THE PHYSICIST
Bizarre Love Triangle
I am a physicist. I am not a writer. Yet all the writers—all of the failures—they come to me. Everyone comes to me, they seek my attention. Why? Because I have written about metaphysics. Because I have said that God is the source of all scientific discoveries. It’s true. But I am an empiricist, like Tesla, it’s just that I don’t create splendors of light in Arizona, no, I specialize in matrix mechanics, the quantal domain of the statistical nature of the material world.
What must my wife think, wasting my time with all of these writer-failures, whose compensation is to write their own personal physics and bounce them off me for an approbation to sooth their wretched egos whenever their fiction is rejected. I must be out of my mind! And what do I receive, what do I receive in return? Their haughty reflections on my approbations of their skinny lives, their skinny thoughts on science. As if they were their thoughts. The dunces of the world, many of the rulers past and present, have said that that is a gift. Make it look as if the thoughts you put out to the desperate egotist – most people are – are their own thoughts, that they are the ones who came up with them. But I am not a ruler of the world, and I am no dunce. Ah, so I’m a fool. Well, at least I’ve ratted that out. Come to think of it, that’s what my wife calls me, a fool, “you’re a fool, Adam. What do you care for these people?” She doesn’t add “. . .and their petty thoughts.” My wife is not the hysterical type, she just puts the question straight to me. I am never able to come up with a proper answer to her. Oh, as for my colleagues at the Institute, my peers at international conferences, I always have proper answers for her about them, but ninety-nine per cent of my peers are also in need of my approbation of their wretched egos, or else they approbate themselves, the implicit image is not a beautiful one.
I am no Bomin, I can’t take care of all of them! Bomin, who was smarter than the gouty bunch of famous German professors and today’s Tech CEOs, was able to catch on to the five per cent that’s always lost in translation, I mean the five per cent of everything—what an intelligent man nearly beating out the mysteries of the Church that way, which after all can only be beating out empirical constants that are simply rules of thumb, mm, and Wittgenstein at his least timid, mm, but Wittgenstein was not such the fool as Bomin, mmmm, Wittgenstein just captured and shew.
Well.
What about my discoveries? They are significant, they are cited as such, they are peer reviewed, and I’m aware, I am a conscious one, I calibrate the 5% rule to stay closer to the Truth, that’s right, the Truth. “Dr. Adam Ledbik, discoverer of ‘The Matrix Pole Theory of Magnetic Fields.’” Still, we mustn’t try to be too perfect after Einstein.
So I do move towards ‘literature’ and I’m aware of that. Think about it. Newton was a Mason and was more known in his lifetime for his life-long study and monumental expertise in and fathoming of Astrology. He knocked out the physical laws of the universe in a few months, so he had to do something! That’s partly a joke, but altogether true. Goethe was a scientist of light: you can be sure Wittgenstein loved Goethe’s Fiats. Gorky said that had Tolstoy not been (or become?) a writer, he would have been (or become?) a great scientist. Not improbable, that one, irrelevant as to whether he would have been one or become one: the one implies the other: and what the Western professors won’t talk about in Groucho Marx. So I’m ratting. Come to think of it, I could rat on Heidegger and Shakespeare at the same time in two languages: ‘To be or not to be. . .’ ‘Dasein.’ Aber ‘Nicht-Dasein’? Ha! And Goethe’s Verities: the Sunny Nature Qualities all he had after his failed run with Newton on the color spectrum, or the culmination of his theory of light? God knows! Not in this part of the world though! We have local conditions, of course we shouldn’t – God knows, we tried to use French, but the geostatic Ether won’t have it any other way: weather, the Slavic temperament, which has too many savvy abilities and characteristics to purchase Humanism. Sorry Wolfgang. Ratting and ranting, ratting and ranting. That’s all I seem good for these days. At least I do it in the privacy of my own 386 Intel processor, I’ve blocked all the ports and the software is ancient, like the 386. My old dot-pixel printer. At least I can print. I do print. I like to read my ratting and ranting on real parchment. I have reams of the unused perforated paper in stock. In my own stock closet: one here in my little room at home, and one in my office just off the lab hall at work. In this part of the world that special paper is still not difficult to come by. Still. Not for long. But I’ve got my reams. Enough to last me to the Resurrection. No, I’m not being profane, well, perhaps a little, but I don’t really mean to be. I Believe. I go with my wife to Holy Communion every Sunday, sometimes the Father and I sit afterwards and have a cup of coffee and discuss his Magnum Opus on the Schism. These priests can work on their PhD theses for twenty years, but it’s not out of laziness. If their cerebellums are not working with their hearts they cannot work, even as the tissue cells are imbued by the Undivided Light, or are muted though not blinded on such and such a day or hour. They are the only true scholars: yes, my pessimism bites. But we in our Brave New World underestimate the duties of the priests who perform the Liturgy. It is a vast amount of work to carry out physically in material time as it is spiritually facing Eternity. Sweat, challenged smiles, unchallenged smiles, the mouth-drying towel under the Eucharist; Metania, Diachrisis. Η