Is space Hot?

Hello, my Dear, Beloved Hot Followers! It has been some time, and I’ve missed you. I’ll skip my usual excuses for silence, as they’re woven deep into this missive, but before we begin, there’s some housekeeping we must do. Yes, I am aware that I have already covered the topic of Space at length in this newsletter. No, I do not plan to revisit that analysis—Space is mystifying, awe-inspiring, and certainly Hot, and I haven’t learned anything about it recently that would merit expanding or revisiting my previous conclusions. Instead, today I seek to tackle a topic that’s only tangentially, homonymically related to Space: space. Beyond a name, however, today’s space shares only the illusion of vastness with that other Space and little else. Though, I guess, Space is a type of space... Alas, I digress.

I am writing to you from a teeny town in the hills of Surrey called Haslemere. My paternal grandparents have lived here for something like 15 years after moving from a slightly larger but neighboring village called Godalming, to which they moved from Mexico City in the 1980s (and before that Argentina, to which my great (and great-great) grandparents migrated from England, Ireland, and Scotland at different moments of the late 19th and early 20th century, usually following an undying urge to proselytize). Reprising a trip last summer that sought to reconnect me with one of my Fatherlands, I’ve been here for just under a month. It’s been somewhat of a holiday, but it’s not really a vacation in that visiting family (and elderly relatives) doesn’t create much room for diversion (though there is a welcome difference from the hub and bub of NYC).

Haslemere is by no means anywhere near Hot. It is quaint and quiet. It quivers with a zealous belief in a higher power and, often, Parkinson's. The town, at the southwest end of Surrey and just a stone’s throw away from West Sussex, boasted 16,000 residents in the 2011 census and was founded, allegedly, in the twelfth century. I like to joke that when I visit, I bring the average age of the population down to 68 from a hearty 72. The Parish of Haslemere is comprised of three towns: Haslemere, Shottermill, and Grayswood; it has one central church (St. Bartholomew’s, just up the road) but several other congregations. It’s a silent, sleepy village tucked into seemingly endless greenery. The “bustling” heart of town, the Haslemere High Street, has four coffee shops, one book shop, a Vision Express, and a smattering of trinket and clothing stores (some of which are charity shops). There are two pubs (the White Horse and the Swan (on) Inn), a boutique hotel, one cycling studio (a haven of youth), a pharmacy (Boots!), a local history museum founded in 1888, and a Waitrose. The post office, after attempting to share quarters with a restaurant, finally closed in the Spring, so Haslemere residents must now go to a neighbouring town to post their mail. The footpath between my grandparent’s home and the center of town takes me seven-and-a-half minutes to traverse. All neighbours greet me when we cross paths.

Haslemere is the sort of place where one goes to get “air”. It is to space what New York is decidedly not—there are vast fields, plump houses roosting on majestic lawns crawling with roses, mossy, winding paths through the woods, and the profound clarity that comes when you’re surrounded by nothing, nothing at all (though I suspect this is only true when you’re visiting. Residents appear boxed in by life in the countryside, limited to the realities of life, death, illness, and, amazingly, croquet). England generally feels more “spacious” than New York (though I suppose this is true of most places, even if this isn’t an observation I have tested elsewhere so as to be able to compare the quality of spaciousness between New York and Not-England). Even a large city here like London creates space in ways that New York has never managed to, at least not for me; when I’m in London, I often encounter bemused curiosity as opposed to the rigid transaction that defines New York. On a recent visit, I was hit on by an eager nineteen-year-old Liverpudlian who simply could not believe that I actually lived in New York. (She also couldn't believe that I wasn't 23. Note: I'm adding this fact into the newsletter not for the narrative, but rather because I'm vain. Note 2: I turned her down, don’t worry) I acknowledge, though, that I am the right kind of exotic for this place.

Space. What do I even mean by space? Until recently, I don’t think I could have given you a good answer. I’ve typically thought of space as distance, openness, the gaps between myself and others, and a lack of construction. Nature, perhaps, is the image that comes to mind when I talk about space. Areas that are not (yet) inhabited. Potential? Who knows. Anywho, this week, I encountered a definition of space from decidedly Hot French philosopher Henri Bergson that tickled me: “Space is what enables us to distinguish a number of identical and simultaneous sensations from one another; it is thus a principle of differentiation other than that of qualitative differentiation, and consequently, it is a reality with no quality.” Space, per our Poet Laureate, is a container that allows us to lay a lot of discrete elements next to one another and compare them, count them. Space, more simply, holds.

For most of my life, I’ve been an intrepid evangelist of space. I wish I were joking, but I’m afraid that, like the good Sagittarius that I am, I love packing up and putting oceans between myself and wherever I was previously. It is only from a distance that I’m able to reflect and think, or so I keep saying. In high school, I decided, for no reason other than the adventure of it, to go to Morocco for a summer and hike along the High Altas Mountains. The furthest I had ever been from my family, on that trip, I started to see patterns, commonalities, between this new exotic land and home, which I eagerly reported back over breakfast upon my return.

