Amy Catanzano

from a play within a play within a dream in MEPO: A Conceptual Memoir from Loveland

I first saw you on the Moon near the flag, but you didn’t see me. Our paths crossed again on a transport mission to Mars. You were inspecting a fuel cell near the warp drive. I was dressed in roses. You love Gertrude Stein, so you noticed me. 

You were wearing a jet pack strewn with stars. I was fixing the Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrai Optical Telescope Assembly. You were preparing to steer one of the spacecraft systems. I was too shy to Hubble over to you. 

I very much enjoyed our conversation at the Justice League/Justice Society Crossover Dance. It’s too bad that we were interrupted by the crisis on infinite earths. You have my contact information. Hopefully there will be no continuity problems.

I can’t stop thinking about our conversation at the Theoretical Biochemistry Institute when I was preparing my presentation on how a radio wave aimed at a Pyrex test tube containing solutions of 0.1 to 30 percent salt, held upright by a Teflon stand, and individually introduced into the radio frequency cavity produces an unexpected spark. Needless to say, I was delighted to hear that you, too, will be attending the annual Thermoluminescence conference later this year. I’ll be staying at the conference hotel under the name, “Electrolytic Epitaxy.” 

It is unfortunate that you weren’t able to attend the Thermoluminescence conference after all. I’m sad about the continuity problems, but I guess that’s the way it goes. I’m at the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, anyway, so no matter. Catch ya at the Kroger—

Naturally I considered Slavoj Žižek’s comments about the reality of the virtual when I received your abecedarian poem from the heliopause. According to my calculations, you are currently 12 billion miles from the sun and have traveled 117 to 177 times the distance from the sun to the Earth. You are in the space between stars. We are suspended in language. 

Even before I became authorless you suggested that questions are a form of measurement. Matter is comprised of subatomic particles, and we cannot know the present position of any particle without ambiguity. Thus, the most accurate answer to the question, “Where are you”? is “Now.”

I completely adore what you did to the field data! Leapt we edit. Worlds are cited. Love is a feeling that allows the 1s and 0s to usurp their respective positions until there is no position. Or, as Mina Loy says, “Dilation has entirely eliminated/your long reality.”

Just because you traveled a specific distance in space does not mean you traveled the same distance in time. Time dilation in relativity is measured by observers, but we know from quantum mechanics that observers are part of the measurement. In other words, MEASURE THIS!

As a surrealist I never really saw you on the Moon. As an anarchist I was not dressed exclusively in roses. As a pacifist and critical thinker, I love Gertrude Stein. We bought Gatorade at the Kroger. 

Long-spacetime-distance relationships can be difficult. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge says, “You give him the light mesh of your longing, which makes distance blue.” She is evoking what’s known as redshift, the way that time in space is measured using the light spectrum. Or, as Gertrude Stein explains to children, “When mountains are really true they are blue.”

---

Amy Catanzano loves HEART.