Obscenity (The Holographic Principle)                                                                                                                                                          Jessamyn Smyth​

I had not studied physics when I took photographs of myself, pictures aggressive and pleading, to give to you. You traced images obsessively then, your hands traced differences on my flesh, always flaws; the flaw magnets, I began to call your hands. You lived in two dimensions, and I

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needed a bridge, so I made images of my body, my inhabited skin, I said, in captions of poetry, to give to you. I had never been loathsome before. I could map neither your sight nor your touch; radiation I could feel, but not predict, came in waves.

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I was trying to make holograms, though I didn’t know it: a tiny fragment of surface containing all information needed to reconstruct the whole. I wanted this, to give to your loathing; a map at the edge of your two dimensions—what poets call the liminal place,

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what physicists call the coded boundary—from which I could spring whole into your dimension; I thought perhaps you could see all the hidden faces of this object, my body, by the sheer effort of my will behind the pictures. So I split the light of my intention, my body, in two, and bounced it off your lens. I let the beams collide, I created an interference pattern on the page: a coded fragment carrying three dimensional reality on two dimensional surface. I tried to make a hologram,

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though I didn’t know what I was doing; I had never been loathsome before, or studied physics. The reason, I learned, that holograms matter, is this: if the holographic principle of stored, coded information about a whole is incorporated into quantum gravity

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we may be able to keep track of what goes on inside black holes. We could know how much radiation they are emitting, and predict the future of the universe. I wanted to measure the radiation, to give you information; I hoped I could alter

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the course of our future by making you see me whole. But I hadn’t studied physics, I made no holograms: I made two dimensions more, another obscenity. See me beautiful, see me inhabited, my body hoped on the page: I gave you only

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more pictures of flesh to trace. I learned that in two dimensions I am not loathsome; your radiation is reserved for the third. Physical principles in spacetime, my body and your vision collide. The smaller I get, the better you see me in two.

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I am emitting, and my shrinking body is a black hole into which your sight falls; but the smaller I get, the more space I take up. I study liminal places; my hologram contains all needed information decoded in my flesh.

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