LEAH SOUFFRANT

THREAD: RIDDLE OF THE PHYSICAL

A poetics implicit in discovery is embodied in the pause, attention to the atom or the eye or memory, the carefully recorded finding of the laboratory.  

The scientific article reminds us that questions reveal new areas yet unknown, we are relentlessly discovering that we know little, what we knew was mistaken, knowledge is nothing compared to the unknown, and what we call known is unstable, uncertain, is more like potential than precision. Science is filled with language of “potential” and “ uncertainty.” 

A poetics of illogic knowing is increasingly recognized, and the reflecting scientist insists again and again on entangling it in our everyday understanding of science and the world itself – what scientists study. 

How the brain functions. 

How the atoms interact. 

How bodies move. 

What we imagine and what we see. 

“The task is to see the riddle,”[2] Heidegger wrote, thinking about art, perception, being in the world.

*

Each noun in Einstein’s writing is held up as a question, is loosened from its place of master knowledge, and this we recognize as, finally, genius. The name Einstein redefining this word, revealing its very instability. Reading the last sentence in chapter four of The Special Theory of Relativity, the eyes blur, not in confusion, but in the wet of recognition. “The laws of mechanics of Galilei-Newton can be regarded as valid only for a Galileian system of coordinates.” [3]  His “only” is a tiny speck, like a star. 

Yet with understanding and imagination we realize that the “only,” like a star, is incomparably vast, impossibly bright. Hotter than hot, farther than far. Not even perhaps, there at all. 

*

The rosebush in the front garden on Albemarle Road in Brooklyn – urban, domestic – was probably planted but is not maintained. This is no English garden. The branches go wild. Children passing by are warned of the thorns creeping over the gate over the narrow sidewalk. It looks spontaneous, exploding there as if by accident. It looks inevitable, too, that rose bush where there needs a burst of color, wild and refined at once in this wild and refined spot. Of course, a rose, of course, a sudden spot of beauty – the it is. Blooming with its inevitable arrogance, its generosity, its surprising thorns.

Martha Graham asked about how to reconcile spontaneity with inevitability. The spontaneous happening or done in a natural, often sudden way, without planning or without being forced. The inevitable is certain to happen. Much of life is a dance, mixing these two, making what is done with planning seem spontaneous, what happens without force feels certain to happen. The well-trained dancer’s grace reaching over the gate of the garden, exploding color over passersby.

*

Physicists observe that the observer effects the reality. Common sense confirmed by elaborate computation.

* 

and 

The rain falls 

That had not been falling

And it is the same world. 

                        - George Oppen from Of Being Numerous[4] 

*

So much of the world – the world we create by perceiving, as Merleau-Ponty put it –  is dense with feeling, thick with hard memories, that I look far less often to the neat poem for that hard feeling of memory-moment to swallow me as I swallow it. All day long I’m swallowing; it’s part of being alive. Poetry attempts to say it.

Still the words surprising on the page are there and come when I turn to them, with focus. Did I have better focus before? Is the diffuse looking a dulling vision or an increasing density of memories cluttering, pressing in? It’s never an either-or when questions are about perception or how I make sense of the world, how I create my world, ours. It’s always both-and, varying intensities in a more or less forgiving simultaneity.

No one can train you to read a poem, only some might give you permission to give the poem your attention. Permission to let this knowledge in, as it comes, without the limits that reduce it. A poetic knowing could come, too, from examining the rug at your feet, the table against your hand, the words uttered by the shopkeeper as you hand over your money. You hand it over. Attending to your own mind is a simultaneity of poetic knowing. Simultaneity of the physicists and poets.

You must be doing something else while sitting. Dragging the pen across the page. Leaning back slightly in the seat. Stepping over a protruding crack in the curb. All simultaneity. And the before returns, happening again. You read this and a remembered sidewalk returns. What do you know about cracks? About stepping? How that moment changed, just now.

*

On the streets on the afternoon of the eclipse, neighbors shared their home-made protective glasses, so we all might look toward the cosmos without being blinded, without being permanently damaged by the light.

*

Mathematics is abstract even if the proofs add up, the knowing of the numbers is nearly always imaginary. But the abstract depends on these real things. What we touch. What we count. How many words, letters, and how wide the spaces dividing the? 

When reading about the wars, we are impressed when the soldier stops to read, is able to compose a poem, anything beyond a letter, and even this is precious, surprising, swollen with meaning. Makes an impression. 

“The task is to see the riddle.”

