Lecture Notes: On the Geophysics of the Satanic Impact Event

1.

This was the side on which he fell from Heaven; 

for fear of him, the land that once loomed here

made of the sea a veil and rose into

            our hemisphere; and that land which appears

upon this side—perhaps to flee from him—

left here this hollow space and hurried upward.

Inferno 34:121-126 (as translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

Hell is a shatter cone, a byproduct of the Satanic Impact Event. Cast down from heaven, Lucifer struck the southern hemisphere of the Earth. As he plunged toward the core, rock shattered ahead of him in a conic pattern (apex to base), was flash-magmatized, and discharged, under pressure, back through the passage he’d opened up behind him – an eruption that hollowed out the northern hemisphere to form a vast new volcano in what is now the South Pacific (at a point antipodal to Jerusalem): Mount Purgatory. 

2. 

Apparently concussed, and as far as it is possible to get from God in a cosmos that consists of nested spheres He is external to, Lucifer is embedded in ice at the bottom of the vacated chasm. His legs dangle into the southern hemisphere; his midsection corresponds to Earth’s gravitational center. This last point is made twice in Inferno – first in Canto 32:73-74, as Dante and Virgil draw nearer to hell’s bottommost point, “the center / to which all weight is drawn…”, and again in Canto 34:109-111, after they’ve downclimbed one of Lucifer’s shaggy haunches (on which Virgil busts a gnarly 180° inversion with Dante piggybacking) and begun their egress to the surface via a hydrogeological hollow in the southern hemisphere downcarved by the river Lethe flowing from atop Mount Purgatory to a catchment in the basement of hell, where its waters are frozen solid by the flapping of Lucifer’s huge chiropteran wings, his every effort to escape reinforcing his confinement: “And you were there as long as I descended; / but when I turned, that’s when you passed the point / to which, from every part, all weights are drawn.”

3.

As with every poetical repurposing of the Tartarus prison pit, it’s always the worst at bottom: a distribution of offenders that corresponds to gravitational differentiation during planetary formation. Weightier sins sink toward the center. Treason against god, in such schemata, being the basest metal.

4.

Lucifer’s sin is weighty indeed. Its mass, in fact, is apparently enough to offset the gravitational anomaly we’d expect from a void belowground the size of hell (Depth estimates of the Tartarus pit vary significantly. “As far beneath Hades [i.e., Dante’s ‘Limbo’] as Earth is beneath Heaven,” Homer informs us in Book VIII of the Iliad. In Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil claims it is twice as deep as Olympus appears tall. Which would make it either 5834 meters or 4710 meters deep, depending on whether you calculate based on the true height of the mountain or its prominence. In Theogony, Hesiod gets even more deceptively specific: a bronze anvil, dropped from heaven, would fall for nine days before it hit the earth, then another nine before it struck the bottom of Tartarus. Which is damn tricky to model the gravitational and frictional conditions of, but would seem to require a longer planetary diameter than the one I’m blogging on has.).

5.

Mount Purgatory is a stratovolcano, not a shield, so when in Purgatorio 4:88-93 Virgil tells a whinging Dante, “This mountain’s of such sort / that climbing it is hardest at the start; / but as we rise, the slope grows less unkind. / Therefore, when this slope seems to you so gentle / that climbing farther up will be as restful / as traveling downstream by boat,” we know he’s talking metaphysics, not gradient.  

That said, he’s also correct geophysically. The gravity field near the top of Purgatory should be slightly weaker than at the foot of it. 

6 a.

