Unlearning Habitual Cosmologies Reading

Unlearning Habitual Cosmologies: Reading Stanisław Lem at the event horizon by Bogna Konior

4. One couldn’t keep saying ‘gravitationally completely collapsed object’ over and over When I was sixteen, I felt that I needed to talk to the Ocean, and I was impatient. I decided that this alien being at the heart of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris was the only god I could ever accept. The single inhabitant of planet Solaris, the black Ocean covered its whole surface and weighed seven hundred billion tons. Resistant to all studies, its intelligence was elusive. It seemed to spend most of its time spitting out amorphous shapes. I was obsessed. In my Catholic, uni-sex, private high school, I skipped prayer and slept through religion classes. I politely refused invitations to parties in order to daydream about joining the NASA oceanography team. I devised methods for submergence, practicing in lakes or - less ideally - in murky, ashy ponds near the coal mines in Wałbrzych, where I grew up. My friends longed to wrap themselves around boys but I was having erotic dreams about Seasat, the first civilian oceanographic satellite launched in 1978. But years passed, 40

and nothing. I graduated, moved to London, moved to Warsaw, moved to Amsterdam, moved to Hong Kong, and nothing. I kept searching for the Ocean, in vain. In 2013, scientists at the University of Miami and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich aimed to study the mysteries of large ocean eddies, vortices that form in turbulent waters, by comparing them to black holes. Even though these eddies can span enormous distances of over ninety miles, their boundaries remain difficult to draw. What links them to black holes is that the only outward-directed information is the absence of information. Edgar Allan Poe described one diabolic whirlwind in A Descent Into the Maelstrom: “the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water . . . sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar.” You can almost feel Poe trying to grab this voiceless inhuman terror by the throat to transcribe it into digestible aural experiences. He also recounted a “broad belt of gleaming spray” around the vortex, akin to the event horizon. Physicist John Wheeler is often credited with inventing the term “black hole” in 1964, three years after the publication of Solaris, at a talk he gave at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. He clarified that a stranger in the audience had suggested the term to him. Seduced by its simplicity, Wheeler decided “to be casual about the term...dropping it into [my] lectures as if it was an old friend” until it caught on, because “one couldn’t keep saying ‘gravitationally completely collapsed object’ over and over.” One of 41

(Up) Adaptation from Black Holes, Monsters In Space by NASA/JPL-Caltech (2013); (Down) Still shot from Solaris (1972) by Andrei Tarkovsky.

the earliest (known) mentions of the subject appeared in 1783 when John Mitchell wrote about mysterious “dark stars” whose gravitational pull was so strong that nothing could escape from them, not even light. Today, we know that black holes are warps in spacetime rather than pits. The black hole is a strange geometry. Light can only travel inwards, no matter which direction it goes. Black holes turn vision onto itself, collapsing its inquisitive properties. Aside from recurrent scientific concerns, one of Lem’s favourite themes, especially in the extraordinary His Master’s Voice, is scholars’ inability to come to a unanimous conclusion. After decades of studying planet Solaris, arguments over the Ocean’s ‘aliveness’ have biologists and physicists on a warpath. Journalists conjure audacious theories, for example that the Ocean is a distant relative of electric eels, capable of producing artificial gravitational and magnetic fields. But it remained unclear whether the Ocean acknowledged human existence, whether its doings were intentional or akin to mere muscle twitches of a corpse. Were scientists assigning intentionality to a dynamic but inert phenomenon? Here on Earth, astrobiologists Aditya Chopra and Charles H. Lineweaver have recently suggested that the reason why we fail to find aliens is that they’re dead. In the Gaian bottleneck model, their answer to the Fermi paradox, life rarely has a chance to evolve quickly enough to maintain surface temperatures necessary for habitability long-term. We’re trying to communicate with corpses. A testimony to our longing for the alien or our inability to stand silence? Lem’s whole 43

oeuvre deals with the impossibility of interstellar communication, a problem that he defined as cultural rather than scientific. In a despair-inducing excerpt from Solaris, he writes: “We have no need for other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds.” When a team of scientists illegally bombards the Ocean with x-rays, they fail to reveal its working but create a mirror: the Ocean starts producing neutrino copies of the astronauts’ deceased loved ones. Lem believed that human inability to welcome otherness would preclude us from the ability to decipher alien communication. Notably, his final novel was titled Fiasco, a bleak parody of literature’s failed mission to open humans up to difference. The funeral march never stops in Solaris, where self-renewing clones repeatedly commit suicide, re-populating the depths of the Ocean, bound to a homogeneity that furiously and cruelly keeps on giving. The debate around whether black holes could communicate anything apart from their basic parameters was one of cosmology’s most fervent. Betting on a ‘no,’ Stephen Hawking said, “You can throw television sets, diamond rings or your worst enemies into a black hole, and all that the black hole will remember is the total mass, the angular momentum, and the electric charge.” There might be abundant information inside them but if anything were to escape, it would have to travel faster than the speed of light, which means that we could not observe it. Even though they came to represent the point of no return, Hawking’s grand discovery was that “black holes are not the eternal prisons they were once thought” and some 44

