by Ruth Ozeki
I picture you now, a young woman of . . . wait, let me do the math . . . twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Something like that. Maybe in Tokyo. Maybe in Paris in a real French café, looking up from your page while you search for a word, watching the people go by. I don’t think you are dead.
Wherever you are, I know you are writing. You couldn’t give that up. I can see you clutching your pen. Are you still using purple ink or have you outgrown that? Do you still bite your nails?
I don’t see you doing a company job, but I don’t think you’re a freeter, either. I suspect you might be in graduate school, studying history, writing your dissertation on women anarchists in the Taishō Democracy, or the Instability of the Female “I.” (For one crazy moment, I thought that monograph I found online might even be yours, but it vanished before I could discover who wrote it.) At any rate, I hope you’ve finished your book about your old Jiko’s life. I’d like to read that sometime. I’d like to read old Jiko’s I-novel, too.
I don’t really know why I’m writing this. I know I can’t find you if you don’t want to be found. And I know you’ll be found if you want to be.
In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that? Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it’s true, even though I don’t really like uncertainty. I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.
But having said this, I also just want to say that if you ever change your mind and decide you would like to be found, I’ll be waiting. Because I really would like to meet you sometime. You’re my kind of time being, too.
Yours,
Ruth
P.S. I do have a cat, and he’s sitting on my lap, and his forehead smells like cedar trees and fresh sweet air. How did you know?
Appendices
APPENDIX A: ZEN MOMENTS
The Zen nun Jiko Yasutani once told me in a dream that you can’t understand what it means to be alive on this earth until you understand the time being, and in order to understand the time being, she said, you have to understand what a moment is.
In my dream, I asked her, What on earth is a moment?
A moment is a very small particle of time. It is so small that one day is made of 6,400,099,980 moments.
When I looked it up afterward, I discovered that this was the exact number cited by Zen Master Dōgen in his masterwork, the Shōbōgenzō (The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye).
Numerals resist the eye, so let me spell it out in words: six billion, four hundred million, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty. That’s how many moments Zen Master Dōgen posited are in one day, and after she rattled off the number, old Jiko snapped her fingers. Her fingers were crazily bent and twisted with arthritis, so she wasn’t very good at snapping, but somehow she got her point across.
Please try it, she said. Did you snap? Because if you did, that snap equals sixty-five moments.
The granularity of the Zen view of time becomes clear if you do the math,163 or you can just take Jiko’s word for it. She leaned forward, adjusting her black-framed glasses on her nose and peering through the thick, murky lenses, and then she spoke once more.
If you start snapping your fingers now and continue snapping 98,463,077 times without stopping, the sun will rise and the sun will set, and the sky will grow dark and the night will deepen, and everyone will sleep while you are still snapping, until finally, sometime after daybreak, when you finish up your 98,463,077th snap, you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.
She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.
That’s what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.
And just like that, you die.
APPENDIX B: QUANTUM MECHANICS
Quantum mechanics is time being, but so is classical physics. Both describe the interactions of matter and energy as they move through time and space. The difference is one of scale. At the smallest scales and atomic increments, energy and matter start to play by different rules, which classical physics can’t account for. So quantum mechanics attempts to explain these quirks by positing a new set of principles that apply to atomic and subatomic particles, among which are:
• superposition: by which a particle can be in two or more places or states at once (i.e., Zen Master Dōgen is both alive and dead?)
• entanglement: by which two particles can coordinate their properties across space and time and behave like a single system (i.e., a Zen master and his disciple; a character and her narrator; old Jiko and Nao and Oliver and me?)
• the measurement problem: by which the act of measuring or observation alters what is being observed (i.e., the collapse of a wave function; the telling of a dream?)
If Zen Master Dōgen had been a physicist, I think he might have liked quantum mechanics. He would have naturally grasped the all-inclusive nature of superposition and intuited the interconnectedness of entanglement. As a contemplative who was also a man of action, he would have been intrigued by the notion that attention might have the power to alter reality, while at the same time understanding that human consciousness is neither more nor less than the clouds and water, or the hundreds of grasses. He would have appreciated the unbounded nature of not knowing.
APPENDIX C: RAMBLING THOUGHTS
The day the mountains move has come.
Or so I say, though no one will believe me.
The mountains were merely asleep for a while.
But in ages past, they had moved, as if they were on fire.
If you don’t believe me, that’s fine with me.
All I ask is that you believe this and only this,
That at this very moment, women are awakening from their deep slumber.
