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  • Dark Matter
  • Susanne Antonetta (bio)

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

—Tertullian

So many opposites in this our universe: matter and antimatter, the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, dark matter and known. Athens and Jerusalem, cold intellection and leaps of faith. I’ve wondered why this bipole world of mine feels so normal. It has breathed through me lo these many years, and though people ask me the question, I can’t even say if it’s strange. I have two different names. My mail carrier and my bank accept them, at times with a bit of mild interrogation: whom are you hiding, and where?

I lived under dual names even as a child. One girl with a short form of my given name, one with a name unrelated, signed not just my school papers but my diary, in different inks. Both of them, for completely different reasons, loved risk. They walked away from things: crumpled cars melded into trees, boyfriends who hung knives above their beds, a toxic milk kindling in the blood—things no one would seem likely to walk away from.

And later: there’s an S——who supernovas; physicists would call her a standard candle. And one scarcely knows where the rain stops.

Perhaps it took a Carthaginian—which Tertullian was—to understand the terms of the world so wholly in terms of place, Athens at odds with Jerusalem. The Romans fetishized the destruction of Carthage, a destruction they pursued, several centuries before Tertullian, through the Punic Wars. The [End Page 59] general Scipio finally defeated Carthage and sold every living inhabitant of the city into slavery, then sowed the ground with salt. The defeat of Carthage was an astonishing destruction, a creation of nothing out of something comparable in ways with what our modern bombs do, but slow and steady and requiring piecework, the loading of individual human beings onto ships bound for slave markets, the plowing of acre after acre of land.

Carthage rose again, as a Roman African city, home of saints: Tertullian, then Augustine, who studied in Carthage and fathered an illicit child, a sin he would spend the rest of his life famously confessing.

An Augustinian prayer: Light of my heart, do not let my darkness speak to me.

Nothing, true nothing, as the Romans learned, is hard.

Even the universe has errors of plenitude. There’s far more matter in our cosmos than astrophysicists predicted, until they invented ways to measure the gravitation within galaxies and found off-the-charts quantities of matter, far more matter even than antimatter, though if two things existed that called out for symmetry, it would be these.

When I was a young woman and doctors went exploring in my body, they found two uteruses, one dark, closed off, prone to illness. It seemed like a just physical architecture for a manic-depressive, and one that should have parallels all over: two hearts, one hard and dry, two spleens.

Space has its own attendant force, dark energy. Space comes into being all the time and as it does, it brings with it more and more dark energy and causes the cosmos to fly apart faster and faster. Space is probably flat, and very plastic, bending, flexing, rippling like water under a skipping stone. The universe and the space that makes up most of it have an end point, a place into which it expands, a ludicrous fact that bothers nonscientists to death.

Popular shapes for the universe come and go—the sideways cone (or technically the Picard horn), the dodecahedron, the doughnut, an infinite flatness. If space didn’t end, darkness would not exist, but every millimeter of night sky would reflect back some sort of light from somewhere. We would have the light of the sun during the day and the light of true infinity at night, and they would look much the same. [End Page 60]

Here where I live, in the northernmost part of the Pacific Northwest, we have short days in winter, with dim skies all day and sunset at three, and long days in summer, the sun finally exhausting itself after ten o’clock. It is, doctors...

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