“And to think I gave up listening to you talk about draperies for this,” complained Snow. “I thought that was Einstein.”
“No, Einstein was Relativity.”
“I thought that was Heisenberg.”
“No, he was Quantum Theory.”
“Which? Heisenberg or Bohr?”
“Bohr. No, Heisenberg. Well, both.”
“Holy Hockey!” Snow swore. “My mind feels like it’s back on the mushrooms again.”
“He never went into the corners you know."
"Who?"
"Einstein. He hung around the blue line, dreaming up crazy theories and letting the other physicists slug it out in the corners doing the math to prove his beautiful theories worked.”
“How do you keep track of all this?”
“There’s a lot of time for thinking sitting around in the gulag.”
“I thought time didn’t exist?”
Magda shrugged. “What the fuck do I know? I’ve probably just eaten too many mushrooms.”
“Start over again. From the beginning,” Snow demanded. “Go ahead. And take your time.”
“It’s not hard,” Magda insisted. “Just basic Physics. “First came the classical approach, which said there was only one reality at a time. Everything was separate, it was an either/or world that pretty much mirrored what came from our senses. For Newton, there were three dimensions of space, each of them absolute. Time was absolute. It had no connection to space or the rest of the physical world. It talked about solid bodies moving through empty space. The problem was it stopped working when you added fast-moving bodies with small numbers of molecules.
“Einstein fixed that by re-defining Time and Space. Space, he said, is not empty or even just three dimensional. Objects are not solid. Time is relative, not an absolute. For example, two people travelling at different speeds see the same thing differently. They even age differently at different speeds. Moreover, neither existed by itself; space and time are intimately connected in a ‘space-time continuum.’ Reality can’t be measured with just our senses. Like Geiger counters, all we can ‘see’ are the consequences, not the phenomenon itself.
“For Newton, everything was cause and effect. If A happens, B’s gotta be the result. Kick a football and it will do exactly the same thing every time. Einstein said, ‘No, it depends on what’s involved.’ Then Heisenberg came along and said they were both full of shit. Newton and Einstein’s ideas only worked on objects with a huge number of molecules. Start looking at small objects and the result was uncertain; it depended on probabilities. There might be a sixty percent chance of an object doing one thing, a thirty percent chance of it doing another and ten percent of yet a third. In fact, all three possibilities existed at the same time. All exist simultaneously, and all are equally real. Which one it ended up being depended on how we observed the object. Reality is a complicated web of relations between parts of a unified whole, or interconnectedness. Everything is part of everything else. As a result, anything that ‘could’ possibly happen, ‘must’ happen. Anything possible was in fact mandatory. All is interconnected, interrelated and interdependent. Everything is simply a manifestation of the oneness in one guise or another. Sound familiar?”
“Buddhism?” asked Snow.
“Yeah. Remember the multi-verse? When you came over the other night for the soup and mushrooms? We’re back to it again. Buddhism teaches reality cannot be grasped with our brains. They’re too primitive. Everything that comes out of them is just illusion. We don’t have a uni-verse, we have a multi-verse, an infinite number of universes existing together. They’re constantly splitting and interacting and affecting each other. Each event in our universe has energy, like a light wave and casts interference patters in all the other universes. Probabilities. It could be here, it could be there; in fact, all those possibilities exist. Every time a new possibility becomes possible under quantum theory, another multi-verse splits off.
“You and everything around you are a cloud of probabilities actualizing yourselves in the quantum field. Nothing you sense is reliable -- no sound, smell, taste, touch or sight actually exists; no, scratch that, they all exist. You are swimming through the quantum soup, trying to understand infinity with the crude tools of the five senses. Your brain disappears and reappears at every second, and yet this magic act occurs too quickly for you to detect it. You try to change the whirling dance of the cosmos into slow-motion events that seem ‘real.’
“The brain is Newtonian, thoughts are not. Our thoughts and minds exist in the quantum world, not the ‘real’ one. Thinking is at root of everything we do. Every thought causes a shift in the patterns and probabilities. With your slightest desire, you make the universe tremble. Reality is the result of complex, unbeknownst negotiations between the observer and the observed.”
Reality is in the eye of the beholder.
Reality is the eye. Behold her.
Reality is the "I".
Be.
Hold her.
“The future is merely a necklace of ‘nows’.” -- Dennis Michael McKenna
Scrotum was lying on the desk, staring intently out the window intently at a group of swallows pecking seeds off of the ground. They hopped left, Scrotum’s head turned left. Turn to the right, and so did the cat’s head.
“What do you see?” Snow said, rubbing the cat behind the ears. “Birds? You know what you could do with those birds if I opened the door and you could catch them?”
Scrotum looked at Snow like he had discovered how to fuse hydrogen atoms.
“Put them in your mouth and eat ‘em!” Snow growled, rubbing his knuckles fondly over the cat’s skull.
Scrotum turned back to the window and looked at the swallows like he’d never thought of that before.
“Do you really believe this?” Snow asked Magda.
“No.”
