One time my father said of my writing that it was very “tightly woven.” We both had a similar way of compacting ideas into a single sentence. He was more artful in his writing. I don’t know what higher praise there is, if writing is not artful, what ought it be? Here I ask how to weave the various ideas in the word Density together. I believe that woven things are a higher art than dense things, and the weave, as a craft, is the Metaphor for metaphor because there are links, nexus points, and emptiness. Density in its physical sense, at most in the sense of gas, means unlinked matter and empty space.

Density also carries the sense of “cloudy” in the Latin “densus.” The sense of dense as meaning stupid is the most recent (non-scientific) development (from etymonline.com entry on dense). I associate cloudy with my own work in the term vagueness, which many will call stupid. My writing, if you haven’t already noticed, is here merely a list of terms that are sort of next to each other the way particles are placed after one another in space. My aim is to weave these ideas together, to claim, for example, that air is not merely particles and space. The particles are linked by something. Actually, the links between particles are found in our definition of the space where the particles are. We claim to know what space is, but I would insist that we do not. This is one point where I am educated enough to feel confident. The rest is drawn from other sources. I am not merely talking about points that are not found on the continuum. I am talking about a nearly complete misunderstanding of space. Space is an unknown. It is the place where things are known. Space is synonymous with the mind; when the mind has arrived at itself. Pure mind holds nothing known. If we could completely fill space with known points, we would still not know space… we would have completely missed the point of space. Isaac Newton knew that the mind was not going to be explainable. The rest he tried to explain with gravity, and in the end he failed to explain gravity. What mechanism causes gravity? No-one knows. We only know that matter has gravity, not how or why. And density determines things like whether a cloud of gas will become a solid planet, or a star, or a black hole, or will diverge into rarer and rarer space.

Space is not a page or a canvas. It is not white or grey or black. A pure mind can be enlightened, but there is no telling if it knows its own enlightenment, just as a lighted space will not reveal its own light.