*

Reflecting on the challenges of the biologist conducting physical research, physicist Niels Bohr in 1932 observed, “In every experiment on living organisms there must remain some uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism will be just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us.”[5] Getting to the core without interference of all the conditions that may be touching that core, each atom about which Bohr is curious, remains a mystery.

The mystery provokes more investigations, even as secrets continue to hide. Mysteries becoming smaller, more precise. We become intimate with the world. With each other.

*

Not only to seek knowledge’s vague limits, but what might some understanding or mere thinking of those vast, messy, luminous limits make way for in the living we do with each other? We trace lines from A to B but in the entangled bubbling, which clings, spreads, pops, all of it, in the very metaphor – part of every communication of thought, the metaphor – is evidence of the limits and the entanglement that says: wait, pause, care.

To be something and nothing at once, we might imagine the electron: behaving as a wave and as a particle. To hold this in the mind, the notion that what is somewhere is not there or it is not possible to locate it in the way I locate my glasses, here. My phone, my fingernail. Yet it is making up these things.

Recognize this detached connection as we have questioned the world, perhaps in youth, head upon pillow, perhaps yesterday, walking alone under fluorescent lights at leisure. As we notice the things we never see: How the skin on the hand up close forms shapes like triangles. How the song overhead enters our consciousness only in parts, even though it is, we suspect, playing continuously.

And this particular song takes me to a memory, an unfixed memory, a sense of my own body in a green place, in a car, lost and singing. I’m singing in a car and walking through aisles under a fluorescent light. I stop hearing the song. My day changes, hours are slung lower in a sense of detached loss.

You may not be able to perceive it at all. 

I do not see that glorious scent of the roses.

One thing might tug at the possibility of another, and their connection is part of what makes this space between recognition and knowing emerge: if we get fixed on one thing, the others detach, and this instability is a kind of consistency. 

But of course.

* 

Heisenberg observed that we rely on classical language, classical mechanics, to describe the world not because that is what the world is, but because that is the way we know how to describe it. An act of translation. Heisenberg introduced uncertainty as a language of science. This tickles the poet.

*

Walking out of the park, past stoops along the shaded sidewalk, I pass books propped up for the taking. Among them, a book subtitled “A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited.” It is soiled; I don’t pick it up. 

Just this morning, I have been reading research on twins, what scientists and psychologists attempt to assert but cannot quite pin down about the mind and the body, nature and nurture; the way twins seem to clarify much and little at the same time. Like walking about and finding a book twins on this very day clarifies and obscures experience and encounter at the very same time.       

On the same sidewalk, in front of a different building, another book. It’s on how entrepreneurs practice social responsibility and kindness. Reading jargon like “grit” and “empathy” and “maximize,” I become curious about the connection to kindness. I pick it up. But it carries little weight. Its lack of heft saddens me, as if it is evaporating.

*

Relativity, uncertainty, simultaneity, a poetics of encounter and a poetics of knowing must fascinate too. Measurements of distance are affected by the motion of objects being put in relation. And, in no arbitrary sense, we are in motion – the fixed quality is fairly illusory. To move my very hand to take the measurement is a motion. In the abstract sense, change is most continuous and our interactions are affected by all manner of “movements.” How we then measure experience shifts. It has appearances and patterns. We can record and share observations, no doubt. But the fascinating instability of what we encounter is not limited to the assessments of the physicists. 

Or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “My moving body makes a difference in the visible world, being part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible.”[6]

*

My contributions may be messy, incomplete, scarred, interrupted, broken, soft, weathered, torn, billowing, edged, parsing, little, fleeting, mild, inchoate, fogged, picked, seared, loose, jiggling, fallen. But they will also be sincere. My contributions will be tender with toil.

 *

And more than things. Hunger makes me weak. Weakness makes me tired. Reading, I drift off, sometimes from this heaviness, sometimes from a lightness.

Nearness to a photo or a letter or a book makes me link with memories, plural, moving. This making creates. Sleep dips in, and the dream-thought takes over. I forget, and the startling awareness of time, of hours and light, shifts, troubles. There is a car groaning some distance away, outside. I should tidy the table. The shape of the shadow looks like a feather. Or a leg. I forgot to respond to an email. The second hand reaches the twelve. What is the crunching noise? A worker outside? I’m exhausted and writing. It is warm. What near simultaneity is this? Add hunger, add thirst. Add a too-snug shirt or a gust of wind, an odor. Add the call from mother. Add some debt collector.

We can look at the formula for the odor of violets, but the smell will not be on the page, nor the memories conjured when we inhale. We can’t even see the odor captured by the scientist, even as it envelopes us when we approach the flower.

Even exhausted, the thoughts are from many directions and touched  by time, light, temperature, and other things. 