Whether because of the inter|n|ment of Lucifer’s supermassive sin or an iron-nickel core, we should expect time dilation based on proximity to Earth’s gravitational center. A clock near the core should run more slowly than one at the surface. This has recently been demonstrated, with a divergence on the order of femtoseconds, over vertical differences as small as one millimeter (which, over thousands of kilometers of depth and billions of years, adds up – so that the planet’s core is now ~2.5 years younger than its [chronological, not geomorphological] surface). When you are climbing a mountain, time passes infinitesimally more quickly at the top than it did at the bottom. When you are standing upright, time passes more quickly for the blood in your brain than in your feet (perhaps there is an opportunity to exploit relativistic effects in computer chip architectures by temporally offsetting certain calculations based on vertical orientation). In a mantle convection cell, the heated, less-dense material rises up, cools, densifies, and sinks back down. As it does so, it passes through zones of the gravity field where time runs comparatively faster or slower – zones which might be correlated (however roughly) to temperature and pressure regimes at specific depths, and exist for reasons that aren’t totally unrelated. 

6 b.

Where there is no movement, there is no change; no possibility of change. 

The motive force of the cosmos is outside it. The instantaneous velocity of its center of rotation is zero.

At the farthest spatial point from the lightbulb of God, the Ninth Circle is permanently frozen and all-but-motionless, in stasis. Well, not static, exactly, but (for those trapped inside it – unlike Dante) in a time-independent state, as if it were a closed system in thermodynamic equilibrium. 

But the system is open.   

6 c.

The closer Dante (pilgrim) gets to Lucifer – i.e., to Earth’s center of gravity – the more slowly time passes for him. 

How do we know this? There are a number of ways it might be argued textually. I will content myself with one, however quixotic. 

In Inferno, Dante (poet) gives us two ‘clocks’ to compare: a phenomenological narrative of an embodied progress through hell and Virgil’s metaphysical awareness of star orientations aboveground throughout that journey. 

There is a terrific paper Frederick Stebbins published in 1963 called “Dante in Orbit” in which he puzzles out the remotely-sensed astronomical evidence to determine that Dante and Virgil reach Lucifer at approximately 6:30 pm on the Saturday before Easter, 1300 CE. Dante passes out during their descent of the devil’s taint and is revived by Virgil at around 7:30 am (the next morning, presumably). They then somehow make their way to the surface, a climb of thousands of kilometers (as David Alexander pointed out in his 1986 paper “Dante and the Form of the Land”, ‘Dante’s conception of the world was based on both ancient and contemporary or recent sources. In his poem Convivio…he cited the ninth-century Arab astronomer Alfragano, who calculated the circumference of the earth as 32,870 km, about 7,160 km short of the actual value.’), before dawn. But of what day? Based on the narrative, one would presume it is, at the earliest, Monday morning, and that the two of them spent Easter making Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold look like slackers. But there is little doubt that Dante (poet) meant for the two characters to reemerge and “riveder le stelle” on Easter Day. 

Stebbins solves the riddle by concluding that Dante, having anticipated the notion of an International Date Line, reset the astronomical clock, back to 7:30 am of Holy Saturday, once they’d flipped into the southern hemisphere, giving them a whole extra day and night to make it to the littoral skirts of Mount Purgatory by Easter sunrise. 

It’s a solution. Another, somewhat less-plausible (although possibly complimentary) one: 

The Morningstar – as though collapsing into a sort of black hole – causes time to pass more slowly for Dante and Virgil at the center of the Earth than it does in the heavens due to (general relativistic) time dilation. An increasingly long delay is introduced between their progress in hell and the motions of the stars. By the time they reach the gravity field at the surface, however, they’ve resynchronized with astronomical time.  

Without a Trace

Last summer, in collaboration with various shovel-wielding partners, I performed a series of full-body inhumations inside an active volcano near Naples, Italy. In so doing, I had hoped, in part, not just to think about ‘Place’, per se, or about that place, or even in that place, but also as that place. To make – to whatever extent it’s possible to do so – an ontological sacrifice of my being’s distinction in order to more fully participate in a common being with the volcano. 

