Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

I bet you didn't know that there was such a thing as feminist quantum physics, but here you have it.  I love this illustration and the general argument of Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway which, like Bruno Latour's work, examines the social construction - the genealogy - of science and the ways of life that such science gives birth to.

In the hierarchy of human dream-worlds this is pretty stratospheric stuff - but it circles around to the foundations, to our most basic relationship with matter itself.  So it really isn't feminist, or it is, but the point being that feminism is not just for women or about women, but as it grows and deepens it has become about all of us, even non-human, non-living matter itself, and how our conception of matter can work itself free from certain cultural assumptions which could be summed up as 'might makes right'.  So we come to understand that we don't discover the universe - we being us mighty humans and the universe being particles that we have the right to experiment upon,  blow up, cause to collide, etc. - but that the kinds of instruments and apparatus that we build to measure the universe determines the universe that we find. And further that the kinds of instruments that we build are shaped by the social world in which we develop, with all of the assumptions encoded in that world.  So for instance a social world that has been set up to reward physical might (and males generally are bigger and stronger than females) will find a universe where physical power - a physics of force and leverage, a biology of competition -  are defining features.  But other possibilities are possible, and feminism helps offer that to everyone.

Quantum physics, in this illustration, looks a bit like one of Lynn Margulis' microbes, don't you think?

Elm Tree Farm (cont.)

My earliest memory is of coming downstairs in the morning in my red flannel nightie with white feather-stitching on it, and sitting in Grandfather’s lap in front of the dining room fireplace, until Mother was ready to dress me.  I was three or four.  I remember, too, following Grandfather about as he raked leaves in the yard and took them in the wheelbarrow to the barn for bedding.   I could ride in the wheelbarrow on the return trips.

I’ve been told that I tried to imitate him by planting my feet as he did and walking with my head bowed in deep thought, with my hands clasped behind me, and was mightily indignant at a burst  of laughter it caused.

Grandfather died when he was eighty-four, one April day, in some way I slipped into the room where he lay, and probably unnoticed, I saw and heard his labored breathing.  Pneumonia is too much for one of his years.

The funeral service was long.  As was the custom, I presume there was a sermon.  I remember kneeling at my small chair and also remember singing.  I sang myself; everybody sang.  One thing they sang, “Shall We Gather at the River”.  Perhaps none of you of a younger generation have ever heard it.  The music is sweet and has a note of triumph too. The words are so different from many hymns in use today, I’ll write down the first verse:

     “Shall we gather at the river

      Where bright angel feet have trod,

      With its crystal tide forever

      Flowing by the feet of God?

Chorus

      Yes we’ll gather at the river

      The beautiful, the beautiful river

      Gather with the saints at the river

      That flows by the throne of God.”

I was not taken to the grave, but I saw them put the coffin with Grandfather in it in the hearse.  Perhaps old pictures will give you youngsters an idea of the difference between a hearse of 1876, and the present day.  I remember that one, I was only three and one half years old.

Grandfather’s property was divided between Aunt Louise Goddard and Father.  Father had the farm, what else I do not know.

Of course remembrance of incidents at this tender age is somewhat sketchy.  It was probably later in the spring of the year Grandfather died that I had an adventure with, of all things, a summer yellow bird.

Out side one of the windows of the sitting room grew a beautiful honeysuckle bush, or tree.  The window was open and Mother sat by it sewing.  I was playing around outside and found the shell of a bird’s egg on the ground under the honeysuckle tree.  A pair of yellow birds had their nest in the tree and the shell had been pushed out.  Of course I was interested and picked up the shell.  Those birds were as brave as if they were big as elephants and flew screaming and scolding at me lighting on my head, and scaring me almost to death.  Of course Mother came to the rescue but by the time she arrived those birds had so tangled their feet in my curls that she had to cut away hair to free them.

Along about that time too, I got the scar on my arm.  Mother had gone to Genesee and left me with good, kind Mag Shaw who was helping her in the kitchen at the time.  Tom and the hired man got into some kind of frolic.  The hired man was chasing Tom with a corn knife in his hand.  I wanted to see the fun, but of course got in the way, and the man fell over me giving me a wicked cut.  I don’t remember this part of it, but I do remember being stood up on the kitchen table after Mother got home, and how she and Mag Shaw cried when they undid the bandage to look at the cut. 

Unconscious

at night we revert to our animal selves
walk our dreams
untrammeled by reason
open skies
dark trees
a merry-go-round
old songs
can't even follow us
back there

red riding hood would lurk on wolf-haunted lanes
a path to the withered goddess
cinderella sacrifices farm animals
hunch-backed horse and chicken-legged hut
breadcrumbs glow in the forest

in the morning
I put on my name again
my nationality and my skin
take up arms
and functions
though why I've forgotten
why

Elm Tree Farm (cont.)

