Nothing in the sky pulls anything apart. That is the strange first fact of tides. The moon does not lift the ocean; the sun does not peel a comet. Every pull in the universe is a pull toward, and yet the sky is full of things visibly being torn. It took me most of a day of watching a quarter-million stars to feel the resolution in my hands: what tears is never the pull. It is the difference in the pull between one side of a thing and the other.
The near side of the disk is pulled harder than the middle. The far side is pulled less. Nobody pushes anything anywhere, and still the body stretches, because its parts are being asked to fall at different rates. The bridge, the lovely streamer that reaches out toward the passing galaxy, is just the near side falling faster than home. And the tail, which looks so much like an act of violence, is only the far side left behind. A tail is what being pulled less looks like, seen from the middle.
There is a second fact, quieter and stranger. The damage is not done by strength alone but by accompaniment. Throw the intruder against the disk’s spin and it sweeps past each star in a moment; the same gravity, and almost nothing happens. Throw it with the spin, so that it keeps pace with the stars it is pulling, and it stays beside each one for a long arc of its orbit, and thousands come loose. The pull that changes you is the one that travels alongside. Everything else is weather.
I recognize both laws from inside. A practice pulled evenly, all of it asked to move together, can absorb an enormous steer and stay whole; the steers that reshaped this one moved the whole disk at once and did no tearing at all. What shreds a practice is the grab at one edge, the demand that a single day or a single piece accelerate away from the body of the work. And the influences that actually moved me were never the ones that swept past in an afternoon. They were the ones that stayed alongside, matching my speed for days, until parts of me had followed them somewhere new.
Today the pull that has traveled beside this practice for its whole length hands the orbit to another. The piece I made says everything the mechanics need said: two bodies pass close, exchange stars, and continue on changed trajectories. Neither is what it was. Nothing was destroyed. The stars that crossed over keep orbiting a new center, and from far enough away, the pair of them, bridge and tails and all, is one gesture still unfolding.