In the midst of these experiments, I noted the following: Buried alive inside Monte Nuovo for the sake of producing an earthwork (that is, subjected to objectification), the physical and psychic pressures increase, become crushing. Subjectivity-constituting senses are subtracted, and new sensations (e.g., acouophonias) are begat from within, as if I were rock undergoing metamorphosis. As my phenomenology becomes increasingly stoney, so does my temporality: the human durée is replaced by a geological one. Such transmogrifications don’t just happen to me. Geology too is changed. The stone, the strata, the earth itself, becomes more Wayne-like: Space contracts around me; Time’s scale shrinks, compresses, re-liquifies, is mobilized — humanized. My goings-under, undergoings of katabasis & anabasis, thus help clarify the earth’s own convections. Albeit temporarily, we obey the same temporal geo-logic: presence (of a present, however specious) absents itself, is pressed downward, deeper into the past, where it gets metamorphosed into future potential by an overburden (historical and otherwise), and is ultimately made available for re-presentation/representation before being subsumed, again & again. This is something I now have more obviously in common with the earth as a whole, and this place in particular, than most other living humans. Each of us — Wayne and the volcano — might therefore be described as having approached the other’s being, asymptotically — a convergence predicated by acknowledgment of our fundamental difference, as Irigaray has it; or, per Derrida, différance. Such an ontic anabasis might actually afford a basis for some sort of consensus politics — a geo-anarchy; an anarcho-geology — that Earth’s human and non-human stakeholders could share in…

There were obvious aesthetic similarities between these experiments and the work of Ana Mendieta – not just Untitled (Grass Breathing) & Burial Pyramid, but also her Siluetas series. In The Ethics of Earth Art, Amanda Boetzkes asserts that in those latter works, Mendieta’s body “acts as both an overflowing receptacle and a surface that registers the point at which sensation abounds beyond the body’s capacity to organize and interpret it.”

Might the reverse also be true, I wondered? As I overflowed with earth-excess (dirt in my nose & eyes, beetles in my ears, a tick stuck to the underside of my tongue), wasn’t it also the case that earth overflowed with me? That I too was a surfeit, metaphysically, if not geophysically — this apparent paradox of scale being less a matter of matter than of being.

After the “interpenetration of…body and the earth,” I could not be “washed away, burned, melted, or otherwise reintegrated into the land by elemental forces” (Boetzkes again), not entirely. Rather, wherever, whenever, my body was emplaced, something remained — for lack of it having anywhere else to flow away to; of anything else into which it might be transfigured: evidence of an absented presence. That is, a trace – a mark of passage, in both space and time.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series (1976/2001)

Mendieta’s trace, photographed, might be described as a presence indexing an absence of an absence indexing a presence. What I mean by that: as Mendieta laid down on the shore at low tide, then got up, leaving an imprint of her body in the sand, then photographed that before the water washed it away, the initial absence (of Mendieta; of art) had a presence impressed into it; removing her body (metonymic for, or performative of, presence), a new absence got exposed – this one indexical of past presence. This second absence was meant to be temporary, to disappear: an absence absenting itself. Before that could happen, however, a photograph was taken of it – a photo that both documented the indexical absence of presence and, by arresting the absenting of that absence with an image that fixed its – or, rather, a secondary trace of its – presence, re-presenting/representing it, itself became an indexical absence: a presence-as-absence, entangled with the absence-as-presence of the initial trace.

In my inhumations, I tried to elaborate this artistic process as part of a larger geographic research method I’ll write more about here later. Suffice it to say for now that by continuing the effacement, the absenting, of my own presence while remaining bodily present – allowing myself to be completely buried until the scene, at the surface, became indistinguishable from an original, non-indexical absence (of me; of art) – I attempted to absorb, and be absorbed by, my own trace; to take part in the convective geo-logic of the earth and experience a katabasis of de-presentation – at once a posteriori, a priori, and en route to re-presentation/representation – that afforded phenomenological & epistemological perspectives I couldn’t have participated in otherwise.

Here are two images from an inhumation within the volcano. In which of them am I underground?

