The CAT man showed up yesterday again, with a larger backhoe, and shoveled out the first pond for two and a half hours. I opened the inlet pipe, but the creek is down to a trickle, and so the sluggish water moved slowly in. Surprised water striders darted into and quickly out of the new tubular blackness.

The little dam we made there last summer has washed away, flattened out. I could rebuild it with stones and gravel, put down another great sheet of contractor's plastic, to raise the water level and really get it flowing through. Well, maybe later in the fall, when days are cold and good for working in the sun.

Once in Denver circa mid-1974, where I lived when my first son was a toddler, I was bringing in the laundry one quiet bright weekday afternoon. The clotheslines ran the length of the unfenced vegetable garden. Rows of six-foot sweetcorn stalks bumped their full ears up against the clothes. As I went along quietly pulling clothespins off diaper after diaper, gathering, folding, in a humming rhythm, saturated with maternal self-satisfaction, in all innocence and inexperience I lowered a dry clean square of white cotton gauze to reveal behind it, inches from my face, a crazed braingray grapefruit-sized bloat of smut.

I was 20 or 21. I had no clue that such a thing could exist in the real world. My mind immediately went to aliens out of UFOs, to bad '50s sci-fi movies, to punctures in the wall between dimensions. A dagger of adrenaline ripped northward behind my sternum, my hair stood on end, and I almost fainted from fear.

Because of a fungus on corn.

Light, gamma rays, radio waves, X rays--all can change from waves to particles and back again. Today physicists believe that subatomic phenomena should not be classified solely as either waves or particles, but as a single category of somethings that are always somehow both. These somethings are called quanta, and physicists believe they are the basic stuff from which the entire universe is made. (Quanta is the plural of quantum. One electron is a quantum. Several electrons are a group of quanta. The word quantum is also synonymous with wave particle, a term that is also used to refer to something that possesses both particle and wave aspects.) ... There is compelling evidence that the only time quanta ever manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. For instance, when an electron isn't being looked at, experimental findings suggest that it is always a wave. ... Physicist Nick Herbert ... says this has sometimes caused him to imagine that behind his back the world is always "a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup." But whenever he turns around and tries to see the soup, his glance instantly freezes it and turns it back into ordinary reality. He believes this makes us all a little like Midas, the legendary king who never knew the feel of silk or the caress of a human hand because everything he touched turned to gold. "Likewise humans can never experience the true texture of quantum reality," says Herbert, "because everything we touch turns to matter."
[Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe (HarperPerennial, 1991) p. 34.]

The word "humans" interests me here, though. Surely the phenomenon applies across the board of sentience. Anything capable of perception will inflict its expectations on the common bouillabaisse, no?
1:10:44 PM    comment []  trackback []