Maxwell's Equations

This is the first features piece I wrote while trying out, or as students here say, 'comping' for one of the literary magazines at my college. I made it past the first round, but didn't have enough time to start, let alone finish, my next piece for the final round. I'm giving it another shot this semester and I'm hoping to write about ramen, a beautiful Japanese noodle dish, which just happens to be my only true love and joy in this world. To be honest, this is a draft more than anything else and I intend to revise it someday, but, for now, here it is posted as it was first written. I didn't bother to remove the double-spacing. Here we go America. 

Maxwell’s Equations.

The following are a series of false analogies concerning physics which you do not understand.

I. Gauss's Law

The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.

You were told that your dreams could not fit within the borders of The Continent. This is why the ground beneath your feet has shifted, and why the grass is no longer a parched yellow, but a nourished green. When you were younger than you are now, you dreamt of flying across the Atlantic to come here. The West. You wished to stand under vaulted, collegiate Neo-Gothic structures to breathe the thoughts of long-dead old white men. Now that this has happened, it occurs to you that you might have been trying to age into one of them. This does not equate. What is equal is the following. To the left of the equals sign: in The Continent, the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet are not the same colour as the rest of your skin. To the right of the equals sign: in The West, the rest of your skin is not the same color as the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

You try to explain.

First, you expand the terms on the left side. In The Continent, the palms of your hands stretched towards the sun when it glowed orange towards the evening and swiped across the sky as it purpled. You had shoes, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so the soles of your feet dance with the dust as you tried to awkwardly help your grandfather herd  the cows home. Your grandfather sighed because the rest of your skin screamt ‘city-child.’ Second, you expand the terms on the right. In The West, the rest of your skin is actually your body it its entirety. This body is yours, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so your palms pick cotton and your soles dragged across the Atlantic through slave-ships in the the water instead of commercial airplanes in the sky. But you say it took you three flights to get here.  

You try to explain.

You were taught that your thoughts are electric currents that flow through your neurons. From this you decided that the beginning and end of your everything must reside within this electricity. The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.  Your everything is nothing more and nothing less than the strange happenings between positive and negative charges. This is why you try to explain your home, your body and your skin with physics which you do not understand.

II. Gauss’s Law for Magnetism

There are no magnetic monopoles; the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero.

There are North poles; there are South poles. They pull together if they’re different; they push apart if they’re the same. There is no such thing as a North pole existing without a South pole; there is no such things as South pole existing without a North pole.

You are black.

One night you are at party with faces that look like your and those faces are dancing. You are still. Their legs and arms swish in movements that are not intrinsic to you.  Their breath fills the air and it is thick, heavy and sweaty. The sound of the music is discordant to your ears. This aural landscape is composed of the following image-associations : hoodies, gunshots, fades, kicks, beats. More than a few girls’ asses are placed neatly in front of boys’ crotches and they rotate around one well-oiled joints. This still feels strange to you. Why? Isn’t the music of the diaspora prevalent in The Continent as well?  Back there and then, when the songs of the diaspora rappers and singers spread  through The Continent like wildfire, you figured it might be a way of returning home for them. And they were welcomed even though your body did not let you dance.  Here you are in the West with your brothers and your sisters who were taken away from you- do you not feel welcomed? Are your faces not the same?  Then, are your faces pulled together because you are different, or pulled apart because they are the same?

One afternoon  you are in the freshman dining hall with faces that look like yours and those faces are talking. You all talk about what you want to study. One wishes to study Economics and African Studies to save The Continent. Another wishes to study Medicine  and African-American studies to save The Continent in the West. You say that you want to study Physics and Philosophy because you’re looking for the true nature and structure of reality. They ask you if you’re interested in philosophy from The Continent. You blankly say that, whether we like it or not, the foundation of the modern world was built by philosophers from the West. There is a pause. You are ashamed. You quickly add that the best way of fighting The West is by knowing their ways of thinking directly and hope that this means and proves something.

One day you and a friend walk down stretches of tarred pathway cutting through the grass. Right by the corner between the big old library and your small old dormitory you find that someone has spray-painted something curious on the black tar. Beneath an arrow pointing forward, the words ‘NO N*GAS’ flash in hasty yellow curls. You lie down next to ‘NO N*GAS’ using your backpack as a pillow , relaxedly place your hands at the back of your head and flash your teeth in an aggressive brace-wire smile. You ask your friend to take a picture of this pose for your Instagram. No niggas. No North poles without South poles. No South poles without North poles. There are no magnetic monopoles;  the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero. Surely your blackness is the same as theirs.

