3. matter: occupies space

This is the third in a series. Previous posts looked at matter as the substance and matter as physical substance. This third definition of matter says, perhaps, that something matters because it has the ability to occupy space.

I’ve always found it interesting that very tiny works make me more aware of their “space” than longer works, even novels. Maybe I just take the longer works’ ability—to take up space—for granted. Maybe it has something to do with my own sense of space, how I’m more aware of it in an MRI, say, than on a football field. In writing my compressed fiction, I’m conscious of how each word occupies that space, how space is filling up, running out.

Space is an interesting word in this definition, from the Latin spatium:

course or track, expanse of ground, area, space occupied by something, expanse in which the universe is situated, intervening space, gap, interval, space available for a purpose, room, linear extent, length, width, distance, great length or distance, actual distance, surface area, extent, size, stretch of time, period, long period, temporal extent, duration, intervening period of time, interval, time available for a purpose, (in music) difference in pitch between two notes, interval, length or time of a metrical foot, quantity of a vowel sound

space, n./1
Third edition, August 2010; online version November 2010. ; accessed 25 January 2011. An entry for this word was first included in New English Dictionary, 1913.

That sense of expansiveness and time, the world after the singularity of the compressed universe banged, is contained within. But maybe even more interesting is that occupy of the definition, from the Latin Latin occupāre: to seize (by force), take possession of, get hold of, to take up, fill, occupy (time or space), to employ, invest (money). Matter is something that takes hold of that space; it does more than just fill it. It seizes it. It’s fearless, without wishy-washiness. It possesses, imposes itself, forces. It lodges itself in the tiniest of containers. It doesn’t move. It isn’t going anywhere. And yet the space of the definition gives it an expansiveness, that sense of its continual expansion beyond its original confines. An expansiveness that stays. Dwells. Abides.

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