EPILOGUE

Thanksgiving

It’s remarkable, given all the shit we can’t predict or control, that our plans aren’t always thwarted. I planned to drive to Illinois to see my friend Robert in June. But on Memorial Day weekend, after a night of delirious half-dreams, I wake up feverish and shivering, my sheets soaked with sweat. I walk to the emergency room of Hoboken’s only hospital, where a physician orders tests. I don’t have Covid-19, blood tests confirm, but I do have sepsis, stemming from my infected right elbow.

The doctor hooks me up to a bag of antibiotics and checks me into a room. Two days later, after more blood tests, x-rays and a magnetic-resonance scan confirm what’s wrong with me, a surgeon knocks me out and operates on my elbow, cutting out the bursa and other infected tissue. I leave the hospital with a five-inch incision clamped together by metal staples and a prescription for heavy-duty antibiotics. The successful outcome of my case vindicates scientific realism. And magnetic-resonance imaging is a quantum technology! [1]

I tell Robert that Mac, Skye and I will visit once the doctors are sure my sepsis won’t return, maybe in late summer. Robert says it might be for the best that we aren’t coming now. His new chemotherapy is kicking his ass. If he caught Covid from us, that would probably be it for him. “We're eager to see your shining faces,” he writes, “but prudence urges that we play the timing by ear till you and I are both clearly in the clear.”

I try to have quantum epiphanies, but nothing comes to mind. I’m just worried about my friend and sad that I can’t visit him. I don’t care about quantum mechanics. My experiment is over. 

View of my elbow post-surgery, June 2021. This photo illustrates a fundamental law of nature: shit happens. But that doesn’t mean we’re victims of fate. Fuck fate.

Blah Blah Blah

My experiment isn’t over. My thoughts keep veering back to what Emily calls the strange theory of you and me. This morning, lying on her couch, freshly caffeinated, I write about this and that, but I’m not getting anywhere, so I scribble: Blah blah blah. I write or say Blah blah blah when I’m getting tired of my own pontificating. Blah blah blah acknowledges that I’m blathering, saying nothing of substance. Maybe I have the blahs, too, meaning that I’m feeling drained, and not in a cool existential way. I’ve been blathering a lot lately, as well as feeling blah. So, to repeat, Blah blah blah.

But wait. What does it mean if one Blah blah blah provokes another? Let’s say I’m talking about quantum mechanics, and you’re getting bored, and you say, Blah blah blah. Stung, I hurl a Blah blah blah back at you. You respond in kind, Blah blah blah, and we continue in this manner until an exasperated bystander, hoping to shut us up, shouts, Blah blah blah!

Blah blah blah has a dual status here. It serves as a critique of a boring utterance and as a boring utterance itself. It is both an expression and object of disdain. Blah blah blah has a self-referential, loopy quality, Douglas Hofstadter would say. All signs are loopy, self-referential. They stand for themselves as well as for something else. This is not a pipe.

Another example: Philosophers speak of a legendary riposte that occurred in a seminar. The lecturer is pointing out an apparent asymmetry in language: Double negatives, which cancel each other out to produce a positive statement (I’m not unhappy), are common, but there is no such thing as a double, self-canceling positive. Or so the lecturer says. Then someone in the back of the room sneers, Yeah yeah. In this context, Yeah yeah is a dismissal, a critique, of someone else’s utterance, as well as evidence justifying the dismissal.

In the “Yada Yada” episode of Seinfeld, the characters utter Yada yada to cut short a boring story, at least ostensibly, but also to evade self-incrimination. George, for example, employs Yada yada to avoid telling a date that he caused his fiancée’s death. The show’s funny/dark theme is that almost all our exchanges are evasive, deceptive. We pretend to be straightforward, but we’re bullshitting each other, swapping Yada yadas.

What’s my kicker here? What’s the payoff to all this jibber-jabber about Blah blah blah and Yeah yeah and Yada yada? This, perhaps: We are quantum creatures, so when we try to understand quantum mechanics, we are trying to understand ourselves. But quantum mechanics is so abstract, so seemingly distant from what really matters, that it can justly be called evasive, the equivalent of Yada yada. If presented as a description of nature, and especially human nature, it can be dismissed with a contemptuous Blah blah blah or Yeah yeah.

I try to convey these thoughts to Emily when she gets up. I expect her to respond with the cheap shot, Blah blah blah, but once again she surprises me. She’s intrigued by the idea of two people saying Blah blah blah back and forth. Emily, who acted in her youth, says Sanford Meisner, a legendary acting coach, invented an exercise in which two actors repeat a phrase like Hello to each other with different inflections. Meisner would occasionally interrupt to tell one actor, Now imagine your mother just died and do it again.

Emily gets me to do the Meisner exercise with her. Say something to me, she says. I say, I don’t know what to do today. We say it back and forth in different tones: whiny, furious, doubtful, giggly, gloomy. It’s fun, and it reinforces my conviction that context is crucial, and meaning malleable, especially when the meaning is bouncing back and forth between two sentient creatures. Hence our outlook should always be ironic, even when it comes to physics.

When experts argue about the meaning of quantum mechanics, they are doing the Meisner exercise with Ψ.

