The Prime Mote In Gravity Construction

[image error]

Maybe its bullshit and maybe it isn’t, but as a metaphor it can shed a little light on strange situations. I first read about this prime mote concept in a Roger Zelazny book when I was a kid and I’ve been fascinated with it ever since. Setting the story aside, the gist is that at the heart of our solar system, you guessed it, smack dab in the middle of the sun, is the atom that started it all. One lonely hydrogen atom in an ocean of gas in the darkness of space that pulled in the atom next to it. Then they worked together to pull in a third. That’s the concept. It hardly matters if that’s how stellar nurseries operate. What matters is that it sounded reasonable at the time, and it stuck with me. So I grew up looking for prime motes.

Let’s apply that same concept to memories and you can see where it gets interesting. Two brothers. They came from the same parents. They grew up eating the same food, going to the same schools, playing in the same parks. As men, one is happy and one is not. In the construction of their personalities, somewhere in the Lego blocks of the psyche, is there a prime mote? For the system governing temperament? For the architecture of how the tools of adaptation array themselves? I wonder, for instance, if a single moment, an unlikely one, can become a new prime mote. I doubt it. It all comes back to the characteristics of the original group.

Take a kid, like my old neighbor Donnie. Nice parents, easy life, only child. His prime mote might have been this sort of blank, off yellow, slightly happy mote that quickly picked up lonely, then rapidly added fear and wonder as he came into contact with other little boys. I remember one day, good old Donnie’s mother had insisted he eat this cracker and as he was in the act of putting it in his mouth, a passing seagull shit on it. That astonishing event certainly helped shape him. It added to his emerging pantheon horror of the sudden variety, and probably gave him some insight into the vengeful nature of the cosmos and even the cruel whimsy of probability. I wouldn’t be surprised then if, in spite of his earnest parents best efforts, Donnie became an accountant for a small lawn and garden chain instead of the dentist they always wanted.

That was my revelation of the morning. Seven AM and I’m standing outside the St Honore cafe smoking a cigarette. Yesterday was the 15th. I met all my deadlines. I don’t have shit to do today, so the day started as my prime mote and its most intimate aggregates dictated. Drink some coffee! Stand around under the awning of a little French bakery and wonder about the nature of my own prime mote.