This Essay is a Manipulation of Matter

Abstract

This Essay is a Manipulation of Matter Jax Connelly (bio) POINT OF ORIGIN: The fuck yous are booming through my sun-dappled neighborhood, threatening to shake branches from trees. The man is doubling over with rage, halting every few feet to bend his imposing body in two, hold his phone in front of his face and fuck you into it as if it has taken something from him he'll never be able to recover. It was a compliment, he's bellowing, over and over, so many times the words become a bassline: dada-da-DA-da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da. It was a compliment it was a compliment it was a compliment fuck you fuck you you fucking bitch. COMPONENT: Seated on a block of cement, she is exactly as tall as I am. Her thighs are pressed together, legs stiff, knees bent at ninety degrees, toes pointed toward the floor. Her lap, wooden and flat and skeleton-narrow—uninviting. She sports a bland checkered coat, black squares alternating with grey, some tan, some brown. She leans backward, away from herself, arching her back like bark splayed out from a droughtracked tree, and where her sternum should be, an explosion: strips fanning out from her chest like a child's interpretation of a lion's mane, or Medusa's snakes scared still and straight, or the flames of a paper sun. Margaret Wharton's sculpture Leopatra is not a crime scene, just dissonance—what the body remembers and what it presents, contradictions occupying the same space because they have nowhere else to go. Half neatly composed—the dainty feet, the polite posture—but before the gaze even reaches her neck, she's come undone. She's lost her head and she's lost her hands, so here is her heart, revealing all the things she can no longer speak, or hold. COMPONENT: I once watched a woman's head explode. In the arthouse sci-fi film High Life, a shuttle's trajectory is altered by a molecular cloud and subsequently dives into a black hole. The pilot, Boyse, dies by spaghettification—the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long, thin shapes in a non-homogeneous gravitational field. This does not happen in an instant. The scene is impossibly slow, Boyse's face beginning to crumple almost imperceptibly, her brain unspooling like it's reluctant to let go. Earlier, Boyse is violently raped. As part of a crew of death-row inmates sent on a mission to extract energy from the black hole, she sleeps with her limbs strapped to her bedframe. She wakes up and it's already happening, she wakes up and understands immediately, in that waterline strip between unconsciousness and consciousness, that there's nothing she can do to stop it. Google tells me spaghettification is "caused by extreme tidal forces." According to some dude on a Quora forum, the process isn't painful: "The black hole will pull you so fast that electrons transmitting [End Page 115] the pain signals will not be strong enough to escape the gravitational pull in order to make it to the brain." POINT OF ORIGIN: My dog and I are close enough, now, to observe how the wrath has colored the man's face slap-red, how it's screwed his features in tight like they're bolted to a table. Carefully, I avert my eyes. I hold my breath. I move my limbs stiffly, quietly, I don't want him to notice me, but I can't help flinching as he passes by, not noticing me at all: da-da-da-DA-da-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da da-dada-DA-da-da fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. COMPONENT: In her novel Milkman, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2018, Anna Burns explores the consequences of a disconnect between language and experience—what happens when we don't have words to describe and transcend trauma. It's Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and the nameless narrator, middle sister, is stalked by a paramilitary known only as the milkman. He doesn't explicitly threaten violence but shows up unannounced and uninvited when she's alone and...