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SPREADS DESIGNED BY RORY KING

JARRETT FULLER

BLAME THE BRAIN John Cloud PA R K I N G LOT S

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NE A R & FA R Charles & Ray Eames A ROMANCE OF MANY DIMENSIONS Lori Ann White ROBERT IRWIN BREAKS LIGHT & S PAC E B A R R I E R S Kenneth Baker FRONTIERS Frank Chimero

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POETRY Charles Bukowski THE FA R A N D THE NEAR Thomas Wolfe THE SOUND I N /O F S PAC E

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Photogrpah by Gabby Snyder Front Cover: Film still from Teenagers From Outer Space

Blame the Brain

JOHN CLOUD

PUBLIC 25 FT / 7.6 M

Why is it so uncomfortable to stand really close to a stranger? Sure, there are the potentially icky things. Sometimes an elevator car is so crowded that you can smell a fellow riders shampoo or chewing gum (or worse). But even when a stranger is perfectly groomed, its usually a bit revolting to be pressed against him in public. Why?
Evolution seems to have programmed this discomfort via a brain structure called the amygdalae, a pair of almond-shaped brain regions deep within each temporal lobe that control fear and the processing of emotion. Its your amygdalae that keep you from getting so close to another person that he could easily reach out, gouge an eye, and then drag your woman off by her hair. So what happens if you disable the amygdalae? This is not something you could (ethically) do to a research subject, but scientists have been studying a 42-year-old woman who has such severe damage to her amygdalaedue to a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which causes calcification in the temporal lobesthat they have stopped functioning. The patients identity isnt public, but neuroscientists call her SM, and a new paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience reports the results of experiments judging her conception of personal space. A team of scientists from Caltech put SM through a series of tests in which they asked her to indicate the position at which she became uncomfortable as another woman, a researcher, approached her. SMs preferred personal distance was 1.1 ft. (0.34 m), about half the preferred distance (2 ft., or 0.64 m) of a group of comparison subjects. At 1 ft., you can easily discern whether someone showered after the gymalthough in the lab experiment, the Caltech researchers made sure the experimenter was well-scrubbed and had just chewed gum before interacting with SM. In another trial, SM was asked to walk toward an experimenter and stop at the point at which she felt the distance was comfortable. SM walked until her nose was virtually touching the experimenters, all the while saying she felt perfectly at ease. The researchers then put eight subjects with healthy amygdalae into a functional magnetic-resonance-imaging device. They found that the amygdalae in those individuals lit up when the participants were told that an experimenter was standing close to them, even if the participants couldnt actually see, hear, smell or in any way sense the experimenter. In short, that suggests that we are wired to repel close human contactexcept, of course, when sex is a possibility. Which explains why so many introductions in bars go wrong. One partys amygdalae gets primed by proximity even as the other partys amygdalae submit to a more primal force: the need to procreate. (Past research has shown that the brains limbic system, which includes the amygdalae, lights up in response to sexually arousing stimulinot surprisingly, more vigorously in men than in women.) Because the new paper is mostly based on one unusual subject, it shouldnt be overinterpreted. But the findings may have relevance for research into autism, whose sufferers sometimes have trouble understanding personal space and are thought to have amygdalae impairment. Previous studies of SM show that her brain impairment makes it difficult for her to recognize expressions of fear or judge a persons trustworthinessproblems that are also common among people with autism. Researchers think people who suffer from extreme shyness may turn out to have a problem in their temporal lobes as well. Theres no known way of repairing amygdalae, so such conditions cant be reversed. But at least its now possible to understand why it can be so unbearable to be in the middle of a packed line for the Hulk roller coaster: your amygdalae is going nuts.

SOCIAL 12 FT / 3.6 M

PERSONAL 4 FT / 1.2 M

I N T I M AT E 1.5 FT / 0.45 M

Diagram of Edward T. Halls personal reaction bubbles, showing radius in feet

I N T E R PE R S O N A L S PAC E
1 INTIMATE DISTANCE
Ranges from touching to about 18 inches (46cm) apart, reserve for lovers, children, as well as close family members and friends, and also pet animals.

