Gravity wears many faces. We feel it in moments, see it in the tides, remember it when pulled into people’s orbit. The ebbs and flows of creative inspiration are well known to artists—muses appear as though in response to mysterious cosmic forces entirely out of our control. 

The transition from Newtonian gravity to Einstein's theory of General Relativity marked a profound shift in our understanding of the universe. Gravity was no longer seen as a force exerted by masses on the background of unchanging space and time. Rather, it became an emergent property of the curvature of spacetime, challenging notions of constancy and objectivity. 

Gravity is the language of the relational: any two beings in the universe are connected through the fabric of spacetime. Its abstract power looms large in the interpersonal. We each have experiences that feel denser than others; moments whose weight eclipses their duration on a clock or calendar. In some cases, we find ourselves orbiting a past experience, our lives resisting the inevitable march from past to future as life’s timeline metamorphoses into a parabola. As with any planet, the gravitational force of these moments gets weaker with distance, but distance is not easily achieved. Once we are in orbit, a third presence with mass and energy is needed to break free and achieve escape velocity. 

While Einstein’s theory explained macroscopic movements, quantum mechanics developed to describe the behavior of particles at subatomic scales. To this day, these two theories exist on parallel planes and have resisted all attempts for unification. 

In this issue, Notch is interested in exploring this space of the ununifiable. Please share works that honor the strange and mysterious, exploring themes of weight, time distortion, singularity, wormholes, and light.