Naysayers would tell you that it is nothing more than folk empiricism, but I know the truth. I lay in bed yesterday with the ether in my fingernails, it crawling on me and me crawling on it. The stuff hung heavy in the air and worked its way into the dampness of my innards. I wondered if it was the reason I had a hard on every morning when I woke up. The institute and I could conduct an experiment to investigate-very sexy, very experiential, probably get me tenure at Beloit. But that’s work for another day. No need for beakers and the spectroscope this morning, I thought, I’ll pull the damned stuff apart with my hands.
Harper’s Magazine says this thing called dark matter is preventing galaxies from congregating into one massive galaxy, with something like a billion black holes at its center, each sucking away at the fabric of the universe and spitting it out somewhere downstream. Like the galaxies, it is this dark matter which prevents us from becoming one with the ether, and one with each other. Instead, we must approximate this oneness and couple in passion. All the better if it is a warm day, for then even the air seems to pull at our flesh, and we have nothing to do but approximate, approximate, approximate. This approximation, however, can only get us so far. At some point we must break down our dark material individualities and accept the pulsating, self-loving whole (see figure 1). This is where ethereal science comes into play.
The ethereal scientific method eschews the conventions of the Baconian method in favor of a liberally interpreted game of exquisite corpse. In such a game, individuals take turns acting on a medium (such as writing on a piece of paper), obscuring a portion of their work before handing it to the next player. The scientist wishing to understand the ether need only to experience it as it is, using any ideas or objects whatsoever as his means of exquisite corpse. Proper observance of the trends, bucklings, and creases on the body, the rock, the prophylactic, or the letter ‘Q’ will eventually convey an understanding of the ether as a donut-shaped mass of energy. A release will follow.
And so as I walked down the avenue that morning I could feel the ether parting around me, pressing at my sides in an attempt to deconstruct, liberate, and unite. I pulled the damned stuff apart with my hands, and it kind of felt like Jell-O.
The Ether: The Autoerotic Fabric of the Universe
