peter jerrim

a bigger bang

essay through clouds, seas their trash magic gone (gone!) whirlpools as exoplanets explore life’s dark sobriety their rattled algorithms rage

it was an ordinary just-walking-down-the-street kinda day when a bird in midair turned inside out for a second splendiferous then back again everything normal, flew on – i shouldn’t have

been surprised by what the universe is like what shape it is p’raps a 3-torus¹ or boringly flat or see recent article the problem being if it’s wider than the distance light takes to reach us from the big bang then we just can’t see enough of it

to know (like if you’d only ever smelt touched and not seen walked round a human or any big enough elephant) you’d have no idea of its shape…yep with this paucity you’d have no idea of any shape except a finger in your eye)

and you’d need to rely on other tricky observations and out of the box ideas which is more or less my problem with you

not the particular you who’s reading hearing this right now or recalling it but the theoretical you (phew, embarrassing!) yeah the theoretical you coming alive as me in reverse

like the bird for a moment i suppose spectacularly inverted guts brain and heart all on display but all so inside out it’s hard to describe like this poem’s inside out when it comes to a brain’s eye view of a heart no pressure of blood to give it a purpose in life so here’s an embarrassing question

what’s your purpose in life? am i talking to you? are you hardly here all the time and what do you mean ‘here’? is this a bit tricky well let’s spell it in, um, out… thrown² into life, if you’re

but i’m here aren’t i? you ask as you turn from your crib mama breast thingy and look at the light on the wall the bars of light, the bars that hold you

prismatic (as a misfolded protein – didn’t aeschylus write about prions?³)

into the world into which you have suddenly arrived it will

always feel sudden

because you have only and always
just
arrived

oh, priam, who begged,
begged
but that’s another story⁴

 

1. A 3‑torus is a three‑dimensional analogue of the familiar ‘doughnut’ shape (2‑torus). It is a finite but unbounded 3‑dimensional space whose topology is like a cube whose opposite faces are glued together. In cosmology, this has been proposed as one possible global shape for the universe. If our universe were a 3‑torus, space would be flat ‘locally’ but wrap back on itself in a way that could, in principle, make us see multiple images of the same object in different directions.
2. Martin Heidegger’s famous concept of throwness may be recognised here.
   Thrownness (Geworfenheit) is a central concept in Heidegger’s Being and Time, describing how Dasein (‘being-there’) finds itself already situated in a world without choosing it.
   It appears primarily in Division One, Chapter Three (‘The Worldliness of the World’), but receives its fullest treatment in §38 (‘Care as the Being of Dasein’) within the section on ‘Dasein as Being-possible’ (§§31–38). Here, Heidegger links thrownness to projection and falling, forming the structure of care: Dasein is ‘thrown projection.’
   The discussion continues into §§39–44 on temporality, where thrownness ties to the past as Dasein’s factical ‘having been’. Earlier mentions occur in §12 on being-in and mood (Befindlichkeit), grounding thrownness ontologically.
   An accessible translation [of Being and Time.] into English is Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised edition, edited by Dennis J. Schmidt, State University of New York Press, 2010.
3. Prions are misfolded proteins that can force normally folded versions of the same protein to adopt the same abnormal shape, triggering a chain reaction that eventually kills cells – especially neurons in the brain. They cause a group of rare, fatal neurodegenerative disorders called prion diseases (transmissible spongiform encephalopathies), such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in humans, scrapie in sheep, and chronic wasting disease in deer.
   Prion diseases are transmitted to humans through exposure to infectious prion material, usually via ingestion or medical procedures. They are not spread by casual contact or the air. The risk is low overall, but when transmission occurs it is usually via one of a few specific routes.
   Humans mainly pick up prion diseases by eating contaminated meat (especially BSE‑linked beef), from medical procedures involving contaminated instruments or tissues, or, very rarely, blood transfusion – not by everyday social contact.
   There is no cure for prion diseases and treatment focuses on palliative care to relieve symptoms. Patients die within months to a few years.
4. Patroclus was Achilles’ closest companion and possible lover, raised together after exile from his homeland for accidentally killing a boy. He fought for the Greeks in the Trojan War as a key Myrmidon leader.
   Achilles withdrew from battle after Agamemnon took his war prize Briseis, but allowed Patroclus to wear his armour and repel the Trojans from Greek ships. Hector killed Patroclus (aided by Apollo), driving Achilles into consuming grief and rage. He rearmed to slay Hector, mutilate his body, and avenged his dearest friend by repeatedly dragging Hector’s body behind his chariot around Patroclus’s tomb, desecrating it out of rage. Hector’s father Priam begged for its release to give his son proper burial rites, invoking shared fatherly grief by likening himself to Achilles’ own aging father Peleus, and bringing ransom as urged by Zeus.
   Priam returned Hector’s body to Troy amid collective mourning from Andromache (Hector’s wife), Hecuba (Hector’s mother, Queen of Troy), and the people. They held nine days of funeral preparations, burning the body on a pyre on the tenth day during a 12-day truce granted by Achilles, then buried the bones in a golden casket. Followed by a feast.
   This comes at the conclusion of Homer’s Iliad. The war resumes soon after, leading to Achilles’ death, the Trojan Horse stratagem, and Troy’s fall. But those events appear in later epics like the Aethiopis and Little Iliad.