The Person: The Garden: The Guide

These are pages from the opening section of a book I am writing called The Garden. The Garden, as I’ve started to say boldly or foolishly, is the first part of a trilogy on the themes of Jewishness, war, memory, and time. I could have said, on the themes of personhood, spirit, afterlife. For in this trilogy, only two sections of which actually exist, personhood is very much in the air while the spirits of persons refuse to stay underground.Having spent five years writing a family history, I’d been pressed into a greater sense of the confluence, of the overlapping kinespheres, that make up what we call our (individual) lives.1 The past was not past, of course, which meant that the beings that inhabited so-called pastness were acting on me in uncountable ways. Moreover, the current of influence seemed to go in both directions. Having trained my light on what had been hidden, I’d altered what was there. The “observer effect,” which applies to particles and hypothetical cats, seemed also to apply to history. The present induces a pressure on what it looks (back) at, altering, if not “facts,” then certainly meaning. “History” is diffracted, as the biblical scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes, by way of “midrash,” the many and ongoing retellings.2One day, when I was in the very early stages of writing this history, I stood up from my café table and wandered over to bother my friend Thomas, who was working a few tables away. I said something about trying to get to the fact of the matter, and Thomas, who is a historian, looked a little amused. “History is less about facts,” he said, “than about spinning tales we can believe in.” I thought about this sentence nearly every day of writing. Did he mean that the historian’s job is to convince people of a particular version of history? Or did he mean that the aim of writing historically was to give the reader “something to believe in,” something to care about, to dedicate oneself to? I suppose he meant both.Reading as I did in the secondary literature surrounding so many topics—Indian removal, marronage, land law, homesteading, populism, spiritualism, water law, birth control, eugenics, World War I—I inevitably came across competing accounts. I worried about who to believe. I worried about what to believe in. When I went to primary sources for the “facts,” these sources too were blurred by interpretation. Just because I could read what senators said to one another in the Congressional Record did not mean I knew what they really thought, or what they said to one another behind closed doors. I could look at graphs charting homesteading, income disparities, or demographics in any given decade or place, but all these data would be suspect, incomplete, biased. I had direct testimony, my great-grandfather’s archive, including the copies of letters he’d chosen to type up, but this too was an unstable source of truth, for not only might he wittingly or unwittingly lie, but he also controlled whom I could and could not listen to. So many voices were silent—my great-grandmother Alice’s most strikingly. But while I could not hear her, I was nonetheless influenced by what I thought I knew. My father had described a strong old woman, an excellent gardener, blinded by glaucoma. These “facts” pressed on me, shifting my story. Or were they stories, shifting my facts?Genealogy.com, 23 and me, ancestry.com: these platforms beckoned like sirens, tempting me toward the shoals of supposed truths about my personhood. I didn’t go there. I could have tracked my blood in order to surmise something about the sex lives of my ancestors. But doing this seemed as useful as licking the sweat off my arm. What I needed to know was not in my DNA; it was in the stories we had told about ourselves, and these stories needed to be refleshed. My own flesh held them as much as it held the thirty thousand genes that spelled my name. Yet, in a sense, reading those stories (that archive), and writing them, retelling them, I found myself altered, while the spirits who inhabited these tales were also, by way of encounter, by way of observation and interpretation, made other.Turning to The Garden and the writing that has come after, I find myself thinking about the movement between past and present, or between self and other, whether dead or living, almost like a weather system. “Smoke” offers a prime metaphor, or better, example, of this ongoing and unpredictable exchange because of how it disperses while nonetheless exacting precise bodily response. “The other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future,” writes Karen Barad, one of the book’s dedicatees who was once, and so is always, my teacher.3 Barad is committed to reminding us that this “other” is not only or merely human. Air, earth, plants, creatures, bacteria, machines—these lists quickly become endless—also participate in the “mattering” of what we call “the person” (and it’s far stranger than that, as we’ll see). Desire, invitation, hospitality, intrusion, vulnerability: these are the activities or states that perform and indicate the movement, what Barad calls the intra-action of self and other that is the person-world-universe.Angels. In fact, I was interested in them, for I was very much interested in beings that trouble or travel the boundaries between genres of “existence.” The Hebrew word for “angel,” malak, is sometimes translated as “messenger,” which suggests that the angel—that between-being—is a language worker. Language is the bidirectional medium through which persons are remade. Yet I found, as I continued to write, that I wasn’t thinking only about the permeable boundaries between persons, or even between persons and so-called things. I wanted to go farther. And what did that mean?The Garden’s second dedicatee is my uncle, the painter Tony Robbin. Robbin has spent a good part of his career attempting to realize in paint, and sometimes in sculptural materials such as glass, metal, and light, fourth-dimensional space. 