BEAUTIFUL WORKINGS

By Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan

Text transcript

LEAVES CHANGE DURING A QUANTUM ARTS RESIDENCY

Week 1: London
It is a luxury, an abundance of green and life and bursts of orange-yellows at the window of the Goethe-Institut apartment. The foliage crowds the view, fills the eyescape, lifts the air with chirps and scurries. In an Imperial College park below, the hammering of construction echoes as a graduation ceremony stage is assembled on the green. The university’s Climbing Society sets up against a sturdy tree trunk, small harnessed bodies swaying from branches, hovering from safe heights.

Week 2: London
Neon green parakeets swoop by the window, travelling together in a tiny murmuration. I look up the collective noun, ‘a pandemonium’. Their smooth, toylike bodies stand out against the trees descending further into autumn. Green still prevails. On the ground, hundreds of giddy students are students no more, the neighbouring streets a swarm of long black gowns, high heels, parents in sensible shoes.

Week 3: London
The construction continues as the stage is dismantled. The damp brown ground of the park is revealed, patches of grass persisting under wide squares of temporary flooring. The trees are fully autumnal now, an enormous rustling mass of mauve and crimson and tangerine and mustard. The parakeets stand out even more clearly against the leaves.

Week 4: Berlin
The hotel window overlooks an apartment block and a petrol station, grey wet backdrops to neon signs. On the way to the quantum arts symposium, wide swathes of road are flanked by foliage glowing warmly in the sunshine, quietly ablaze. I meet other artists: a pandemonium of parakeets.

Week 5: London, Dublin
Back in London the leaves begin to tumble down into soft carpets of mulch. I watch them fall in the days before a flight to Dublin. I am home for the first time in weeks and a storm has pushed a park’s worth of shedding trees into neat piles against my front door. I clear a third of them and the brown bin is already full. In front of my home, trees glow ruby and jasper and citrine, O’Connell’s tower rising up from behind them.

Week 6: Dublin, Belfast, Dingle
A blur of crunching leaves, the Liffey, the Lagan, the Atlantic, the statue of Fungie the Dolphin. In the days between travel I relish the softness of my sofa, getting trapped on it for hours, horizontal in front of a TV. The house is both abundant and lacking; I am both abundant and lacking. I am inbetween things. The piles of leaves outside my door grow larger and I do not clear them.

Week 7: London
Back in South Kensington the trees are suddenly naked. Through the spindly silhouettes of branches I can see into the student halls across the park, the lights on in their flats; no more strutting about nude in a well-lit apartment for me. We’re all exposed to each other now. There is no rustling, less chirping. A disquieting quiet.

Week 8: London
Thin arms and long fingers wave and scrape in the chaos of Storm Bert. The remaining piles of leaves are bagged up, as are my belongings as I prepare to head home. I go downstairs, walk through the softest earth, pick up the widest, brightest leaves. They splay out larger than my palm. I tape them onto my wall covered in poem drafts and post-its, then photograph it all before I take it apart. I throw the leaves back out the window, letting them continue their journey into decay, death, fertilising the ground for renewal. They return to where they belong. I do the same.

GHOST MOUNTAIN

i am pressing myself into quantum
shoving my skin up against it
trying to imprint the whorls and flakes of myself onto something impenetrable

i have treated quantum like pick and mix snatching phrases and concepts out of context slapping them on like grocery store barcodes hoping they make me comprehensible

i have tried making the knowledge sticky
wished it melting honey-like into the folds of my brain seeping into the crevices, solidifying into amber instead it flows in one ear and out the other

i have churned myself through the language of quantum felt versions of myself vibrate against each other
felt the crescendo of amplitudes
the dull crash of interference

quantum is itself whether i’m looking or not ambivalent to me twisting it to my needs
i anthropomorphise it, thank it, resent it but quantum is quantum, simply there

LOVE LETTERS OF AN ELECTRON TAMER

i. BEAUTIFUL WORKINGS

I am perfectly held
by this sea of firm uncertainty
against a tide of wrong answers through the shallows of right questions on waves of tiny eurekas

I am perfectly seen by
eyes poring over words
scribbles in the margins
warm, open people with outstretched hands blunt, brusque people with outstretched hearts

