The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  I open my eyes a crack and see the slightly blurry silhouette of Ritva, who immediately livens up when she notices I’m awake. She has stood by my bedside for hours. Once upon a time, back in distant 1968, she had been in Bulgaria for seven days. The best seven days of my life, she always says. I was twenty—young, leftist, and in love. Those three things never came together for me again, Ritva says. We must paint a strange picture for the doctors. A woman of sixty and an immobilized man of forty. The only thing we have in common is a year—1968. The year when she was happy is the year I was born. Without a visible connection between the two events.

  What worries me most at the moment is a terrifying hypothesis. I can’t raise my head to look. So I try to move my leg. Nothing happens. I can’t feel anything from the waist down. Suddenly I imagine that the sheet there is empty. I feel myself falling back into that thick milky whiteness I had just swum out of. When I swim out of it again, it is because of a searing pain. My eyes jerk open. Ritva is again standing by me, I tell her it hurts, she calls Nurse Painkiller. I gradually realize that the pain is coming from my leg, so it must be there in its place and I can even move it. It hurts, thank God. It’s there and it hurts.

  A week or two later, a cast-encased survivor, I’m lying at home, physically feeling the hours and minutes. I lie there throughout the summer of that year, serving it out like a prison sentence, without knowing for sure what crime I’ve committed. But that’s what all convicts say.

  Triple fracture to the left ankle, two plates, seven pins, two cracked ribs, again on the left side. I stare at the ceiling for hours, the recumbent one’s only sky, and remember all the ceilings I’ve lain beneath. The high one in Berlin and the low one of my childhood. The constellations of flies on it. The bare light bulb wrapped in newspaper, that sole lampshade.

  I recall the endless afternoons with which we were so generously endowed in that “once upon a time” of childhood, when I would again lie with my eyes open and stare up fixedly until the barely visible cracks and bumps in the ceiling started to change into strange mountains and seas upon which I set sail to distant lands. A few years later, the mountains and seas would magically transform into female hips, thighs, breasts, and curves. The more uneven and imperfect the surface, the more ships and women it hid.

  And thus my journeys naturally came to an end . . . I returned to the saddest place in the world, shattered. All that remained from several years of hotels, airports and train stations were a couple of notebooks filled with hastily jotted impressions. Now, as I page through them distractedly to kill time, I finally realize it—melancholy is slowly swamping the world . . . Time has somehow gotten stuck and autumn doesn’t want to give way, every season is autumn. Global autumn . . . Traveling doesn’t cure sorrow, either. I need to look for something else.

  The saddest place is the world.

  1Peyo Yavorov, the most famous Bulgarian poet from the early twentieth-century, whose short and turbulent marriage ended in their double suicide, 1913-1914.

  VIII.

  AN ELEMENTARY PHYSICS OF SORROW

  These notes are stored on old punch cards from the dawn of electronic computing devices, which have long since fallen out of use.

  QUANTA OF EQUIVOCATION

  One of the most mindboggling things in the physics of elementary particles is how important the very act of observation is on their behavior. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, as early as the 1920s quanta act like particles only when we observe them. The rest of the time, hidden from our gaze, they are part of a scattered and supposedly disinterested wave, in which we don’t know exactly what’s going on. Everything there is possible, unforeseeable and variable. But once they sense we’re watching them, they instantaneously start acting as we expect them to, orderly and logically.

  The world is the way we know it to be from the old textbooks only because (or when) it is under observation. Or as Idlis, Whitrow, and Dicke put it in the mid-twentieth century, “in order for the Universe to exist, it was necessary for observers to appear at some stage.” I’m watched, therefore I am.

  OK, fine, but if no one’s watching me, do I still exist? I live alone, no one comes over, no one calls. On the other hand, there’s always one big invisible observer, an eye we should never forget. The Old One, as Einstein called him. Maybe that’s precisely what quantum physics or metaphysics is telling us. If we exist, that means we’re being watched. There is something or someone that never lets us out of its sight. Death comes when that thing stops watching us, when it turns away from us.

  The world behind our backs is some kind of undefined quantum soup, says a Stanford physicist—but the second you turn around, it freezes into reality. I like that definition and never turn around too abruptly. I think about that teacher from kindergarten who threatened to pour my soup down my back if I didn’t eat it all. Then I would’ve found out what quantum reality is.

  I write in the first person to make sure that I’m still alive.

  I write in the third person to make sure that I’m not just a projection of my own self, that I’m three-dimensional and have a body. Sometimes I nudge a glass and note with satisfaction that it falls and breaks. So I do still exist and cause consequences.

  If no one is watching me, then I’ll have to watch myself, so as not to turn into quantum soup.

  Someone must constantly be watching and thinking about the world so that it exists. Or someone needs to be watching and thinking about the one who is watching and thinking about the world . . . Crazy stuff. Can I take on that round-the-clock duty?

  The physics of elementary particles rehabilitates randomness and uncertainty. Now that’s why I love it. Whereas Einstein himself was horrified precisely by this and grumbled in his letters: “The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the ‘Old One.’ I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” I, at any rate, am convinced that the Old One—just like the local geezers who spend their afternoons playing backgammon—nevertheless loves throwing dice.

