"It's just like method acting, honey," Carol repeated hopefully.
cf0
"You mean," Natalie, dressed, asked, awed and full of hashish, "that this whatchamacculum, this state vector, collapses every which way?"
"No, no, no," Blake Williams hastens to correct. "That's only the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model, and it's obviously nonsense. It means that in the universe next door, Furbish Lousewart is President instead of Eve Hubbard. Pure science fiction and I, um, wonder what Everett, Wheeler, and Graham were smoking when they thought of it. What I'm trying to explain, my dear, is the most plausible alternative theory, which comes from taking Bell's Theorem literally."
"The ripple theory," Natalie prompted.
"But the ripples are all-over-the-universe-at-once," Williams explained again. "It's called the Quantum Inseparability Principle, or QUIP. Dr. Nick Herbert calls it the Cosmic Glue."
"Just like ripples in a pond, Jeez." Natalie Drest was bemused. "Parts of us are still interacting with Joe Malik and all the other people at the party. This is superheavy."
"Yes, but QUIP acts nonlocally in time as well as in space," Williams went on. "You've got to think of time ripples, as well as space ripples, to grok the quantum world…"
THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION
There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinion as to what is sense and what is nonsense.
–eric temple bell. Debunking Science
There was nothing really weird about Blake Williams, except that he was passionately in love with a dead man. This great, if somewhat bizarre, passion was entirely platonic, of course-nothing queer about good old Doc Williams, except his head. With his six-foot frame, his neatly trimmed gray beard, and his heavy black-rimmed spectacles, Williams was the very model of a modern major generalist. Due to the incident of the Gansevoort Street incinerator, he had learned to keep his mouth shut about his more outlandish ideas and obsessions.
The man Blake Williams loved was Niels Bohr, the physicist who had chosen the Taoist yin-yang as his Coat of Arms when knighted by the Danish court-which was rather far out back in the 1930s (before Taoism became faddish with physicists). Bohr also added nearly as much to quantum theory as Planck, Einstein, or Schrodinger, and his model of the atom-the Bohr model, it's called- had been believed literally by a generation of physicians before Hiroshima. Bohr himself, however, had never believed it; nor had he believed any of his other theories. Bohr invented what is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which holds in effect that a physicist shouldn't believe anything but his measurements in the laboratory. Everything else-the whole body of mathematics and theory relating one measurement to another-Bohr regarded as a model of how the human mind works, not of how the universe works. Blake Williams loved Bohr for the Copenhagen Interpretation, which had made it possible for him to study physics seriously, even devoutly, without believing a word of it. That was convenient, since Williams's own training as an anthropologist had schooled him to study all human symbol systems without believing any of them.
On a deeper level-there is always a deeper level- Williams was a scientist who didn't believe in science because he had been cured of polio by witchcraft.
But Blake Williams didn't believe in witchcraft, either. He didn't believe in anything. He regarded all belief systems as illustrative data in domesticated primate psychology.
"The study of human beliefs is an ethologist's heaven and a logician's hell," he liked to say.
Actually, Blake Williams hadn't been cured of polio by witchcraft, exactly. He had been cured by the Sister Kenny method.
But he grew up thinking it was witchcraft. That was because all the experts in Unistat at the time-the members of the American Medical Association, who would not admit there were any other experts on health-claimed the Sister Kenny method was witchcraft. They also said it didn't work.
Since the Sister Kenny method obviously had worked in his case, Blake grew up with the gnawing suspicion that the experts didn't know what the hell they were talking about. He was also intensely curious about all forms of witchcraft, which eventually led him to become an anthropologist.
Young Williams soon enough discovered-on his very first field trip, among the Hopi Indians-that witchcraft does by God and by golly work, after all. He began, tentatively and secretly, sharing his knowledge with carefully selected colleagues. Most of them were pretty evasive about the whole subject, but Marilyn Chambers, the author of the epoch-making Neuroanthropology, was star-tlingly blunt.
