#analogies
Kintsugi
The heart beats radiate out,
earthquakes from the epicentre of my being.
With my ear pressed to the mattress,
I hear it rumble. The pulse
of my body; the proof of my living, my
breathing.
Sometimes it feels like everything I touch
shatters. Like the magnitude of my heart
is too strong for anyone or anything to handle.
Sometimes I hold myself back from holding
just in case I make a break by accident;
I am not a master of mending - I cannot seal
your cracks with gold, you have to learn how
yourself.
Like I did.
That’s why no one can ever tell
how often my whole self - body and soul -
has splintered under the force of my own
undeniable
existence.
The rumbles cease; the aftershocks,
the followers and the precursors
to the main event - so quiet now
they bleed into the history of my being
even as I seal the wounds shut.
No wonder my hands shake; they know their work
will be in vain.
But the history of every war
is written in the hand of the victors,
and my stories will be told,
even after the earth reclaims me
as her own.
January 23, 2016
It’s a word that reads the same even if you flip it over, until you stare at it for too long and it starts to look weird, look foreign, look unreal whether it’s read left to right or otherwise that you have to check online a few seconds later just to make sure your spelling’s right and the word actually exists in this reality.
It’s electric lines running parallel each other, left and right along the same highway you’ve traversed the past four years—weekly once that slowly ebbed into months, then semesters, then rare holidays—and you’re only acknowledging as you lie in the backseat of a friend’s car with a Best Coast song playing in the background, quiet and familiar but new.
It’s watching Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, clicking random videos on YouTube that soothe your clogged up mind and take the more pressing matters at hand into the back of your head so as to help you find the first problem to focus on, remembering how Dad used to sing you MJ hits during long waits in lines.
It’s a telephone number that you’ve got memorized from day one, and realized would still call the same institution, the same line, the same person, if you ever decided on a whim to dial the digits the other way around into a pay phone because you don’t own a landline at home.
It’s taking your shirt off like Mom told you based from superstitions, and turning it inside out like you don’t give a shit, and damn right you shouldn’t when you’re at a crossroads and you don’t know where to go because you’re lost.
You don’t really care that the word is tattarrattat,and that it’s a word you got off the internet that’s a more complex (and frankly idiotic) onomatopoeia that apparently exists in Ulysseswritten by James Joyce.
You don’t really care that the lines are running out as you approach the South Luzon Expressway on your way to the only place you ever considered home, and that Meralco’s probably got underground ones or some other way to keep the power running in these grasslands.
You don’t really care that it’s the middle of the night and you’re blasting Billie Jean and it slowly segues into Thriller even though it’s the middle of May and the neighbors are probably asleep, and then into Man in the Mirror, the words, Could it be really me, pretending that they’re not alone? ringing in your ears and sticking to the center of your corkboard brain even as you decide to just give up and go the fuck to sleep.
You don’t really care that you’ve only got the last two digits—and they’re the first ones, too, ironically—left to punch in to call your Aunt Grace, in her office in the rundown hospital she works in, with an apology eight years late clutching at your tonsils that you have to choke down with some mucus and tears because it’s eight years late and you’re sorry you broke her locket, the only thing she has left of your grandfather, but pride’s a bitch and so are you, so you’re going to have to grit your teeth some more and punch in the second to the last number before you put the earpiece back on and walk away (because you live three blocks away from the nearest phone booth and you walked all the way here half-drunk and thinking you could finally do it, but no).
You don’t really care that this shirt is a secondhand band shirt, a gift from your favorite friend and drummer, and that the logo’s printed in vinyl that makes it thicker and hotter so wearing it outside in makes the print stick to your stomach with sweat, because you really cannot do anything else and you have nowhere to go—for now at least.
(You don’t even care that this is a metaphorical crossroads, and that the path to be made is a mental one, a decision that will take you places or one that you will bear hatred for your entire life, because it’s Mom’s advice andshe’s never wrongandthis is Degs’ shirtandyou’ve always looked up to him.
You fall asleep on the couch like that, warmer and better than you have the past week, with a friend in mind and a handwritten home note in your hand.)
Studying black holes … with water
Let’s continue the fun with analogies! Below we expand on the use of a particular analogy from science which we briefly discussed in a recent article.
The image above depicts the supermassive black hole M87*, which sits at the centre of the M87 galaxy some 55 million light years away. It was compiled from radiofrequency signals collected across several telescopes over two years. It is the first of its kind.
In the image we are given direct evidence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The black hole is dark, as predicted, since radiation cannot escape black holes once it’s within their boundaries. Moreover, the accretion disk (bright) around the black hole, from which radiation is emitted, is of a lopsided-doughnut shape. This varied brightness results from intense gravitational warping. And, because of rotation, there’s a kind of relativistic Doppler effect going on: radiation is boosted in the direction of rotation towards Earth.
Now, here’s a funny thing of relevance to us: some scientists and philosophers claim we can study black holes by investigating … [drum roll] … plain old water. One argument goes like this.
Inanalogue experiments, involving surface-water waves, something about black holes is realisable in surface-water waves’ ‘white holes’. Therefore, black holes can be modelled by analogy because their models and the models of white holes are related by the assumptions they share.
The analogy is not defined by a material relation. Nonetheless, thermal aspects of Hawking radiation (named after Stephen Hawking), which is released at black-hole boundaries, can be simulated in water. The analogy owes itself to ‘syntactic isomorphism’ between models, whereby the relation is confirmed in a ‘Bayesian sense’.
‘Analogue simulation’ is still a powerful experimental tool which can be used in a similar sense to computer simulation. Isn’t this cool? Or are such analogies fraudulent in some way because they only offer crude and opaque approximations via models which are often proven incorrect?
(Picture credit: Event Horizon Telescope project.)
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The Philosophy of Analogies
InThe Republic—after introducing ‘the analogy of the sun’, in which the idea of goodness ‘illuminates’ truth, and ‘the analogy of the divided line’—Plato presents ‘the Allegory of the Cave’ (depicted above).
Prisoners in an underground cave are chained by the neck and legs, their eyes fixed towards a wall onto which shadows are cast. Trusting their senses, these two-dimensional figures mark the prisoners’ reality. But this imaginary world does not represent the intelligible reality above it: the ‘world of ideas’.
Like the prisoners, we can only hope to understand reality by ascending out of the cave. Plato’s analogies are powerful. But is each story, the source, really consistent with its accompanying theory, the target of the analogy?
Read more here.
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Los paseos, las bufandas y los cielos.
Nilo.
Superpark.
Nilo ventaneando.
Andar.
Esquivar.
En ruedos
Mapa.
Salir.
Aparecer.
Ahí.
Sostener.
Nadie.
Atrapando al eclipse.
Sonreír.
Que nunca falten olas.
Reír.
Propio.
Espejos.
.
