Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle - quantum writing, continued
(This post follows “Schrödinger’s Victory.”)
Did you think I wouldn’t do it?
I thought I wouldn’t do it. It was a joke when I wrote it last week. But I woke up this morning and thought, I gotta do it. If I don’t, I’m bagging the challenge. So here goes, with Schrödinger’s cat as my daemon.
If there’s a realm in which I’m super confident that I know virtually nothing, it’s quantum physics. So it was a big deal when I asked Siri to explain Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to me, and I felt like I understood what they were saying. (That’s a guess: I haven’t asked Siri for their pronouns.) With certain pairs of properties, such as position and momentum, the more accurately you know one property, the less accurately you can know the other. So, the more accurately you know a particle’s position in space, the less accurately you can know the momentum at which it’s moving. This may be a blonde version of a far more complicated principle, but at least I can get my head around it.
You probably know the test of perception in which you’re asked to count the passes between certain players on a basketball court and a guy in a gorilla suit saunters through the middle, and you don’t even notice him? Maybe you’re one of the people who did notice him, in which case you’d make an excellent secret agent. I didn’t. Some people can’t help but notice him, but they hardly ever get the number of passes correct. I’m going to call this the Heisenberg Average: you can’t notice everything.
So, why do we notice what we notice? Why do certain details, like a chipped bathroom tile, stick in the memory when more important details disappear? I’m going to posit that the two related properties are objective awareness and subjective emotional experience. The more accurately you remember one, the less accurately you remember the other. And in the present moment, the more you notice the full picture, the less you’re personally engaged in the scene.
You remember that chipped tile because it became the external representation of something you were feeling internally. What was that? Can you retrieve it? That’s the conundrum for the memoir writer: how to retrieve enough of the circumstances surrounding an event so that your account of it doesn’t feel random, or myopically self-referential.
A recollection of events that insists on its own accurate completeness feels inauthentic, because we all have an inner Heisenberg. Much as we like to pretend it isn’t there, we’re aware that a penumbra of uncertainty surrounds everything we think we know. So, as a memoir writer, you also have to dislodge your certainty from your own version of events in order to access a little more awareness of other possible versions of those events.
Let’s call the version your memory has settled on position, and call the other possible versions momentum. If you’re trying to pin the position of something, any momentum it has slows down—in your awareness--or even stops. Is this ringing the same bell for you that it’s ringing for me? Whenever I’ve tried to simply “write up” a memory, as accurately as possible without questioning it, it flops lifeless on the page. Zero momentum. Only when I start asking myself what I don’t know does the writing start to move.
And what about the opposite? If you’re overly focused on momentum, things can get hectic. Your story is all story and no you: no emotional resonance, no connection between writer and reader. We need to know your position: there, at the center of your story. Not just what happened and where you’re going, but where you’re at, in the crucial moments of revelation and change.
So, it’s oscillation we need as memoir writers. A looseness of certainty. Awareness that we must choose a focus, but the point of focus isn’t all there is.