"Everybody who's been in the field knows that," she said with a kind of weary patience.
"But why doesn't anyone say so?" Williams asked, still young, still naive.
"Freud and Charcot once had virtually this same conversation," Dr. Chambers said, "but the topic then was the sexual origin of the hysterical neuroses of Victorian women. Charcot invited Freud to be the goat and talk about it in public…"
"I see," Blake Williams said slowly. He did see.
THE CAT AND THE DOG
If we accept multiple universes, then we no longer need worry about what "really" happened in the past, because every possible past is equally real.
–joseph gerver, "The Past as Backward
Movies of the future," Physics Today,
April 1971
"He who mast--… who hesitates is lost," Marvin Gardens said one day in the Confrontation office. Joe Malik considered it one of the most interesting Freudian slips he had ever heard and recorded it in his diary, where it was, of course, subsequently scanned by the Illuminati.
Marvin and Joe never got along well, but that was because Marvin regarded Joe as an extraterrestrial invader and Joe regarded Marvin as a nut.
"Marvin is emphatically not a loony," Justin Case had been heard to say quite often. "He's a genius. The greatest put-on artist since Hitchcock. Nobody recognizes what a great satirist he is."
"Justin Case," Marvin said when that was repeated to him, "thinks he's being liberal, but he's just another victim of brainwashing by the Amazon Invasion."
Marvin Gardens had been traumatized by the 1970s and always referred to the Women's Liberation Movement as the Amazon Invasion. He believed, or pretended to believe, that the ringleaders were all extraterrestrials who had arrived by flying saucer in 1968 and were boldly conspiring to seize supreme power everywhere through what he called semantic black magick. "They've atomized the language and created a semantic smog in which ordinary humanity is obliterated by abstractions like 'chairperson' or simple mammalian erotic signaling is politicized into a new sin called 'sexism.' Any male who dares to oppose them is stigmatized as a 'male chauvinist,' and any female who opposes them is labeled a victim of male brainwashing. Obviously, within a decade, they will command the key posts in all areas of industry (they've captured publishing already) and then government will fall. Probably, then, the males of their species will start landing and we'll all be enslaved. (Some of the males may have landed already; look at the Manhattan literary scene.) It's the sweetest infiltration job in the history of galactic espionage. For merely daring to reveal their plans, I am smeared by them as a 'male chauvinist pig,' which is ten times worse than an ordinary 'male chauvinist' and equivalent to an SP on the Scientologists' hit list."
Some agreed with Justin Case that Marvin was kidding, that he had merely seen an opportunity-the chance to attain fame and fortune by espousing a bitterly controversial extreme position. Others, however, claimed he was dead serious, and was a classical case of cocaine paranoia. Marvin always pointed out, when either of these theories was mentioned in his presence, "there is a third possibility. I might be right. In that case, how convenient for Them that my sanity and sincerity are so often called into question. It almost looks as if They are conspiring to defame my character. Are they afraid that some might listen to me before it's too late, before the takeover is complete?"
Marvin's principal enemy, among
the male half of the population, was Frank Hemeroid, of course. Hemeroid, oddly enough, hardly even knew of Marvin's existence and, hence, was incapable of being harmful to him by intention. That didn't matter. He was still the enemy with a capital E. At times Marvin had even suspected him of being extraterrestrial, like the leaders of Women's Lib.
Hemeroid earned his animosity entirely by the books he wrote, which were full of treason, according to Marvin. Actually, Hemeroid's novels merely reflected the 1970s literary society around him, in which most people were a little weird and all of them were losers. Hemeroid carefully depicted a world exactly like that: Most of his characters were weird and all of them were losers. The critics, who were all losers, called him a brutal realist. Marvin called him a traitor to planet Earth.
