Ships turning for the tide – almost beyond the horizon – can rattle doors in our house. Across miles of sea, the grumbling wavelengths make their way to gaps we didn’t know existed: shuddering in hinges and handles, between locks and screws.
Judda-judda-judda-judda-judda-judda.
Must be a big one today.
*
I think I drank too much at Christmas because come Boxing Day I was googling whether all curves are infinite.
No, was the short answer.
And the truth stung a little.
But, I guess I was talking about the trajectory of curves? If you draw an arc on paper – quickly and without thinking – don’t you find it hard to stop? As if you’re doing that bent line an injustice clipping it at both ends. Like it’s left wanting. Forever stretching to close itself into a loop, or find some other path to join.
*
In print, the “bleed” is how a design is able to go right to the edge of the page: extra paper allows for extra ink that spreads like an oil spill beyond the margins, until the sheet is sliced to its final size. Whatever the “whole” shape was before the cut is yours to conjure and assume from what remains.
And…
Now, I was full of fading plum liqueur and distant horizons; sad curves, rattling door frames and seeping edges, but suddenly two words brought me back to life:
ultraviolet catastrophe
There’s a scene in Donnie Darko where Drew Barrymore’s character, a high-school English teacher, tells her class that Tolkien claimed: “of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, ‘cellar door’ is the most beautiful.”
Not anymore, J.R.R..
Swimming out of my depth on Wikipedia, I found the term trying to find evidence of endless curves: my short-lived hangover hypothesis.
The ultraviolet catastrophe, as it so elegantly declares, was a failed experiment.
In the late 1800s, a piece of classical theory in physics presumed that an absorbing object (?) would continue to emit energy infinitely the more it was heated. But on reaching the ultraviolet spectrum, it began to misbehave.
Instead, scientists realised the ‘hot thing’ :) had an ultimate temperature; ‘peaking at a certain wavelength’ and then its ability to radiate energy would fall off a graphical cliff edge.
It couldn’t take any more.
With a strong correlation to my son being around, I’ve found Christmas to now be the most highly-charged time of the year. The two weeks demanding more love and more attention and more effort than any other of the seasons and holidays.
And I can do it. We all can. And we love to, because we love our loved ones.
Except, now physics has intervened — because I found the most edible pair of words in the english language. And now I have quantum theory to validate my heavy eyes. And the thick, snowy layer of wrapping paper is slowly melting towards the recycling bin. And I realise the horizon of a new year beckons, with fresh notebooks and paper to draw half-finished shapes and words upon. And I can fall like a swirling deck of cards into the sofa, because my ultraviolet catastrophe has begun.
Don’t deny your own catastrophe, darlings.
Let it instead be ultraviolet.
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