On Magnetizing

An essay on the force shaped like the aligning. Magnetism, with its poles and its fields, becomes here an image for the way lives orient one another — the pull that not only draws together but arranges, sets a direction, brings scattered filaments into a common line. It is the sibling of On Gravitating; where gravity is the shape of reaching, magnetism is the shape of aligning, and the two essays together read two physical forces as figures for two ways coherence propagates. As always the physics is borrowed for its form, with the seam between analogy and claim kept in plain view.

Read it with On Gravitating, its sibling: where gravity is the shape of reaching, magnetism is the shape of aligning — the force that not only draws together but arranges, giving scattered filaments a common direction. The pairing is one of the clearest demonstrations of the series' method of borrowing a physical form to figure a human motion.

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