I am perfectly found
between the pages of grandmother’s textbooks
by colleagues, adversaries, unlikely friends
in a dusty office hollow with absence
in Moscow, London, Tokyo, Barcelona, Dresden, Berlin

I am perfectly lost
cushioned, lifted, warmed and dazzled
by the twistings, the meanderings
the failures, the solvings
the yesnomaybes of these beautiful workings

ii. MAGIC IN THE MARGINS

at the peripheries of papers
he lives in inky scrawls
skittering down the flanks of a page

amongst dusty sheafs destined for the bin like meets like as she reads his notes
this one is worth keeping

iii. CHIRALITY

a handshake trapped in a spiral of light drowning out the noise, the chatter
what were the chances of this, of us
of things that don’t travel in straight lines we turn a handshake into a dance

held tight in the glare of spotlight
my palms folded into yours, all eyes on us as we look into the mirror of each other

Interviewed scientist: Margarita Khokhlova

FINESSE

In a lab in
King’s College London,
a woman in baggy jeans and a crop
top crouches over an experiment, gold earrings flashing under fluorescent lights. She suspends a particle - a nanorod - between two lasers where it floats, vibrating tightly with the push and pull of forces. Flanking it are two mirrors forming a ‘cavity’, the space between mirrors so precise and polished that the particle behaves strangely between them, growing colder and colder.
She says to me, how does it
know that the mirrors
are there? Things
behave
strangely
between mirrors,
trapped all alone with
themselves. Nestled in the
crook of a laser beam a particle
can be nudged and held and spun without the grabbiness of hands, without the pinch of things, removed from all that can push, shove, taint, derail. Let it exist in the safety of isolation. It won’t mind if you watch, praise it for existing: it’s what it does best. So place the particle between mirrors, see how it slows down, how its reflections make it sit in the cold of itself. It
loves it there, in its tundra of isolation: untouchable.

ENTANGLED TONGUES

a life in constant translation
Italian to English and back again algorithms like sheet music for the cosmos

words for quantum scatter across rivers of earth and time dropping anchor into a history of mouths

at the crossroads is a Trickster watching you explain the universe through code watching you laugh with your sisters

as the words jumble and stumble

groviglio, intreccio, garbuglio

the Trickster asks

with all this entanglement would you rather be a Rosetta Stone or deliciously untranslatable?

Interviewed scientist: Clelia Altomonte

QUANTUM WONDERLAND

i. things that happen at the foot of trees

I’ve never been interested in fallen apples
preferring to drag my belly along the bark of possibility: dancer, mathematician, architect, anthropologist... below, a mirror beckons

ii. ‘you should have realistic expectations’

a comment like an arrow to the back of a classroom I catch it, snap it, throw it back
use it to carve my answers onto the wall
laying claim to the future said to be out of reach

iii. if I wish it were mine, then it is

with child eyes I trace the lines of London cartoon silhouettes on a tv screen
now gum-clad pavements underfoot
glue me down to my dream

iv. 6 impossible things before breakfast

the whisper of maths into a child’s ear turns into roar, into hurricane, into tunnel out of Kansas and through the looking glass Oz and Wonderland in a theoreticist’s hands

v. the universe expands and so do I

while pregnant I write a paper on expanding spacetime co-authored with the father of the universe inside me between contractions I take calls from a journalist
my papers, my baby: discovery, creation, expansion, love

vi. there is no peak

they say of both dancers and theoreticists
that they peak in their 20s
but I’ve never been stronger, seen clearer
quantum speaks to me, through me, louder than ever

vii. appleseeds

I call out across the void and the women answer scraped and battered from the bark and the briar we take our unbelongings, bury them together
in time there grows a tree, a mirror

