1.0
she sat amid a murder of crows and sat. she pondered the myriad black. she sat. like an oil spot in the rain drifting with
gritty smell
asphalt
minerals
lime slices
she sat

1.1
he lived in a house. it was just an ordinary house. not extravagant. inside the house resided new letters and new colors but to him. to the man. it was just a place to
eat his meals
lay his head
and thump his fingers on the windowpanes

2.0
she bites at her nails. left hand. ring finger. always a nuisance. she ponders. how is she going to get a new job. she needs a new cardigan after all. one just like the one she has. the one she’s wearing. grey. but without the holes in the armpits. her mother keeps telling her to quit safety pinning her life back together.

she sits. she watches a crow tug at a crust of bread. how do the holes get in her armpits? do moths invade her room and nibble at the threads of her sweater while she sleeps? and how do moths get into her dresser? and find the armpits of her neatly folded sweater? or do they get at it while she’s wearing it? when she’s not paying attention? watching the neighborhood children cross the street? at the end of a good book? and why the armpits? do they taste or smell better to moths? oh her wandering mind.

like taking candy from a baby

In 1926, a German scientist Werner Heisenberg, formulated his famous uncertainty principle. In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately. The obvious way to do this is to shine light on the particle.

she stares at the crows. one thick-bodied bird is dragging a large twig with its mouth and trying to fly. crows are big birds. and this one is a healthy specimen but the twig is too big. longer than the bird’s body. every time the bird tries to fly its wings just won’t catch flight. oh determined bird. i bet that bird could get any cardigan it wanted. she thinks.
she hums. she enjoys watching it struggle. tugging at the end of the nail between clenched teeth.
maybe i’ll marry a postman. a postman with a pension. a postman with a pension. a postman with a pension. wouldn’t that just be easier? before the gangrene gets us all. no. she meant. before she has to settle for. for. the crow hauled the tree branch away. no doubt to make a superior nest! the murder is one less for the leaving. a beta bird finds more bread…

like taking candy from a baby

Some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle and this will indicate its position. However, one will not be able to determine the position of the particle more accurately than the distance between the wave crests of light, so one needs a short wavelength in order to measure the position of the particle precisely.

she read. uh. she read somewhere that bread is bad for crows. it expands in their fragile little intestines, causes their wings to be disfigured, sticking out at awkward angles. these deformed wings prevent them flying. she is worried about the crows. she is worried about this world in which a simple childhood can have disastrous results. oh crows. oh innocence.

2.1
while he’s shaving today, chin lifted into the medicine cabinet (always observed), the house threw out new numbers – numbers for the numbers between the numbers – he’s an ordinary man, he puts on aftershave – the new numbers, unnoticed fade back into oblivion no dedicated algorithm may ever uncover, and so goes the house.

3.0
she’s plain
but a postman would be happy
they could take walks together and share muffins on Saturday mornings
they could plan trips to exotic places like Aruba and Belize
they could go when he retires
in the meantime they can water-ski in the summer
and the casino on the reservation on the other weekends
the other weekends
when there isn’t mail to be delivered of course
three crows fly away
a murder made smaller
she sits

3.1
he seemed to always have dishes in his sink
(the sink was just finishing its study of Wittgenstein’s famous closing remarks in Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus)
and always holding dishes
it seemed
some cycle was off somehow
somewhere
“whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”
elbows in the dishwater

like shooting fish in barrel

Now, by Planck’s quantum hypothesis, one cannot use an arbitrarily small amount of light; one has to use at least one quantum. This quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. Moreover, the more accurately one measure the position, the shorter the wavelength of the light that one needs and hence the higher the energy of a single quantum. So the velocity of the particle will be disturbed by a larger amount.

the talk radioman told of an African lion outside of town
he said they sent the dog teams out to the Outskirts
no scent detected
by wet and capable noses
but several witnesses
a fuzzy photo
and one paw print
a phantom lion
from Africa
he remembered the buzz of African killer bees years ago coming from Mexico
everything to worry about
he worries
comes from Africa or north from Mexico
but didn’t the lion just come from the zoo
the man on the radio didn’t say
the zoo was not missing a lion
a paw print
a phantom
the shutters on the window giggled

4.0
she packed some things
it wasn’t practical
a suitcase to go to the park
but she seemed to always have bags
plastic shopping bags
canvas shoulder bags
like hapless limbs
hanging from her grey arms
her life was just incongruous like that
perpetually transitional
one thing into another
one hour bearing no resemblance to the one that had just passed
in one day
she needed so many…
things
so a suitcase
finite and discrete
“this could work”
she said out loud to no one

4.1
he had a fair amount of books
here
there
he hadn’t read most of them
he preferred the evening news
and the things on the internet
or staring out the windows at the train tracks and the airplanes
oh modern man
the walls of his house would borrow the words from the books
while the book jacket shells sat inertly on the shelves
the house would compose manuscripts and fancy word problems for algebraic results
searching the texts for all the x’s that could be found

5.0
the crows hung together
and yet they were rogue
black bird oil spots slipping away from the rain
a crow had to watch her back
even in the sweet languid summer months
someone
her family
her lover
were always cawing something about survival
you take care of you
with eyes like floating coals
she drifted
of the lists she ignored

5.1
Heidegger and Nietzsche
suited the appetite of the house
the man
all whiskers and boxer shorts
followed basketball games and even admitted to enjoying a poem or two
but philosophy never suited him
he survived
what use was there in thinking about why?

6.0
she bears a deep rigid scar on the back of her upper left thigh
she bears it with pride, received in her one act of courage

like shooting fish in barrel

The more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa. Heisenberg showed the uncertainty in the position of the particle times the uncertainty of the velocity times the mass of the particle can never be smaller than a certain quantity, which is known as Planck’s constant. Moreover, this limit does not depend on the way in which one tries to measure the position or velocity of the particle, or on the type of particle: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world.

in grade school she had protected a friend who was being bullied
she put herself between the friend and the bully
and was shoved
down, down, warm bodies tangled and tumbling
in the way of young girls, her friend, in repayment
transferred the string of unpopularity to her
denying her and spreading rumors
and she was alone from that day forward
but her martyrdom appealed to her
refusing presumed insecurity
she took solace in the black and blue
turning her back to her mirror and staring over her shoulder
she’d tell herself
i did the right thing and for that i will suffer
and so she continues
every several days
she re-opens her wound
on her left thigh
from grade school
it has never healed
but built up with scar tissue
an ugly thing
in her mind
she knows it as her home
and when she sits
the constant pressure
winces
cross, uncross her legs
she reminds herself of the importance of courage and humility
and of how to act right
when she falls asleep
if it’s been a day when she’s been bad
full of herself and not acting right
she’ll sleep
curled up on her left side
the bruising cut pressed against the cool sheets
until she can feel her heartbeat

like taking candy from a baby

The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace’s dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!

her cheeks pinkened
the wind picked up
the murder of crows startled
and hopped and scattered, taking flight
one crow stayed
hopping and hopping
and she was suddenly embarrassed
pink cheeks
black bird
she needed to fly too
knuckles raw
tugging at the split in her sweater
she had to fly too

she gathered her suitcase
thick-soled shoes pounding puddles
cluck cluck
city sidewalks
little squares of tree and flowerbed
nothing much
sopping leaves stuck to the pavement like a smack of jellyfish
a thick fat drop
rolled off a leaf above
trickled down the center of her forehead

6.1
the house snugged it shoulders in eaves squeezing ah…
a good day for some theory or to pore over a formula
selecting, hmm…
from Scientific American, oft so easy to disprove
or the What is Enlightenment? articles collecting dust under the bed

the man crinkled his forehead
grey days are depressing
nothing to do

the house
perennially tired of the tedium
moved to the tiles in the bathroom and began rearranging the compounds
in the shaving cream rusting in the shower
in chemical distillation
the shell of bathtub
the twist of sink
the house certain it is poised to discover a new element
housilium (it may call it, after itself, of course)
or maybe structursium
or perhaps even toiletiarium
so that the discoveries of the house on Oneida avenue
could live in perpetuity
to live in a world where ideas survived bricks and mortar
where legacy outlasted bones

7.0
the dress hung
hook, eyed, and sunk
behind her bathroom door
she hoped her mother, and her mother’s moat of disappointment,
forgot it was even there
she’d slip
at night
she’d slip into it
bare décolleté and tulle between her legs
and slumber sweet slumber
of worlds of white crows and black lace and only the grey scale in between
and a left thigh blood spot in slate deep slate
alas she was headed to the Outskirts

alas she was headed to the Outskirts

7.1
it was out in the Outskirts
that’s where the airport was
one strip across a grey green strip of wet glass field
at night he’d listen for it
single prop dreams buzzed buzzed away
and an African lion lurked

