Last week's experiment in public research went well, and seeing y'all get up and actually write about mounds filled my heart with joy. If you want to revisit the prompt that kicked things off, you can here [link].
I'm not going to dissect or comment on the writing that got submitted in this piece--please check out the blog posts connected into this channel to see all the lovely thinking that people have been doing. I'm here to talk about mounds' reciprocal: holes.
A mound is the shape of longing.
You and your theories are riddled with holes. And sure, the days go by, and time piles on, and things happen, constantly. Your seconds and indistinguishable experiences make you mound, but mound lives in hole. Filling a hole does not get rid of it. This is easy to imagine: if you stand in one and fill it all the way up to your neck, you're still standing in a hole.
With time, you become more and more (your mound) but the call, the feeling, the desire (fuck it, yeah, the trauma, the wound of what didn’t happen, what couldn’t happen, what you couldn’t get and didn’t have) sits underneath you… fill the hole all you want, pile everything on top. You’re still in the hole, you still are hole. Let's decouple the hole from its negative connotations if we can.
Holes have been investigated in great and poetic length by the late Pope.L, and the connection between mounds and holes for our purposes bridges his thinking with the Dirac hole theory in particle physics.
Pope.L wrote about the very American "fantasy of having," highlighting that, in US/its exported culture, being and having are all the way tied up. To be is to have and, conversely, to not-have is to not-be. This puts you in a predicament when you live in a country like the US, that is determined to keep all the having in the same small(er) pool, and define those who lack as not worthy of dignity, recognition, or even life.
"Lack," though, for Pope.L is a condition of emergence. There is no such thing as mere absence--the hole, what's missing, what you lack--this is a real space that is occupied, a material you can actually use. It is where things come from. To make something out of nothing.
Dirac hole theory and the actions of the subatomic provide all-scale physical evidence for the unity of mound and hole, the existential inseparability of the negative and the positive, absence and presence, longing and #keep #going.
In particle physics, there are seas of negative energy. Photons/light can be trained on incident points in this sea of negative energy to excite an electron until its spin turns positive.
When an electron in a sea of negative energy is hit with enough photons to turn positive, it leaves behind a hole occupied by an antiparticle, the positron. This is the subatomic logic of the unity of mound and hole.
The positron is the antimatter equivalent to the electron, and when the two collide, they both disappear in favor of two photons emerging. This process is called annihilation, but not in a destructive or disappearing way.
The mound and the hole collide and annihilate, producing light.
Mounds' verticality compromises their classification as rhizomes, but their unity with holes makes that type of reading too complicated to begin with. More importantly, mounds are lumpy. What I mean by this is they tend to pop up unpredictably based on the convenience of where things can go.
Get that trash out the way; rake those leaves up; can you get your laundry off the floor? Where am I going to put all this extra sand?
What we're often left with is a pile that doesn't quite belong. That might be because of the unavoidable acknowledgement that nothing gets resolved. For all your mound, you are still hole, and the mound is shaped by the hole it's filling.
Pope.L wrote about longing as his favorite material through which to engage holes. I agree that "what we long for" is super fittingly described by the metaphor of a hole in the self. Trauma makes wounds that open up holes (upside down mounds), you spend your life trying to fill them. And you get something out of it! Life is made! But do not discredit the gravity of hole-y space. Abandon the notion of emptiness and replace it with opacity.
Nothing that makes sense really makes sense (be suspicious of things that make sense)
Obfuscation as an operating condition (maintain a healthy respect for what cannot be seen)
Mound theory is homework for realizing opacity, in an attempt to create infrastructure that dignifies what can't be seen and what won't be resolved.
What hole are you trying to fill?
How long can you stand in the same place?
Can you keep digging, and inhabit the hole?
The stars only know how craterous this hole gets. We've got mountains to make, too.
Big thank you to @aristotle; @cnsc; @fallwinter2002girl; @kale; @medea; @sam for participating in last week's experiment. Thank you to @saraaa who did not write for this project, but for starting to talk with me about their work on dignity, which is having me look at things differently.