Thermoanimatics: The Thanatological Ramifications of Heat¹
By Christopher Fritton

We gather in rooms with the bodies of the dead, collecting our heat, trying to give our collective heat to the dead. We think that a greater accumulation of heat might be able to warm them again. But the dead can no longer receive heat because the dead can no longer give heat.² It isn’t with our tears that we try to raise the dead; it’s with our heat. But the heat we give them just goes. We waste our heat on the dead simply because we don’t know what else to do.³

A parade, or a series of funeral processions for particles, a particular procession of some sort of success. A grieving motion. The grief of warming the other or cooling the self. No body can maintain a particular temperature without the addition or subtraction of heat. All things are heat-grieving in a particular way, absorbing heat from the mourners who surround them, or sacrificing their heat to those they mourn.

Intermittent heat is a reminder of presence.⁴ This means: Heat is the failed index of location. As heat (re)gains motion, the catalog of whereabouts it sustained dissipates. You are not always where your heat is, or was. Heat is orbital, as in orbiting and elliptical. Ellipsis, the absence of heat; when you are not moving, you produce no climatory disequilibrium; you make no grieving weather. At aphelion, the cold rotting body of the zombie, at perihelion, the warm breath of the ghost on your neck. Always this commute between bodies and not, heat makes.

The measurement of these grieving motions could be a critical component in liveness studies. If it were possible to accurately determine the amount of heat being lost or gained by a body, it might be possible to approximate the degree to which that body is alive. It cannot be assumed, however, that there is a direct relationship between the temperature of the body and its liveness. Someone with more heat is not necessarily more alive. Quite often too much heat causes death or madness. It is far more likely that liveness corresponds to the degree of dynamism in heat transfer. The more heat being given or received, the more alive the body. This is the principle of thermoanimatics.⁵

It is important to remember that all bodies, by this definition, may have some degree of liveness, but it is only mobile bodies that may actively decide to gain or lose heat. Only we may warm another and choose to cool ourselves; only we may register our coolness and seek the warmth of another. This is the basic premise of anistropic, or “directed” heat transfer, as opposed to isotropic, or “undirected” or “radiant” heat transfer. Immobile bodies absorb heat (whether isotropically or anisotropically) and radiate it isotropically and involuntarily. Ambulatory bodies facilitate the conduction and convection necessary for anisotropic heat transfer. Sometimes you can choose where your heat goes.Heat is product and process, a result and an event. A resultation, the exultation of excitation. Its physical extension suggests that it is also a prosthesis.⁶ A prosthesis of process, a processthesis. With this said, be careful not to laugh too much, you will lose your heat to heat-stealers and false mourning, breathe only enough to keep yourself warm, and be certain to give your heat to the right bodies⁷, because our condition is to remain in the penumbra of the fate of heat, the fate of heart, and the fate of Lord Kelvin, and that is to be immeasurable.

1 Heat is process of transfer. Heat is also the product of this transfer. The motion of particles convected, conducted, or radiated. The event that provokes heat is heat. The result of heat is heat. The circuitry of heat is closed. Though exothermic and endothermic dispersions continue regularly on a local level, actual loss of heat is impossible. Things and persons may lose heat, but the system cannot.