NOTES ON HIGH ENERGY, Emma Tilley

NOTES ON HIGH ENERGY

EMMA TILLEY

(G. I. Taylor from photos alone determined the energy released in the first nuclear bomb test with a back-of-an-envelope calculation.) If it’s wishful thinking, so be it, so is everything else, a kaleidoscope of fractal fictions. Description and exegesis as reverse engineering? One of arbitrarily many possible models? I’m attacking, maybe, more than I can hold here, but there has always been something scorched-earth about the pursuit of purer reality.

(The test was allegedly called Trinity in reference to poetry written by Donne and favored by Oppenheimer, dealing among other things with the nature (composition?) ofGod and a unity oflife-death-resur- rection.) Is there any way to evaluate human actions without the incentives of the present or the narratives of hindsight?

(Francis Bacon described experimentalism as “putting nature on the rack”.) Does this make theory a being in the presence of mathematical process. Distancing themselves from the mundane, the humane and inhumane, the theorists I know have described their practice as intuition, as translation, bordering on channeling. Invariably aspirational, invariably billowing into all else.

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