III. Faraday’s Law

The voltage induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux it encloses.

“Maxwell’s Equations are a set of four differential equations that describe electromagnetism. One might shudder at first at the word ‘electromagnetism’. What  a strange unification. The world of charges and currents; sparks, fizzes and flashes. The world of poles and magnets; compasses, maps and directions. Brought together. In fact, the forces of electricity and magnetism are essentially the same force. Electricity and magnetism are just manifestations of electromagnetism in itself. Furthermore, a changing magnetic field produces an electric field and a changing electric field produces a magnetic field.”

So you think to yourself.

From the first equation, you showed that the electricity is the blackness in your mind which is tied to The Continent. It will travel with your forever, no matter what space you exist within, because the blackness you carry with you is always proportional to the blackness you were born with. From the second equation, you used magnetism to relate your blackness to the blackness of the diaspora, the blackness of The Continent to the blackness of The Continent in The West. You discovered that even though they appear to be different, they are the same blackness, because one does not exist without the other. The third equation tells you that the blackness in your mind and the blackness of your skin are the same blackness.

You cannot think your way out of your skin.

IV. Ampere’s Law

The magnetic field induced around a closed loop is proportional to the electric current plus displacement current (rate of change of electric field) it encloses.

“Maxwell’s fourth equation is symmetrical to the third equation. So they basically look the same. If you fiddle around with them a bit, and if the current density J is zero, then you can make them look exactly the same. There is then no doubt that a changing electric field produces a magnetic field, or that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field, or that electricity and magnetism basically amount to the same thing, electromagnetism. Another interesting thing that happens if you play around with the equations: you get c: the speed of light.”

So you think to yourself.

You are surprised and astonished and awed at this physics that you do not understand. From it appears a fundamental truth of the universe, the speed of light. It is the fastest anything in this space and time can ever go, the limit of everything that has been, is, and ever will be. And it is the product of your skin.

How beautiful, how terrible, how fast, how slow.

***

P.S The images for the equations are sourced from the Wikipedia page for 'Maxwell's equations'. They're rather well made...

Writing Again.

Somehow between the Joburg airport and now I found again those whisperings within me that say, 'Say something.' Ten minutes before my flight I rushed off to the bookstore to buy my first love with words of this nature, 'Ariel' by Sylvia Plath. This collection remains an enduring fascination of mine. Here I am. Some of these, oddly enough, follow readings of Barack Obama's 'Dreams from My Father'. I haven't bothered editing them to make them better and I won't. These are transitional works, I hope. There's another thing: I don't believe in anything at the moment. I don't know why. I wish I did. I should. Soon. The world is moving far too quickly for people who don't believe in things to justify their place in it. There is a right side of history. There is a wrong side. History is ever present. 


Many Sad Songs.

There were words once.
Meant to be heard and said across
various distances, sometimes
an eternity, seemingly, continents
pushed together into one, sometimes
a whisper, momentary, finally, lips-
they say things that very often mean
nothing. Nothing she says. What's wrong he asked.
Many things. Nothing at all. You press play
and something sings in your ears and you
wait for another flight to somewhere.
Nowhere feels everywhere at once, always,
which is why we built these planes. Sometimes
out of paper. As a child I did those things.
Watched how they gleamed across the tops
of my eyes- never too far they went.


What the World Looks Like.

skin is a net endlessly catching the school of character-fish swimming restlessly in myself
ocean unknown depth murkily swirling with waters composed of molecules of culture or and? DNA
what does the world look like to such a thing as me?
I am, or was, rarely bothered by mirrors
now every reflective surface is a cascade, a waterfall
in which I collide with myself then part with I
a wooden staff struck furiously to the ground to lead me away from some desert to some promised land
a wooden staff thrown at an emperor and his court of spellcasters turns into a snake-
this is a dick joke.


And Where To?

