Calabi Yau Space

When I was in high school my friends and I had a Minecraft server. I don’t remember the name of the mods that we used but one of them allowed me to create a nuclear power plant. Unfortunately, I never got around to it. Around that same time, I was taking a physics class that I was failing miserably. At some point, we started doing equations centered around the theme of nuclear physics. Once I learned the basics of constructing the equations, I’d make my own and do them for fun. It made me feel like a scientist.

Listening to Dopplereffekt makes me feel like a scientist or a mathematician, regardless of how little work I’ve done to understand anything more than basic algebra and however far I stray from that Platonic ideal of the white clad laboratory worker. I’ll look up the names of their songs, things like Calabi Yau Manifold or Hyperelliptic Surfaces or Non-Vanishing Harmonic Spinor and I’ll skim through their Wikipedia articles, where I’m greeted by labyrinths of symbols and equations I know nothing about. I don’t know what I’m looking at, but through a combination of musique concrète and ambient synths it’s almost as if I can hear it.

There’s a scene in the anime Welcome to the NHK where the protagonist, Tatsuhiro Sato, asks in the midst of a mental breakdown, “I always thought that when I’d grow up I’d become something like an astronomer or a scholar, someone that would contribute something to humanity. How, after everything, did I end up like this?” When I listen to the synth pads of Hyperelliptic Surfaces, which grate like the engine of some interstellar starship, I ask myself the same thing. I’ve listened to this album in my best and worst moments, as if it’s the background music to another life I could’ve had, in a research laboratory or with a grant in a famous university. I ask myself, how in the fuck did I end up like this?

333 words.