Marvin wrote about all this in dialogues (he rather fancies himself as being of Platonic disposition) in which the speakers were Frank Hemeroid, representing 1970s values and reality-constructs, and Ernest Hemingway, Marvin's childhood hero who had been consigned to the literary garbage heap when the extraterrestrials took over. Hemingway, in these dialogues, represented Man, individual Man, the universal maverick, as he was before the extraterrestrial invasion.
The dialogues were full of things like this:
FRANK: Did you ever really believe in your own myth, you old faker? Did you think you could come out of a neurotic suicide-prone family and by sheer Will transform yourself into a hero, a brave man, a great artist, a boxer, a big-game hunter, a cult figure, an image of courage and of grace under pressure? Didn't you know you were a worm, that all men are worms and cowards, and that you'd be beaten at the end? Didn't you know you'd be like all the rest of us and give in to self-pity and self-doubt and pull that final cosmic trigger?
ERNEST: I never said my way was easy. I said that Man was not meant for defeat, however many individuals may be defeated. I said that the effort to be conscious enough and brave enough was admirable, whatever the consequences.
FRANK: Consciousness? Bravery? Consciousness is only aware of its own suffering in this blind existence, and bravery is only a gesture against the inevitable end. A stupid gesture, since the cowards live longer, and if they're cowardly enough, they make all the comfortable decisions and have all the security possible in a Death Universe like this.
ERNEST: I deny none of that, and I have shown the f cruelty more nakedly than any of your generation. I still say it is admirable to be brave and take big risks for the things you value. When everything mammalian and mechanical tells you to run, and you stand and don't run, you learn what Man can be.
And so on. Marvin was obsessed with something he called the Dignity of Man. He was not at all amused by ecological relativists who told him that an ant or a swine might equally believe in the Dignity of Ant or the Dignity of Swine. Men were not ants or swine, he would say coldly; and he would classify the heckler as probably brain-warped by the extraterrestrial Amazons.
In truth, like most philosophers, Marvin never wrote explicitly about the one factor that really determined and explained everything in his philosophy. Just as Marx never mentioned his carbuncles in Das Kapital, and Freud didn't publish anything about his own sexual hang-ups, Marvin Gardens never wrote a word anywhere about the source and motive of all his theorizing. This was his penis. It was four inches long at best, and it had given him a defeatist psychology about things in general, and women in particular, against which he had struggled mightily to build his philosophy of Transcendental Male Courage. The women he classified as extraterrestrials frightened him only a little bit more than the ordinary women he classified as terrestrials.
Sometimes Marvin wrote dialogues between Pavlov's Dog and Schrodinger's Cat, instead of between Frank and Ernest. These were usually quite short and almost like Zen stories:
DOG: I've got a million proofs that we're not free.
CAT: I've got one proof that we are.
DOG: What's that?
CAT: Who asks what's that?
64 AMOEBAS
The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form-in other words, that every fact consists in some thing having some quality-has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science.
–bertrand russell, Our Knowledge of the External World
DECEMBER 23, 1983:
Natalie Drest was amazed as the conversation swung in a new quantum direction. "You," she gasped, "you dig Krazy Cat too?"
"Indeed, my dear," Blake Williams beamed. "I may be the most devout student of Herriman's work anywhere in the civilized world."
He didn't tell her (yet) that he regarded Krazy as a symbol of Schrodinger's Cat in the great wave-mechanics puzzle.
Even Blake Williams occasionally worried that he was talking over his audience's head.
But Joe Malik seeks purchase for an elbow on the back of the couch, noticing the statue of the Virgin of Guada-lupe in the corner alcove, her foot pressed down on the head of the Serpent. He was wondering what the hell Santaria was, amazed as always by the blind skill of female fingers, Carol guiding him into her without looking down actually lying with her eyes closed as she reveled no doubt in strictly private fantasy (Am I Paul Newman? Woody Alien? That damned third ex-husband? First or second ex-husband? Some damned high school football hero ten years ago?), slipping in smoothly, interlocking, beginning to merge; to meld; to float on the great ocean of sensation, to find the window.
