Valley, Uncanny

Don't let the name fool you: a black hole is anything but empty space. — NASA's website, Astrophysics page, Focus Areas, Black Holes

Where's the hole's end?

— [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Kim Hyesoon, "A Hole"

A valley makes a kind of hole. A hole open on two sides. Korea — an island on three sides. South Korea — an island: water, water, water, DMZ. North Korea — water, water, DMZ, the People's Republic of China.

I was a hole and I brought it, myself, to [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] miguk "beautiful country," America, the United States. I carried a train of holes — holes of smoke, holes of sky. Holes of water, holes of rice milk. I was an uncanny guest. Two years old. A week after arrival from Korea, a brother, born in America, asked, "When is she going back?" Like the heavenly maiden with too many children to carry, too many holes to go back t(w)here.

There is a limit to canniness, but not to being uncanny — it is infinite, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], mu han.

To many immigrants, exiles, and pseudo-exiles, back becomes a manifold; space and time — an asymmetrical nonevent. A hole surrounded by light that pours in and down like Niagara Falls. In my boat is my nameless two-year-old self and my nameless adult self. We approach the water; the air around us glitters. When my past self reaches out to touch the rushing white wall, like a dress she is wearing, I mimic her gesture ...

Maybe I am a kind of star. Burning — sending you light to read by. A valley you might come upon gradually, not a hole to fall into.

When are we all going back? There is no back, there is no there there. Like the travel of light, upon arrival, the star may be dead. Time can be fragile. It can be a blossom, and when you peel away the petals, that hard, dark face remains.

"Most famously, black holes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which showed that when a massive star dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core."

I lost my name and I stepped onto this corner, this half frame, the axis. It was empty in that moment. White space, cousin to the black hole. I had my face, my feet, my duration in time.

One small step onto vertical Y and horizontal X, at the crossroads between familiarity and human likeness. I could keep walking into this space, eating this time, and drawing it into me like thread through the hole of a needle. I could stitch it to me.

The positive rising into infinity — an arrow on which familiarity travels without limits. Rope to heaven. Fraying, frayed.

The negative descending not into infinity but into dusk, oblivion, the nihilism of Freud's unheimlich. We have always known, we humans, about holes.

"Although the term [black hole] was not coined until 1967 by Princeton physicist John Wheeler, the idea of an object in space so massive and dense that light could not escape it has been around for centuries."

The opposite of what is familiar is infinite possibilities of startling encounters.

One after another, after another.

How much of one's life can one spend on the approach?

There is not always a name for what is [unheimlich].

Two lines, each like one train track, travel through space — to plunge into the valley.

moving _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

still ________________________________________________

My performance of childhood rode both rails. This machine of love. This language machine. This hole made for survival. The hole was like a shadow that changed at will. The spaces between moving and still widened and narrowed and rushed and plunged and lazed like a river.

Act natural, act natural.

    My father built a robot,
    a creature of industry,
    a tool with a perfect face and perfect thoughts.
    A memory made of magnets.
    I crawled into its inner space.
    My memories, now holes,
    pooling above each temple.
    My mother gave me a creature,
    a toy, a "stuffed animal,"
    one without a motor but with a string I could pull
    to hear its voice
    over and over again.
    It was not difference, but repetition.
    It could not dance or sing, but it could travel.
    It could fall lightly into holes.

Others who pass too close to me may be subject to certain processes.

"If a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, for example, it will draw matter inward in a process known as accretion. A similar process can occur if a normal star passes close to a black hole. In this case, the black hole can tear the star apart as it pulls it toward itself."

Two gorgeous words: towarditself

* * *

My dreams are the ivory gates, the bone gates, the accordion, a mouth, a mind, that same floret splitting away from its hard, dark face. Some bulbs are good for eating, some are good for sleeping, repairing, emitting time like a bomb. Radium.

Sometimes there are horns or hooves waiting to be fitted to my head and hands, feet. A tail swishing away the space-dust of any remaining light.

In my dreams I passed before the axis of human likeness, a black line that had to be contained on all sides, a pipeline.

A kind of dark traffic.
Men in uniform were posted all along its length.
Some had cameras, some had guns.
To slip down its invisible curtains.
Like sheets tied together and hung out of a hotel window.

Underneath, the ur-world, without measure or mark. Here I communed with each at its station:

Corpse
Zombie
Bunraku puppet
Prosthetic hand

Not holes but force. Electricity, instinct, momentum, the vigor of our "lives" — so many words for a progression, like chords, sine waves, lines:

Contract
Heaven
Paradise
Human (Likeness)

Moment
Lapse
Error
Mistake

Incident
Accident
Event
Episode

Emergency
Crisis
Disaster
Catastrophe

Dystopia
Apocalypse
Time
Expand

There is a code for every kind of duration. One must be careful to carry the right holes on one's journey. Forth. Back. X. Y. Toward the familiar ...

The bottom of the valley is the palm of time.

There, one finds rest.

All objects fall at the same rate.

No outside, no inside.

I spent sixteen years living with American parents.

They are inside me now, they are my guests.

They are my holes, like babies, like stones.

I have a thousand valleys inside me.

Descent upon descent.

The swallowed becomes the swallower.

Egg, star, event, time, hole, black, bound, devour, collapse.

Reaching for —

"However, as the star collapses, a strange thing occurs. As the surface of the star nears an imaginary surface called the 'event horizon,' time on the star slows relative to the time kept by observers far...