  One remark. Quantum physics—perhaps so as not to turn entirely into metaphysics—avoids delving into the question of who that observer could be in order to have such a status. Are we including anything here but the eye of God? Does the eye of man count as capable of maintaining the world? Does the eye of a snail, a cat, or a violet figure in the equation?

  Well, we mustn’t forget, after all, that quantum physics explains things on the micro-level. But how can we be sure that God isn’t an elementary particle? It’s quite likely that he’s a proton, electron, or even a boson. God is a boson. It sounds nice. It sounds like God is a bison, Aya would say.

  However, He’s most likely a photon—which has a dual nature like all quanta, but a rest mass of absolute zero. And that’s why it can move at the speed of light. When we say that God is light, we don’t even realize how deeply we’ve gotten into quantum physics. Or else he’s a neutrino, maybe even faster than light and capable of unexpected transformations. That which the old Evangelists/physicists described as the Transfiguration of the Lord was a transformation of the neutrino. But I still would like Him to be an ant, a turtle, or a Ginkgo biloba tree.

  That which has not been told, just like that which has not happened—because they’re of the same order—possesses all possibilities, countless variations on how they could happen or be told.

  Alas, the story is linear and you have to get rid of the detours every time, wall up the side corridors. The classical narrative is an annulling of the possibilities that rain down on you from all sides. Before you fix its boundaries, the world is full of parallel versions and corridors. All possible outcomes potter about only in hesitation and indecisiveness. And quantum physics, filled with indeterminacy and uncertainty, has proved this.

  I try to leave space for other versions to happen, cavities in the story, more corridors, voices and rooms, unclosed-off stories, as well as secrets that we will not pry into . . . And there, where the story’s sin wa
s not avoided, hopefully uncertainty was with us.

  A QUESTION FROM THE QUANTUM PHYSICS OF READING

  Has anyone ever developed a quantum physics of literature? If there, too, the lack of an observer presupposes all manner of combinations, just imagine what kind of carnival is raging among the elementary particles of the novel. What on earth is happening between its covers when no one is reading it? Now there are questions that deserve some thought.

  EXPERIMENTS

  That popular experiment with the electron, in which it acts like a wave and passes through two openings at the same time, gives certain grounds for believing that it is possible to be in different places at the same time. But, as the Gaustine in me notes, we’re not talking about electrons weighing 180 lbs. and standing 6’2”. (If this were so, my grandfather would have stayed in both villages—the Hungarian and the Bulgarian one, bringing up both of his sons, living out both of his lives . . .)

  Luckily, the things I’m concerned with have no weight. The past, sorrow, literature—only these three weightless whales interest me. But quantum physics and the natural sciences have turned their backs on them. If Aristotle had known that the formal division of physics and metaphysics would definitively and artificially partition the universe of knowledge, he surely would have burned his work himself. Or at least he would have combined the parts of it.

  A while back, under one of my pen names, I published a novel based on the atomism of Leuccipus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera. Ultimately, it turns out that they discovered quanta way back in the fifth century BC. Lots of time needed to pass for everything to be forgotten. I liked those pre-Socratics, those first quantum physicists, who coolly and boldly painted a picture of a world made only of atoms and emptiness. Endless emptiness and countless atoms floating around in it. I wanted to transfer the model of atomism to literature and to discover whether the encounter between individual atoms of classic literature would produce new matter for the novel. An atomic novel of opening lines floating in the void.

  This was a wholly serious experiment, but it was taken more as a postmodernist joke, grasped in terms of its metaphorics rather than its physics. Physicists don’t read novels. Which disappointed me greatly and caused me to withdraw from publishing for a decade or so.

  Here’s what I’m interested in now. Can going back in time by recalling everything down to the last detail, with all senses engaged, bring about a critical point? Can it flip some switch and cause the whole machinery of the Universe to start going backward? It’s on the edge in any case, so the only redemptive move is backward. Minute by minute, during this hour everything that was an hour ago will happen. The entirety of today is replaced by yesterday, yesterday by the day before, and so on and so forth further and further back, we slowly step away from the edge with a creak. I don’t know whether we can meddle in those impending past days. We’ll have to relive our prior failures and depressions, but also a few happy minutes among them. There’s no getting around . . .

  . . . the new injustice of death. Those, who at the moment of the reversal had already lived eighty years, will live another eighty, backward. Those who had lived not as long, say thirty, forty, or fifty years, will have to be satisfied with that same amount. But let’s note that they will be heading toward their own youth and childhood. Ever happier at the end of their lives, ever younger, ever more adored. Happily wobbling on their unsteady little toddler’s feet, having forgotten language, cooing and gurgling, until the day comes for them to go back home. Thus, I, born on January 1, 1968, will be able to die again on January 1, 1968. That’s what I call complete universal harmony. To die the hour and minute you were born, after passing through your whole life twice. From one end to the other and back again.