Things. Ten cherries in a bowl. Have I even seen a cherry tree? Some would measure the delight, the taste. This measuring is only part of what we know, and this only part of what might become known.

Where does love come in? Whence this fear? The anxiety about corrupt government? The missed deadline and the ominous knock at the door? The last chance? The abandonment? The knowing that death, maybe, death just now or imminent. Loss. So much love emerging as that shadow shifts into the shape of a longer feather, a wing, a falcon.

*

I don’t recall reading Einstein. For many years, for my whole life until now. I knew his face. I recognized his famous equation. The t-shirts, the posters. At some point, I knew how to calculate energy, how it was used, as a measurement, as a prediction, what I now think of as a visioning. 

What of his words were nevertheless mixed with mine? What did I argue for and against, not hearing with whose ideas I was grappling? Which part of the long debates, sometimes in wooden chairs, sometimes at podiums, did I join, did I take part in, never invited, never heard?

*

How does it feel to discover something that becomes a killing machine, a weapon of mass – truly massive – destruction? The nuclear bomb. What madness are we celebrating in the image of the mad scientist, head as if on fire?

*

Reality in science is in part its recognition, over and over in the literature and in the life of the laboratory, of the shifting site of knowledge, of known. The unknown is the curiosity of the scientist – suspicions of hypothesis, wonder of thesis – and not the known, the stuck. Every discovery leads to new questions. These questions do not trouble the reality of science, but rather affirm it. To fix knowledge in place, is, after all, a fiction, a fantasy. Not science. Yet this tension is important. We can know evolution without knowing its cause. We can see or surmise patterns, trajectories, expectations, and build entire world on these. This building does not close the questions. The knowing of how does not disclose a why each time. We can understand more and more about larger and ever-smaller increments of experience, and still the unknown expands. Hence the possibility of science coexisting with faith or speculative theological curiosity. Hence the disjunction between strict, limited doctrine and the wonders of scientific learning. 

*

Einstein, putting “truth” in quotation marks, begins the discussion of relativity with the unresolvable concerns – what cannot be measured by geometry’s methods, what the limits are of how we can measure the world. Einstein asks us to attend to the ways we assume that what we know – the Euclidean geometry measuring a straight line between two points – is relative, is unstable, is a study in how very uncertain our ways of claiming truth are.

To know where one object is located, Einstein continues, we must locate it in relation to something else. This is where the measurements begin, to start with a point and extend to another, with numbers marking the in-between. But this also is where we might begin to wobble, to shake, as the certainty of the one is dependent on the other, and we ourselves are in relation to these. The cloud moving in as we find it.

*

The earth appears to be a flattish plane covered with buildings, here rising and falling, here spreading with water or swelling with soil, blurring under dust. I live understanding that my proximity to the streets changes them. I hike to the top of a mountain near the Cilento and below I see orange rooftops. The town that has swallowed me like a stifling gas now is tiny, harmless, charming. The clouds cast their shadows, but only here and there—shapes shifting as the wind and sun’s rays shift. The valley becomes small.

I decide to walk home, across Brooklyn, rather than take the subway so many stops. The distance is the same, the time stretches, but the earth becomes smaller, more intimate, mine to traverse. A different kind of smallness.

*

Einstein writes “Every description of events in space involves the use of a rigid body to which such events have to be referred. The resulting relationship takes for granted that the laws of Euclidean geometry hold for ‘distances,’ the ‘distance’ being represented physically by means of the convention of two marks on a rigid body.” 

The living body is not rigid. The conventions Einstein asks us to puzzle over are the conventions of a dead nothing – where the entangled world is mystically transfigured into a disentangled Euclidean track of straight line from point to point. Even the bird is stillness. Yet, and he tells us, there is nothing quite “true” in this figure that disentangles for the sake of the convention. For the sake of reasoning the dead. Even the rare mustached kingfisher, captured and stored in the American Museum of Natural History, truly dead, is a link to the life of the bird, the South Pacific, the radiant color of the forest.

The living are not rigid bodies yet. Even the things we observe are nothing but things-in-relation. Are nothing, are but things, are in relation, all three at once.

References:

[1] Richard Feynman. Six Easy Pieces (New York: Basic Books, 1963, 2011), 117. 

[2] Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language & Thought. trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper Collins, 1971).

[3] Albert Einstein. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (New York: Three Rivers, 1961), 14.

[4] Oppen, George. Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1975).

[5] Niels Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Mineola: Dover, 1961, 2010), 9.

[6] Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge Classics, 1962, 2008), 455. 

Image and text courtesy of © 2020 Leah Souffrant