Ευχή: “Doamne Iisuse Hristoase, Fiul lui Dumnezeu, miluieşte-mă pe mine păcătosul.” Ratting and ranting, no, I am not now. It is most likely of all at this particular moment the rub, the Shakespearean rack, the secular imprint in opposition to the Christogram. Or the alternative, more likely. Perhaps I am stuck in my ways. But what has been irking me (or, more mollifying, has interested me) for a long time is that physicists aren’t interested in physics anymore, the few real and passionate ones that I know; they’re interested in literature (unless they’re careerists and therefore interested in neither, which is not the kind I mentioned of course). Now Dostoevsky, what an uncommon preternaturally insightful man. Or William Faulkner, that American genius of tragic genealogy, raising his own Yoknapatawpha County (Oxford, Mississippi, actually) to a Universal Universe. Or, by the light another man who thought the same of Dostoevsky: Solzhenitsyn. I go to his Cancer Ward to alleviate my 20th Century cum 21st Century headaches, real migraine-like headaches. And all the while all of the non-physicists, the laymen who aren’t clerics, have forgotten literature and want nothing more than to understand physics. They beg for the Hawking-child’s books, commercial books that present the real science and discoveries of physics and the great physicists who made them as scientistic child play in some awful genre of cheap metaphysics and arguments by tautology, both the exact places they’re supposed to stay away from as scientist of the physical world. So why do I play with these fools? I cannot guide them. I don’t wish to. It comes back to my wife’s question about the failed writers coming to me with their own homemade Physics, usually after a fiction piece of theirs’ is rejected: “What do you care for these failures, Adam?” I think I know the answer now. They want to write literature (for whatever reason), they’re rejected, many of them almost methodically rejected; but for me and in my mind for them even more, it is this failure that marks them off from the rest of mankind, that it is a precondition writing literature. That’s why I approbate them! Why they come to me, I believe I’ve explained. It doesn’t matter to me that they’re egotists. At least they’re trying. And who knows, maybe just one of them will make it. Maybe several of them won’t take their own lives. Maybe even more of them won’t die of drug use overdose or drink themselves to death and destroy their families if they have them. No, I’m not so stuck in my ways after all. It’s just all too likely that all of this would apply to me too if I were in their situation—like Tolstoy the scientist becoming Tolstoy the writer-moralist, or vice versa, it doesn’t really matter. Or Dostoevsky, like Tolstoy but without the moralistic annoyances, of course Dostoevsky would have been a terrible scientist. But I’m trying to thrash out of me the Swine also, as well as the idea that I’d rather go to the devil than give in to an evil system. I’d rather not. I’d rather do neither. It’s bait. But it’s still a confused and desperate and enticing thought to many, and I am of many, I am of man. Because if you really kept to that rule you’d be pre-destined by the Fates and not by your own choices. You’d negate the Christogram in toto. Everything that it gives and everything that it makes possible for you. Think of Ivan, the oldest son of old Karamazov. He had rather gone to the devil than give in to a system that was not progressive, that was unjust, brutal (was evil). The other brothers? I am no essayist by God!
My wife is serving tea: she’s calling me: “Adam, come out of that musty office and have tea!” The processor on this old 386 is loud and heats up quickly. I’ll shut it down and go take tea with my wife. I may see you later. Ah, let me print this out first. I’ll take it to bed with me.
The autumn is coming. I really must get to work on this. As I was saying, I love the paper. It has the smell of an older time. That time is familiar to me. But it’s more of feeling than that even. It’s a feeling that there has always been an older time, which we look back on with pleasure, if not pain—but always with special butterfly feelings in the stomach, in rare moments of dare I say grace, warm tingling up the body then down. A physiological feature of what would perhaps naively seem of lowest probability even in an emotive species. But there it is. And so the paper. I dip my sweet cakes in tea, and I look at the paper, and I smell the past, my past, and I deduce the great past. From my cubicle to the great orchestra of minds, the grand symposium that our existence invites us to. And then I am good. I am innocent. As guilty as I may be of crimes and sin, I am innocent—and not least because of that! What an amazing story, this strange, guilty story of humans. Of hands and faces. Of course of genitals. Body be allowed to, organismul să li se permită să, the desire of the organism, deşi organismul. Licet. And to discover that I am not a philologist is not that difficult! Umilinţă! Ha! Now into the belly of the whale, if only I could!
Ah, here is my wife. “Adam, what is that noise you’re making?” “Clearing my throat, that’s all, dear, just clearing my throat.” “Shall I bring you some more tea?” “No, I am fine. Thank you dear.” Am I lying to her? No, yes. Does it matter in this case? No, we are married, it is a domestic incident of the smallest proportions. And besides, I was invoking a particle from a vacuum today, one that had not existed prior to creating the vacuum. So I am not so concerned. I’m innocent, and I am guilty, and even more so because I it! What more can a man desire? I don’t think much more.
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