Interpersonal Space refers to the psychological bubble that exists psychologically when one person stands too close to another. Research has revealed that there are four different zones of interpersonal space:
3 SOCIAL DISTANCE
Ranges from 4 to 12 feet (1.2 m to 3.6 m) away from the person and is reserved for strangers, newly formed groups, and new acquaintances.

2 PERSONAL DISTANCE
Begins about an arms length away; starting around 18 inches (46 cm) from the person and ending about 4 feet (122 cm) away. This space is used in conversations with friends, to chat with associates, and in group discussions.

4 PUBLIC DISTANCE
Includes anything more than 25 feet (7.62 m) away, and is used for speeches, lectures, and theater. Public distance is essentially that range reserved for larger audiences.

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PA R K I N G LOT S

There is something about empty parking lots at night that brings tranquility to my mind and to my heart. Maybe its as simple as the way the light from the lamps reflects off of the paint of the spaces lines or the small amounts of moisture hidden in the cracks of the asphalt. Or maybe its the solitude of no one or thing being anywhere near you as if this huge empty lot is the backyard for your mind to wanderwith the ambience of passing cars in the distance. Or maybe its my childhood imagination pretending I am in outer space. Whatever the case, I could stay in a night-lit parking lot forever, like some sort of bum.

Photogrpah by Film van Alledag

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Air and Light and Time and Space

CHARLE S BUKOWSK I

And the Moon and the Stars and the World

CHARLE S BUKOWSK I

you know, Ive either had a family, a job, something has always been in the way but now Ive sold my house, Ive found this place, a large studio, you should see the space and the light. for the first time in my life Im going to have a place and the time to create. no baby, if youre going to create youre going to create whether you work 16 hours a day in a coal mine or youre going to create in a small room with 3 children while youre on welfare,

youre going to create with part of your mind and your body blown away, youre going to create blind crippled demented, youre going to create with a cat crawling up your back while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire. baby, air and light and time and space have nothing to do with it and dont create anything except maybe a longer life to find new excuses for.

Long walks at night thats what good for the soul: peeking into windows watching tired housewives trying to fight off their beer-maddened husbands.

Photogrpah by Fabian Neyer

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The Far and the Near

THOMAS WOLFE

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On the outskirts of a little town upon a rise of land that swept back from the railway there was a tidy little cottage of white boards, trimmed vividly with green blinds. To one side of the house there was a garden neatly patterned with plots of growing vegetables, and an arbor for the grapes which ripened late in August. Before the house there were three mighty oaks which sheltered it in their clean and massive shade in summer, and to the other side there was a border of gay flowers. The whole place had an air of tidiness, thrift, and modest comfort.

Every day, a few minutes after two oclock in the afternoon, the limited express between two cities passed this spot. At that moment the great train, having halted for a breathing-space at the town near by, was beginning to lengthen evenly into its stroke, but it had not yet reached the full drive of its terrific speed. It swung into view deliberately, swept past with a powerful swaying motion of the engine, a low smooth rumble of his heavy cars upon pressed steel, and then it vanished in the cut. For a moment the progress of the engine could be marked by heavy bellowing puffs of smoke that burst at spaced intervals above the edges of the meadow grass, and finally nothing could be heard but the solid clacking tempo of the wheels receding into the drowsy stillness of the afternoon. Every day for more than twenty years, as the train had approached this house, the engineer had blown on the whistle, and every day, as soon as she heard this signal, a woman had appeared on the back porch of the little house and waved to him. At first she had a small child clinging to her skirts, and now this child had grown to full womanhood, and every day she, too, came with her mother to the porch and waved. The engineer had grown old and gray in service. He had driven his great train, loaded with its weight of lives, across the land ten thousand times. His own children had grown up, and married, and four times he had seen before him on the tracks the ghastly dot of tragedy converging like a cannon ball to its eclipse of horror at the boiler heada light spring wagon filled with children, with its clustered row of small stunned faces; a cheap automobile stalled up the tracks, set with the wooden figures of people paralyzed with fear; a battered hobo walking by the rail, too deaf and old to hear the whistles warning; and a form flung past his window with a screamall this he had

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THE SIGHT OF THIS LITTLE HOUSE AND THESE TWO WOMEN GAVE HIM THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY HAPPINESS HE HAD EVER KNOWN.

