a n  a t o m  o f  g o l d 

 

 'I exist in two places/ here and where you are.'

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You can find these words on inspirational lists; e.g. 30 Long-Distance Relationship Quotes. They are taken from a poem by Margaret Atwood called ‘Corpse Song’, except Atwood's intention was not to create the strapline for a gaze across a movie poster, rather to encourage a sense of dreamlike detachment. Consciousness deliberating in the peripheries of body-becoming-cadaver — so long body, so long — like where we find ourselves at night, dreaming a slideshow around our impulses, as neurones and synapses perform the thankless task of stuffing a day’s worth of memories and experiences into their allotted files somewhere deep within the fats of the brain.

I’ve given up trying to fully understand Schrödinger's cat, but I like this idea very much — the same electron being in two places at once — it speaks to the lag between thought and action. ‘We have now used indirect measurements to determine the final position of the atom in the most gentle way possible,' says PhD student Carsten Robens. On my first day at the school I work at in Honduras, I watched two young parents peering over a balcony to keep an eye on their son, trying not to be seen by him or his friends. In another assembly a few weeks later, the Head of School teaches the students how to greet each other using elbows, nods and reverential Thai bows in anticipation of Covid-19. Determining position in the most gentle way possible.

A cliché is a comforting truth. It allows us to express the ineffable in a close-up, cosy way. To say that absence makes the heart grow fonder can make the heart grow fonder without ever worrying about its microbiological system for pumping blood around the body at 36.5–37.5 °C. I searched for ‘how far is the heart from the brain’ and discovered they are in fact two places. Braine is a small city in northern France, and Sacred Heart is somewhere left of centre in the broad chest of the USA. ‘The travel duration from Brain to Heart [sic] is around 186.78 hours if your travel speed is 50 Kmh’. This website — http://distancebetween.info/ — speculates whether there is a train from Brain to Heart or available bus services. The distance between these organs is, of course, dependent on the height of a person, but something like 18 inches in adults.

 

When we created units of distance did we move the world slightly further out of touch? Besides allowing us to build a slant into a pyramid exact enough to catch the rising beam of an equinox, a cubit can have the controlling effect of reminding us that we are too close to something else. When I phoned my mum in England yesterday she told me that an enterprising cafe in Hastings has drawn chalk rings around benches so that clientele can keep 2 metres from each other during the period of self-isolation. Elsewhere, a long thread posted on the town’s Facebook group aggressively debates the ethics of a child coughing over a shelf of crisps in a local One Stop. Whenever the air is cold enough, I am always amazed by the size of the clouds of condensation that mammals exhale; how they blend above sports teams in winter. Presumably we can inhale something like the same amount. 

 

The distance between a troll and their target is usually quite far. And yet when we press our fingers into our screens and keys are we not in a sense closer than when we speak across a room. Does the electricity move faster across all that distance than sound? It feels like there’s something intimate about the act, yet there seems to be enough distance to hate effectively in the darkness. ‘I enter your night/ like a darkened boat’ begins Atwood’s poem. I wonder if she wrote those words onto a detached piece of paper, or writes them into the mainframe of us all? I once read an Instagram post along the lines of: 'if ever you’re feeling lonely remember that there are millions of algorithms keeping track of every move you make.'

 

'Distance sometimes lets you know who is worth keeping, and who is worth letting go.' This is a quote from Lana Del Rey. I can’t find which song it came from, and nobody on the internet seems to know either. I gave up after looking through 10 pages of searches. One post on a fan forum suggests that it was probably something she said in an interview once. It seems that someone has wisely captured this wisdom and it’s been reposted ever since like a fragment of Sappho. The further I search for its source the further Lana seems to move away from her words. I like her use of ‘sometimes’. It creates a little distance in the certainty of the sentiment, moves everything a little further apart. Apparently proximity is the cause of the spike in Wuhan’s recent divorce rate, but I now I realise this is partly what Lana is saying. 

 

How to get closer to everything? You can’t wrap it around yourself. You can't lather your hands in its foam. An atom of gold has a diameter of 0.000,000,000,144 m. That’s so small that our value system wouldn’t bother to keep hold of it, even if it could. Does knowing an atom of gold is that small bring us closer to an atom of gold? If we had an atom of everything we could smudge them all together, but would that bring everything closer? Thinking about atoms of gold for these past two sentences has given me the feeling of being closer to atoms of gold than I ever have before. It might be a good place to start.

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