  G. G.

  January 1, 1968—January 1, 1968

  Lived happily for 150 years.

  (Everyone can insert their own name and date here.)

  They claim that life arose on earth three billion years ago. With this mechanism, we can guarantee at least three billion more years of life. If someone else has a better offer, then be my guest.

  Another gravity is pressing in on us, one not found in classical physics, one which must be overcome, the gravity of time. That gravitational delay, which Einstein described back in 1915, doesn’t work for me. In 1976 NASA confirmed that in the microgravity of space, time really does slow down a teeny bit, and this gave rise to the legend that people don’t age in space. The myth of eternal youth was again on its way to being revived. A dozen or so aging millionaire matrons must’ve glanced up at the sky as if toward an eternal sanatorium, calculating how much a stay there with their beloved fox terriers would cost, because what’s . . .

  . . . the point of being young if your pooch is pushing up daisies? This legend even reached us, I remember it vaguely, but being all of eight years old I hardly paid any attention to it. In 2010, they actually measured that time lapse with an interferometer. Yes, there was a slowing of the cesium atom (that’s what they used), but it was insignificantly small—over a few billion years there’s a delay of a hundredth of a second. Those who had hoped to stay forever young in 1976 surely hadn’t lived to see this highly disappointing result.

  My goal isn’t to slow time by a few hundredths of a second over a billion years, which I don’t have at my disposal in any case. And not in outer space, which I have no particular soft spot for (even the bus makes me car sick). I want to bring back a slice of the past, a pint of drained-away time right here, within the confines of one insultingly short human life.

  NEW EXPERIMENTS

  I practice concentrated and close “observation.” I realized relatively early on that the shorter the time period I want to recreate (replicate), the better my chances. I gave up on the idea of my whole childhood. For some time I tried one chosen year. To remember that year in detail, to reconstruct it personally and historically, leaving nothing out.

  I picked the year of my birth, because the infant has a more limited and pure world, which in that sense is easier to reconstruct, with fewer extraneous noises. So here’s the new 1968. By happy coincidence, I was born in its first days, so the two stories, mine, small and piss-soaked, and its, grand (and also piss-soaked), could unfold in parallel. The wet cloth diapers, the January cold, my mother’s warm skin, the first signs of spring in the Latin Quarter, nighttime colic, summer in Prague, the international youth festival in Sofia, “brotherly” troops in Czechoslovakia, first tooth . . . Everything was important. After a few months I was lying on the floor exhausted, crushed by the world’s entropy. I realized that it was beyond my strength and stamina to build—as if from matchboxes—a year in its real dimensions with all of its scents, sounds, cats, rain, and newsworthy events. I’ve kept the draft of that failed experiment.

  I need to narrow the range of the experiment. I decided on a month from another year, August 1986, I’m eighteen, my last month of freedom, after which my mandatory military service awaits me. A month, in which you say farewell to everything for two years—actually for forever, but you don’t know that then. You let your hair grow long, you try to get to home base with your girl. Late at night, when your parents are asleep, you sneak out with a friend into the city’s empty streets, you go to the river and look at the dark windows of the panel-block apartment buildings, on the verge of yelling “Sleep tight, ya morons!” à la Holden Caulfield or whatever it was he said . . .

  . . . but in the end you don’t do it. At the end of the month you go to the barbershop farthest away to get a buzz cut. You watch your hair falling to the floor and you try not to start bawling. You leave the barbershop already a different age, crestfallen, freaked out, sporting the hat you had prepared in advance, and you take the shortest route home. A few days later you’ll have to show up at the appointed place in some strange city—with a shaved head and a bag filled with all the things from the list of what a recruit needs. I’ve kept that list in one of the boxes.

  That was more or less the month from whic
h I needed to reconstruct every moment and sensation with all of their subtlest oscillations. It wasn’t so easy. Yes, there was fear during that month, but it was thousands of variations on fear, in some of them it looked like a radical dose of daring. Yes, there was sorrow, but the atoms of this sorrow moved quite freely and chaotically (sorrow’s state of aggregation is gaseous) and in the best-case scenario I could only follow its twists and turns, the smoke that smoldered nearby. I lit up my first cigarettes, I now realize, to give a body to this sorrow, bluish, light-gray, vanishing. I remembered everything clearly, but I couldn’t manage to get back into that former body. What I used to be able to do—entering into different bodies and stories with the ease of a man entering his own home—now turned out to be out of reach.

  EPIPHANIES

  It happened when I least expected it.

  It was a late winter afternoon, the snow was melting. A few days before I completely stopped leaving the basement. I was walking ever more slowly, looking at the houses, the Sunday’s empty streets, January . . . It occurred to me, for the first time with such clarity (the clarity of the January air) that what remains are not the exceptional moments, not the events, but precisely the nothingeverhappens. Time, freed from the claim to exceptionality. Memories of afternoons, during which nothing happened. Nothing but life, in all its fullness. The faint scent of wood smoke, the droplets, the sense of solitude, the silence, the creaking of snow beneath your feet, the vague uneasiness as twilight falls, slowly and irreversibly.