Fear of Mimas 4

spacetime, that roughly spherical shape and,
essentially, that same moon.
There is evidence, derived from an
interpretation of the mathematics of quantum
theory, to suggest that Mimas did exist in this
enfolded form, even when it did not exist in
rock-ice form. A powerful analogy from
chemistry gave rise to this idea. A physicist,
David Bohm, watched on television a simple
experiment in which a drop of ink was
dispersed in a cylinder of glycerin and then
pulled back together into a single drop. This
suggested that a drop which had completely
dispersed but could be retrieved to its original
form contained, in its dispersed form, some
remaining disposition or potential to be a single
drop. In other words the drop, or the
disposition to the order of a drop, still existed
in an enfolded form in the glycerin and the
dispersed ink. Bohm eventually showed with
mathematics that this potential is present in
quantum, or subatomic, systems.
The same might be said for objects on a much
larger scale, say moons. Mimas has come and
gone a number of times, the way a drop of ink
can come and go a number of times, or a
quantum system comes and goes, enfolded as a
potential and then unfolded as an empirical
reality. What the literal fact of this potential, or
enfoldment, or unfoldment could be, no one
knows, because no one knows literally what
the mathematical equations of quantum
mechanics refer to. Reality is not necessarily a
solid, it might be a force or a shade, or the
underlying disposition of the universe to unfold
its potentials.
Further, no one knows what the unfoldments
might consist of, other than rock and water.
They might consist of metaphors themselves. If
so then a myth unfolds when the mind touches
a sense -- or a potential, or a disposition -- of
some aspect of the natural history of the
universe. Apollodorus' story of the war in
heaven is a literal unfoldment of the same
potential unfolded in the bombardment of
Saturn, Mimas, Hyperion, Tethys and the other
moons. John Herschel's name for the tiny,
disfigured, inmost-orbiting moon of Saturn
unfolds the same story and the same
macro-event from billions of years before. The
human mind has this power to recognize and
invent metaphors which transform signs and
potentials into concrete experience.
A metaphor in this sense might be more real
than reality. The sense of motionless death
evoked from the physical examination of
pictures and data about Mimas is more
humanly immanent and real than the physical
object itself, which is after all 800 million miles
away. It is not Mimas we fear, it's death. In the
modern age, Mimas is death.

And then, unfolded in the natural history of
Mimas is its disposition to recur. Mimas keeps
existing, somehow, even when it is annihilated.
And even when it seems imperturbably dead,
orbiting Saturn absolutely inactively, there it is,
existing between annihilations. Because for a
certainty, Mimas will not orbit there forever
butwill be destroyed again in some far-distant
catastrophe of asteroid-bombardment or
Saturn-disruption. Like all human beings, all
moons die. They are spread out like a drop of
ink in glycerin, dispersed to apparent nothing,
but their potential, or idea, or essential relation
to the unfolded physical world somehow
remains enfolded in the wavelike fabric of the
universe, and they accrete again. It is then a
question whether sentience is required to truly
live. We fear, not Mimas, but our own potential
powers.