One Two Three...Infinity

10 minutes feels an hour until you become numb from the cold. Sprinters traffic in seconds and milliseconds. If a paramecium possessed consciousness it would recognize time in nanoseconds. Time is the question itself in the universe of subatomic particles. Quantum entanglement allows a particle to be in two places at the same time. The enormous magnets of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva are capable of colliding particles at such a speed as to produce bosons, the materiel out if which all matter was created at the time of the Big Bang, 12.9 billion years ago. The light year a product of cosmology enables scientist to represent increasingly immense quantities of space/time. Kepler planets which spectrum analysis has shown to contain carbon are 1200 light years from earth. Due to "dark energy," the universe is continually expanding and in turn becoming more and more devoid of light as objects are separated from each other.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Raising Hell

Botticelli "The Map of Hell"

How to raise hell in hell? Hell is other people is the famed Sartre quote from No Exit. So you don't have to go any further than your the local diner where you have possibly gathered with friends as a break from holiday shopping, a hell all unto itself. Dante conjured 9 circles of hell, each with its own crimes and punishments. So you are not likely to run out of destinations. Just sin and your transgression will be sent on the way to its own fiery punishment. Maybe you just want to have a no strings attached good time, Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck.” Maybe you’d like to inhabit an episode of “Sex and the City.” Do you want to produce or revive pleasure? Maybe it’s a combination of both! Here you can both exorcise your demons “having a good time” while literally raising yourself up from your neighborhood underworld.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Embarrassment Redux

Embarrassment is not a malady or syndrome. It's an existential condition. Nearly everyone has had one of those dreams where you’re caught with your pants down either literally or metaphorically. In dream life it tends to be fairly literal eg you realize after it’s too late that you have only your underwear on at an oneiric social gathering. On a more global level, there's the subset of people who suffer from chronic embarrassment over their misspent lives. They’re fuck-ups. Shrinks more benignly allude to maladaptive behavior. You may know somebody like this. Maybe you’re one. Shame. You live in a state of pre-snubual bliss in your attempts to avoid those humiliating social situations in which someone may ask you what you do. Even worse, however, is indifference. You may find yourself lingering and trying to figure out what to do with your hands. The advent of devices like cellphones and androids has been a help since it makes you look too busy to be aware of the sniveling condescension of your “peers.” Shame can be a delicious vigorish to sexuality, but that's a subject for another day.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Regret

Regret is a form of time travel. If only you hadn’t decided to go to the gym that day you would never have met up with the lover or friend who has become such a bane--or had that fender bender in the parking lot. In fact, the expression "accident waiting to happen" expresses the notion of predestination, another way it’s put: everything is as it’s supposed to be of it would be different. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism monetizes the aphorism. One’s class is therefore legitimized as a divine calling. You may marry your mother or father first time around, but what follows might as well as well be a factory part. Free will has little to do with what you do or who you choose to do it with.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Physical Control of the Mind

Tom Wolfe citing neurophysiologist Jose Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind in I Am Charlotte Simmons:  "His position was that the human mind, as we conceive it--and I think all of us do--bears very little resemblance to reality."  Delgado btw worked with an invention called the Stimoceiver, a brain wave stimulator attached to an EEG. Seance or sayance? From The Ants by Bert Holdabler and Edward O. Wilson: "Ants are everywhere, but only occasionally noticed. They run much of the terrestrial world as the premier soil turners, channelers of energy, dominatrices of the insect fauna--yet receive only passing  mention in textbooks on ecology. They employ the most complex forms of chemical communication of any animals and their social organization provides an illuminating contrast to that of human beings, but not one biologist in a hundred can describe the life cycle of any species."

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Vanity

Shelley’s “Ozymandius” is the playlist for this marching band. There’s comfort in the notion of living as vanity. Once you're born you begin to die. Are you guilty of comparing and despairing? Do you compare your insides to other people's  outsides—even when that someone is no longer here? Parenthetically you may have wished to get the last word in, to get a reprieve which will allow you to ask or tell over the river of eternity, with its mythic rower, Charon. Today you wake up and feel almost relieved at the fall of an idol, but who knows? Tomorrow's another day.

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Do you find yourself spinning like dervish or top? How nice it would be if one could harness that centrifugal force. Imagine confusion and sensory overload as an enormous implacable turbine, a satellite generator in some back road, emitting its persistent hum. You enter reality at Times Square. Someone points you to that tunnel leading to the A . You think "great," until you begin to realize you’re not going to get there so fast. You stare at your phone suddenly realizing you didn’t allow  enough time  No sense turning back, but the platform is three deep and it had already started to rain when you ducked into the subway. You’ll never get a cab. To make matters worse, it just happens to be one of those meetings. They can do without you but you’d rather make your presence felt. Now make a paradigm shift. You’re a subatomic particle pulled by the huge magnets of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, on your way to becoming a boson whose fleeting existence will appear as a scratch. Movement creates kinetic energy is another way to look at it. You’re a fart, punching your way out of a paper bag and beginning to love it.

read "Double Exposure" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

read The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy

and read The Wormhole Society: The Graphic Novel by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver