Schrodinger's Bones

Schrodinger’s Bones

Cynthia Daffron & Neil de la Flor & Mario Matus

He said: Belly dancing bears are born and live and explode into Big Bang bits all at once. Time, the fourth dimension where all things happen at once, is just a trick.

She said: You’ve scheduled a meeting with your neighbor, who once slept with your wife, the one who steals your newspaper. You plan to kill him, but you don’t know yet whether you will, you don’t know if you’ll go against God and commandments. But the cat in the box knows, Schrodinger’s cat knows by the beating of his heart if he is alive or dead or both.

I said: Cats! What does the big bang have to do with belly dancing? What is a belly? Why is my belly expanding? Did the infant universe expand like the big belly? Yogi! I’ve lost my bandwagon. I think I left it behind Schro(ding)er’s cat. My poor cat is all dead. Orange and white, he was just balding between the ears. One day, kaaaboom! Kawabunga! I never slept with the neighbor’s wife but I just had sex.

He said: So if quantum time is all time at once, where is the trancing-transliminal state? The are no borders in all at once, because it is all…transliminal is all and neither, at once, the contradiction, the holding of two truths (self-evident or not) that work together.

I said: What? Have you read the book Arrow of Time by Illya Prigogine? He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Just now I searched the web and discovered he died May 28th, 2003. I never truly understood his work but I think it’s transliminal. His main scientific work focused on a better understanding of the role of time in the physical sciences and biology. He contributed significantly to the understanding of irreversible processes, particularly in systems far from equilibrium.

He said: Some much is given before the end.

She said: So, Roger the Cat, pet of childhood neighbors, long dead in my linear experience, his fur stays soft and warm under my hand. Roger is immortal in quantum time. I long for Roger, for the rabbit in the hat, the belly dancing bear, the moments of grace that are absent from my experience, skewed, linear, true to me, ethics sliding out glass doors like spilt grease onto relative Mexican tiles.

I said: I long for Illya. I long for him to explain to me the context of time. Is it really linear? Do we really die? At the end of life, is there another land? A Borderlands? Space of some sort, like turf or beach sand? Illya, do you hear me? If I reverse Schrodinger’s cat will I find the anti-cat? Isn’t all experience linear, Illya? If so, isn’t all literature. Is literature a measure of time or a reflection of it?

She said: Neil tangos with a rose held in his teeth.

She said: He tangos with a sheep beneath his feed.

She said: Mario shakes and sings “Suspicious Minds.”

She said: A little lives in all of us. Few of us ever live.

She said: In Minnesota, the school buses have shelters (for the living and the dead, Neil said) so you don’t freeze in the winter waiting to go off to school, don’t disappear off the line into a period dot, end of sentence, 1969 - 2004, RIP. Ripped and curled, you could also, in an alternate reality, be surfing in Hawaii, one armed like that girl, a shark swimming away, sated with a full meal.

I said: Who died in 2004? Who hasn’t died, yet? Multiply the 2 by 4 and you get a glimpse of history.

He said: In quantum time, all things are being BANGed. In the quantum time, all things fall apart. Entropy is the fairest of judges. Entropy is your mother’ milk. Entropy is your father’s breath upon her neck. Entropy is we.

I said: The second law (of thermodynamics) states that a closed system will remain the same or become more disordered over time, i.e. its entropy will always increase.

He said: Bang-bang!

New Scientist, July 2002, read: One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems.

It also said: Results: researchers led by Denis Evans found the change in entropy was negative over time intervals of a few tenths of a second, revealing nature running in reverse.

And: By using a precise laser beam to trap latex beads it was discovered the bead was gaining energy from the random motion of a water molecule-the small scale equivalent of a cup of tea getting hotter.

She said: Well, if I cross a border, a limit, an edge does that line/space/horizon cross me? Can one really split the infinite? Constructions of human fallibility? Where do the constructions end and the constructing begin? Can we leave the space into which we’re born? Can we traverse the wide open space of our lives?

I said: Follow Illya, he knows the limit. But leave your chromosomes behind.

He said: I think Bongo is the best belly-dancing bear there ever was. There’s a picture of him performing with the Moscow circus in 1948 in a book somewhere. He wears a red hat (or we assume it’s red) since the pic is in B&W, but was it red? Who knows / who cares? Bongo the best belly-dancing bear and he is dancing with me. And Roger purrs contently as he enters the picture because he lives in Cyn’s quantum time and even though I didn’t know him, I know him now because I know Cyn. One degree of quantaration. All Cyn had to do was write about him and now he’s part of me.

I said: The red bear is black and white and is also red. His name is Roger and it is not Roger. Who is Cyn? One degree of separation could get you up into a quantum wind. Mints, anyone?

He said: Is that the next step? The sharing of mints? Thoughts and ideas? Feelings and memories? Where are Schrodinger’s bones? You’re right here with Cyn and I. Cyn is here with you and me. I’m here with Cyn and you. The convenant is 3…plus 1…those that regard/know the trinity.

I said: Zinger! It’s about opening vortices from the experiential world into the transliminal. It’s about drilling holes into our bones.