PYRAMID CLIMBING PRESIDENT -- COMMENT -- FRAGMENT OF "A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA"

 

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 2, 2012

    

(The comments are from a high tech corporate executive with whom I have had the privilege to work.  A short segment of "A Green Island in a Black Sea" follows.  These are placed in juxtaposition of each other, as the uncertainty of the times is not unlike the protagonist's world of Seamus "Dirk" Devlin in South Africa in 1968, or forty-four years earlier.  The more things change they, indeed, stubbornly remain the same.)

A READER WRITES WITH REFERENCE TO PRESIDENT OBAMA AS A PYRAMID CLIMBER:

Hi Jim,

I always tried to be a productive worker, but now that I approach the end, I question that choice.  It reflects the blue-collar values of my upbringing, but it seems the rewards go more to the climbers. Since I now realize that morality is subjective, I really wonder about my choices.

On the current POTUS, my take:

1.      He’s the first black President.  I think that means more to him than anything else.

2.      He’s a Chicago pol, with everything that entails.  That’s where he learned the game, that’s what got him where he is today, without judging it good or bad, it would be silly I think to expect different.

3.      He’s a self-defined anti-hero with the same polarity.  That is very, very common in our society.  For Obama, that means he tends to embrace socialism.  Were we a socialist society, he’d be embracing capitalism.  From what I can see, the only difference between the two is the path to the top.  Under capitalism, it’s through financial prowess.  Under socialism, it’s through political prowess.  In both cases, the people are left to fend for themselves, often without success.

I’m glad you’re still writing.

Later bro,

e

DR. FISHER RESPONDS WITH YET ANOTHER SEGMENT FROM HIS NOVEL:

e,

It is so good to hear from you and to enjoy your acerbic wit.  I don't differ one iota from what you have said here.  My novel, which I have been working on for more than forty years, is reaching the uncertainty of some kind of fruition.  You always make me smile with your grasp of this concept with your refreshing candor.      

Be always well,

Jim

THE PHYSICS OF UNCERTAINTY (From "A Green Island in a Black Sea" © 2012)

The Devlins had reached the point of irreconcilable differences in their marriage.  Little energy was left for explanation or protest.  When Sarah and Rickie left with Marsha Williams and her daughters for the American hamburger joint on Downers Road, she knew she wouldn’t see her husband again until the sun rose on another day.  Both were disinclined to say anything as surprise had worn out its welcome. 

There was a time when Sarah resented Devlin’s routine of retiring into the sanctuary of his study after dinner to read, listen to classical music, ponder some mystery thriller on the BBC radio, or simply stare into the fireplace, watching the timbers smolder, drinking coffee until falling asleep with a book in his lap.  He insisted on having a fire in the fireplace no matter how warm the weather as he claimed a kinship with its disintegrating timbers.

*     *     *

Devlin arrived home early on Tuesday after returning to work from his short sabbatical.  Sarah hid her surprise, then registered hurt when he said, “I’m going out.”

“When will you be home?” she asked evenly.

“Later,” he replied.

“Then later it is,” she said as if in surrender.  “We won’t wait dinner for you.”  Her unconscious letting go would prove a brilliant stroke of control of their conjugal chaos in the end. 

It was amazing how civil people can be when the antipathy is so thick between them that you could cut it with a knife.  Ultimately, when all passion is spent, even hate takes a holiday as world-weariness takes residence.

*     *     *

As Devlin drove to Nina’s just past five o’clock, he thought of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  The theory states the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely the other can be known in the instant, and visa versa. 

In the dicey mathematics of quantum mechanics, the act of measuring one magnitude of a particle, be it its mass, its velocity, or its position, causes the other magnitudes to blur.  The uncertainty relation describes the “blur” between measurable quantities of a particle in mathematical terms.  The blur is not due to imprecise measurements.  The blurring of these magnitudes is a fundamental property of nature.

Heisenberg promoted the notion that the observer is part of the system observed with the observer no longer external and neutral.  Through the act of measurement, the observer becomes part of the observed reality.  This marked the end of the neutrality of the experimenter. 

Devlin saw his life and work as part of his laboratory, a subjective world, to be sure, but a world with an objective reality not unlike that of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.  Objective truth can be viewed from different perspectives as was the case with Erwin Shchorodinger’s wave mechanics, that Heisenberg saw as “crap,” only to find his matrix mechanics and Shchrodinger’s wave mechanics proved the same theory. 

In Devlin’s laboratory there was the duplicitous position of apartheid, the ambivalent momentum of the church, the duplicitous energy of his corporate universe, and implausible time line of the merger. What could be more uncertain?

The church blackmailed him with the threat of deportation.  His Bantu gardener was murdered and his death deemed trivial.  Police blocked his inquiry meant to ease his mind.  What could he do?  Absurdly, nothing! 

Clearly, Asabi had affection for Josiah.  She spoke his language, and Devlin was sure he was the kind of man she dreamed of marrying one day.  She didn’t understand he valued freedom more than physical pleasure.

Devlin and Josiah had a warm relationship that he chose to call friendship.  They were in quantum mechanic terms canonically conjugated variables with the momentum of one with the energy and time of the other.  Murder most certain eclipsed the variables in space and time. 

Surely, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applied equally to life, perhaps even to the idea of free will.

Could the blur between Nina and him be intelligible in terms of lust and love, or was it simply a manifestation of nature, which simply, is?  That was his uncertainty, which was far more complex than the laboratory of his work as observer and the observed when it came to apartheid, the church and his company.  Neither people nor particles can be punished with arbitrary authority to behave as desired.  Nature has its own agenda and it has no moral equivalencies.  . 

Could the uncertainty principle be merely pointing out the obvious?  That he had been dropped into this universe with no choice at all.

Josiah was caught in this web, and now he was in Devlin’s dreams.  Does that mean that even death is uncertain, that the ultimate momentum to justice will one day be precise when everything balances out quantum mechanically?  If order and chaos are relative, why was he so obsessed with control?

In the uncertainty of his nightmares, where he was often lost, thoughts ricocheted off his unconscious between being deported and murdered by his wife.  He had become a pervasive irritant to everyone including Nina.  Collectively, they had little appetite for his uncertainty. 

Sarah was exceedingly unhappy.  Was he responsible?  The church, his company and the government were obsessed with him.  Had he created this?  Was he a toxic variable in a world that denied inescapable uncertainty?  It was only a matter of time before that toxicity infected his work and Nina, if it hadn’t already.  What was he to do?

Heisenberg was on to something.  Luckily, he fell short with his atomic bomb, or Germany might have won the Second World War with the uncertain but projected possibility that there would be no Seamus Devlin in South Africa today.  Chance ruled. 

As he stumbled forward, thinking of Heisenberg and the horrific possibility of Germany launching an atomic holocaust, he marveled at how uncertainty had fueled his tasks in South Africa. Could God be the ultimate uncertainty principle?

*     *     *