Soon after that, I embarked on a more permanent expedition across oceans by enrolling in a liberal arts college in the UAE. On flights back and forth between Abu Dhabi and Mexico City, I’d take advantage of the vast container of the air to try to put recent events into some kind of order—I remember silently chuckling into the folding tray before me as I labelled the different chapters of my adventures in each country, trying to tease apart the plot lines that developed here and there. That moment of sense-making was critical for my well-being as I entered a more complex existence, one in which life moved, simultaneously, in two different places. Time, I learned, didn’t stand still once I left.

I’m finding it hard to speak solely of space—time invariably encroaches on the concept, or perhaps it's the other way around. Sitting in this remote country village, I can’t help but think of that early realization in my first permanent expedition into space: while my time follows me around like an eager velcro dog, my time also has a double that stays put in the spaces I leave and keeps ticking on. When I position myself differently in space, (thereby extending? encouraging? it?), time no longer feels linear or unique to me. Across the ocean, time splinters off—life continues on in the places I’ve left even if I’m not there to observe its motion. Upon my return, I’ll see hints of time in the new dust that has settled on my shelves or in my friends’ new haircuts, stories, and sighs.

The relationship I’m experiencing here between time and space isn’t limited to its splintering. Time and space, from where I’m sitting, feel like two sides of the same coin. I need time to traverse space. By stationing myself in Surrey, I can’t simply walk over to my friends’ apartments on the UES, or buy a bagel, neither at Tal’s nor Bob’s, or reach out and hold a hand that was once conveniently right next to mine. Taking any of these actions right now would take me hours, or days, rather than minutes or seconds. Technology has removed some of those barriers, certainly—planes have narrowed distance through speed, and I feel close to my dad, for example, to whom I speak on the phone each Saturday for a couple of hours, despite our living thousands of miles apart—but not entirely. The tricky thing, however, is that I also need space to understand time. Think of a clock: we’re only able to put a number on the passage of “time” when we’re able to see hands taking slow, measured steps around a dial, and count these. Is that really time I’m measuring?

I went to London this past weekend to remind myself that my body is not like the bodies of my current housemates and their friends, but rather active and buoyant, steady and intentional, desired and desiring. While I was in London, the hours scurried away at my feet—in the morning, I would look at my watch and think, great, I have four hours before meeting a friend. That’s loads of time to walk and see and shop and find the trainers (sorry, sneakers) that my mother firmly requested. Three neighbourhoods later and convinced that only an hour had elapsed, I realized I only had an hour left and that my hotel, where I desperately needed to deposit my ten newly purchased books, was more than a 40-minute walk away.

After 26 hours in London, I was sitting on the train shuttling back to Haslemere, and I thought, wow, that absolutely flew by, but I must have made the most of it because my phone is congratulating me for walking 32km, biking another 7km, and climbing the equivalent of 40 staircases. Why did the conversion of time to space make my adventure feel more meaningful, more worthwhile?

“Time, conceived under the form of an unbounded and homogenous medium is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness,” our trusty Bergson explains. Time, like space, is another container. Rather than hold objects, however, time holds conscious states—feeling, being, becoming. Time holds a set of activities, meetings, movements, or, well, our lives. It’s a third dimension to space. It appears that we incorrectly assume time and space are different and then clumsily flatten one onto the other when both are part of the same thing.

I’m likely butchering Bergson’s argument, but at one point in Time and Free Will, he explains that the most dangerous quality of this flattening is that, in our consciousness, we’ve created the illusion of sameness by the way we have settled into and rely on space. Nine o’clock today seems indistinguishable from nine o’clock tomorrow morning because we look at what appears to be the same clock, with the same hands, pointing at the same numbers. But, in fact, that’s only an illusion caused by space. If we factor in the vertical axis of time, the hands pointing at nine o’clock today can not be the same hands pointing at nine o'clock tomorrow because they've been changed in the time that it's taken them to travel around the dial twice. So while tomorrow’s nine o’clock appears, in space, as merely another turn, it's actually removed from that original instant through an upward spiral that marks each moment as unique. Nothing is ever repeated; or, as Heraclitus claimed, we never bathe in the same river twice.

Before boarding the train out of London on Sunday afternoon, I enjoyed a shawarma wrap from a shop that had the same logo as a restaurant from where I'd buy very similar shawarma wraps in Abu Dhabi. As I unwrapped and delighted in its garlicky, chicken-ey goodness, the shawarma appeared to me to have the same taste as the Maroush shawarmas we’d buy in downtown Abu Dhabi. However, that poor wrap—even if I had returned to the OG Maroush in downtown Abu Dhabi—, will never, can never, relish in the experience of sameness. Repetition is an illusion!!!!!!

This trip, positioning myself at two different points in space, has allowed me to revisit my relationship with time. Time feels different here. Or perhaps, by stepping away from the two-dimensionality of routine life, I’ve been able to remember that time is a critical dimension of my days, even if it is a fickle muse: unreliable, entirely unmeasurable, at times responsive, at others elusive. I've enjoyed watching the passage of time in Haslemere. This town allows time to both race and stand entirely still. I've somehow convinced myself that time moves faster when there is much to go to, see, and do, when you’ve filled your day up with possibility. However, though Haslemere has nothing approximating a flurry of activity, time here has a way of slithering through my fingers like I’ve never experienced. Though a day lasts a week, three weeks have slid by with squirreled enthusiasm. Afternoons curled up on a pink floral couch reading have piled together and suddenly I find myself near an end.