If I could but write entirely in the first person,
I, who am a woman.
If I could write entirely in the first person,
I, I.
—Yosano Akiko
These are the first lines from Yosano Akiko’s longer poem Sozorogoto (Rambling Thoughts), which were first published in the inaugural issue of the feminist magazine Seitō (Bluestocking), in September 1911.
APPENDIX D: TEMPLE NAMES
After doing some research on Japanese temple nomenclature, I realized that Jigenji was the name of the temple, and Hiyuzan was the so-called mountain name, or sangō (). According to early Chinese tradition, Zen masters would retreat to a distant mountaintop, far away from the distractions of towns and urban centers, where they would build a solitary meditation hut and devote themselves to practice. As word of their spiritual accomplishments spread, disciples would climb the mountain to seek them out, and before long communities sprang up, roads were built, and vast temple complexes were constructed, bearing the name of the formerly remote mountain. (How did word spread? How did these viral networks and reputation economies develop before the Internet?)
When Zen came to Japan, the custom of giving a mountain name to a temple persisted, regardless of whether there was a mountain beneath it or not. As a result, even temples built on the coastal plains of metropolitan Tokyo bear mountain names, and no one seems to mind.
There are several possible kanji for the temple name Jigenji, but the most likely combination is , consisting of the characters for merciful, eye-ball, and temple. The character for gen, or eyeball, is the same as the one in Master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye.
The most probable kanji for Hiyuzan seems to be (Hidden Hot Spring Mountain); however, when I first read the name, the combination of characters that popped to my mind was , which can be
translated as Mount Metaphor. I couldn’t help but think of René Daumal’s brilliant work Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. The object of Daumal’s quest is a unique and geographically real mountain, whose summit is inaccessible but whose base is accessible. “The door,” he writes, “to the invisible must be visible.” Mount Analogue is where peradam can be found, an extraordinary and unknown crystalline object that can be seen only by those who seek it.
All of this might seem like a digression and quite beside the point, but when old Jiko’s temple proved so elusive, thinking of Mount Analogue gave me an enormous sense of hope.
APPENDIX E: SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT
The experiment goes like this:
A cat is put into a sealed steel box. With him in the box is a diabolical mechanism: a glass flask of hydrocyanic acid, a small hammer aimed at the flask, and a trigger that will either cause the hammer to release, or not. The factor that controls the release is the behavior of a small bit of radioactive material being monitored by a Geiger counter. If within, say, an hour, one of the atoms in the radioactive substance decays, the Geiger counter will detect it and trigger the hammer to shatter the flask, releasing the acid, and the cat will die. However, there is an equal probability that no atom will decay within that hour, in which case the trigger will hold and the cat will live.
It seems simple enough; however, the point of this thought experiment is not to torture the cat. The point is not to kill it, or save it, or even to calculate the probability of its succumbing to either fate. The point is to illustrate the perplexing paradox of the so-called measurement problem in quantum mechanics: what happens to entangled particles in a quantum system when they are observed and measured.
The cat and the atom represent two entangled particles.164 Entangled means that they share certain characteristics or behaviors, in this case their fate within the box: decayed atom = dead cat; and undecayed atom = live cat. The two behave as one. Together in their box, the entangled atom/cat are part of a quantum system that is being measured by an observer, who, let’s say, is you.
Now, hold that thought for a moment, because in order to proceed, we need to understand two other fundamental quantum phenomena: superposition and the measurement problem.
Imagine that instead of an entangled atom/cat in the box, you were measuring a single electron. Before you open the box to observe it, that electron exists as a wave function, which is an array of itself in all of the places it might possibly be in the box. This quantum phenomenon is called superposition: that a particle can be in all of its possible states at once. (Think of a superimposed photograph of a pacing tiger in a pen, taken with a shutter that exposed the film every couple of seconds. In the superimposed photograph, the tiger would appear to be a blur or smear. In a microscopic quantum universe, governed by the principle of superposition, the tiger is the smear.)
The measurement problem arises the moment you open the box to observe the particle. When you do, the wave function appears to collapse into a single state, fixed in time and space. (To use the tiger analogy, the smeared tiger becomes a singular beast again.)
Okay, now, let’s go back to the entangled cat and radioactive atom. The state we’re measuring here is not the location of a tiger, but rather the entanglement of atom/cat. Instead of the possible positions of the tiger in the cage, we’re measuring degrees of the cat’s aliveness, its existential status, as it were.