Rhythms

I’m heading back to Hoboken from Emily’s. Passing through a park on my way to the ferry terminal, I spot a plaque with a poem on it, “Nature Poem” by Tommy Pico. Two lines jump out at me:

When Nature palms my neck I can’t tell if it’s a

romantic comedy or a scary movie

I can’t tell either. Will our movie have a happy ending? And what would that mean, anyway? Isn’t the happiest ending no ending? I brood over these questions while waiting for the ferry. It’s windy, the floating pier is rocking, and I think of the rhythms that rule my life, the days and nights I spend with or without Emily, teaching or not teaching, and the longer undulations of seasons, semesters, years.

The repetitions can make life feel monotonous, humdrum, especially under this lockdown, but they keep me grounded, too. They lay down a beat for improvisation, doing new things, like studying complex numbers, and they help me cope with unpleasant surprises, like getting sepsis. I move toward the illusory asymptote of wisdom as I age, approaching the all-too-real asymptote of oblivion. The waves dance up and down on the Hudson, the river ebbs and flows and swirls, the water always ends up in the ocean.

Don’t forget the inner beats that define us, propel us, the rhythms of the heart, the lungs, the brain. A single neuron oscillates faster than the fastest jazz drummer. Now imagine 100 billion drummers, sticks blurring, their individual rhythms generating higher rhythms, meta-rhythms. Neuroscientists eavesdrop on this incessant neuronal clamor, hoping to discern the harmonies underpinning consciousness.

Then there is the subatomic scale where electrons and quarks shimmy and shake. That’s the beat beneath the beat, the heartbeat of reality. An electron flutters like a sine wave, up and down, or like a point racing around a circle, around and around, and the rhythm of one electron merges with the rhythm of others to form a cosmic rhythm, the wave function of our universe. String theorists hear strings thrumming down at the Planck scale, that imaginary microrealm at the bottom of space and time, and multiversers imagine a trans-cosmic beat, universes bursting and collapsing. Our vast cosmos is just a grace note in this eternal symphony, as evanescent as a whitecap on the Hudson. 

Are we on the upswing of a sine wave, about to crest? Is reality, from the broadest perspective, cyclic? And what do we want to be the case? What would be consoling? Let’s say things are, on the grandest scale, cyclic, and we’re in a bound state. From the trans-cosmic perspective, human progress appears local and fleeting and hence in the long run meaningless. In exchange we get the comforting prospect of eternal recurrence.

Or maybe our universe is the only one that ever existed, that ever will exist. When we die, we die. Death is death. We give up eternity, the perpetual return, and accept our mortality. In exchange, we get the thrill of feeling, knowing, that this great adventure on which we are embarked is one of a kind. It has never happened before, and it will never happen again. Yes, we’re doomed, so let’s make the most of our existence, let’s have fun while we can.

I sit on a bench beside the Hudson to write down these thoughts. When I’m back in my apartment, Skye calls. She’s been dwelling on something awful that happened in her childhood, something she thinks was her fault, the death of a family pet. My daughter has built up a kind of mythology around the event, it’s her original sin. She feels terrible guilt, after all this time. She asks me what I remember about the incident. I assure her she was innocent, it wasn’t her fault. She was four years old.

Skye has endured so much trauma in her short life. The death of people close to her, including her first boyfriend, lost to heroin. My heart breaks for her. I’m desperate for her to be happy. After talking to her, I have a hard time focusing on my quantum project. I set my notebook aside and listen to music. My iPod, on shuffle, plays the John Lennon song “Instant Karma,” and I hear it as if for the first time:

Why are we here?

Surely not to live in pain and fear

The lyrics make my eyes well up, as does the refrain:

Well we all shine on

like the moon and the stars and the sun

Yeah we all shine on

on and on and on…

Do we all shine on and on? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Certainly not the physicists who claim that information lasts forever, or that mind can endure even in the face of heat death. Sometimes I’m not sure I want us to shine on and on. I’m soothed by the prospect of a final darkness that brings our frantic busyness to an end.

No, I take that back. I don’t want our frantic busyness to end. I want it to last forever.  

My daughter Skye with a friend.

The Blind Piranha

After my surgeon plucks the metal staples from my arm, I start tentatively exercising again. I’m jogging along the Hudson when an ancient memory pops into my head. It dates back to the late 1970s when I was painting houses in Denver. One day after work I found myself in a grungy saloon on Denver’s dusty eastern outskirts. Behind the bar was a tank containing a snaggletoothed, milky-eyed fish. A blind piranha.

Now and then, the bartender nets a few minnows from a fishbowl and drops them into the piranha’s lair. The piranha freezes for an instant, then it darts this way and that, jaws snapping, as the minnows flee. The piranha keeps bumping, with audible thuds, into the glass walls of its prison. That explains the thumb-like callus on its snout. Sooner or later the piranha gobbles all the minnows, whereupon it reverts to its listless, suspended state.

I identify with the piranha. I’m blindly thrashing about for epiphanies. Every now and then I think I’ve grasped some slippery truth, but my satisfaction never lasts. Sooner or later I crash into an invisible barrier. I don’t really know where I am or what’s going on. I’m in the dark.