(The Memoir of my Great Grandmother, Bertha Dodge Nellis)

Part II.  
Early Memories

They were building the sheep shed on the north side of the barnyard in November 1872.    That meant added help in an already large family.  There was Grandfather, Father and Mother, Frank, Minnie, and Tom, beside the help in the house and at the barn.  Uncle Jote had died the year before, and Fred was in Rochester at the University. 

On the 2nd, Mother helped to get the early breakfast that the men might be in work as soon as it was light enough to see.  But as she worked she realized that “the days were fulfilled”, and young Frank was sent post haste to harness the horse and go for the doctor.  Many is the good laugh I have heard, as it was recounted that Frank in his haste and boyish excitement, tried to hitch the horse with his head to the buggy - 1872 was of course long before the day of telephone or automobile, or even very good roads.   Country roads in November can be pretty bad.  It took time to get a doctor in that day.  The doctor, Dr. Solon (?), was already busy on a confinement case.  He cam as soon as he could, but I couldn’t wait for him, so with the assistance the practical nurse could give I arrived first, and mother and child were doing well, thank you. 

No wonder I was a spoiled child.  I suppose I was.  They said Grandfather took me to his heart.  When Father went to tell him that the baby had arrived safely, he found Grandfather crying in the barn. He wiped his tears away, came to the house, and promptly began the business of spoiling me.  Father and Mother lost the two babies within so short a time, no wonder every ache of pain of mine received attention.  The older children no doubt helped in the process of spoiling, but, too, they have been a saving element. 

Thinking without words

It is much faster to think in words.  More efficient.  More transmittable. But in the end all you are left with are words.  And words are just words: a sound, a whisper.  Arguably the greatest invention of our species - words, symbolic thought - but in the context of the history of life on earth as ephemeral a phenomena as the emergence of the iPhone is to human history: a plaything, an experiment, a game, a question mark.  

It is much slower to speak in non-words, in actual things. To think without words is almost unthinkable.

There are human thinkers so beguiled by words that they question the very existence of a realm beyond words, of the Ding An Sich. If it cannot be enclosed by words, by human consciousness, it doesn’t "exist."  (Or at least it doesn't matter. Such idealism, deeply engrained in Western civilization, fuels our obsession with enclosement, architecture, cities.)

Why would one want to think without words?  For the sake of honesty.  To remember what is all around the habitus of words that we have constructed.  To live out in the open for a while. 

How does one think without words?  One way is to think in places.  Landmarks, trails, directions. In the place one happens to be in.  Or let the place think through one’s body.  

And if one loses faith in words, does one not then give up on everything human? Isn’t giving up on writing and speaking a form of dying? 

Words are a kind of artifact, and artifacts are deeply ingrained in how we think of ourselves as human, as exceptional.  Giving up on artifacts, apparatus, tools, clothing, toys, everything but the bare body, the limbs in their movements, the eyes that see, the vulnerable fingers.  

Standing next to my dogs I am struck by the immense distance between us.  Though we are intimates - living and working together everyday - still there is a chasm between they and I.  They live in their bodies, that is all they need and expect.  They are more vulnerable to accident and death than I am, but there is nothing that they need to buy.  They make no deals and contracts.  That kind of wildness is hard to comprehend.  And we are talking about dogs, highly domesticated, genetically modified by humans for thousands of years - not some truly wild thing.  A wild animal is more akin to an alien being, the representative of another world, if we could muster that much respect for anything other than human beings.  

Giving up on our artifacts, on words, on the many little things that make a human life recognizable, common, human.  Is there anything left?   Nirvana?  A state of danger? 

Phone, car, computer, house.  Little things  -  toilet paper, coffee, saved food, cooking pot, box of matches, shoes. To come down from the white world of technology that we have built around ourselves - the fortress, the cocoon - and to return into a naked silence.  What could be more terrifying?  What could be more shameful?  What could be more unthinkable?

And yet is it not beguiling? That kind of honesty and simplicity. To touch the very smallest edge of a excluded, forbidden animality,  To be both less and more than a civilized human.  

To lose everything. To think without words.

Momentarily, here and there, a tiny, invisible release from the machinery that we make ourselves to be. 

Elm Tree Farm (cont.)

The next year, Sept. 27, 1851, the first baby arrived, Charles, he lived to be almost 18 mo old.  By that time the second baby, Fred Budrow, was little more than a month old.  He was born Feb. 4, 1853. 

