a shadow at the center. This is a quasar, a baby galaxy.
I am five and my mother is thirty-five when we summer in Tokyo. Without the need to translate for my dad, we return to her mother tongue. The lines of our English grow formless and void.
Akasatana, my mother says, by the chart in the bathroom: akasatana. Hamayarawa; hamayarawa. She teaches me by singing about mornings and korokke and lunchtime and rice stuck onto cheeks.
A galaxy is a spill of milk. It churns, flatly, pooled by dark matter. At the center of a galaxy is a black hole.
When I return to the U.S. for my first year of pre-K, I cannot speak with the other children in my class. My mother, to re-integrate me, removes Japanese from our home.
At the center of an essay is a black hole.
At the center of a black hole is a singularity. A singularity is a wordless, volumeless thing: a division of mass by no space: a divide-by-zero error: a spatial infinity. It quivers.
[epoch]
At nine billion years our solar system is formed.
My middle brother goes to sleep late—3, 4 a.m. Often, just at the point of drifting off, he wakes into a room full of murmuring and doubt. Wordless words, or at least words without any perceptible sense. The sound fills the room, he says, lasting five minutes, twenty, thirty. He says he lies with his eyes open until it stops.
Planck; quark; Big Bang; Big Rip; neutrinos; uterus; globular clusters; microwave background; Shoemaker-Levy 9; John Berger; the James Webb Space Telescope; the Very Large Telescope; the Extremely Large Telescope; Elon Musk; machos; wimps; wisps —
The universe’s design looks like a lot of empty rooms. Galaxies filament into arches and walls, leaving broad drifts of space throughout their structure.
One morning some resonance worming in my brother’s ear reveals itself as the voice of our mother. And then it’s all her, the voice of the ghost is the voice of our mother, which is really, she’d say, the voice of the Holy Ghost.
Inside the empty rooms is aether: void: unfillable space. The room falls to the edges of itself.
Our mother wakes early in the morning to pray for us in the room beneath my brothers’ room. She prays in tongues, in secret.
[epoch]
At ten billion years life emerges on Earth.
The Adamic language is said to be the language spoken by Adam and Eve in the garden, the language with which Adam names all things.
I have known a man who speaks in a slow and unrepeating tongue, who draws out his words from that deep resonant bone-house of elderly Japanese men. I have known a woman who never speaks in tongues, only sings, an atonal thread of syllables quivering out in no direction. I have known a violinist who uses her violin to speak in tongues, and a deaf man’s wife who signs in tongues.
If language is a medium through which people encounter each other, then glossolalia is not a language.
Olive; elephant; the dark; poppy; nose; Eve; kiss; orange; breeze; collarbone; fig; grapevine; armpit; snake; sky; apple; orca; oil; rib; dust; ladybug; breath; nostril; gate —
You are never bored, listening to tongues. I can tell you it sounds like an orchestra tuning pre-concert, reasoned chaos, a microtonal cloud.
The Adamic language unites all humanity until we decide to build a tower high enough to climb and capture heaven, and God, to stop us, scatters us into so many varying tongues that we never again understand one another.
It begins with a desire: an inwardness, a contracting into yourself to make yourself a body. It begins humanly, with a shururururu, maybe, or an akasatana, hamayarawa, a waiting for something sanctifying to take hold.
[epoch]
Thirteen billion years from the birth of things: return to the pre-verbal. To the early universe, to the subatomic primordial aether from which things gradually formed—but also to the Word, according to John Berger, or his prologue. The pre-word Word, a wordless Word ‘thing’ taken up and placed into the body.
At a conference of church elders, I am the only child. My grandmother has brought me to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
On the third day the preacher says: Let everyone speak in tongues. He repeats this many times for a long time. The tongues grow. My grandmother and I are standing together, her arms upraised. Her tongues sound like shalalalala. I have no tongues.
Does a void flow towards the surface of a body?
Spacetime grooves arch themselves wildly in the wake of black holes merging: sling stars far from shore, or rip them into the pool’s fresh center. Tides must be re-established.
Too embarrassed to stay silent, I relent and my tongue sounds like shururururu. My grandmother calls my mother after to tell her that I’ve received the gift. My mother tells me she sounds very excited.
Ointment; hymn; oil-lamp; sepulcher; lyre; the ten-stringed harp; for the word of the Lord is; the Lord loves what; fear the Lord; for you O Lord; O Lord you are; for the Lord moved upon the face of the waters—the impulse to babble.
At the center of language, Berger says, is a phonetic uterus.
[epoch]
18 billion years following the birth of things, the Milky Way collides with Andromeda. It begins with bodies bumping into each other, lightly, in passing. But as the pool of each sinks toward the other’s, they are caught: lock tides: swing once; twice; each falls into the other’s body. The black holes at their centers merge.
Glossolalia is a facade: a veil: an apophatic body. It puts a sound to the inexpressible, but that sound is incoherent. Maggie Nelson rephrases Wittgenstein thus: the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed.
An “apophatic body” is a self-negation: a bodiless body, a wordless word. What, after all, is it, asks ER Wolfson, to speak of a body about which nothing can be spoken?
My mother would call ER Wolfson a cerebral man.
Dark matter I like, massive inscrutable stuff whirlpooling about our galaxies, like aether, or the dark. We know dark matter exists when it messes with the behavior of a galaxy. In my memory “dark matter research” consists of looking at stellar behavior and saying, well, that’s not right. Too fast, too close. Ergo dark matter.
