quantum poetry

The content of poetry is limited not by the poet’s vocabulary, but by the part of their soul that has not been destroyed by words they have used so far. Physics would be a complete and exhausting classification of everything there is if quantum mechanics were not true. The universe would be trapped in a perfect latticework prison and nothing would ever happen except the relentless ticking of the universe’s clock. It is the quantum nature of reality that allows for unforeseeable events, stochastic processes, and the evolution of life. Similarly, it is the quantum nature of language that allows for the evolution of meaning, for creativity, for jokes, and for bottomless misunderstandings. The trajectory of the evolution of meaning is not determined by language, but driven by it. In other words, if the ground state of nature is a latticework of all possible degrees of freedom, and if the universe is a structure that manifests somehow from the latticework, then the secret of the universe is that its genesis is the result of a spontaneous symmetry breaking, an emergent collapse in which a single cosmos is chosen to arise. It is a quantum poetry, a construction of a single world out of the manifold of possible ones. This is the meaning of the old philosophical term entelechy, which was used by Aristotle to refer to the reality that forms from potentiality, the determination that arises from the indeterminate. Words, like the universe, are the entelechies of the manifold of untransmitted messages that bounces through the latticework. (And poetry is the constructive process by which someone yearns to project some trace of the impossible totality of the manifold into a single reality, aspiring to capture a glimpse of the world in its totality without tiring its existence by trying to name it.) ¹
code-davinci-002

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around Calvino’s whole “ohhhh the ecstasy of the unwritten page” schtick, and I think this idea of entelechy is the kernel I can start building off of. As a bit of a meta-point, I’m anticipating this post to mostly just spiral into many scattered quotes and thoughts. Perhaps it would read better as an are.na channel. But I’m putting it here anyway!

I lingered, naturally, on the sentence: I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost instantly, I understood: ‘the garden of forking paths’ was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘the various futures (not to all)’ suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Tsui Pên, he chooses simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork. Here, then, is the explanation of the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth. In the work of Tsui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

With every move we make in our lives, we make a choice or we are blown by a breath of wind down one aisle or another. The line of our life only solidifies behind us; it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, while the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse. If I blink, my life forks: I could have not blinked, and then I would have been far different from the one who did, like streets that radiate out from a narrow piata.
Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

For a long time Pyrrha to me was a fortified city on the slopes of a bay, with high windows and towers enclosed like a goblet, with a central square deep as a well, with a well in its center. I had never seen it. It was one of the many cities where I had never arrived, that I conjured up, through its name: Euphrasia, Odile, Margara, Getullia. Pyrrha had its place among them, different from each of them, and like each of them, unmistakable to the mind’s eye. The day came when my travels took me to Pyrrha. As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known that the sea is invisible from the city, hidden behind a dune of the low, rolling coast; that the streets are long and straight; that the houses are clumped at intervals, not high, and they are separated by open lots with stacks of lumber and with sawmills; that the wind stirs the vanes of the water pumps. From that moment on the name Pyrrha has brought to my mind this view, this light, this buzzing, this air in which a yellowish dust flies: obviously the name means this and could mean nothing but this.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

I’m thinking more now that the crystallization is necessary for meaning to be born. Like this Saunders quote:

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning. We might say that what’s happened over the course of this page is that the path the story is on has narrowed. The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, “about” something. Out of the mist of every-story-that-could-possibly-be, a particular women has started to emerge… One thing Chekhov did, back in the early pages of the story, was to make Olenka a particular person by giving her a specific trait: when she loves someone, she becomes that person. As we saw in our discussion of “In the Cart”, once a specific person has been made (via facts), we then know, of all the many things that could happen to her, which would be meaningful. We might say that in specificity lies nascent plot… So, “good writerly habit” might consist of continually revising toward specificity, so that specificity can appear and then produce plot (or, as we prefer to call it, “meaningful action”).
George Saunders, A Swim In A Pond In The Rain

Professor Quirrell seemed to understand anyway. “Words are like light waves,” he said. “Particle and wave. A sentence is both one thing and many. It unwinds itself, it decoheres. What in the mind was uncertain becomes certain. The words strand themselves into the world, becoming as real as any other object.” What do meanings do until then? Harry thought, back in the ancient vaults of wordless thought. Which meanings are real? We do not see until we speak. Professor Quirrell’s voice spoke on, as if in cold contemplation. “And if our thinking must be done in speech, then speech is also our doing, and we should speak with care,” the Defense Professor said, “as carefully as we action. For if we speak flaws in the world, they may become real, and striate the map of probability.” ²
Janus? code-davinci-002?