No wife no whores no mustache (Carol Christmas was thinking) a real weirdo he is but Arab that's nice a Sultan we're in the harem it's my first time again, no a movie, yes a movie the camera moving in technicians all over the place watching me watching eyes watching me fuck the first really high art porn movie deeper ah good deeper first porn flick to win the Academy Award no more Off-Off-Broadway for me watching me watching me fuck millions of men watching me in theaters like that Pussycat we passed jerking their cocks fantasizing me fantasizing and coming don't think of Ronnie don't think don't think Mongoloid the doctor said and I said I never balled a Chinaman didn't understand at first why me why of all the millions of births on the planet that day why me don't think about it don't get sad again just go with it the camera the eye of the camera moving in on my face to get my orgasm and millions of men watching in theaters spurt after spurt damned cruel unjust murderous universe my poor Ronnie coming spurt spurt spurt Academy Award coming now me coming no wife? no whores? no mustache?
And, "I love you," Joe Malik gasped, really believing it in that warm moment slowly coming back from the reverberation of her orgasm and beginning to gallop toward his own climax as she muttered "darling oh darling" Paul Newman? Ex-Husbands? Me? Me? ME??? Me?
But Natalie Drest, fifty blocks north, was still objecting: "And I thought you were just some high-brow…" "I am, my dear, a high-brow. And a low-brow. And I suppose, alas, even a middle-brow. A single ego, as our friend Malik was pointing out at the party tonight, is a ridiculously limiting perspective on the universe." Williams smiled.
"You mean like you've got three minds and one is a Krazy Kat fan and another is trying to study modern physics from an anthropological point of view? What does the third mind do?"
"Ah, my dear, that is the Great Work, opening the third I…"
What they forgot to kill, said Joe,
Went on to organize
"What I like is the way Offisa Pup gets embarrassed about being a dog, you know? That's symbolism."
Went on to organize
"Offisa Pup, my dear, is the superego…"
Went on to organize
PETER PAN! CHILDHOOD! INNOCENCE!
In a fine old mansion on Lake Shore Drive, Markoff Chancy toddled down the hall leading to the Master Bedroom. He was dressed in a Teddy Snow Crop suit and felt like a perfect damned fool.
Oh, well, the money is good, he told himself. Then he pushed the door open and entered the first rich person's bedroom he had ever seen.
There was, as he had been told, on
ly one light, behind the bed, playing upward on the ceiling and shedding a soft glow by reflection. The bed was made up, covered with an expensive-looking heirloom spread. Beside it, lit up nicely by the indirect light, was the table bearing a single can of Snow Crop orange juice, as he had expected.
And on the bed, nude, eyes tightly closed and pretending to sleep, was his hostess.
Chancy caught his breath. Judging from what he was expected to do, he had been prepared to see a crazy old frump; instead, to his intense delight, it was obvious that the lady was still fairly young, quite well preserved, and definitely stacked. Crazy she might be (but how could he judge? Maybe it was normal for rich people to act out any fantasy that struck them.), but unappetizing she definitely was not.
Although she was the first live naked woman he had ever seen, she was no less strikingly golden and rounded than, say, a Pussycat Pussyette of the Month. A head of gloriously fiery red hair was spread on the pillow, and below it her supposedly sleeping face was lovely in its peaceful anticipation. His eyes swept over her rounded shoulders, the two snowy-white breasts rising and falling with her respiration, the cute nipples that stood in surprisingly large areolas upon those breasts, the soft pillow of her belly, and, best of all, the thick swatch of reddish fur that hid her sex. And she had legs like a chorus girl.
She's waiting for me-for me!
Markoff Chaney experienced true happiness. Boldly, he stepped forward and grabbed the orange-juice can. An opener lay beside it and he quickly punched two holes, his hands trembling a bit-when the lady's belly moved with her breathing, he felt his penis stir in the same rhythm.
SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY Page 20