Not of any thing, holes and shadows are immaterial, but they do have a shape, a place and a duration. When I tell Paul that I am trying to describe different kinds of nothing, he responds, Ah, you meanthe one big nothing and all the little nothings circling around it.  His succinctness is always refreshing!

I finally rediscovered FNAC yesterday. I remember it as something really new when I was here in 1985 or so with Mario. Nancy pointed it out to me in our skype conversation the other day when I said that I was looking for certain books and was unable to find them. Wow! How could I not have noticed a place that big and that important? Paul and I must have walked right by it several times. I realize that it is something about the way interior space is organized differently here. There are a lot more doors and they are solid. One must first recognize what they look like and secondly, know that there is something interesting behind them. I notice when advertising places for sale,  it is walls, or murs that are for sale. Architecture here is still a foreign language for me, not unlike reading the newspaper, Le Monde. I mostly know what all the words mean, but sometimes I can’t figure out what the article is saying! FNAC is the – everything you could want in the world of cultural communications: three floors of it inside the Les Halles shopping centre right downtown.

Writing is a bit like dark energy; it repells me, throwing me to the side, like the locks in the doors of this building. After one turn in the hole, the key is automatically ejected and if your hand is not firmly gripping, it will be propelled into mid-air at an uncatchable speed. I hear crash-landing keys echo up and down the hallway several times a day. I want to jump up, run off, do something else. I get up and  walk away, I stretch and then the gravity of words pull me back into their orbit. 

Astronomers seem to agree that the universe is made up of: 5% matter, 25% dark matter and 70% dark energy. They also agree that although we are unable to see what dark matter and dark energy are, we can see them acting in the universe. Words such as knots, clumping, web and scaffolding are used to describe the architecture of matter and dark matter in the universe. Some go as far to suggest that the underlying structure of space is a scaffolding of dark matter and the galaxies, knots of light caught in this cosmic web of unseen (dark) matter. We call it dark because it has no light and we call it matter because we cannot imagine a nothing holding something.

I think of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical question, Why is there something rather than nothing?  My thought is, It is amazing that there is something rather than nothing and that they seem to be all mixed up together.

What if it’s the other way around and the holes and the shadows are giving shape to the light and matter?

What if dark matter is our own shadow?  Hmmm. I need to go back to my Intro to philosophy book, but I am stuck in the Logic and its Place chapter. It is the big part in the middle. Maybe I’ll skip over it.