“I think of Neihl Bohr’s assertion that there is no deep
reality, and I know exactly what he means.
I am looking through the woman I am talking to,
seeing through her
to the soft bank of azalea bushes behind.
It’s a nice effect, rather like a double exposure.”
I used to think that religious people were dolts, grasping at security, a benevolent God, a false knowledge and faith in what is coming next. I used to think that atheists were stronger, smarter, that a belief in science was a stark and brave stance. But, recently, I’ve realized it is just as comforting, sometimes, to think that there might be some order to everything, some as-yet-undiscovered explanation for everything in the natural world. That we just aren’t smart enough to know it yet, but that science could explain it if we could just unlock the right experiment.
It has been constantly surprising to me that Spring is still happening this year, amidst the coronavirus. Wet, grey days, peonies and poppies and magnolias still flowering against the bright milky glare of the sky. The natural world continues to tick on with or without us. Whether you believe in God or not, something keeps the world going despite it all. You cannot scare a flower, you cannot scare a virus.
The argument between whether God or science is behind it all finds its way into so many things. When quantum mechanics was developed, a debate sprang up between Albert Einstein and Neihl Bohr. Einstein believed there was a deep reality, or an ultimate reality, where the normalcy of physics would prove to be in effect. Neihl Bohr didn’t think that the rules of the world we live in would necessarily apply to this new world of molecules. I thought at first that Einstein had less capacity for uncertainty than Bohr did. He had to explain everything, put it into a system he could already conceive of and understand, rely on science the way an atheist might while Bohr went boldly into the unknown. But then I learned Bohr invoked God in his explanation, told Einsten to “stop telling God what to do!”(1)
The most recent viral pandemic was in 1918 when the Spanish influenza swept across the world. I wonder how it must have felt then, how scary the world must have seemed. Einstein and Bohr would have been alive, their debates over quantum mechanics happening just ten years later. Einstein spent part of those two years (1918-1919) divorcing his wife and carrying on an affair with his cousin. Bohr was opening an Institute of Theoretical Physics, which now seems such an optimistic thing to do at such a time. I wonder if the pandemic’s uncertainty had anything to do with their two stances on quantum mechanics.
Uncertainty is scary. We know this. It is why we worry, it is what causes anxiety. I know this for sure. It is why I grind my teeth at night, it is why I take medication, it shortens my breath and hazes my vision. Intolerance of uncertainty leads to what some scientists call “cognitive vulnerability.” An outsized reaction to uncertainty—panic attacks, unsettling worry—has been called a “psychological allergy.” It follows the same logic that physical allergies do: give one person a peanut and they survive, give someone else the same peanut and their throat closes up. Give one person two months under quarantine and they write a book and bake sourdough bread. Give another person two months under quarantine and they crumple into anxiety. Give one scientist a flu pandemic and they start a scientific institute. Give one scientist a flu pandemic and they divorce their wife on Valentine’s Day and fuck their first cousin. (2)
Even during times less stressful than now, we are constantly batting away the unknown. Oprah has a section in her magazine called “What I Know for Sure.” She writes things like this: "You are the only person alive who can see your big picture —and even you can't see it all.” Lines like these in her editorial letters sound good, but when you begin to pull them apart, they start to make less and less sense. It is like the graduation speech given when I graduated from undergrad, the one that my poetry professor called “platitude after platitude.” It’s just something people say.
A week ago, we met on my professor’s lawn to celebrate our graduation from our master’s program. She kept caveating everything she said about coronavirus with the phrase “I don’t have anything really that interesting to say about it.” But we kept talking, kept sharing things that were happening to us, patting ourselves on the back for being people with rich inner lives, talking about how hard it is to deal with not seeing anyone for weeks. If an interesting thing to say about it involves some kind of narrativizing of the event then we will have to wait months, years, to see what this is. It seems that saying something interesting involves being able to be more certain, to find stable ground to stand on.
The other day, I was talking to a friend on the phone. I walked down to the Rivanna River and back and we laughed about the New Hampshire cable shows she’s been watching in quarantine. On the news was a woman talking in a gruff voice about how to cook chicken breasts, lots of them, how to make them into chicken salad. Mario Lopez inexplicably interviewed Owen Wilson about the movie Old School, which came out in 2003 and is celebrating no anniversary we could think of. Maybe, I said, this is all just comfort news. Things you already know about, things you can reasonably expect to know how to do. An interview about a movie we’ve all already seen, recipes for things we’ve been able to make since we first learned how to cook. A rebranding for the times. Instead of the news, call it “Things You Know.” Make it feel like at least one thing is under control.
The peonies. I keep thinking of the peonies I saw on my walk the other day, how they were dotted with dew. I told my friend on the phone about them. She was on the other side of the phone line and while I was talking to her it was like I was seeing through her the flower bush. A tenet of quantum mechanics is that the observer interacts with what is being observed. Those scientists were thinking on the smallest scale we know of: electrons and photons, but it’s true also of me and the peony, of me observing my friend over the phone.
A thing I have been doing to keep anxiety at bay is working out. My yoga teachers come to me through Zoom or Instagram Live. Today I did a cardio dance party with Ryan Heffington, thinking the whole time about observers and the observed, how it changes our perceptions of things. A man dancing alone in his kitchen is solitary, maybe sad, maybe ecstatic, depending on how you view it. A man dancing alone, however, is always just a man dancing. A man dancing with a camera on him, with 2,500 people watching and following along is not a man, he’s a movement.
At the end of the dance class, Heffington puts his hands to his heart and says over and over, we’ll get through this, until finally, he says once, we’ll get through this together. It should be corny, but it never is, somehow. I like that I can count on it. That when I turn on to his video, I know he’ll dance around, scream at me to GET IT! GET IT! and urge me to use an umbrella as a microphone and to grapevine across the living room. It feels like something certain. It feels like connection.
While Einstein saw the theory of quantum mechanics as something that must be incomplete because it was not fully understood, because he had yet to figure out how and when the relationship between the observer and the observed broke, Bohr saw the connection as something that revealed our deep connection to nature.
I do not know if the peonies represent my connection to nature or evidence that it doesn’t need me at all. Or maybe they are evidence that all life is change as they bloom and drop their petals within a few days. Are they evidence of God? Something as beautiful and lush must have come from something holy. Or are they evidence of science, a world that can be explained by pattern, sun, rain, pink petals radiating exactly from a center? Either way, they are here, photons and electrons are here, coronavirus is here. That much is certain.
Sources:
1. “Einstein, Bohr, And Ultimate Reality” by Marcelo Gleiser
2. “How Uncertainty Fuels Anxiety” by Julie Beck
Comments