THE HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE IN POETRY:
HYPERSTRUCTURES IN HELL
Twenty years ago in high school Astronomy, I was taught that nothing escapes a black hole. We now suspect this is not true—at least 2 things theoretically do: Hawking Radiation and information. We have witnessed a single star survive an encounter along the event horizon. The hyper-velocity star S5-HVS1 skirted gravitational overwhelm in the singularity of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. When this sole survivor absconded, its information was imprinted onto the black hole’s exterior—etched as an image. An astral engram.
The stunning stellar incident replicated the exact mechanics of holography, which likewise compresses voluminous shapes into sheets of light. The holographic principle of the universe proposes that the entire observable cosmos is iterated in such micro-images—in merely two dimensions. Essentially, we inhabit a hologram.
(A hologram is an image; and imaginarium; a device of light; processed light; like an index lit; lux manipulated by laser; light manifesting its own mapping; diffracting the light field.)
Suppose this principle is borne out—that our universe is a projection, a panorama reproduced by machined light. Imagine all of us projected from a lightroom unfathomably far away. Imagine parody. Is this prospect exciting or terrifying? Frivolous? Something else?
To the naked eye, holograms pixelate, like low-res renderings of the “real” thing. This is only because they are easily distorted under uneven ambient light. In fact, holography accurately accounts the source material it reflects. It acts as an archive preserving object information. That’s why holographic designs appear 3D—alive—even atop the two-dimensional plate of your credit card.
The term “information,” in this context, refers to quantum information (as opposed to classical information) and conveys the physics of subatomic scales. Classical information relates the arrangement of particles in a structure and can be stored/transmitted in a binary “bit”—the smallest unit of digital data, expressed as a 0 or a 1. Conversely, quantum information is not binary, and it is affected by being measured or described. Particles entangle other particles. They occur in tandem, in flux, in several positions at once. They pop into and out of existence, potentially at random. Notably—numinously—quantum information may never be nullified, obliterated by an insatiate, unlit abyss. Information is imperishable, ever, always, and lossless, and does not die.
As a poet, I mean to pursue what is eternal or real or true—or some similar shade of such. In actuality, my medium is illusive, and I might only follow lumen and omen. We are taught that there are 4 dimensions we do directly experience in everyday life: 3 of space plus 1 of time. There may be more; maybe mirrorlike. Detailing one dimension ‘higher’ than photography, the hologram refocuses the lens through which I look. Science is one language articulating the esoteric fabric of spacetime. Verse is another valence. Astrophysics and poetry pair prettily. Both concern themselves with the behavior and spectacle of celestial bodies; with the margins of massive matters alongside the infinitesimal; the inconceivable infinite. Dreamers in the two disciplines speculate alternate & extra dimensions. We enlist anomaly. We trouble in stasis. We peer into—across—the reality tunnel: the entangled expanse between what you see and I perceive.
poetry: a shorthand system of semantic invention
A poem yields a curious container. Its dimensions are distillate—vectors; line; lightcraft. Each line encodes an illimitable amount of information into the page. Poetry exploits the kinetic complications roiling as words are positioned, with precision, in proximity to one another—poised to collide, clarify, confound. A hyperstructure engineers an apparatus to make and magnify meaning—to impalace memory. Poems inscribe more insight than one can process after inspecting them at first or from any single angle.
In “One Hell,” I compose my paracosm: a particularized, polymythic nightmare. The poetic list indulges the impulse to architect equilibrium and regulate chaos—to control at least these lines. The list formula generates self-sustaining gravity and weight. Its powers may be used for good or evil. I configure a framework at once rigid and irregular to approximate the discord inside boundaries that are confining but ill-defined. A mantric catalogue induces, then intensifies, claustrophobia—you are trapped; and you are trapped in a repeating cycle; a repeating cycle. Enumerated items are added on, as if in onslaught.