“Good. ‘Cause it’s nuts.”
“Yeah, it is,” agreed Magda. “I don’t believe it. I believe it’s even crazier than that. Time marches on, people say. But does Time have to march? Can’t it sashay? Dawdle? Take a rest? Not only do I think time doesn’t exist, I think it’s got multiple dimensions, the same way space does. Space has at least three dimensions that we know of. How could time possibly have only one? One direction? One flow? One way? It must have dimensions we don’t know about. Nothing is the only one of its kind. Vegetables? There’s vegetables I ain’t even tried yet, like okra. Sins? The same; so many I can’t wait to try. Love? Myriad kinds. God? There’s a whole passel of ‘em. Time? Only one? Come on, get real. You know what I think?”
“I’m a lot of things, Magda. Omniscient isn’t one of them.”
“I think time is informed by entropy — the level of disorder in a system — and that the movement from low to high entropy as the universe expands establishes the direction in which time flows. Furthermore, I think our universe is just one member – and a relatively young one at that -- of a large family or universes and that in some of our sibling universes time runs in the opposite direction. Some others, don’t experience time at all; once a universe cools off and reaches maximum entropy, there is no past or present.”
“I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about,” Snow admitted. “I can tell you this, though. Whatever they did to your mind back in that gulag psychiatric ward ain’t pretty.”
“In the strict formulation of the law of causality—if we know the present, we can calculate the future—it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.”
-- Werner Heisenberg
“There is nothing in any scientific equation that says time can’t flow in any direction. Newtonian, Einsteinian, Klingon? What kind of math doesn’t matter. And how come there’s only two axes, past and future? Why can’t there be many?”
“Then why doesn’t it?”
“Why doesn’t it what?”
“Move backwards? Sideways? Along a diagonal? Kitty corner? In figure eights? In cute little hearts dotting th
e letter ‘I?’ How come when we drop an egg it only flashes forward and we see it smashed on the floor? How come we never see the smashed egg go backwards and recombine into egg white and yolk inside a perfectly sealed shell?”
“Entropy.”
“Entropy, huh?”
“Yeah, entropy.”
“What’s entropy?”
“You are, Snow. You’re Mr. Entropy, Snow. You’ve given up on everything, except being a man. It just keeps slipping away with you. What you need to learn is that if you don't keep putting energy back into the system, it's just going to slip back into nothingness. Like you sucking on that vodka tit in your porta-cabin. I’ll bet your mother even had to have your birth induced.”
"Don’t talk about my mother.”
“You know what you are, Snow?”
“No, what?”
“The world’s longest-surviving suicide victim, that’s what you are.”
“It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact, it stays where it is. This idea of passing may be called time, but it is an incorrect idea, for since one sees it only as passing, one cannot understand that it stays just where it is.”
-- Dogen (Zen Master)
“Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, measures disorder in a system, which states that unless you add energy to something, it degrades; its mixed-up-ness will increase. The one thing it won’t do is stay the same. Everything before and everything after is going to have different order than it does now, one way or another it’s going to be different. So it works all ways, past and future and other directions we don’t have names for yet. How does the English saying go? The only thing constant is change?”
“I still got the same problem. We only ever see the egg go forwards, into the future smashed on the floor or frying up into an omelette on the stove.”
“With mushrooms? And garlic? And dill?” Magda was turning into Pavlov’s dog just thinking about it.
“If you want.”
“I knew you’d get to that. The arrow of time.”
“With elephants, right?” Snow teased. “Arrows to shoot the elephants.”
Magda ignored him. “If I can’t talk about your mother, you will not talk about shooting elephants.
“I told you. Your problem is that you’re still thinking with your brain. Using it to measure reality is like using a thermometer to measure radiation. Our brains were designed to understand hunting and gathering, running away from tigers, chasing after pussy: medium-sized objects moving in three dimensions at moderate speeds. The problem is not everything in the world falls into that category. At the atomic or cosmic level -- atoms and galaxies, in other dimensions or at the speed of light, using our brains to figure out what’s going on is like using Jello to tighten bolts.
“The brain sees time as series of snapshots but that’s all just a delusion. Our brains tell us otherwise -- we have memories, we see cause and effect -- but it’s all a huge illusion. We can’t prove we woke up this morning. We guess we did because that’s what our heads tell us and it tallies with our conversations with others. We live in a universe with neither past nor future. We live in an eternal present, we only experience moments we call ‘now.’ Each ‘now’ is perfectly contained.
“For a convinced physicist, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion. Each instant is like a photograph, a unique snapshot. In this way, we are alive and dead at the same time. The particular arrangement of particles in the universe at this very moment includes the neurons in my brain which contains, my memories, and this conspires to give me the overwhelming impression that I did indeed wake up, etc.
“Imagine you’re sitting here in your porta-cabin watching Muffy the Vampire Layer and slugging back vodka at 9:00 pm. Five minutes later your glass is empty and clock reads 9:05. It looks like the same you, the same room, the same glass. It’s not. Quantum mechanics dictates that in fact they are very different. They just appear very similar.
