volume 5 | issue 1
marginalia
Stuck on... me
A column by douglas abel
Attachment. A word with two distinct but related meanings, each one imply-
ing or generating the other. There is attachment as an observable fact, as a ‘thing’, or state, or situation: we have the fact that something--an atom, an
object, an emotion, a human, an event—is joined or connected to something
else. A is joined to B. Then there is attachment as action, the describable pro-
cess by which things become joined together, the act of connecting itself. A
is joining itself to B, or C is connecting A to B, or A and B are mutually coming together. There is the act of attachment, and there is the resultant—or causa-
tive—fact of attachment. Because things have been attached (process), they
are attached (situation). And from those two phenomena, the act and the fact, come “life, the universe, and everything.”1
We (think we) know now that the basis of the cosmos and everything in
it is the joining of sub-sub (-sub?) -atomic particles (or particle-like enti-
ties) through the action of four fundamental forces: gravity, the weak force, electromagnetism, and the strong force. The action of these forces on those particle-like entities causes infinite sequences of attaching and detaching—
bonding, splitting, attraction and repulsion, exploding (banging), collapsing, etc. Smaller particles are attached to become neutrons, protons and electrons;
neutrons, protons and electrons attach to form atoms; atoms form molecules; molecules form substances, substrates, proteins, plateaus, planets . . . and
people. In other words, attaching and detaching result in the structure of . . . everything. The entire universe, at any one instant, could be described as a
set of attachments. As the set changes, the universe changes. Attaching and
detaching are the processes by which all things, from microbes to galaxies, grow and change, live and die. The sequence of attaching and detaching is the sequence of time itself.
Does time somehow ‘cause’ the change of attachments, or does the change of
attachments cause or define time? Perhaps time is just a useful temporary (!)
observation point from which to examine the universal attachment structure. Attachment is, in fact, a state and a process at the same time. So attachment may be another version of Einstein’s space-time—or vice versa!
Ideas of time and of change point to a crucial feature of attachment, as act or
as fact. The process can usually be reversed; detaching can follow attaching, or precede it. Attachment is not necessarily or inevitably permanent. Joinings might last ‘forever’, or for a very long time. But there is nothing in either the
process or the relation that says they have to endure. In the human world, the Christian wedding service enjoins, “What God has joined together let no man
1 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979. There is no obvious or necessary connection between the idea of attachment and the number 42.
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