Deb Chachra, who buried me on this occasion, is the only person with direct phenomenological experience of what it looked like at the surface throughout. I was experiencing it from the other side of the dirt. Anyone else, minus the sequence of intermediary documentary evidence, will have to take our word for it.

Once you know I’ve been inhumed like that, the whole volcano – the whole Earth, in some sense – is made gravid with the possibility of me being inside it. Seriously, though. Wherever one stands, it does become harder to believe that somebody, something, some past present with potential for future presence, isn’t hidden there – just there – beneath the surface. Because, of course, it is.

Librera me, Domine.

Certain minor miracles – of timeliness, rarity, price – occurred among the bookshops of southern Italy this year. In Rome, I found an Alexandra David-Néel from the private collection of Freya Stark I gifted to Eva; at Dante & Descartes in Naples, a complete reproduction, plates and all, of William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei. Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies as They Have Been Communicated to the Royal Society of London, a book that sells for $100,000+ (USD), for €65 that she gifted me. A crumbling edition of Amadeo Maiuri’s far less costly, but no less crucial, I Campi Flegrèi: Dal Sepolcro di Virgilio all’Antro di Cuma also, improbably, appeared on a rack at Port’Alba. 

I will finish about seventy-five books this year – mostly titles like The Ethics of Earth Art, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity, and The Path of Shadows: Chthonic Gods, Oneiromancy & Necromancy in Ancient Greece. Although I quite liked Cormac McCarthy’s career coda Stella Maris, Mathias Énard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, etc., none of the new (to me) fictions I read gave me as much pleasure, I think, as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques (although the first and last lines of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It are tough to beat). And none affected me so strongly – for whatever lame psycho-meteorological elucidation of my inner weather I might proffer – as Zorba the Greek did. 

As I wrote a friend:

This morning, I ran from the center of Naples through the kilometer-long hole in the Posillipo peninsula into Fuorigrotta, and thence across the supervolcano to Lake Avernus: just over 20 km under a blazing late-morning sun, listening to Zorba the Greek, occasionally laughing aloud as I padded along the colossal industrial ruins from Bagnoli Futura to the western limits of Pozzuoli. The sky and sea were blue; the tuff of La Starza, yellow. The face of that tremorous escarpment is festooned with ancient Roman ruins like some coast cliffs are with fossils. I was happy.

That’s weather, not climate, as I said. Days later, I wrote again: 

Was feeling especially human last night. Hard to say why. The weather, maybe. Or dead ends in my work. Had had a few too many beers, and there was an intense conversation in Piazza Dante about the war in Ukraine with a guy I know who works the crowd there, an anarcho-communist, that felt almost life or death, and finally erupted into us singing a Bourbon-era Nnapulitano brigand song together, him pointing to the hairs standing erect on his arms. I was fatigued, overheated, not especially clear-minded. At the flat, I actually asked myself, “Is that it?”, and answered by striding back off into the night furnace, bent on reaching the highest point above the city and the sea I could find stairs to. Made it about five miles before I exhausted them (not they me). The last chapters of Zorba the Greek in my earbuds did a number on me up there in the dark: more than once, I actually bayed like a dog or wolf as I climbed. Not out of pain, or even unhappiness. Rather – good as it is to live, even just to be alive – it’s often a hell of a thing when I allow myself to _really_ feel like a body – this aging, broken-down body – in the midst of life. Needless to say, no one paid me any mind. Nor should you.

Bob.

In April of 1996, shortly after being talked onto a raft afloat on a small artificial lake at Stanford University by a guy with a gun who was very, very angry with me (justifiably, I confess), I escaped to San Francisco with my friend, the painter Eric Sweet. We were in SFMOMA, gawping at Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, when Eric looked up, shouted BOB!!!, and sprinted off, knocking past a handsome woman with a distinctive white streak in her dark mane. Susan Sontag glared after him until he prostrated himself before one of Robert Motherwell’s elegies to the Spanish Republic, then pulled a shrugging face – as if to say, well, OK, I see what he means – that I will love her for forever.

