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INTRODUCTION

hi, and welcome to the official website for CONTACT LIGHT: the void inside and out. in here you’ll find resources on where to buy the book and the music i listened to while writing it -- but more excitingly, you’ll find the notes and bibliography that was included in the first self-published version of the book but not included in the final one. the poems in CONTACT LIGHT are based off concepts in cognitive science and astronomy, so i spent my days researching alongside the actual writing. naturally, i got so much inspiration for my pieces from that process -- and because this book was originally a school project, of course i had to document it all! i’m glad to share these to the internet, and to you. i hope you can recognize that science and literature (or even humanities in general) are not polar opposites, but instead are always influenced by each other. humans discover and create -- that’s what we do. i’m really no exception to that rule.

with warmth, madina

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where to buy

gramedia (physical copy; out of stock) / (digital copy)

amazon (physical copy)

google play (digital copy)

& if you liked it, please consider leaving a review on goodreads. it means the world to me!

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NOTES

the self-published version of CONTACT LIGHT had a paper color that neared cosmic latte, the average color of the universe, obtained by sampling the colors of more than two hundred thousand galaxies. its hexadecimal RGB value is #FFF8E7.

something rumbling is an ode to the human voice and its power. it was first written as a daily autowrite in winter tangerine’s 2016 summer writing workshop, and is a partial homage to the character “red” from the video game transistor.

trepidation is based on the fact that we never really remember everything that happens to us, and as time goes on, we remember even less. it is also partially based on the concept of memory encoding.

the last two lines of exposed wire comes from harvard’s fundamentals of neuroscience online course; more specifically from the video neuroscience of art – “all they can do is fire and not fire.”

THERE IS ONLY DATA ruminates about the inevitability of us wanting to be stronger than we are now; us wanting to be immortal – but in doing so, are we leaving behind our humanity?

ROUTINE CHECK-UP is an experimental poem based on medical examinations.

told in the perspective of robots and other manmade consciousness, artificial compares our search for meaning with their inability to do so.

fragility tells about the nature of human relationships, and whether we are inherently good or evil.

stars, their grandeur is written after a viewing of the movie the martian, and narrates the journey of hopelessness being trampled by our innate instinct for survival.

clench explores the idea of spacetime as both a physical and untouchable thing for us.

the figures in the girls in satellite town are all based on the properties of strange exoplanets. glass rains sideways in planet hd 189733b, wasp 12-b is slowly being consumed by its sun, and hd 188753 ab has three suns.

LET THIS SINK IN is a reminder that nothing, even the most ancient, can be immortal.

deorbit burn is conceptualized on the process of the same name that happens upon earth re-entry. it is the act of firing against the direction of motion to cut the spacecraft’s orbital speed, so that it can enter the earth’s atmosphere through a lower orbit.

ARA is the name of a constellation depicting an altar in greek astronomy. it is the exact altar that the gods in greek mythology used to swear allegiance to defeat the titans.

time, exhausted stems from a few concepts for the end of the universe: heat death, where low entropy is reached, or the big crunch, where the universe will contract and restart the whole process again.

asteres planetai is told on the point of view of the planets in the solar system regarding the battle between the geo- and heliocentric view of the universe.

light roaring is a piece exploring how light pollution has affected humanity’s naked eyes to see the sky as it is at nighttime. the mention of a galaxy as a “behemoth” is inspired by an event that happened in 1994 los angeles, where, after a blackout, residents of the city called the griffith observatory to ask about the “strange sky they saw”. the sight of the naked sky, without our artificial light, had become unrecognizable.

great rift tells about the limit of human thoughts and our incomprehensibility to understand most of the things in this universe. the gyri and sulci mentioned in the poem is the “folding” of the brain tissue, which gives the brain its wrinkly shape – the sulci are the “valleys”, and the gyri the “mountains”. this increased surface area is what gives us more brainpower, even when considering our small skulls.

throughways chronicles a story of a boy who is trapped in a limbo of liminal spaces and the wormholes that makes it happen. liminal spaces are defined as a place or time that is the position or a boundary of a threshold. when presented without their usual context, they cause the brain to panic, because the subject is represented by the people or objects in it instead of a standalone concept. through repetition, he learns to deal with the strangeness of this all, but there is still something in his brain saying: this is not it.

why we looked up is a grand finale to answer the question: what is it that makes our curiosity about space so intrinsic throughout generations?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

this is the hyperlink version, to see the proper MLA version click here.

research

last words / vsauce (video)

how far can we go? the limits of humanity / kurzgesagt (video)

three ways to destroy the universe / kurzgesagt (video)

the fundamentals of neuroscience (online course)

bortle scale (infographic)

the universe is structured like a language / sean carroll (blog post)

science, mind, and limits of understanding / noam chomsky (transcript)

how to see the future / warren ellis (transcript)

a desert plea: let there be darkness / rong-gong lin II (article)

memory encoding

are we different people in different languages? / ana menéndez (article)

the average color of the universe

the main elements that compose the human body shown from most abundant to least abundant

deorbit burn [or, phil plait’s tweet]

ara / star tales

inspiration

the politics of light & dark

cyber gothic

hd 189733b, wasp 12-b, hd 188753 ab

liminal spaces

the smell of space

beautiful obscure vocabulary

there is nothing wrong in wishing to the stars

temporal buoyancy / uel aramchek

zodiacal light, zodiacal band, gegenschein and red airglow / doug zubenel