I hate airports. My father is a pilot, my ex-girlfriend(s)
live(s) in another (other) continent(s). My friends either resent me
or (also) live far away. The movies I watch
are filled with white people. My skin gets darker by the day.
I don't want to be another diaspora poet boy- my
hair coils thick and violent as it is and I can't
manage it with my afro pick (end of handle with no black power fist attached). I'm the only
one from my country here as an undergrad and I didn't apply from home. No one
at home even greets me in my mother tongue anymore (can't speak it anyway).
My mother says I don't try hard enough to keep in contact. Within the space
of three years my father has changed jobs from Ghana to India to Saudi Arabia.
This poet girl I once fell in love with goes to school in a desert with skyscrapers
(it's close to Saudi Arabia). My sister is in Vermont and she's sad. What
is this? It doesn't snow back home. I love it, I love it.
The crisp crunch of my boots in the white. It beats the thorns
and the sand and the stones and the dust in the sun, which is yellow
and orange then red and purple,
but will appear winter white in the clouds once
the plane finally lands. In the fucking airport.


As a Movie.

My jet-lagged self sleeps early,
wakes early, sleeps again, reads.
Having watched one movie too many over summer
I relish the sounds designed above- a click
of a door handle, bare warm socks gliding
across wooden floor, the scrunch of toothbrush
against the rusting metal straightening yellowing teeth,
the few lone cars across the street, that hazy
early sound that only light can make as it
becomes aware of itself in my dorm room. What
kind of camera lens would make this moment more
livable and is it already dead?


March.

Today, we marched, or rather, I watched him,
my friend, next to me dream. Of what futures, I'm not
quite aware. Some orange man has overtook
the american government everyone in their right mind
and heart
cried,
and a square in Boston was filled with lively
dreamers
with placards and gleaming eyes and faces
that said no (./!) not again (./!). A few toddlers
sauntered around the feet of their parents
saying and shouting and muttering and playing
with words and slogans they don't understand
yet in their minds,
maybe their hearts,
in them they know. Next to me my friend grabbed
an abandoned placard and I felt lost. I only
came to watch how the words of the orange man
came alight. I was afraid we would catch flame.
A grey-haired woman had earlier skipped across
the crowd in front of us to show us a different route and
told us useful things- we were fresh I had explained-
and we carefully avoided police but there weren't many.
It was cold. Not the orange man. Somehow we
met my friend's friends and we started a chant
in the crowd below us, perched atop a crumbling
history of a church. Pictures were taken. Instagram.
We dabbed to the beat of Hindu chanting and tambourines.
Muslims prayed towards Mecca beneath Christian statues.
Amazed. I felt a certain emptiness.
Then my friend joked,
'I'll make a social justice warrior out of you too!'
Why am I not angry? The orange man is wrong.
A fool, a jester. Yet our testicles are in his hands.
Sometimes, rarely, I feel a meager sad frightening pressure
between my legs. Some have already been castrated
in confused airports. Accidents of birth have left them
stranded in a great barren womb of this world. What
is a state? A foreign policy? Man? Woman? Child?
How much time do I have left to cum? On whose
face can I do it on? Is the orange man aiming for
mine? Ours? The veiled woman? Is the immigration
counter camera pornographic? What awkward things
to do with one's time. One's body. One's mind.
One's heart.
I am ashamed.
Instead of working, I am thinking. I am lazy.
I spend scholarship money in restaurants
away from the college dining hall so that the noise
around me will be something I cannot recognize.
Still both are the same bubbles of safety. Different
stages of cocooning is all. I am a caterpillar surrounded
by butterflies eating steak and salmon. I am ugly. So ugly.
Nothing beautiful at all.

Ratios.

I wrote this for someone in New England who is beautiful but does not know that she is beautiful. I'm posting it now because everywhere they are people who are beautiful but do not know that they are beautiful.

Ratios. 