“There are other possibilities for you and your booze. There is the possibility that at 9:05 you will find your glass is still full. There’s even the possibility your porta-cabin has been has been hit by a meteor. The possibility isn’t great, but it exists. The complex rules of quantum mechanics ties the separate snapshots together in some fashion and tends to exclude the least likely snapshots. Time does not flow. It doesn’t pass. It just is. Past and future aren’t different places. ‘When’ doesn’t exist. Asking when depends where you are. Space-Time? It’s a continuum. In some places, ‘when’ was hundreds of years ago. In some other places, it hasn’t happened yet.
“You know why we say we ‘tell’ time, don’t you?”
“No, why?”
“Because time is a fiction – story – and can only be told, not proven. Stories survive. Tales. Culture. Myth. Cans of whipped cream and cell phones with voice mail don’t. Instead of us telling time, it’s been telling us. What we’ve got to do is dissolve the ego and kill time. Not while it away, pass it, but annihilate it. Destroy it. Slaughter the motherfucker. The only good time is a dead time.”
“God does not play dice with the universe.” – Albert Einstein
“God does play dice with the universe, but they’re loaded dice.”
--John Ford
“Not only does God play dice, he hides them.” -- Stephen Hawking
"Who are you to tell God what to do?" -- Niels Bohr
That night, after Magda left, Snow decided to tackle her book. It had been awhile since he’d last sat down and tried to decipher piles of words pressed between two covers. Reading took a concentration and interest that had been in short supply for a long time. Tonight, he got through the first couple of chapters of Animal Farm before his old ennui took over and he flipped through the channels on his new TV then hooked up his laptop to the Web and connected to the world. He had gotten as far as the part where the windmill gets destroyed in a storm. On the internet, the Edmonton Journal told him the Oilers had lost. Again. What else was new? They hadn’t been a good team since he had been living on the ranch and thought life was still worth living. Next, he checked out Pig’s new web site. As usual, by nine o’clock he could barely keep his eyes open and fell asleep with the book across his chest. Reams of four-hour nights had a way of catching up with you.
Snow woke up from the weight of Scrotum on his chest and a vague sense of confusion over whether four legs or two legs were bad or good. The cat was licking his nose. Its rough sand-papery tongue scraped across the bridge. There was a soft purring hum warming his chest. Wake up slowly and leisurely and your dreams disappear like mist melting in the sunrise. Get jolted awake and it will remain full-formed there for you to decipher.
“Hey, I know,” said Snow to the cat. “Let’s lick our bums.”
He’d had three dreams, three that he could remember anyway, all seeming to be happening at the same time. In the first dream, he was still living and working in the oil camp along with the same people who lived there in real life, but somehow they had all been turned into animals. Pig had turned into a large pig called Napoleon, who ran the place and expertly manipulated all those around him. The Doctor was another pig called Squealer, who went around convincing animals that every single thing Napoleon did was brilliant and trying to convince them how much happier they were now. Kolya was an old donkey called Benjamin, who’d been around so long and suffered so much that he was most content now to just stay out of harm’s way and live his life out as best he could. Arkady and Frantisek were huge draft horses whose mantra was that Napoleon was always right and they could solve every problem simply by working harder. Magda? Magda was a bird able to flit in and out of the oil camp through virtue of her ability to fly and enchant the animals with tales of Sugar Candy Mountain. And him? Snow? Snow was Snow – well, Snowball at least – a pig who Napoleon felt threatened by and would do anything to get out the way. Scrotum was Scrotum, a cat that slept most of the time and ignored everything around him unless it meant a morsel o
f fish or getting his cheeks scratched. He could talk, but the only thing he was interested in saying was. “Put it in your mouth and eat it!”
In the second dream, a group of physicists stood around arguing while another group of gods stood around a crap table playing dice. The table would appear and disappear, fading into and out of reality, according to which physicist was winning the argument.
Finally, in the third dream, an elephant with a mouth full of mushrooms barged through both other dreams and scattered everyone. That was when he had become aware of Scrotum licking his nose. When Snow looked at him, the cat meowed and rolled over to go to sleep. No putting it in his mouth and eating it or licking his bum tonight. Snow himself was stuck the rest of night watching porn on his new TV: Monty's Python and the Holey Girl. For the benefit of who don’t know, it’s a story about King Arthur’s knights on a search for the Holy Grail in Camelot. Snow thought the production values were okay, but the title should have been Came A Lot instead. Too many shots of the guys, not enough of the girls. Good god! He couldn’t believe this. Now he was becoming a porn expert. Maybe he’d been here too long.
In the course of his work, Doctor Bandar spent a lot of time on administrative matters as well as the medical ones. Besides his duties patching people up in the clinic, he was responsible for stocking and staffing it as well. He also had to keep records of all the patients who went through the clinic and details of their treatment as well. Finally, he was Pig’s chief sycophant and factotum. When the camp boss told the camp doctor to turn his head and cough, he looked like Linda Blair in the exorcist regurgitating pea soup.
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