particles may escape as radiation, eventually leading to demise. On such a descent, there is a way out for thought, too. In imperceptibility or uncertainty, there’s a possibility of unlearning the habitual. The space of science-fiction is a multidirectional geography of contingency: narrative hypotheses model scientific experiments and vice versa, to the point where this distinction becomes performative. Black holes and gravitational dilation are valuable models for thinking about the asymmetry of extinction. For an outside observer, an object falling into a black hole appears to gradually slow down until it freezes at the event horizon, lingering on the border of annihilation, and disappears. Yet, from the perspective of said object, spacetime (and entropy) fast-forwards. This ostensibly incoherent spatiotemporality is at the heart of our cosmos: astronomers believe that a supermassive black hole lies at the centre of every galaxy. The veil of smog that we pulled over the skies necessitates interspecies design of unparalleled temporal daring: if not now, then when should we consider this axiomatic vantage point from which the human species can perceive the multitude of spatio-temporalities it belongs with? 45

Works Cited Chopra, Aditya, and Charles H. Lineweaver. “The case for a Gaian bottleneck: The biology of habitability.” Astrobiology, vol. 16.1 (2016): 7-22. Ford, Kenneth W., and John A. Wheeler. Geons, black holes, and quantum foam: A life in physics.” W. W. Norton & Company (2000). Haller, George, and J. Beron-Vera, Francisco. “Coherent Lagrangian vortices: The black holes of turbulence.” Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol. 731 (2013): 1-10. Hawking, Stephen and Shukman, David. “Stephen Hawking’s Reith Lecture: Annotated transcript.” BBC News (26 January 2016). Lem, Stanisław. Solaris. Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej (1961). Lem, Stanisław. Głos Pana. Wydawnictwo Czytelnik (1968). Lem, Stanisław. Fiasko. Wydawnictwo Literackie (1987). Poe, Edgar Allan. A Descent into the Maelstrom. University of Virginia Library, 1986. Schaffer, Simon. “John Mitchell and Black Holes.” Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol. 10 (1979): 42-43. 46

Dispatches from The Institute of Incoherent Geography Volume I

DISPATCHES FROM THE INSTITUTE OF INCOHERENT GEOGRAPHY © 2019 Flugschriften This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or Flugschriften endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. First Published in 2019 by Flugschriften Pittsburgh and New York https://flugschriften.com/ Flugschriften rekindles the long tradition of 16th-century pamphlets –or ‘flying writings’–giving heterodox, experimental, challenging writings a pair of wings with which to find like-minded readers. Flugschriften publishes short, sharp shocks to the system–whether this be the political system, literary system, academic system, or human nervous system. ISBN-13: 978-1-7335365-3-0 ISBN-10: 1-7335365-3-1 Cover image: Adaptation from A Place composed entirely of entries by Markos Zouridakis, 2015 Design: Felipe Mancheno

Table of Contents Introduction: From and by the Director 7 1. The Little Mole Mari Bastashevski 12 2. The Story of Bernard M. Drew S. Burk 19 3. Adrift: Attribution & Responsibility in a Changing Climate Adam Sébire 27 4. Unlearning Habitual Cosmologies: Reading Stanisław Lem at the event horizon Bogna Konior 39 5. hieroglyphically challenged Tyran Grillo 47 6. In Sweden Dominic Pettman 51 7. The Sound of Shaking Paper: A Sonic Archive Carla Nappi 58 4

8. Ante-monuments Thom Donovan 66 9. Geometry of Corn and Blood Joseph Heathcott 73 10. The Island for the Lost Ania Malinowska 82 11. Dispatch From Nose Dodge Nina Hien 90 12. The Memory of Water Öykü Tekten 97 13. Cabazon Dinosaurs, California, USA Lindsey A. Freeman 103 14. The Purr-Loined Letter: Another Case of Feline Absence Kári Driscoll 108 15. The Radar-Type Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan 114 16. New Horizons of Exhaustion:Mapping Poland in the Karakoram Margret Grebowicz 121 5

17. The Streets of London anywhere, really Iain Liddell 132 18. Bowling in Pyongyang Witold van Ratingen 139 19. Sonic Geographies Evdoxia Ragkou 146 20. Space is A Place Leila Taylor 152 About the Authors 158 6