Dark Matter

March 25 2014

We even see ourselves as remote,

far enough off

to seem almost exotic,

out here

in the vast neglected middle.

Take stoic pride

in the hardship of distance;

like weather snobs, in winter,

one-upping each other

with tales of snow.

When they are just as far

and no less alone.

And except for the weight of numbers

we'd ignore them, as well.

But even if you do live

in the centre of the universe

-- in New York City, say, near Central Park --

you find yourself wishing

you could fall out of touch.
You stand by the window

tilting your head, angling just so

until you see only trees,

something wild and green

that feels like home.

Because deep in our DNA

this landscape persists,

some pastoral, tropical
antediluvian world.

And anyway

your insignificance here
makes you undetectable as us,

as theoretical as dark matter

just passing through.

It could be a tiny island

a thousands miles by sea,

a blind spot

even satellites miss.

I could close my eyes

and hear its breaking surf, its ocean breeze,

a white sand beach

too far south

of everything.

Or open them

and all I see

is blowing snow
4 feet deep.

I live in the middle of the continent, the kind of place where you can't see your neighbours and the area codes have big numbers. (In the days of rotary dial phones (before push-buttons and no buttons), big numbers like 8 and 9 took longer to dial. So the population centres were favoured with 1s and 2s. Here it's 807, which lets you know right away that we're "remote"!)

So we are properly "in the middle of nowhere." On the other hand, wherever I am is the centre of the universe to me, and should be no less valid than anywhere else. After all, who's to say it's me who's remote, when you're just as far away? Some people in some places might rightly regard themselves as being at the centre of action, and have the weight of numbers to substantiate it; but their personal experience really isn't any different than mine. Not to mention that today, with the internet and instant communication from just about anywhere, there no longer appears to be any hierarchy of distance from the centre.

So in this poem, I'm playing around with the subjectivity and ultimate meaninglessness of this idea of "remoteness". Not only who's to say, but the idea that you can be at the centre, surrounded by people, and still be alone. And also the push/pull of here and there: we love the vitality, action, and human contact of big cities, the bigger the better; yet also long for those quiet remote places that are not only spiritually nourishing, but seem to fill some need deep within us.

Here, the trees provide the urbanite with a simulacrum of wilderness, just as the snow provides me with the illusion of a tropical beach: there is always somewhere more remote to escape, at least in imagination.

The first stanza may be getting at something uniquely Canadian: how we're weather snobs, and in the inverse calculus of suffering, like to brag about how cold it is, how much snow we've gotten. In the big cities to the south, they may complain about their mild winters; but here in the northern wilderness, we know what winter's really like!

Of course, there are truly remote places on earth. This has come up recently in the disappearance of MH370, the Malaysian airlines jet with over 200 people that's now been missing for 2 weeks, and looks more and more as if will never be found. In this day and age, who would have thought that a large modern commercial jetliner could just disappear? It seems to have done so in the southern Indian Ocean, and the difficulty of the search there has illuminated the vastness and remoteness of that, and similar, parts of the world. The planet is gargantuan, and only seems small because the ease of transportation and communication have distorted our sense of time and distance.