seen and known. He had known all the grief, the joy, the peril and the labor such a man could know; he had grown seamed and weathered in his loyal service, and now, schooled by the qualities of faith and courage and humbleness that attended his labor, he had grown old, and had the grandeur and the wisdom these men have. But no matter what peril or tragedy he had known, the vision of the little house and the women waving to him with a brave free motion of the arm had become fixed in the mind of the engineer as something beautiful and enduring, something beyond all change and ruin, and something that would always be the same, no matter what mishap, grief or error might break the iron schedule of his days. The sight of this little house and these two women gave him the most extraordinary happiness he had ever known. He had seen them in a thousand lights, a hundred weathers. He had seen them through the harsh light of wintry gray across the brown and frosted stubble of the earth, and he had seen them again in the green luring sorcery of April. He felt for them and for the little house in which they lived such tenderness as a man might feel for his own children, and at length the picture of their lives was carved so sharply in his heart that he felt that he knew their lives completely, to every hour and moment of the day, and he resolved that one day, when his years of service should be ended, he would go and find these people and speak at last with them whose lives had been so wrought into his own.

Clockwise from top left: Unknown, Alex John, Kris Verdugo, Unknown Previous page: Unknown

That day came. At last the engineer stepped from a train onto the station platform of the town where these two women lived. His years upon the rail had ended. He was a pensioned servant of his company, with no more work to do. The engineer walked slowly through the station and out into the streets of the town. Everything was as strange to him as if he had never seen this town before. As he walked on, his sense of bewilderment and confusion grew. Could this be the town he had passed ten thousand times? Were these the same houses he had seen so often from the high windows of his cab? It was all as unfamiliar, as disquieting as a city in a dream, and the perplexity of his spirit increased as he went on. Presently the houses thinned into the straggling outposts of the town, and the street faded into a country roadthe one on which the women lived. And the man plodded on slowly in the heat and dust. At length he stood before the house he sought. He knew at once that he had found the proper place. He saw the lordly oaks before the house, the flower beds, the garden and the arbor, and farther off, the glint of rails. Yes, this was the house he sought, the place he had passed so many times, the destination he had longed for with such happiness. But now that he had found it, now that he was here, why did his hand falter on the gate; why had the town, the road, the earth, the very entrance to this place he loved turned unfamiliar as the landscape of some ugly dream? Why did he now feel this sense of confusion, doubt and hopelessness? At length he entered by the gate, walked slowly up the path and in a moment more had mounted three short steps that led up to the porch, and was knocking at the door. Presently he heard steps in the hall, the door was opened, and a woman stood facing him. And instantly, with a sense of bitter loss and grief, he was sorry he had come. He knew at once that the woman who stood there looking at him with a mistrustful eye was the same woman who had waved to him so many thousand times. But her face was harsh and pinched and meager; the flesh sagged wearily in sallow folds, and the small eyes peered at him with timid suspicion and uneasy doubt. All the brave freedom, the warmth and the affection that he had red into her gesture, vanished in the moment that he saw her and heard her unfriendly tongue.

And now his own voice sounded unreal and ghastly to him as he tried to explain his presence, to tell her who he was and the reason he had come. But he faltered on, fighting stubbornly against the horror of regret, confusion, disbelief that surged up in his spirit, drowning all his former joy and making his act of hope and tenderness seem shameful to him. At length the woman invited him almost unwillingly into the house, and called her daughter in a harsh shrill voice. Then, for a brief agony of time, the man sat in an ugly little parlor, and he tried to talk while the two women stared at him with a dull, bewildered hostility, a sullen, timorous restraint. And finally, stammering a crude farewell, he departed. He walked away down the path and then along the road toward town, and suddenly he knew that he was an old man. His heart, which had been brave and confident when it looked along the familiar vista of the rails, was now sick with doubt and horror as it saw the strange and unsuspected visage of the earth which had always been within a stones throw of him, and which he had never seen or known. And he knew that all the magic of that bright lost way, the vista of that shining line, the imagined corner of that small good universe of hopes desire, could never be got again.

