the early history of light
Last summer the new telescope went into operation, sending back to us almost immediately pictures of what astronomers are now confirming are the most distant, and thus oldest, galaxies human beings have ever observed. These galaxies defy all expectations; they are far larger, far more massive, than astronomers predicted. They were born much more quickly than they should have been. We know quite a bit less than we thought about the early history of light: “‘We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,’ [astronomer Joel] Leja said in a Penn University statement. ‘It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science.’”
The first time I can remember listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor I was twenty years old and living in a cabin in the woods in a small town at the edge of the world, a place I have written about often, a time I sometimes wonder if I have ever really left. That summer was an opium summer, ditches and fields and backyards fiery with poppies, the whole town from teenagers to the elderly ambling around in the sunshine in an opium-tea-drunk stupor. I know that reads like something out of a story, but that’s just how things used to be there. My friend Jayna lived in another little cabin in a different patch of woods from mine, and one night I bicycled there, and we lay on her bed drinking poppy tea, or tea with whiskey in it, or probably just whiskey, and she played F♯ A♯ ∞ for me from beginning to end—which sounds, actually, like a date, now that I am writing it down. But we were both in love with other people who lived in their own little cabins, and we were young enough to think we would live in the woods in love forever, our own time spinning forward in gentle circles. Rain, dark, summer, repeat. In the candlelit dark the voice of the speaker in “Dead Flag Blues” washed over us:
The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze
I said: “kiss me, you're beautiful—
These are truly the last days”
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream or a fever
Like a daydream, or a fever.
Maybe time is a shining cord stretching from the furthest parts of our blurred pasts to a point so far from where we stand that we will never see its ending; maybe the cord is a loop, and we are only holding on to a small part of some vast whole tugging us in an endless circle, like toddlers on the rope tow at a ski slope. Maybe time is a vast basin, and our universe rolls merrily along inside it like a marble in a glass bowl; maybe it is like a map that can be folded in upon itself until its most distant points are touching. We are anchored always to our own histories, to the histories of our generations, the histories that move through our bodies like a wave, the histories of our ghosts and the ghosts of our ancestors and our ancestors’ histories. All that time tangled together across space, all mixed up with light.
If time is stitched into the fabric of the universe, and the universe is expanding, pulling time outward with it, perhaps one day the universe will reach the limit of its inhalation and collapse in on itself again, time sweeping backward as the universe breathes out, and our lives will ignite in reverse as a record needle moves across a groove. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that everything in the universe tends to move from order to entropy, from uniformity to chaos, galloping recklessly into disaster, or maybe just gleeful disorganization. The passage of time can be marked by a movement toward mayhem. The young star burns brightly in its tidy constellation; the messy blast of a supernova tells us the star’s time is past. The longer we live the more the times we have lived through accumulate in our bodies, in our hearts: palimpsests whose original texts are so overwritten they can no longer be read. We bloom outward. Our edges blur. We accumulate, accrete, and fall again into disarray.
But some music brings us back always to the person we were the first time we heard it; so it is with this music for me, so it was a few weeks ago, when I went to see GSY!BE in a club in Hamburg, a club on the fourth floor of a massive former Nazi bunker turned luxury condos and startup offices. (“All shows in Germany are in weird former Nazi bunkers,” said Clyde, who isn’t wrong.)
For me this music is the kind of music that moves through your whole body and opens you up so that all your histories become legible to you at once, so that the shining cord connects you to all the selves you have ever been, all the stories you have ever told. So that you are in a crowded club in Hamburg and also Jayna’s house in the night-dark woods and all the candles are lit. What is even a body, anyway? It is made from the afterlives of stars. And if we are stars, then maybe time is also a burning. Does history repeat itself? Or is it that all history happening in the same place, an infinity of concentric circles, the repetitions of its traumas but also the recalculations of its joyful possibilities? Maybe all resistance is always occurring, everywhere, all at once, echoing backward and forward, overlapping in the unruly present.
Maybe the future toward which we are yearning has already come.
How does anybody write about the beginning of the universe? How does anybody write about music? How does anybody write about hope? How does anybody write about light? In a crowded club in Hamburg, in a former Nazi bunker, in a room heavy with the breath of strangers—which holds a different meaning now than it did three years ago, than it did when I was a child throwing myself against the stage at show after show, the press of bodies behind me, the exhilaration of such pressure, such closeness, such heat and light and sweat and noise. In a crowded club in Hamburg, in a building full of ghosts and nightmares, in the circle of the arms of my beloved, in a country that will remain unfamiliar to me no matter how long I live here, in a language I can barely speak, in a language I was born knowing. In all the years between then and now and what will happen next.
One by one, the musicians come onstage. The lights dim. I close my eyes, and the sound begins.
We woke up one morning and fell a little further down—
For sure it's the valley of death
WRITING LATELY:
I wrote an essay about star death for the first issue of Genevieve Valentine, Annie Wu, and Ming Doyle’s new comic series, Two Graves. You can preorder it here.
I wrote about Christopher Pike and HP Lovecraft for Tor.com earlier this year.
You can order a print copy of my latest novel, The Darling Killers, here. It’s also an ebook.
READING LATELY:
“What is crazy? The world is a bag and the water inside the bag is all the sense of power, joy, and possibility in the world, but there are holes in the bag: each wounding experience or painful loss is its own hole. Everyone carries their own world-bag and sometimes the bag gets so ragged with holes that all the water of possible joy runs out of you and you are left with a collapsed and empty bag that once held everything. That is crazy!” Hannah Black, “Crazy in Love”
“[T]he State of Washington passed a law that steelhead could not be sold in the state, so [the Indian fishermen] had no market for our salmon and our steelhead. We called Vine [Deloria Jr.], who was in New York at the time. Vine found a good market for our fish with the Mafia at the Fulton Fish Market in New York City. We butchered our fish at Frank’s Landing at the mouth of the Nisqually River, boxed them, and took them right to Sea-Tac airport to send back East.” Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Vine Deloria, Jr.
Fish-Ins & Black/Native Solidarity in the 1960s, Mariame Kaba