Chemistry

I fall in love easily. I don’t fall out of love easily. In fact I can’t count a single person with whom I’ve fallen out of love.

It’s a nebulous claim. What of the girl from first grade who I was going to marry? What of E who my heart finally left off on? Not a falling out of love, but a loosening of it.

What of all the women I don’t want to see. Isn’t that the antithesis of love?

But love is not seeing. Love is having seen. I cannot unsee a person’s soul. I cannot stop caring.

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Muse magazine, February 2008, there was an article on Oxygen and its relationship to love. I cannot quote directly as I intentionally left that issue on a plane to Philadelphia as a sacrifice to the plane gods for our safe passage, but I still remember it.

Oxygen is the only fuel, reactive enough to allow us to be the size we are, and move at the speed we do. Non oxygen breathing life exists, in fact we’ve got a whole host of them, from the methane producers in our bowls, to the Anaerobes in our guts. Some plants survive without it, but you can’t get big without oxygen, you can’t get complex.

But Oxygen comes with a price. It’s extremely reactive. From slow burning rust, to fire, to explosions, oxygen reacts. The body uses those reactions to move, sucking in oxygen to live - but it also means we eventually die, burned up by the very thing that sustained us.

Every cell in your body is burning right now. The body degrades as DNA is injured, unable to remember just what it was originally supposed to be making. Movement means oxygen, oxygen means aging. This great power of size and strength it comes with a price.

But life has a workaround. What if you split DNA into two sets. One that stayed away from oxygen entirely. It would hold the whole genetic code. Another set would be smaller and use oxygen to move. It began looking like an X but over evolutionary time has been burned away to look like a Y. One complete code and one partial can be pieced together. New life untouched by oxygen can emerge to begin again.

If it emerges of the first set it will have enough eggs set away for its entire life, created without oxygen and always set apart from it. DNA preserved from our earliest ancestors. If it is of the second set it will have to make its copies. Copies that will swim oxygen powered until it meets an egg, then jettisons its tail so that the offending explosion won’t harm the new life.

So it is that men and women, the necessity of procreation, comes from oxygen. Romance emerges from fire. Love comes from reaction. We are bound to our chemistry, shaped by it.

You could almost say, chemistry is love.

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Of the three subjects I’m learning right now Chemistry is the hardest. It doesn’t emerge from first principles, an axiomatic discipline that arises from logic and logic alone. It’s not even at a scale you can see, testing the nature of oscillation with a wheel, feeling the nature of velocity, and acceleration as you run and skid to a halt. Chemistry is experimental. Every law a human construct dropped ontop it. Every model rife with exceptions, imperfect in its ability to capture the reality of the very very small.

Those who succeed in chemistry anthropomorphise. There’s no other way. Atoms are happy or unhappy mattering on the number of electrons. Elements are reactive or unreactive mattering on their nature.

Yet I have never seen a better parallel than activation energy.

Each element wants to get to its lowest possible energy state. It does this by what friends it has around it. If it’s part of a molecule, it can share electrons, sink into whatever energy state that molecule usually possesses.

As molecules float about they encounter other molecules. Sometimes there’s an element that if bonded with would lead to an even lower state. The atoms never bother reacting with anything that’s less comfortable, molecules just float by each other, but if they could get lower they’ll try.

Unfortunately there’s an energy cost to bonding and unbonding. A little hump they have to get over, an uncomfortable spot they have to get through. Their elemental cohorts are holding on tight. It would require them to change their habits. They would become something new, put themselves out there, maybe say hello first, and that’s scary.

So something has to happen to elicit the change. Sometimes there’s an enzyme involved, a catalyst that lowers the energy to get over. Maybe a shared friend or an obvious interest both elements like. Maybe there’s alcohol.

Alternately you can add heat, effectively increasing the energy of everybody until there’s no more barrier to cross. Everybody is comfortable everywhere, free to mingle, free to talk. The environment holds the energy cost. A party, or a church, or a dance.

Sometimes you don’t need any of that. Put two elements in the same space and they will react. The energy state is so much lower with each other than anything around that they manufacture the energy from within and meet in the middle. The energy created comes off as heat or light, sometimes explosive amounts of both.

Have you met those people?