We know that on account of the measurement problem, the moment you open the box to measure the cat’s state, you will find the cat either dead or alive. Fifty percent of the time the cat will be alive. The other 50 percent of the time, the cat will be dead. Whichever it is, the cat’s state is singular and fixed in time and space.
However, before you open the box to measure it, the cat’s state must be smeared and multiple, like the blurred tiger. Due to the quantum principles of entanglement and superposition, until you observe it, the cat must be both dead and alive, at the same time.
Of course, this conclusion is absurd, which was exactly Schrödinger’s point. But the questions his thought experiment poses are interesting: At what point in time does a quantum system stop being a superposition of all possible states and become a singular, either/or state instead?
And, by extension, does the existence of a singular cat, either dead or alive, require an external observer, i.e., you? And if not you, then who? Can the cat be an observer of itself? And without an external observer, do we all just exist in an array of all possible states at once?
There have been many attempts to interpret this paradox. The Copenhagen interpretation, formulated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1927, supported the theory of wave function collapse, positing that at the point when observation occurs, the superposed quantum system undergoes a collapse from the many into the one, and that this collapse must happen because the reality of the macroscopic world demands it.165 The problem is that nobody has been able to come up with the math to support this.
The many-worlds interpretation, proposed by the American physicist Hugh Everett in 1957, challenges this theory of wave function collapse, positing instead that the superposed quantum system persists and branches.
At every juncture—in every Zen moment when possibilities arise—a schism occurs, worlds branch, and multiplicity ensues.
Every instance of either/or is replaced by an and. And an and, and an and, and an and, and another and . . . adding up to an infinitely all-inclusive, and yet mutually unknowable, web of many worlds.
The astrophysicist Adam Frank told me that what’s important to remember about quantum mechanics is that while there are many interpretations, including the Copenhagen and many-worlds hypotheses, quantum mechanics itself is a calculus. It’s a machine for predicting experimental results. It’s a finger, pointing at the moon.
Professor Frank was refering to an old Zen koan about the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, who was illiterate. When asked how he could understand the truth of the Buddhist texts if he couldn’t read the words, the Sixth Patriarch raised his arm and pointed to the moon. Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon’s location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing.
“Not same,” old Jiko would have said. “Not different, either.”
APPENDIX F: HUGH EVERETT
Hugh Everett published what came to be called his “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1957, in Reviews of Modern Physics, when he was twenty-seven years old. It was his doctoral thesis at Princeton. It was not well received. The leading physicists of his day called him crazy. They called him stupid. Everett, disheartened, gave up on quantum physics and went into weapons development. He worked for the Pentagon’s Weapons System Evaluation Group. He wrote a paper on military game theory, entitled “Recursive Games,” which is a classic in the field. He wrote war games software that would simulate nuclear war, and he was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He advised the White House on nuclear warfare development and strategy during the Cold War, and he wrote the original software for targeting cities and civilian population centers with atomic weapons, should the nuclear Cold War turn hot. He’d already written the mathematical proof of his many-worlds interpretation, and he believed that anything he could imagine would occur, or already had. It’s not surprising that he drank heavily.
His family life was a mess. He had a remote and troubled relationship with his kids. His daughter, Liz, who suffered from manic depression and addiction, tried to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills. Her brother, Mark, found her on the bathroom floor and rushed her to the hospital, where the doctors were able to restart her heart. When Mark returned home from the hospital, Everett looked up from his Newsweek and remarked, “I didn’t know she was so sad.”
Two months later, Everett himself died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. In this world, he was dead, but he believed that in many worlds he was immortal. His wife kept his cremated remains in a filing cabinet in their dining room before eventually complying with his wish and throwing them in the garbage. Mark went on to have a successful career as a rock musician, but Liz’s life spiraled downward. When she finally succeeded in killing herself with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1996, she wrote a suicide note that said:
Please burn me and DON’T FILE ME. Please sprinkle me in some nice body of water . . . or the garbage, maybe that way I’ll end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w/ Daddy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arai, Paula Kane Robinson. Women Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Bardsley, Jan. The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Essays and Fiction from Seitō, 1911–16. Ann Arbor: Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Number 60. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2007.
Byrne, Peter. The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Daumal, René. Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992.
Dōgen, Eihei. Shōbōgenzō. Translated by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and Chodo Cross. Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, dBET PDF Version, 2008.
———. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo. Edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi. Translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi, Peter Levett, and others. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2011.