In my hellscape, numerals mimic—to mock—the classical binary. The only real numbers are 0 and 1 (the “1000” implied in the imaginary unit milliHelen is the quantum of an abstraction, beauty). Each stratum of afterlife is predicated upon the previous as well as the next. Yet a sequential narrative is dismayed. Each Hell retains the value of “One” in addition to another ordinal number, depending on its pecking order in my inventory: the second or third or fourth, and so on. Discrete experiences exist ensemble—time is omnidirectional; dilating; anti-linear. All is ether, etc. Poems haunt/are haunted. Every well-wrought image proves greater than the sum of its parts—after it dissipates, there persists an ineffable, ineffaceable remnant. Poets invest images with potential energy—thus incarnating also their byproduct: the afterimage. The revenant remainder. My final Hell—“One of One desire”—is inversive and reflexive unto itself: an entity of total desire equaling its outer extremes. A dreadnought. Dragonlike. A black hole.
“Hammerspace” refers to the trope of cartoon characters brandishing big weapons by drawing them out of thin air—a theoretical plane capable of containing things more voluminous than itself. This capacity is holography. This is the word. Consider the word “Nylonkong,” a portmanteau superstacking 3 megacities: New York, London, and Hong Kong. “Nylonkong” offers an evocative example of a 2D word scaffolding a 3D scene. We instinctively orient its mental image vertically, erecting high-rise edifices in cloud-spangled skyline. “One Hell” occupies ranging spaces I aim to illuminate as a poet of place. England I reference outright; the American South I dub “Dixie.”
In all poems, I scavenge logics and lexica from unlike multimedia, ephemera, and urtext littered through time. Here in Hell, I use intertextuality to impress implex perspectives, vantages, and vernaculars into the verse. One late night, I read an article in The Economist, which implanted this pageantry of pessimal underworlds. The King James Bible lends the setting of “night / at the beginning of night watches.” During the real estate frenzy of my Detroit days, even doom went on the market: a “disaster mansion.” Splicing my diction with external, disembodied expression, I speak as though urged by alien tongues. I work at world-building.
Poetry mystifies—which is the point; which is the mandate. As I write, I remind myself: certain infinities outsize other infinities. If quantifying infinity, breaking apart every whole into pieces exponentializes the rising count. A lyric poem essentializes and elaborates the astronomical interiority of its speaker. The closer one looks, the more complex its contouring. The inner nature of a person is readily understood as a kind of space—an inscape. A poem succeeds or fails by its ability to chart the immensity of our inscapes. My poems set out to survey an odditorium of ancestries and spirit worlds: Islam, Evangelicalism, animism.
When I was younger, I began to frighten before the inferno ahead—the one waiting at the finish line of my life—my fate for a lack of faith. A childhood regimented under religious indoctrination left me involuntarily preoccupied with superstition and with sin: unduly concerned with the haram and heresy. In “One Hell,” a lonely borderline recalls my birthplace near the border between Niger½Nigeria. It parallels the limbus separating the physical world from the veiled. Influenced by missionaries embedded amongst Muslims, I adhere mainly to mysterianism: that I may never comprehend my own consciousness—let alone cosmogenesis at large. My poem’s scenery seems surreal because I grant no steady ground upon which to stand. Its scales destabilize: they itemize, atomize, aerosolize. The state of our bodies: at zero status. We are sifted into outer space. We are electromagnetized. So we move past the material.
Compared to the conventionally accepted model, the optics of a holographic universe is constellate—it clusters and combines towards recurrence. “One Hell” concludes through mise-en-abyme, in which Hell communicates self-awareness, naming itself. “Killing jar,” it calls itself, conceiving a construction that consciously represents the properties of the larger poem, the abyss wherein it abides and behaves as echo. In here, Hellfire; torch-flame; chicken fat flashover in the fryer. In language, I unravel layers of light—wavelengths of light within the visible window; on butterfly wings.
We are lucky, living to see sea changes across fields of physical science. Maybe gravity holds memory. Perhaps spacetime spirals tightly into a spring. Something serious will happen when it uncoils; we’ve no notion of What. We might now stand in awe of what our engineering has achieved, but the body of knowledge outpacing all else comprises imponderabilia—the increasing awareness of what we do not know. Every object turns odder. We careen through God’s Good Claymation; preconceptions of a corporeal comfort zone unhinge. The cosmologies poets envision breach the hypertridimensional, proceeding beyond the third. Our task is no less compassing than cosmopoiesis—our subject matter, no lower nor closer than miracle; the marvel of creation; the ultimate mysterium tremendum; the original theory of everything.