4D, which cannot be perceived in the ordinary 3D world, is a mathematical extension of three-dimensional space, and it is best modeled on a computer by the shape of a hypercube (or tesseract) in planar rotation.4 Robbin’s paintings, unlike a digital model that can move, visualize 4D by way of the movement of the viewer. As we walk around the painting, its shapes shift (think of how the eyes of a portrait might follow you around a room). Again, “the observer effect” at play. As viewer and painting, subject and object, generate fourth-dimensional geometry together, Robbin hopes our perception of space, of what space is, and therefore our understanding of time—what time is—will be radically altered.One of the earliest discussions of the relationship between fourth-dimensional space and visual art comes, interestingly enough, from a poet. In his 1913 book, The Cubist Painters, Guillaume Apollinaire writes: “Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. . . . The fourth dimension is supposedly engendered by the three known dimensions. It thus represents the vastness of space stretching eternally in all directions at any given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of infinity.”6 Apollinaire wrote his book on cubism before he entered World War I. Perhaps it was more possible then, before space-time condensed into the geometry of a trench, to imagine infinity, to consider simultaneity. Or maybe war, and other forms of trauma, make this desire, the desire to see “objects beyond immediate perception,” even more urgent.7Before the war we had only the surfaceOf the earth the seasAfter it we’ll have the depthSubterranean and arial spaceThese lines are from Apollinaire’s poem “War,” written in January 1916 from the front. On the one hand the poem seems to eagerly anticipate the expanded geometries and geographies promised by total war (U-boats, biplanes). But the poem’s final lines suggest a far more radical desire. After the war, Apollinaire imagines or hopes that the poem’s “we” will be “together in the touch of things from far away / From farther still / From the Beyond of this earth.”8 Apollinaire, in peace and in battle, craves contact with this “Beyond” and envisions access guides, not as angels, but as math, art, technology, and poetry.The second book in my trilogy (again, of which only two books exist), writes through the medieval Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides, engaging his “negative theology,” which runs through his great work, The Guide of the Perplexed. Maimonides’s Guide seeks (among other goals) to correct the mistaken impression that God is corporeal. God cannot be corporeal because of its infinite nature. No beginning, no end, no boundary, no body. Since God is infinite, and the human is not, God also exceeds our capacity to know. “Man’s intellect indubitably has a limit at which it stops. There are therefore things regarding which it has become clear to man that it is impossible to apprehend them.”9 Every attempt to apprehend and describe God betrays what God is. It would seem, then, that one cannot say even that “God is good,” or “God is love,” or “God is in you,” for each of these statements posits a limit, which makes no sense for an infinite being.Beyond definition, beyond description, beyond comparison, beyond language—to “know” God is only to know that we cannot know. But does this mean there is no God? Yes, it does. And it also means there is no not God. As the philosopher Sarah Pessin writes: “Apophasis with respect to God is not merely a negative refusal or inability to speak about God; it is a lived experience of elative dance. . . . As a rejection of any number of claims about God, it is a kind of atheism—but not the garden-variety kind; it is an atheism in/as/of prayer.”10This kind of thinking makes mayhem out of the categories of being and nonbeing, for to what or to whom do we pray? With what or with whom are we dancing? But one doesn’t even need God to confront this befuddlement. One only needs the world; that is, one only needs, as Barad teaches, the particles, the fields, and the void that, in constant intra-action, make up what we call the universe (including, of course, ourselves). According to what Barad teaches about quantum field theory, particles, the smallest units of matter, do not simply exist, just as the void can no longer be considered (as it is in Newtonian physics) pure nothingness. In quantum field theory, “particles no longer take their place in the void; rather, they are constitutively entangled with it. As for the void, it is no longer vacuous. It is a living, breathing indeterminacy of non/being” (my emphasis).11If for Maimonides God is infinite (and is therefore outside