A friend tells me he finds dark matter beautiful because it obscures the brightness of the stars. He says reality’s need to veil itself from our eyes is a beautiful thought. It is a beautiful thought, but dark matter does not obscure the brightness of the stars. Dark matter is not the veil; it is itself the thing veiled. The stars are the veil.
I’ll try, if I can, not to talk as if glossolalia is a single phenomenon. You’ll try, if you can, to keep in mind the effects of all the various excitements, pride-sources, degrees of comfort, security, elasticity, on the tongue. Think of the tongue’s capacity to emit, lie, love, or scatter light; think of Babel. Ask yourself, what is my pre-verbal voice?
Dark matter is not to be confused with dark energy, which I also like for being dramatic and hidden. Dark energy is physicists looking at the accelerating expansion of the universe and saying why.
Dark energy can also be called quintessence, or aether: Aristotle’s fifth element. It can be called the energy that belongs to empty space.
Newton says aether, upon reaching the surface of the Earth, is both absorbed and diffused. Picture: a quasar at an event horizon, or early mist upon an onsen.
People speak in tongues to gain attention; to evade attention; to fake themselves; to obey the Spirit; to put words onto emptiness; to release emotion; to climb heaven; to try, one last time; to tell God a thing they don’t know yet; to be healed; to be convinced.
The universe is composed of three-quarters dark energy and one-quarter dark matter. The residue around the edges is what we call matter—everything we touch and test and record on periodic tables.
[epoch]
At twenty billion years, Earth is absorbed by the Sun.
Heaven is a vault. A vault can be the roof of a cathedral, ribbed, breezy, studded with beams of light and pigeons that got in by accident. Or a vault can be an underground chamber, musty, built to keep bodies in storage for a long time: corpses, wine.
The body is a bone-house. Flesh fills its rooms, or milk; tongues; mothers; quintessence; aether; the dark.
Aristotle and Newton think of the universe as a container: bank vault, wine vault, burial vault, skull vault. The universe is secure, enclosed, evenly-paced. Light travels in a straight line.
I go to my grandmother to receive her tongue but she speaks to me only in broken English. When I see you, she tells me, I see a white person, and English just falls out.
With his theory of general relativity, Einstein invents the universe as curved, ribbed: Gothic vault, skull vault. …these arches are but rooves / of earlier churches, says Lissa Walsak, cold spots where galaxies / would eventually form. Light and matter follow the grooves of spacetime.
When a Japanese person sees me they see first their own absence: a Japanese-less Japanese person, a wordless word. This is an apophatic body.
John Berger’s prologue knows the Word is not an opaque plasma. That’s why it can be picked up and moved around—into a womb, into a singularity, onto your tongue silently reading, your tongue using words to hold a wordless thing in the back of your mouth.
[epoch]
At 10¹⁴ years, star-births end. Living stars grow faint, burn themselves out. They leave lighted remnants.
A friend tells me that spacetime is just a useful fiction. He says spacetime is a lot of nothing: if there are no bodies, there is no space; if there are no events, there is no time. He says that when one body stops and another begins, there is a thing between the surfaces, which, for lack of a better word, we call “space.”
When I return to my grandmother, we clean the floorboards and then our hands. She shows me that the kimono, which exists to be filled, lives in flat boxes of paper. Its layers start when touched, lifted, laid out on the floor.
The “apophatic body” is a thought belonging to apophatic panentheism, a thought that the universe is a veil into which the spirit ‘thing’ enters: it is only through the garment that one can see without any garment.
Since kimonos must live only along existing creases, we arrange them with their arms folded or outstretched. I stand amid them with my arms spread open. It doesn’t look wrong on you, she tells me. Your bones are correct.
[epoch]
By 10²⁰ years, the empty rooms have swelled enough to shred their walls and ceilings. Black holes feed off of galaxy deaths. On planets’ surfaces, horizons draw near; night skies go blank.
Sergei Bulgakov says the idea of an Absolute God, one who exists without a relationship to the universe, is a conventional abstraction. He says the pure and Absolute God, who neither creates nor sustains bodies, is a lot of nothing: this God simply does not exist. Bulgakov is an apophatic panentheist.
My mother tells me this is a cerebral essay.
Now I’m trying to think of space not as a fabric but as relations between things. A void that neither flows nor whirlpools but is simply void.
A vault is also a leap, a changing relation between bodies. Think of heaven vaulting.
[epoch]
By 10⁴³ years, black holes are the only bodies left.
Though I have never myself spoken in tongues I can tell you it feels like surrender, like writing, like tweaking a paragraph over and over again, like birthing a singularity, like hiding in an upper room, in a vault, in a vaulted place. I can tell you it feels like leaving the room.
Black holes near death grow hot enough to emit light. Long after stars have gone extinct, space is illuminated by intermittent black holes dying.
…strange lamps burn brightly, says Anne Carson, and human tongues press the night.
[epoch]
Space, which has preferred disorder from the beginning, loses hold of its centers. Atoms disperse and all things return to dust. Time exists now, as it always did, only as a technicality.
In the company of my mother and her mother, the prophet stands behind me, places her hands on my shoulders, and proclaims for a long time—five minutes, twenty, thirty. They do not translate.