Interviewed scientist: Dr Ivette Fuentes

FERTILE VOID

Once in a blue moon I think about having a daughter, and tonight is a full blue moon and I am thinking of you. I am thinking of you because it is just past midnight and I am googling ‘quantum pregnancy’, because I am thinking about the times where someone is both in existence and not at the same time. I am thinking about the waiting room where myself and others were sitting, simultaneously bored and vibrating with worry. The nurse repeating the term ‘failed contraception’, emphasising the word ‘fail’. / That is a day where I don’t end up pregnant. But for those hours inbetween, in a body that felt both with child and not, realities bloomed and expanded and came into being. And then, a measurement, an outcome, an answer: realities contract, a state collapses, the amplitudes have spoken: this outcome emerges as the winner. / It's ok for me to not want a son, because I’m not going have one. Or a daughter for that matter nor offspring of any kind, because I don’t want to. But sometimes that other life appears out of the corner of my eye, wavering like heat off of summer tarmac. I see my daughter walking with me, small hand in mine. My tiny witch child, my solemn little harbinger of doom, the chubby cheeks on her. / The eggs that might have become you remain in this body unfruited, and so the potential of you has been part of me, will be part of me, is part of me, and so I direct these stories to you in your current form, whatever it is to be the opposite of a ghost. The ghost of an idea fused into meat. Sure isn’t that what a daughter has always been.

YOU MENTIONED FEYNMANN

“Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.”
– Richard Feynmann

It’s not in your nature to live in a silo; it isn't in the nature of the universe. That connectedness calls out to you, lures you into the dense fog of existence where classical meets quantum. You wade through, feel the murk about your ankles, meander through the swamp of it. In that space you build bridges and walkways, wonder if there are others like you, full of want, full of a desire to make sense of the unthinkable. When they finally arrive you revel in your similarities, your elation so very infectious.

But you’ve been told that this isn’t ‘natural’. You’ve been told ‘you'd better make up your mind about where you belong’, but it’s wrong, because you often feel quantum mechanical, holding all of your selves within yourself, resisting a collapse. To you it’s natural to exist outside the binary. Why should you choose between one thing and another when they have always co-existed side by side, entangled, interwoven, wholly of themselves while resonating within each other?

It's a wonderful feeling, to push back, to take space, knowing that you wield solutions to the problem. Because you’re still wading in the depths of the inbetween, a place you compute from, draw breathe from. It doesn't ask you to be anything but yourself, your selves, all of them.

Now when others look they finally see, so onwards you go, traversing worlds with tools to offer up to whoever is searching, to whoever is wanting, to whoever is wading into the fog and looking for a flashlight; to whoever wants to question, measure, experiment, try.

Interviewed scientist: Clelia Altomonte

GOLD IN THE GROUND

en tournant / girando

turning towards that glint in the floor sparkling in the corner of your eye

en avant / avanzando

towards mystery, anomaly, complexity gold on your mind

plié / flexionar

bent over your laptop well into the night peering through the thick silt of research

sauté / saltando

a leap of faith, then follow through experiment, theorise, test between your teeth

relevé / levantado

rising to the challenge, rising through the ranks rising tempers, rising temperatures

glissade / deslizar

gliding in the sweet spots of firing synapses of balanced equations, of peer review

tendu/extendido

stretching time, stretching energy, stretching budgets stand up from your desk and reach for the ceiling

en tournant/girando

in the corner of your eye, another glint from the ground turn towards it, begin the dance again

Interviewed scientist: Dr Ivette Fuentes

SHUT UP AND CALCULATE

sometimes you ruin things by asking why

you see something neat and tidy at surface level
note its perfect outputs ignore the feeling that there should be more that something’s amiss

because you’ve learnt not to trust feelings toomushytoomessy so things tick along seemingly ideal

flashes of dopamine with every encounter the reassuring thought that

this is perfect
it cannot be improved

you suspect that something might shift when looked at too closely best not to do that best to stick to what we know what works but you unfortunately are

a why person
a how person

a give me more person
so you begin to enquire delve further and on one hand

the world opens up to you
with answers you never had before answers that fold in on themselves that dazzle
that confuse
that set everything you know alight

but on the other hand they weren’t the answers you wanted they are full of heartbreak

you realise this needs to be done differently that the way we did things did not account for

all this information all this wildness all these contradictory feelings you couldn’t just leave it alone could you

and thus you are the reason it all dismantles
but it was meant to be

dismantled re-written re-built because that’s always where why gets you

dismantled

you didn’t mean to burn it all to the ground you just get excited when you find answers and forget that sometimes other people don’t

eventually it will be ok they’ll come round to it things needed to be

re-written re-built

standing amongst the debris of your own discovery you hope you can be a part of the rebuilding that the next version of things will have space for questions for contradictions
for the splendour of wild things

you hope
and you question

and you keep trying
and you feel

and feel
and feel