…is the aforementioned substance at the heart of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, a title based on the game of yarn and hands to form nests of intersecting lines–the two ends of the yarn being joined–between palms with fingers the principal rhythm shuttling back and forth a form like a conclave of the sisters of fate, and we should never have counted past ten as past them we had to leave their circle–not that they actually formed a circle or more the three sisters in attendance to another woman giving birth and never stopping–as ten times ten is a pefectshape or at least enough if you are weaving a human life–and how carefully between our hands we should hold each–as though it were something we were making–and perhaps it is–but it is much more that just each other as birth is one field of breath–so many hands–like the patterns of string combinations and flows being called “waves,” as in this image of “‘cat’s cradle’ patterns based on Waves…” (below). This is the game Felix Hoenikker, a fictional Nobel laureate physicist and co-inventor of the atom bomb–based on Irving Langmuir, whom Vonnegut knew–was playing when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Ice-Nine, invented by Felix Hoenikker, introduces a molecular twist to water that instantaneously changes it to ice of this self-replicating structural homogeneity that roars across the oceans freezing the world–or that’s my memory and sort of concept–the touch of a wand at the end of the world, and it’s last one totally calm making the om form out of nothing to harm. The novel doesn’t end this way–or maybe it does, who knows?–yet reading it circa twelve living in ancient DC without any rhythm, and still in need, to ease my hangups–I remember the feeling, tied as it might have been to the bomb, he was writing at the end of the world. I think writing at the end of any world is good, also, if you look past it to another inside it, like in Vonnegut’s Bokononism, a sort of bogus mind control, but for real we have an infinite number of worlds to end together–yet always the feeling this is the one–and then we begin again.
But What Is “Ice-Nine?”
It’s as plausible a catalytic spike–or as apt as fire–as we may imagine though nothing to our own, the contracting horizon of which is around us and ahead, slowly narrowing promontories of sufficient biological diversity to sustain life
and then poof or dismal scramble up the other side. Or we’ll pull the rabbit out of our bottom parts, as a part of me speaks out of when I say I look at the waves of maps and think maybe it won’t be so bad, unless the world flips upside down, which Athropopene scenarios are and this is, it’s just like a slow-motion photograph of a temporal imbalance vomiting into the sky shock waves of various amplitudes–feeling around the edges of a life like a coastline for a pulse of Ice-Nine to flip the world on, like 9-11.
The question with which I am left is what disorder in the human equilibrium, parallel to the global-warming one, compelled the hypnotic form and brainwash that propelled a bunch of men to be so naive to believe anything you believe slamming into a building will mean anything you believe. Or maybe I am naive. I am a squiggle.