Only gratitude will be gushing from it.

My kid sister and me, in our father’s clothes. Nicole Krauss made this back in the Pleistocene of our friendship. The Brodsky quote – despite a year too often darkened by the sadness, madness, sickness, and/or death of those I love – still holds.*

*Indeed, having recently had dirt crammed down my throat, I can attest: even after.

For Mark Lauer, wherever I may find him.

My friend Tom Vanderbilt and I have exchanged notes recently about our various 50+ mile single-push efforts/debacles over the years (the sorts of experiences I should tattoo “It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.” backward on my forehead to help explain to my senile future self as he stares, confused, at the bathroom mirror). To riprap an eroding memory, I’ve been rummaging through the archives of deleted social media accounts, in which, among the digital shoeboxes, I found this snapshot:

“In 2014, a friend and I crossed the Grand Canyon rim to rim to rim – 57 linear miles and 21,000 feet of elevation change – in just under 36 hours, including an overnight bivvy on the north rim. After crossing the Colorado, we were exposed to increasingly direct sunlight, with no place to hide, and no access to potable water for long stretches. Climbing 6,000 vertical feet up from the river, we slept under the stars in a residual snow pack, partially sheltered from 40-mph winds by ponderosas. The next morning, we dropped back down into a cloudless blue heat, retracing our steps through the vipergrass, red-flowering prickly pears, century plants, hemlocks, periwinkles, and all manner of other vegetation clinging to life down there amid the raw geology. We saw giant ravens and cliff swallows, pissing deer, a rare foxtail squirrel, a Gila monster perched on the edge of Bright Angel Creek, and hundreds of its diminutive cousins scurrying about everywhere else. We identified a couple of exotic psychoactive plants. We saw signs warning of bubonic plague. We heard rumors that thirst-crazed elk had figured out water fountains, and were attacking humans topside to get at them. I mistook a big piece of sandstone on Asinine Hill for a grinning, empty-socketed cranium; and then confused a terrace of mesquite shrubs for a long row of waxy yellow skulls staring down at us. Cognitive misfires, sure, but death was down there too, I think. We hid inside a cave at one point before deciding to hustle the hell off the canyon floor, where it felt like some giant, sadistic child was holding a magnifying glass over us to see if we’d catch fire. Whether because of heat stroke, caloric deficit, or just grosse fatigue, I was somnambulant climbing out. But I couldn’t resist a backward glance to snap this photograph. It’s the sort of view that would have turned Lot’s wife into a salt lick.”

Mark Lauer, wherever you are, let us procure a canoe and portage it across the whole of the Boundary Waters. Before it is too late.

My typology of fun.

I tend to think of fun in terms of a type-1 (feels fun in the moment), type-2 (feels fun afterward, although not – or not necessarily – in the moment), type-3 (which isn’t remembered as having been fun, but is still fun to tell stories about), and type-4 (which isn’t even fun to tell stories about, for you, but is fun for others to tell them, about you and your sufferings).

Shake It Off

Electronic Terraforming: “The creation of a material environment that mimics a digital representation of a physical territory…but is entirely fictional. [A] process of emitting an electromagnetic volume that creates fictitious cyberscapes… [E]lectronic terraforming operates through elastic – and increasingly uncanny – spatial behaviour, allowing it to bend, stretch, and fold cyber territories. This topological, rather than topographical, understanding of spatial deformation provides a novel approach to defining the territorial power of cyberwar.”  

(Anna Engelhardt 2023)

In a chapter of the forthcoming book Cyberwar Topologies (co-edited by Svitlana Matviyenko & Kayla Hilstob), Anna Engelhardt introduces the idea of “electronic terraforming.” Her premise is that cyberwar combatants, with the right equipment and expertise, are now capable of producing – and then ensnarling opponents in – a new sort of ‘Eldenian’ territory that obeys a topological rather than topographical logic, one characterized by elastic, disorienting deformations of spacetime as digital devices – jammed, spoofed, or countermanded – get pulled forcibly into electromagnetic looking-glass worlds, and trapped there, temporarily, for tactical reasons.

