Astrophysics, accident, affinity, affluence

Hare, hunter, field - anyone?

Who isn't very touched when someone is willing to betray having heard what one is trying to say? It leaves one open to an edgy, precious canard, of trying too hard, but it puts paid to its flip side, that any-thing beyond pride is incomprehensible.

What is more accidental than our respective conditions in life, unless it is our position amongst it when the shutter is snapped? Nothing gave me the right to own such greetings of very, very supportive readers as I saw the other day, except their generous focus on matter passing through their own occupied space. Dear evidence and practitioners, all of them, of Wolfgang Pauli's Exclusion Principle, portray the exception for assimilated thought.

That simple concept, lodged in the sidebar for a year, has never been better illuminated than in the happenstance-defying confluence of three contributions to that festschrift. Here was a reciprocity vastly beyond transmittal originating here. As matter, ourselves, distributed at random, to be so linked is to imply a kind creation.

Yet impossible to interchange as our condition is, this is not to define fortune as fickle, but as fertile. Everything gravitates - period. Everything has its own vector and volume of urging toward an other, and we investigate this to understand not just ourselves. Someone's sternum will be shattered in war, someone equally eligible will inherit his peace; someone dear will be taken by the same risk we all exchanged; some brother will go for some other. We are the leg-atee of accident but the proof of gravity, or desire defies itself in the tangents of pride. No one can be better occupied than by friend-ship; no one can occupy a higher estate.

Gifts of Valéry Lorenzo,

Bruce Barone, and 

Victoria Thorne

Hubble photography

  Saturn and Cassini

The Slab 

Mar, 2007