I see it in my grandparents, too. Thirteen years ago, my grandfather suffered a heart attack that slipped him into the steady downward stream of dementia. Today, though, it’s as if that heart attack, essentially the end of a life (as we knew it and all), belongs to the near past. My grandfather’s body still (sort of) stands strong and imposing as the body of a former rugby player should. And while his mental decline has recently accentuated, for many years it could only be described as a slow, painstakingly gentle slope, one in which every day felt painfully familiar to the last.

I don’t think I realized how much I needed to remind myself of the nature of time. I’ve lost track of myself in New York, and I haven’t felt steady on my feet. The Summer, initially shiny, breathless, and electric, soon turned viscous. I’ve lopped around between this and that, a visit here, a travel there. My ears rang and everything began to blur together in a heavy vat of humidity. While it’s no longer as easy as it once was to thread apart the different narratives that I’ve found myself in and rigorously label them in time and space, I’ve enjoyed the silence to do as much of that sorting as possible, even among the trials and tribulations of caring for age. I feel grounded, even if I'm not sure where. Maybe just in time.

So, I guess that leaves us with the important question—what does any of this have to do with Hotness? I don’t think space, in itself, is Hot. Though it is a more loyal muse than time—a meter will always be a meter, while an hour can be a minute or a year depending on your proximity to a pretty girl, as Einstein famously posited—and though it is nice that space holds us, gingerly, and allows us to come home after a long day of being in time and set out all of the various things we have collected so that we can make sense of them, space feels far too caring, calculated, and artificial for me to feel comfortable labelling it Hot.

At the same time, space holds so much power over us. Even if reality is an illusion and I’m missing out on mostly everything around me because of my underdeveloped human perception, space is a habit to which we return and return, even if we know that return isn’t possible. I returned to Haslemere this year, thinking I would find it the same as it was last summer, only to be shocked by the change, however minuscule (I think, actually, that minuscule change is the most hurtful since it triggers the uncanny). Space tricks us into believing there is such a thing as sameness, and who can blame it, when superficially, it feels like there should be spirit to a space that feels unquestionable. When you try to pin that spirit down, though, you realize it is entirely ephemeral. Ancient people didn’t equate their deities with concepts, but rather places. In time, however, deities have become more and more conceptual, at times personified, at others aggrandized.

Space is necessary for the imagination, for logic, for abstraction, and for writing. Without space (an empty page, a smooth tablet), I would have nowhere to put all the words that form in my mind. At a more elemental level, Bergson claims that even words themselves are the product of space; it is only in space that we might be able to label unlike things with a common language, and thereby establish a connection. Though my idea of a tree is very different from your tree, in space, we can lay our trees side by side and appreciate the shared understanding. If we were to stay only in time, the link we see in space would be impossible since each tree’s uniqueness would always set them apart. I guess in that paradox—that space allows us to distinguish, which in turn allows us to connect—, space is valuable.

Ultimately, though, what truly feels Hot is the acknowledgment that each moment is singular. Yeah, I know, this realization is but a truism. It feels wishy-washy, like woo-woo magic that has lost its glimmer due to how often it's repeated. I'm sorry. Even the turtle master in Kung Fu Panda reminds us that today is a gift, which is why it is called a present. But, give me a chance, please. To visualize life as a spiral, to remember that there’s no such this as repetition, that I will never return to the same space twice, that I will never meet the same person twice, and that even the books and the art that I love will constantly change when I am away from them (and even when I am with them!!), feels like an important anchor in the journey of Hotness. This realization, perhaps, feels particularly powerful to me right now because my dear octo- and nonagenarians are napping in the opposite room. Neither of them could care less about whether there is a relationship between space and time because they simply don’t have very much left of the latter to make use of the traits of the former. Life slips away.

Space, dear, holds me and sorts me, but it is not, in itself Hot. It is much Hotter, I would posit, to make use of space and wield it, intelligently, to remain connected, simultaneous, and near so that we don’t waste any of these singular points in space that we’ve all been gifted. Standing before space, we may believe our work should be silence. Sure, I think that's the right response, at times, as is stillness. But if we venture too far into inactive silence, we’re giving into space in ways that rid of us our juicy humanity. Rather, I think that, before space, we have to follow in the steps of Walt Whitman’s noiseless, patient spider, who, “surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space” is “ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,/ Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,/ Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”

xx

P.D., We measure human life in years and relate it as a succession of events, but perhaps, we should, like Walter Benjamin, attempt to measure it in space and write biographies in the form of maps. Imagine the life of Dominique as lines of different colours cutting through all of the different places where I’ve been and lived, colour seeping more deeply into the spaces that have been more deeply inhabited. There wouldn’t be a lot of space for all the boyfriends I have been collecting to keep my future biographers entertained, but I guess that’s alright, they’re not that important, not yet anyway.