Detroit Research Volume 1

180
Livonia, Livonia ...
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispes. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. 1
A void, simply put, is a defined space
where there is a defined no-thing. Voids can have
a history, and be a cavity, a place where something
had previously occupied it, but voids are
always a place yet to be occupied. A burp in my
mouth. In astronomy voids can be identified, and
possess a rigidity in scale and structure. We can
then consider voids in terms of possessing material,
and we find they are comprised of either
time or space, both, or a lack of these "materials."
Furthermore, these two materials are the chief
entropic vehicles of the universe, and we must
understand entropy's one, self-perpetual objective
is to render all it can into one sprawling, yet
super-dense void, one which Robert Smithson
dubbed "an all-encompassing sameness." 2 As
ambivalently unyielding of a force the universe
has, we as human beings fart away, and calculate
new strategies in an attempt to conquer entropy,
to perhaps exist outside of its agenda.
The entropic process, may be viewed as
an infinitely patient, ever-present swalloing, and
is thus described by its founder Rudolf Clausius
in his book On the Mechanical Theory of Heat: "the
entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." 3
Whilst it's certainly possible for the degeneration
(or we can use the more poetic Smithson term,
energy drain) to occur in sudden, intense explosions
of energy, like wildfires or hurricanes, the
universe tends to prefer a more methodical approach,
one of aphid-like penetration. A network
of voids over time is carved around, which can
then ultimately collapse into one deep pothole,
and yet still we so naively deny our free-fall. No
one has been able to reverse the trajectory towards
this entropic future, but through his strategies,
man has, perhaps by accident, succeeded
in suspending himself in arrhythmia with his future.
In The Illusion of the End, Jean Baudrillard observes
that "We are, then, unable to dream of a
past or future state of things [...] neither finished,
nor infinite, nor definite, but de-finitive that is,
deprived of its end." 4 Can the present be used to
hide the shadow of the past, like breakfast while
hungover