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The Sound in/of Space

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Artist Album Length Label Producer Genre

Stars of the Lid The Tired Sounds of 123:54 Kranky Brian McBride, Adam Wiltzie Ambient, Minimalist, Drone

Heavy Rotation On Repeat

01 Requiem for Dying Mothers Part 1 6:36

02 Requiem for Dying Mothers Part 2 7:37

03 Down 3 5:46

04 Austin Texas Mental Hospital Part 1 2:48

05 Austin Texas Mental Hospital Part 2 12:18 10 Mullholland 6:48

06 Austin Texas Mental Hospital Part 3 5:47 11 The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier) 10:07 16 Ballad of Distances Part 2 3:00

07 Broken Harbors Part 1 3:31

08 Broken Harbors Part 2 6:47

09 Broken Harbors Part 3 9:16

12 Gasfarming 3:20

13 Piano Aquieu 10:54

14 FAC 21 3:08

15 Ballad of Distances Part 1 3:36

17 A Lovesong (for Cubs)+ Part 1 6:45

18 A Lovesong (for Cubs)+ Part 2 8:05

19 A Lovesong (for Cubs)+ Part 3 7:45

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Powers of 10

Near & Far

Charles & Ray Eames
16 SWAY: SPACE
Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames, rereleased in 1977. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten. The film is an adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work. In 1998, Powers of Ten was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. The film begins with a view of a man and woman picnicking next to Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, in between Soldier Field and Burnham Harbor. The view settles on an onemeter-square overhead image of the man reclining on a blanket. The viewpoint, accompanied by expository voiceover by Philip Morrison, then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across (or 101 m in scientific notation). The zoom-out continues (at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds), to a view of 100 meters (102 m), then 1 kilometer (103 m), and so on, increasing the perspective the picnic is revealed to be taking place in Burnham Park, near Soldier Field on Chicagos lakefrontand continuing to zoom out to a field of view of 1024 meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate into the mans hand, to views of negative powers of ten101 m (10 centimeters), and so forthuntil the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom at 1016 meter. There are some errors that occur at various points in the film. For instance, what is shown as one square meter is actually somewhat more than that at times. When zooming out, the 107 m rectangle fits snugly around the Earth, but in reality the planet is somewhat bigger (when zooming back in, Earths size is shown with even greater inaccuracy).

Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames and was rereleased in 1977.

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Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inwardinto the hand of the sleeping picnickerwith ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten. The film is an adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work. In 1998, Powers of Ten was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

The way things look extremely close is very similar to how they appear very far away.
Selected screenshots of charles and ray eames 1968 film, The Powers of ten.

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A Romance of Many Dimensions

text by LORI ANN WHITE
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, Writing pseudonymously as A Square.

One hundred and twenty-two years ago a modest little volume entitled Flatland appeared in London, written by the pseudononymous A. Square. Flatland purported to be a memoir by Mr. A. Square of his adventures and misadventures during a series of fantastical journeysrather like those in Gullivers Travels or the Alice books. A cursory examination might have tempted Victorian readers to dismiss Flatland as a charming but far-fetched fantasy for Victorian children. Victorian readers would have been wrong. And Victorian children would have been baffled. Despite its brevityless than one hundred pagesFlatland seamlessly melds social satire, pointed commentary on the vanity and hypocrisy of the upper classes, philosophical musings, higher mathematics, and a dash of what we would now call hard SF. It has inspired numerous successor books and quasi-sequels: most recently Flatterland, by mathematician Ian Stewart (originally published in 2001), and Spaceland, by mathematician and SF writer Rudy Rucker (originally published in 2002). A. Square, the author and narrator of the original Flatland, is a mild-mannered mathematician who likes nothing better than a quiet evening puzzling over geometry problems. He lives in a society that seems very much like Victorian England. The class structure is solidly in place: members of the lowest classes are considered to be scarcely better than animals; women are delicate, emotionally unbalanced, and need the controlling, stabilizing force of men; and there is an aristocracy, although of priests rather than peers. Flatland seems very much like Victorian England. And very much not. Flatland is just thatflat. Everyone and everything in it is two-dimensional. Class is denoted by the number of ones sides; the more sides, the higher ones social standing, and, it is assumed, the more finely honed ones intellect and the greater ones moral rectitude. Triangles are the lowest class, all the way up to the priestly class of Circles, who are not true circles but who have so many sides they might as well be. A. Square himself is literally a square. And women? Women are straight lines, the poor dears, but they really cant help themselves. A. Squares life in Flatland is rather flat itself, but hes content. He is kind enough to take the first part of his memoirs to introduce us to his societywhich he does not questionuntil his world is rocked by the appearance of a sphere that takes him on a 3-D jaunt. Upon his return to Flatland, A. Square attempts to spread his multidimensional message and suffers the consequences. What in Heavens name is this rubbish? a Victorian reader might ask. And who is this A. Square chap?

