Magnetism in matter and mudflats

 I’ve noticed that whenever something is mysterious to me I write “in mathematics” and find some theory to grasp at the existential whodunit. 

Some expert tells me “Whether in the context of hairstyles, relationships, or parachute cords, one must be familiar with the notion of a braid.” In the braid group we don’t allow strands to turn back up, they are plaited down, fixed into their pattern. In braid theory you simply braid groups by tugging on the strands until the simple pattern emerges. Of course, the tugging is purely mental. Entanglement, disentanglement, I can’t decide which is more important to braid theory. 

The chain of islands in my dream resembled the ones on the map in that they could be travelled between at low tide. If you had water proof galoshes and a strong will to pull your feet free of the mud, you could travel between them at a slow speed. Birds nested in the boulders by the shore, they call to each other, remarking on my slow progress. 

A close relative of braid theory, knot theory, (inspired by knots which appear in daily life, such as those in shoelaces and rope), creates mathematical knots where the ends are joined so it cannot be undone, the simplest knot being a ring. The name for this simplest knot is unknot.

There is something strange in the tidal plane, shifting out below the waterline. The man in the stooped wood house over the water tells us, 'everything is common in the tidal plain.' My friend stands out on the pier, remarks how the sunset looks like a shark's back tonight. I can't shake it. The tender things are exposed twice daily, we will return later. 

Three notions (arrows) of time:

Hawking argued that the first two notions of time are the same. Our brains (or, computers) are made up of pairs of neurons. Memories are formed by these pairs of neurons orienting themselves in a particular way.  In order to create a memory, our body must expend energy, heating up just a bit; total entropy increases. ∴ our memory increases only when entropy increases, and so the first two arrows of time point in the same direction. The third arrow moves forward when the universe is an inflationary state and backward when the universe is in a deflationary state. That arrow is confused.

I move around the room sliding my feet across the floor, just to see how it sounds. I move in lines, up and down, across, to collect the sounds. Listen listen to the window the doorstop. Eventually you hear it all, I thought. Yesterday I heard the woodpecker against the telephone pole for the first time. Occasionally I wonder if I move through the world like a blank curtain, pulling silence behind.

The world abounds with singular sensations, cowlicks, fingerprints, storms. In the singularity of the cowlick the hair is confused, can't decide which way to grow. Singularities reflect nature’s attempt to resolve mismatches, to enforce continuity against all odds. Sometimes, disagreements become inevitable (hair directions, wind directions, skin), singularities attempt to herd those mismatches to the smallest space possible: a single point. Singularities are undying, unflinchingly, persistent. Your skull gets bigger but the cowlick stays. A whorl is a singularity that is composed of the fusion of two loops that have been squashed together so that their two inner endpoints coincide. A whorl is in each of your fingertips. 

Some mudflats are exposed not by tidal action but by the wind. Wind-action drives the water away from the shallows, the boddens, and out into the sea. You can take a large kite and some skis and let yourself be pulled out to where the water laps again, to the new rim of the sea. The cranes eat there and I talked to them once, they told me about long legs and white wings, about their brothers and mothers.

In all of the writing I am trying to explain myself. To make certain unidentifiable things understandable, the peripherals, edges, etc. Things are made distant or untrue in order to do so, to get at something shimmering at the lip. I end up the large cat on his page, circling the center. I end up cow licking around a singular point, crashing into a whorl, a confused arrow.