Perfect: I used that word once to talk about you
as if you were a doll with limbs made of plastic:
stiff and whimsical and subject to the niggardly
commands of the conscious- yet you, who thinks
as aggressively as any doll-house builder do not
construct your own set-pieces; instead you 
pirouette into one carefully constructed day to the 
next as you delicately 
stride
from bed to shower to wardrobe to mirror to desktop to
window to mirror to mirror to 
mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them 
all-
and the staid look on your face when the mirror gives no
answer 
because it can’t. Checkered skirt, sharp eyelashes, wary
jumper, almost heels. Perfect, you might think
for a moment before your eyes roll gently from self
to mirror
to self 
to mirror
to mirror
the self. What was
it that you were looking for if all it does is lead
you back to your skin? Meanwhile, the snow
stutters softly from above as if God had dandruff-
perfect- and it all gently glazes the spongy surface of the world like
flawless coconut icing on some sorry party cake- perfect- and the morning
bell rings impossibly on time like the last
breath you thought was your last- perfect- and somewhere in
America I use words to remind you of the little 
unreachables 
of perfection that both start and end with your perfectly
snow-pale skin, where somewhere in 
America and somewhere on
your thighs perfect ridges of red have formed themselves like
plastic scratches on a Barbie which we both think
are little but we both know
are big
because you are not plastic.

                                               At nighttime our feet 
skip on the icy brick pathways that lead from
the dorm-rooms to the library and we shiver
as the snowflakes bob in and out of our bodies 
like thoughts 
that seem funny but aren’t quite- they melt away
as soon as they stumble upon our skin. From our mouths
cloudy puffs of being flutter out- little butterflies affirming
out listless snowflake-filled minds, sperming out ice-clouds
from our mouths, our mouths, our mouths; birthing friendship.
Breath, visible, is laughter. I trip and swear and momentarily
skate
across a sudden ice-surface as you speak another ice-breath. We
arrive
at the library but dart towards the empty right-side, the science
classrooms. We hope
to examine the thought-skirmishes on your right thigh, to turn  
and change this hopeless world-spinning into centrifuge 
separation-
make apparent the light from the dark
                        the firmament from the void
                        the flesh from the plastic, the-
here we are as you talk 
about your family and I 
try my best to look you
in the eye so I 
can become
your eyes
even when
normally
I 
am 
so
vehemently 
against

staring 

at the soul-gates of another being- 
here we are as you talk;
God is still missing from the centrifuge 
of the endlessly turning world- your
axis
is your skin yet 
you trust it
not. The salads without dressing,
        the weighing scales,
        the taste of bile at the back of your
throat-
all for skin that 
       you
do
not 
      trust. 
All for flesh that you think is plastic
so
     you 
     cut. 
       
             Enough
talk because the bell cuts through the flesh
of our conversation. Enough 
talk because the world insists on
turning still 
and forcing us to revolve
with it. Enough
breathing, enough
snow, enough
life. I remember you saying 
that the ratios of your face are wrong;
that certain equilibriums do not exist between
your cheeks your lips your eyes your life…I remember the science
classrooms where parts of you were as mathematical as the architecture... I remember how
you keep thinking your flesh is plastic… You forget how 
inglorious the nature of these words is. The problem
with human thought, with the ratios of your face, with the
geometric structures that cut across your thighs, with the
statistical neatness with which your family decomposes;
the problem with our conception of perfect is how 
awkwardly it both exists and does not exist for us to
see. 
The ratios of your face which you think are broken are
the same miracles I wonder about as you laugh. The incorrect distance
from your cheek to your eye which you think is wrong is the same
lightyear which separates the stars from the planets. The curvature
of your stomach is the bending of a spacetime to accommodate 
the way the air must move to let your body occupy the space and time in which it
exists. 
The ratios you speak of spring from your own limitlessness, your own
perfect imperfections , imperfect perfections-
strange oddities and unfathomable beauties and yes. Yes, 
even the ridges across your right thigh are minute, red, 
gasping
grand-canyons of 
flesh,
of human, of breathing clay
flesh-
           never 
plastic;
            always 
worthy. 
             
              Recently the voices in my head have been getting louder,
telling me all sorts of things about how the snow ought to bury me
in its mercilessness. They mention also that my words bear no meaning,
my thoughts even less so. Assumedly, the ridges across your thigh
carry such spectres as well but, I messaged you before you went to bed
about coming out and having an adventure because tick-tock-tick-tock…tick…tock…tick-
the last bell of the day is going to ring soon and the voices and ridges
will assert themselves again with the bedtime silence, but check your Facebook
messages and come outside and let’s go skipping with your friends across
the century-old polished prep-school brick pathways that smell archaic because it’s

snowing outside and it’s lovely. 

Photo credit: cdn.paper4pc.com

Update, 4/23/2018, the poem found a home here: https://postscriptpublication.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/ratios/ thanks to a friend.