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The place I encounter activation energy most often is on the bus. A few weeks ago I was headed towards the college I forget why now. It’ late. I think I have something I’m supposed to be reading but I’m not. Instead I watch the other people.

Then the most beautiful woman gets on and sits below me, facing the center of the bus so I can see the side of her face as she sits. She’s not pretty, not in the way you get with makeup and photoshop. She’s beautiful in the way that some people glow a little from the inside.

I imagine getting out of my seat, going down and talking to her. Introducing myself and asking who she is and why she glows. I urge myself to do it and I can’t. There’s no excuse, no pretense. Conversation by itself just doesn’t happen very often.

She gets off the bus.

A man across from me asks another passenger if she has a lighter. She says no, and they exchange a few words. He sits for maybe a minute before asking if I have one. As it so happens I do, but I lie and say I don’t. I feel morally responsible for people killing themselves with my lighter. Nonetheless we’ve made contact and so we continue to talk. He’s an evergreen graduate, but still has to walk through the college every evening to get to his house. He tells me how strange it is walking through it all and not being part of it anymore. All the people he knew have left.

The bus pulls in at the college and we part ways. As I walk away I wonder why it was so easy to talk to him, but not the beautiful woman. We had a catalyst, the lighter. We also had a lower energy threshold to cross, he was sitting across from me so neither had to move.

What an interesting conversation we would have had if I’d told him truth.

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I’m on the bus home. I’ve been on for four hours and this is the last ten minutes. I’m feeling excited. A woman gets on, maybe early thirties, and walks past me. “Wow” I think. Beauty and its inevitable gateway in.

She’s sitting behind me and I keep trying to glance at her and she keeps seeing me and smiling at me. It’s awful. I try to focus on my book but I’m aware of her. She’s looking at me. She’s at the angle for it. She’s knitting something.

As I so often do I classify the two possibilities. If this is reality I get off at my stop. If this is a fairytale we both get off at the same stop. We both get off at the same stop. I don’t know what to do.

I pause looking at a hawthorn until she catches up with me then turn and ask “what are you knitting?” It’s a cozy. We talk about knitting for a block until we head different directions.

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I’m at the Evergreen dance Co-op, that laboratory of chemistry - molecules dancing, splitting and finding equilibrium. There’s a group who’s been coming lately who bring heat. Where dance Co-op is traditionally an individual affair, each person dancing their own dance, these people dance with everyone. It makes me feel lonely sometimes. People dancing with each other and I, too shy, watching from the center of it all, unable to engage.

Last week as I was about to go, their leader approached me. He speaks with exaggerated emphasis on odd syllables. I mildly dislike him. He tells me that he “APPREciates my DEEP dance, and the PResenCE I bring to the ~space~”

I have a hard time talking after dance, preferring movement to words, but I tell him what I’ve imagined saying before, that I like seeing more people dancing with each other. He asks about my dance and I tell him about Soul motion. He knows of it. I mention a mutual friend. She was his teacher. I lived with her for a few months. He’s amazed. She changed his life.

This week I find myself in the center dancing my deep dance, when he comes up to me and touches me. Just arm against arm. I move into Butoh and follow the movement. It’s oddly intimate. I’m used to doing this with C just the two of us alone.

Tensions inevitably lead apart and I move into my dance again. Sometimes fast, other times slow. Near the end I approach him, and we dance till closing.

At the end we sit in a circle, drum on the floor for our DJ, and go around and say names. One person asks what people were dancing, and people shout out things like “Self love” and “Compassion” I stay quiet. No one needs to know I was dancing alpha sex god.

A woman, says she really needs touch, and if we could close with a Cinnamon roll hug. I’ve never heard of this before, and as we all get up and hold hands, and she lets go of one side and spins until we’re all wrapped around her, in one big loving, humming, molecule, I decide it’s my new favorite thing.

It’s then, near the center, holding and being held, that I realize. Love is not feeling. Love is having felt. Surrounded by chemistry, surrounded by love, it’s a feeling that never goes away.

Reviews

[Effector Prime]

You purport intelligence by dropping a common constant between prolific subjects. by shedding new light on old things. by making radical connections that seem so natural and are in fact normal. of what you could think, you have hidden nothing.