8.0
struggling with leaden suitcases, cluck cluck soles against the pavement
now she was furiously headed to the grasslands
the Outskirts of the town
she dropped everything, corner of Oneida and Cleave lane

8.1
it was drawing up a list
“how to remember Oppenheimer” scrawled across the top
one category, hero
the other category, evildoer
the list below hero doubling the words below evil
the discoveries of the implications of the gravitational field of a star on the path of light rays in space-time
the collapse of stars more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit
and the atom bomb
light cones and black holes
and on
and on
Los Alamos, the Outskirts, and beyond

the man was ready for a sandwich

9.0
a pathetic creature

9.1
he noticed a pathetic creature
in a disarray of grey papers
wet and smelling slightly of dust, mildew, and the blood of a martyr
she seemed to be spinning in disorganization
mousy
“how do you do” he muttered
rushing away and thinking only of pickles and mustard

10.0
huh?
she asked
she raised her eyes to the edifice of a giant brain of a house
and two bodies
compelled by electromagnetic forces
she now knew everything that it knew
and ominous she could see and ominous it was

it was clean
a spot for everything
the back porch door unlocked
leading into a kitchen
one mug
one bowl and two spoons
in the sink
in the skin

she helped herself through the doorway
leaving her bags behind in the entry
this could be a postman’s house
she pondered extemporaneously

she stopped there
she would be ready

10.1
what a ridiculous notion
and yet how intriguing
the house became aware of her alien presence

two blocks over
irritated with the sandwich clerk’s inattention
he picks the tomato slices from the bread
leaving seeds and juice in a mess of white waxed paper

he watches the closed captioned court show from an old stained booth

the house could not be bothered
it was just applying the anthropic principle to the current understanding of an inflationary universe as it is understood now to other initial configurations of the universe at the moment of the Big Bang

this silly slip, interrupting this great work
on the precipice of discovery,
was the last thing the house needed
the house needed the girl like it needed another chimney in its head

silly thing

10.2
under a staggering grey sky she hopes and hopes
and copes and copes
balls of satin in her little fists

silly thing

an apparition
a beautiful broken woman
a thief and intruder

10.3
he was startled by these thoughts

he passed a woman on the street that was made of paper
he passed her and knew that he’d found his purpose

he went through the streets, searching

he found what he was looking for

he gets the sledgehammer

10.4
she was being bad
she was being indulgent
she knew this
her thigh throbbed

but she couldn’t help herself
she loved this place
she
she belonged
she was known here
but such a worldly and sophisticated house
and it consumed her, took her in
enveloped her
and she received it

silly thing

10.5
the poor creature
sat helplessly inside an enclosed box
accompanied by a small radioactive sample
and a Geiger counter hooked up to hammer
that will smash open a vial of poison

a woman, like an electron, is not an elementary particle
her numerous atoms and electrons do not sit quietly in some single quantum state to talk of the quantum state of a woman is to specify what every particle in a woman is doing
at some precise moment
at some precise moment
and the state of the particles in a woman fluctuate with unfathomable rapidity so that
a woman’s quantum state is a fickle, elusive thing
and her fixed properties nonetheless subject to the laws of probability thus
a woman
in a house
is both half alive, half dead
both a little bit here and a little bit there

pieces
half alive, half dead

10.6
“he found himself
in a land where no one had ever penetrated before
where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature
artificial compulsion imposed on motion
against which every free energy of the universe revolted
and which
being merely occasional
resolved itself back into anarchy at last”

11.0
the house
dusted itself off
foundation reeling the Laplacian universe can have no moment of birth since any set of conditions must inevitably arise from some prior situation, and so on, ad infinitum
nothing uncaused can happen
yet
quantum events happen, ultimately, for no reason at all
the existential paradox
the house sighed from eaves to floor
one experiment thus concluded
for a rest
a breath

_credits:

Stephen Hawking. A Brief History of Time.
David Lindley. Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science.
David Lindley quoting Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams.
David Lindley quoting Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosphicu_s