In reality, A. Square was Edwin Abbott Abbott, and surprisingly he was not a mathematician. Abbott was a theologian, classicist, educator, and author of books and articles ranging from a Shakespearean grammar to a Frances Bacon biography to theological fictionnot to mention the article about the Gospels in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This thoughtful man of God lived in a time and culture of contradictions: where great scientific minds were matched by rank spiritualist frauds; where a willingness to believe in fairies was matched by a reverence for logic; where the upper classes congratulated themselves on being the epitome of human development while indulging in a visit to a freak show or an asylum. Abbott disagreed with some of the most ingrained views of his time (for example, he supported education for all including women) and viewed Victorian self-satisfaction as an intellectual straightjacket. He saw contemporaries who were willing to believe in illusions but dismissed the message of Christ because of the trappings of the miraculous that surrounded it. The conclusion he drew from such an observation, however, was somewhat surprising; Abbott argued against both illusion and miracles as a basis for faith. Illusion was false by definition, while miracles might someday be explained by a deeper understanding of natural law. Abbott returned to this theme again and again, usually in theological fiction. However, at some pointprobably through acquaintance with the mathematician Charles H. Hintonhe was exposed to the idea of the fourth dimension, and methods of visualizing it through the analogy of viewing the third dimension from the vantage point of the second dimension. (Whew. Caught that?) What Abbott saw in this was not a geometry lesson, but a chance to illustrate his idea of a miracle simply being a manifestation of a greater reality. To A. Square, the appearance of the sphere in Flatland is at first miraculous. But we, three-dimensional beings that we are, know that spheres arent miracles. A. Square comes to realize this as well, but still falls prey to the temptation to treat the sphere with a bit too much reverence, until he continues the analogy and questions the sphere concerning a fourth dimension he is sure must exist. The sphere vehemently rejects the idea of yet more dimensions, proving itself not even A. Squares intellectual equal. This seemingly miraculous sphere is no godit is as close-minded as the priests of Flatland. Regardless, what the sphere has shown A. Square is the truth. Our hapless square tries to share this revelation of higher dimensions with his fellow polygons, only to be arrested and summarily sentenced to life imprisonment.

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Robert Irwin breaks light & space barriers

text by kenneth baker

OPPOSITE: INSTAllation at MCSAD // BACKGROUND: LIGHT & SPACE (2007) // BELOW: IRWIN IN HIS STUDIO (BLUE), DISCS, Varese Scrim (1972)

At 81, Robert Irwin still sounds as upbeat as if he had a whole life and career ahead of him. But he has had two museum retrospectives and a string of honorary doctorates and was the first visual artist to receive a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. A Southern California native still residing there, Irwin trained and worked in painting until he reached its limits as a means for affecting the viewers experience. He then experimented with optical devices and light and shadow, as in the late 60s work by him hanging in The Anniversary Show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Eventually, he abandoned making objects altogether and began retuning physical situations - interior and exterior - by any means available to induce people to ponder the nature of their experience. The critical term light and space art remains attached to his work, though he finds that nomenclature, even his own, inevitably lags behind what he does. Irwin, who will be giving a lecture tonight at Mills College, talked to The Chronicle by phone. If light and space does not fit your activity, what term might? I went through a whole series of reductions and broke the frame of painting and the object. ... So I decided that Id work with space and energy, and the most available form of energy in space was light.