Yes, the piranha is inside the fish tank, and we are outside. We can take solace from the fact that our world is bigger than the piranha’s tank, and that we know things the fish cannot. But it’s easy to imagine an enlightened, superintelligent being standing outside our world looking at us with the same pity and smug superiority that we feel toward the piranha.

Socrates presents himself as this enlightened being in his parable of the cave, which I make my first-year humanities classes read every semester. The parable (which is actually narrated by Socrates’s student Plato) describes people confined to a cave for their entire lives. They are prisoners but don’t know it. An evil trickster behind them has built a fire, by means of which he projects shadows of cats and piranhas and geese or whatever onto the cave-wall in front of the prisoners. The cave-dwellers mistake these shadows for reality. Only by escaping the cave can the prisoners discover the brilliant, sunlit reality beyond it.

We are the benighted prisoners, and Socrates, the enlightened sage, is trying to drag us into the light. But isn’t it possible, even probable, that Socrates and other self-appointed saviors, who say they’ve seen the light and want us to see it too, are charlatans? Or loons? Given our profound capacity for self-deception, isn’t it likely that when you think you’ve left the cave, you’ve just stumbled into another cave? You’ve swapped one set of illusions for another? Forget enlightenment. We’re all bozos on this bus.

I’m so pleased with the metaphor of the blind piranha that I write a column about it for Scientific American. I mention that quantum mechanics, our deepest theory of nature, implies that nature is unknowable. I worry that Tim Maudlin, who insists that we will know, we must know, will hate my column, but he surprises me. He says on Facebook that the blind piranha doesn’t have a bad life. Its basic needs are met, and it even catches a minnow now and then. Maudlin must be mellowing.

I’m still swapping emails with Dean and Luis, my old PEP553 study buddies. Late in the summer we meet on Zoom to catch up. Luis just started working for a defense contractor in Tucson, Arizona. He isn’t using his quantum knowledge as much as he’d like, but the work is challenging, and he likes his co-workers. Dean is enjoying Vietnam, where he is living with his girlfriend and teaching adults how to speak English. My young friends both seem happy, which makes me happy. I tell them I’m still stuck in Hoboken trying to figure out what the hell wave functions are, and they laugh.

The difference between me and the poor piranha is that he has no friends.

Love Is Real

In the fall, Ruth emails me an update on Robert’s condition. It’s worse than he’s been telling me. They just picked out two burial plots on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, a few miles from their home. “I felt like my heart was being sucked out of my chest,” Ruth says. “I cannot imagine my life without Robert. Such is the price you pay for lasting love. Strange isn't it.”

Nothing is more real, nothing matters more than love. And we learn as children that those we love are doomed. I’m going to leave my children behind someday, perhaps when I descend into dementia like my father. I hope I’ll have the wherewithal, as my kids recede into the mist, to raise my fist and say, “Hooray for you!” 

On Thanksgiving Day, 2021, I fly out to Illinois to see Robert and Ruth and their son Blaed. I expect Robert to look awful, but he is eerily beautiful. His illness has pared him down to his noble, elemental self. My big, tough friend can barely get out of bed, but he joins us for a turkey feast prepared by Ruth. At her urging, each of us says what we’re thankful for. Robert, in a hoarse whisper, says he’s grateful to have such a wonderful wife, son and friend. He wipes away tears, as do the rest of us. I want to say something consoling, maybe inspired by my quantum experiment, but I can’t think of anything but platitudes. Robert can’t abide platitudes. So I just say I’m grateful to be here with my old friends.

Me and Robert, Thanksgiving Day, 2021. I don’t remember why we’re sticking fingers in our noses. Probably just for the hell of it.

The next day, we drive to a hospital to arrange at-home hospice care. Robert and Ruth bicker over how to get to the hospital; we get lost, briefly, but we make the appointment on time. After leaving the hospital, we go to a forlorn Thai restaurant for lunch. For most of the meal, Robert rests his head on the table, looking away from us, as I chitchat with Ruth and Blaed. I ask Robert if he’s in pain, and he whispers, still looking away from me, “No.”

What a stupid question, are you in pain.

After dropping off my friends, I drive back to my hotel, a grand old resort that perches on a bluff above the Mississippi River. The hotel is empty, ghostly. I might be the only guest. I lie down to take a nap, but I can’t sleep. I call Emily to recount my day, and she tries, as tenderly as she can, to console me. Then I lie on the bed and watch the sun set in a blaze of red and gold beyond the black, gleaming Mississippi. I’m suddenly overcome with an upwelling of grief and gratitude, and it’s not just a feeling, it’s an insight into the heart of things. The swooning transports you, you’re helpless before it, it lifts you higher and higher, like a great wave, and you can only hold your breath as you await your fate.

Robert loved tramping through the wilds of Iceland. Photo: Ruth Copeland.

Notes

  1. I wrote two columns about my elbow surgery for Scientific American. The first extolled the health-care system, which might have saved me from dying of sepsis. The second deplored the health-care system, after the hospital and surgeon billed my insurance company and me $287,365.08 for my treatment.

 

 
 

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