See and wait
I spent some time in the late nineties and early aughts working on contracts with the US Department of State, collaborating with the governments of what were then called the Newly Independent States (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, …) on non-proliferation and export control initiatives. (This is around the time Ukraine agreed to curtail its nuclear capabilities in exchange for security guarantees. Just saying.) That’s how I found myself in Moldova, in a February snowstorm, watching out the ovoid window of a large prop plane as the ground crew sprayed some chemical mix from a firehose to de-ice the wings before take-off.
The engines were idle, and I could see that the plane’s propellers each had three long white blades. I was looking at them as the engines started, and saw the blades transform as they sped up into a smooth translucent disk. I guess I had been reading about airplane engine bird strike tests, because I started thinking about throwing objects at the propellers, and about how fast the blades would have to be spinning in order for a beach ball to bounce off unharmed, as if hitting a solid surface. And then how fast they would have to be spinning for there to be no way for even a molecule to pass between the blades, for friction to no longer be possible, for me to be able to lay my hand against that virtual disk as if it were a table top. It occurred to me that this is basically what a table top is, mostly empty space, with the electrons in the atoms existing as probability distributions spinning so fast and with such magnetism that, though conceivable, the chance that the armada of spinning translucent disks identifiable as my hand would ever, from the beginning to the end of the universe, pass through a table top is indistinguishable from zero.
I recently read “When We Cease to Understand the World,” by Benjamin Labatut. It uses the fictionalized lives of late nineteenth and early twentieth century scientists to explore the human impact of the dawning understanding that the world, what’s really happening at the most fundamental level, is not accessible or comprehensible to our available senses. That people and animals, that trees and tools and tasks aren’t telling the whole or even the central story, but that they constitute levels of abstraction making the alien mysteries happening above and below them on the scale continuum somewhat comprehensible. Confronting the truth of this can be deeply alienating, but it doesn’t have to be.
It is hard to describe how satisfying it is to just want to see what a painting is going to look like once I do the thing that just occurred to me. Or, in the absence of an immediate idea, to just look and look and look and look and look and look and look until one reveals itself. It feels to me like there are these unique and singular expressions of feeling and meaning and awareness that exist like virtual particles in a quantum vacuum waiting for someone to realize them as discrete solid objects, and I get to be the observer that collapses the waveform, affording them specific location and momentum. Forgive how pretentious this sounds, but I feel like I’m making cave paintings in the age of particle physics.