Then at a certain point I became involved in art in public places, and really the issue was how does an artist work in the world, what can he do? ... I did things like the Getty Center garden and the landscape and interior architecture of Dia Beacon. So now I speak of myself working conditionally, because my role is to understand the conditions of a situation and bring some kind of aesthetic perspective out of it. Do you know what youll be speaking about at Mills? Essentially, Ill be dealing with that history, what Ive been doing since I stopped having a studio. ... When I got to the point in reducing the paintings to where I broke the frame, I became lost in the space around them. I realized that if I stayed in the studio Id probably just do things similar to what Id learned to do. And I loved being in the studio, its a great refuge for an artist, but I decided to divest myself of all those investments Id made. ... For a couple of years, I just wandered around in the Southwestern desert because there you really can get away from objects. ... One of the things I was doing was questioning the whole system of signs to which art objects belong. Ive since been trying to make the case that the reason art gets done is to step outside the system of signs, to work phenomenologically. ... Mine is really a philosophical inquiry. Ive become a question addict.

Have the retrospectives affected your thinking about what you do? Their effect on me has been rather large. At first, I didnt want to do the San Diego show, but its where I live, so I did it. I started working with fluorescent lights in the process. And Hugh Davies (director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego) kept insisting that I spend time in this studio they had set up. ... I met this guy there, a security guard whos obviously an artist-in-waiting, so to speak, who I really liked. Hes the only person Ive met whos read what Ive written about art. He was full of questions, and he got me started on a whole new line of work. Is it a return to the object? One could look at it as an object, but it doesnt function as an object. ... What youre looking at is as simple as possible, but youre aligned with all the phenomena that it creates. ... A single piece has as least four different conditions. I grade these things in four different phases, and if they dont work in all those phases, then I throw them out. ... Im really in midstride with these things, though, and I have absolutely no idea how to exhibit them. They break all the patterns of how we look at things.

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Frontiers
I wonder where were going. If you would have asked my parents this question when they were young, they would have had an easy answer. To the moon.

TEXT BY FRANK CHIMERO

originally published JUNE 27, 2010

Theres never so good a direction as up. Up always seems like progress. The appeal of the new and unknown was attractive to everyone, I suppose, but I suspect there was also a secret desire to be able to escape everything we knew, even if it was only vicariously through a few men. The astronauts escape seemed to be an adventure to me when I was young. As I get older, escapes have become more of a search for catharsis than a thrill. Space used to be an appeal to me because it was at the rim of our understanding. But, now I just want to go because its quiet in space. I need a vacation, I suppose. Right now, we dont get the benefit of an easy answer. Where are we going? Forward. Is forward left or right? Im not sure. How will we know when we get there? I dont know. Id like to think one can develop a thick skin towards ambiguity, but the lack of answers to these questions still strikes pangs of fear in even the strongest of us. Im an evening guest walking down a dark hallway. If Im lucky, my fingertips can skim the wall as I walk to guide my way. Most nights Im not lucky. It feels like floating. But these problems are not new. Maybe this is how stumbling through time feels. My parents had the moon. Before that, there was the west. And before that, America. Do we have any frontiers left? Frontiers exist for one reason: promise. Where do we go now

to find promise? What direction? We are a people hungry for something to believe in. It seems that so much has fallen apart so quickly. So much of what we thought to be true is on its last legs. Yes, this can be exciting. But, it is also harrowing. Im weary. I dont think we need to shoot up another leaky rocketship. But, where do we go to find promise? Where is a light we can start walking towards? Well project promise on to anything that feels like it will not break. Politicians, deities, products or punditry, no matter. Promise us something unbreakable and well give you our hearts. For the past three years, things have been breaking faster than we can fix them. Infrastructures (real and imagined) have toppled. Theres rebuilding to do, but weve no moon. We have building to do, but no blueprints and no general direction to work towards. There is no up, and the edges keep moving further out as we build in every direction. This is exciting. This is confusing. This is building a spaceship as you fly it. I went outside tonight to try to see the moon. Coat, keys, and hat, I stepped out. The moon wasnt there. Just light pollution. Just gray. Most nights Im not lucky. All I could see were the light trails of sirens heading north. The ambulances always head north in this part of town. Up, I guess.

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The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

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sway
ISSUE 01: SPACE