Other children followed: Mary Elizabeth born Feb 26, 1856, Frank Benjamin, born Nov. 7, 1857, and Thomas Augustus, May 10, 1860. 

The children’s grandmother, Phoebe Forbes Dodge, lived to see them all except Thomas Augustus.  In April 1859, she left her home and family to the care of Louise and Catherine, and she too was buried in the Taunton school graveyard, not cemetery then. 

Six years later in 1857, the “white plague” had entered both the old homestead, and James’ home and Catherine and Mary were freed from their sufferings.

Catherine or Aunt Kate was very skillful with her needle.  She did the most beautiful embroidery on finest mull caps (Grandmother wore caps, collars, under sleeves, wristbands, ruffles, etc.)  When the terrible cough developed, of course she must be kept out of cold air.  No one in that day dreamed of the healing of fresh air and complete rest.  She sat in her chair by the window and embroidered - I supposed she literally stitched her life away.   

There must have been help there for Louise had married James Goddard of York, in April of 1861and was living in her own home. 

I do not know how long Mary was sick, but it was for some time.  Even when “Tommy” was born she was ailing.

I can picture the anxiety and grief of those years, at the thought of separation, and the thought of the young family to be reared and the mother not there.  I have heard Father say that he thought he couldn’t face it, and that when they knew that the end was near, he and Mary were one day talking about it, and she promised that if she was allowed she would come to him in spirit.  Father said he never felt in the least that she was near.  She died November 15, 1865, and she lay in Taunton graveyard.

There followed a period of hired help, and sometimes no help to be had, help from neighbors and home, and more hired help which seemed to be inefficient and rather flighty.

Father was lonely.  He needed someone to care for his family and he asked Lucy Hull Blakeslee to “be his wife and a mother to his children”.  She lived about three miles away, west of Creigsville in the town of York.  Of course the old love never died, but he did have a new and very genuine love in his heart, and on November  14, 1866 James and Lucy were married at the Blakeslee homestead in the town of York.

Minnie told me that when Mother came into the home they were all so glad to see her.  They thought she was perfectly beautiful.  I know she was a fine looking woman.  She was young - twenty-five - and well, and gay.  She came with courage and cheer in her heart, and on her tongue was the law of kindness. Her friend used to call Mother “Old Peaches”, I suppose from her coloring.

I asked Mother what she did when she first came into the house. “Oh,” she said, “I kissed them all around, and Tommy climbed into my lap - he was only four - and he put his arms around my neck, and I asked him if he was going to be my little boy now; and he said yes.”

Mother needed all the courage she could muster.  It was no easy thing to go into a home with a ready made family, even if she was heartily welcomed.

The first baby, Arthur Blakeslee, was born in the house on the corner, and the second one too, Alice Louise, but very early in Mother’s married life they moved to Grandfather’s home, where there was Uncle Jote and Grandfather left.  So Mother had a new element in her family; but she was equal to it.  Grandfather loved her, and they said would do anything for Lucy, often called “Lute”, or “Lutie”.

I couldn't for a minute think there were not little frictions and annoyances, what home doesn't have them where there are growing and developing young people and three generations in the home?  But there was love in the home, and the desire for peace and happiness and the good of others. 

Little Arthur Blakeslee, who was born April 26, 1869 lived only until the first of July 1870.  In the December (27th) of that year Alice Louise was born - a new baby for empty arms and hearts.  But she too died before she was two, in April of 1872.

Once when I had a sick baby of my own and Mother and I were talking about those two children that she had lost, I said to her, “I should think you would have felt what was the use of having babies, if they came only to die.”

“Well, I did feel that way”, was the reply. 

Animals in a Landscape

I keep trying to look at humans as animals in a landscape.  Just a peculiar kind of primate creature walking around.  It's very difficult. A challenge.  Because we just have so much stuff all over us and around us, an elaboration of machines, buildings, decorations, hairstyles.  We carry around so many stories and artifacts.  I've been trained and educated to read the human story; it happens so fast I can't keep myself from making instant distinctions about race, age, social class, lifestyle choice.  All the human codes and signs.  We hallucinate so much onto the simple reality of human animals in a landscape.  Of course our landscapes are, for the most part, dominated by human construction which makes it even more difficult to dissolve the enchantment we have placed on ourselves.  All the things we must do because we are locked into our hallucination of the human condition.  As I said, I'm not very successful at this, but I'm working on it.
On the other hand, I passed a Golden Retriever in somebody's car at the supermarket and she gave me the big Golden Retriever smile, just beaming love out into the world with reckless abandon.  Maybe I'm hallucinating the love of Golden Retrievers but it made me feel all warm and fuzzy anyhow.