Vibrations, Excitations

Graphed traditionally, frequency is either a solid line considered on the time axis, with the whole band being filled spatially across time, or a singular point upon the space axis, with the change in position now longer marking the point as anything in wider context. It’s only through this dual relation that the frequency comes into being, a motion of total filling between its outer boundaries (bandwidth) stretched out by taking place temporally, ie, via motion. It’s through this that a law of communications derives, that a bandwidth transmits the same amount of information no matter the frequency’s intensity.

These waves travel through solid matter, transmitting by proximity, radiating outwards to excite nearby atoms. The closer the proximity of atoms, the quicker they become excited to reproduce the waves traveling through them. This transformation is one of dissipation. The original intensity of the wave loses as it disperses outwards, transmitting through further and further atoms, a trajectory akin to Zeno’s paradox of the marathon or the arrow, until zero. At the terminus of entropy, all movement ceases, heat having been fully equalized to essentially nothingness.

Bataille writes of entropy in his writings of consumption, of construction. The solar descends and its travel to the abyss is prolonged as its captured, sublimated into creating the liminal region between infinity and nothingness. The real number line comes into being in an attempt to prolong life against death, to slow entropy through countless constructions and buildings, through ever more inventive, larger and grander methods of capture. It’s from this that Bataille derives the concept of the solar anus, the point of ultimate expenditure. The wealth captured is only reaching its potential in its reaching of death. All energy captured is destined for the same fate, a fate only reached upon expense. The cathedral becomes detritus as soon as its built, energy now sublimated into another skeletal trash-heap sinking into the abyss. it’s the pomp of the battlefield, the orgiastic triumph where this is most evident, the timescales sped up far beyond that of the supposedly conservative expense. The prolonging-death, the human consumption, of solar energy is drawn out far quicker in the orgy than the cathedral, though both would be graphed identically.

Such a graph is the origin of “vibes”, those of the Beach Boys, of slang. The atmosphere of a situation described not in experiential, but metaphysical sense. The air vibrates with the atmosphere, is energy is expended through the room. The orgy creates the headiest of all, immense energies compiled into the fogged mists wafting about oriental cushions and hedonistic decay, the attendees at Woodstock or Altamont or Haight-Ashbury through the summer of ’67 all remember the same thing - you could feel it in the air.

Solar energy collects at various points throughout the world before bursting open in this way. Beginning with the romanticism and neo-mysticism and ending with the repressive puritanism of the middle 20th century, solar energy built up like a straining dam until it broke free, exploding outwards into the vibes of the hippie era. By the same mechanism, wars occur, as do historical openings. Luther gave voice to the long building tension between secular and ecclesiastical authority in constructing the embryonic State. World War One was the orgiastic death-knell of the political order that had been stagnating since the Enlightenment first reified it.