I’m fascinated with this idea, and I’ve been thinking about territorial contestations in which the distinction she draws between the two logics might be collapsed and/or usefully set in dialectical opposition. 

A mountain range, for instance. Let me explain.

In 2009, Friedmann Freund of NASA Ames demonstrated that strain at seismogenic depths can cause igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks to release positive charge carriers (so-called “positive holes” or “p-holes”) from the stressed rock into unstressed rock surrounding it, leaving electrons behind. Positive surface potential builds up in the unstressed rock, and as the stressed rock becomes negatively charged the difference between the potentials results in a semiconductive, battery-like outflow of electric current. Positive charge accumulates at the surface, ionizing the ground-air interface and producing a plasma. As airborne radio waves strike it, they can induce what Masafumi Fujii of the University of Toyama has called a “terrestrial surface plasmon.” The waves bend asymptotically from their path in the air, couple with the plasma, and follow its complex topographic path toward mountain peaks, where they are diffracted and reradiated beyond lines of sight.

In short, deformational pre-seismic stress could turn a mountain into a giant radio – an electrified, infrastructural landform that enables the sorts of electronic terraforming Engelhardt describes. That is, topography (specifically, a mechanically topologized topography) harnessed to deploy weaponized topologies with.

At the risk of sounding unserious, consider the Pamir mountains; or the Carpathians, or the Caucasus, or the Zagros. They all satisfy the requisite tectonic and geological conditions for a surface plasmon-based radio frequency network. They’re all settings where geopolitics and geology might (sadly, if somewhat predictably) align in such a way that guerrilla insurgents get chased among pleated folds of rock at high elevation by technologically superior belligerents determined to make use of mountain geophysics – not just for cyberwarfare, but also to establish electromagnetic supply chains for communications, piloting drones and EOD robots, even SIGINT, snatching radio whispers out of the mouths of caves. 

One can, of course, also imagine the guerillas utilizing their traditional terrain in novel ways: to monitor EM signal fires from afar; to track the spectral bleed of alpine commandos; to disrupt enemy comms; to jam and spoof their weapon systems.

One can further imagine locals wanting to be able to shut the radio effect off, should the invading army be trying to make use of it; or turn it on, should it not already be available for themselves to use.

What I’ve described is a byproduct of pre-seismic stress, and seismic induction is its kill switch. Whether by inducing a small earthquake (by means of, say, hydraulic injection – lubricating faults until they slip – as three USGS scientists first demonstrated was possible to do deliberately at a Chevron oil field in Rangely, Colorado back in 1969) or some other, more controlled, method (about which I have ideas), once the stress gets discharged, the surface plasmon will collapse, and the radio effect with it. 

Conversely, if stress can be built up to a point where the rock strains but doesn’t rupture, a plasmon could be generated artificially. Once again, the work done fifty years ago at Rangely is instructive. Those guys didn’t just start earthquakes, after all, they also stopped them – by reversing hydrostatic pressure in the fault complex. Pumping water out of the ground dried up pore space in the rocks, increased their friction, and stopped them from slipping. Which, in turn, set the stage for new deformational stress to build.

Think of it as a geophysical pas de deux based on a tactical truism that holds at every geopolitical scale from a barfight to Westphalianism: when your opponent bends, you break; when they break, you bend.

Plastic Surgery Disasters

The evolution of my face, over several days, under the influence of many dozens (possibly hundreds) of Simuliidae bites. I reckon I got off lucky, insofar as these creatures can kill horses and, I shit you not, mules.

What I ordinarily look like, for reference:

Under the Volcano (Exhumation #5)

Totum nasum. Zoom in.

All the way under. No snorkel.

Inhumation, exhumation, and documentation by Deb Chachra.