space and also time), for Barad the infinite everything that is also nothing lies at the core, or at the origin, of all matter (of all that matters, again, not just around us but in or as us). The key to understanding this lies in the fact (or is it a story?) of the presence/absence of what physicists call virtual particles. Virtual particles do not exist in the same way that so-called real particles do; however, they can be measured as appearing and disappearing constantly, “bubbling up” from the void (this bubbling up is often also described as vacuum fluctuations or disturbance in the field). Indeed, says Barad, without “virtual particles” quantum physics simply fails to describe the universe at all; the math falls apart. As they (sort of) explain, virtual particles are “a kind of thought experiment the world performs. . . . [They] do not traffic in a metaphysics of presence. They do not exist in space and time. They are ghostly non/existences that teeter on the edge of the infinitely fine blade between being and nonbeing.”12 Moreover, as an effect of their ontological indeterminacy, the intra-actions between virtual particles and so-called real particles are, theoretically, infinite. Because of this entanglement of quanta and void (of being and nothingness), Barad finds in quantum field theory—as Apollinaire and Robbin find in 4D—“a call, an alluring murmur from the insensible within the sensible to radically rework the nature of being and time.” “Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering,” Barad concludes with a kind of awed (odd) delight.13In one of the essays I am quoting from, Barad admits that all this is shorthand (or poetry?). They do not have enough space to explain in detail why electrons, for example, produce and reabsorb virtual photons as constitutive of themselves (they have been measured doing so). I suspect that they also do not have, for this essay, the right audience (or at least, I am this wrong audience). The essay is the introduction to a special issue of differences, “Feminist Theory out of Science.” Barad is not writing here to other quantum field theorists who share their ontological/mathematical grounding. On one level, we have to take their word for it, just as I’ve had to take my uncle’s word for it on 4D, and Maimonides’s (anti)word for it on God. I will come back to this.But first let me entertain this mayhem, this mayhem between being and nonbeing or between matter and the virtual, this beyond-being, another way—through story, or “tale.”From 1945 to about 1950 my mother, my uncle, and their parents lived in Yokohama, Japan. My grandfather was a lawyer working for the US government. He’d been sent to participate in the Tokyo war crimes trials (some of which took place in Yokohama). His job was more clerical than theatrical, but he did play a part in the process of bringing American-led justice to the generals of Imperial Japan in the years immediately after the United States dropped Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. In other words, just after the United States had murdered about two hundred thousand Japanese civilians in instants and poisoned hundreds of thousands more (and killed over one hundred thousand other civilians in the firebombing that preceded), we set to work extracting justice for war crimes, defined (legally) in part as “intentionally directing attacks the as such or civilians not direct part in my grandfather to generate this the family the on the land on which had and water from the and into which would also have found its way through the My was a and my a my and his had a who (as was with a same my grandfather of a after, my to things. I a day came out of with on the outside of was for by a man who nonetheless he could no longer do at which my to a care in my in my mother, who was my name. It took just five years for to no longer or After at my a very to of the all intra-action is Perhaps very little of it while it is far from that my family was poisoned by the in the or water of could have all had other is that the of war are not not in or I do not know whether the Tokyo trials justice or only the of And I do not know if the trials in justice for this same many of whom had been murdered by and their in what is in the on the of a Indeed, I do not know what or almost any the of a is in the is not it These are and than their the matter has been into and The are then sent out with and on the of other which in out a that, in theory, is infinite. when these unstable contact the of the the One can by way of even if one is not the of And the is in this way can be through Just as the of the core of an it can also be said that the stories of and of in just like the stories of and all across have no War into war, infinite war could be as the of the infinite God we can know not know. But again, such make no sense, for nothing that is infinite can have a Perhaps it makes more sense, when trying to ongoing to about the quantum void, as Barad writes, being nothing not being . . . in fact be the source of all that is, a that In this of source without source Barad calls “a without a we it no at void might birth a of infinite but unlike Maimonides’s God, which cannot be known but and be and the void is a But is Barad to it at our of this void us nothing in the way of what we can call What then, is it to know about the of the essay The I Barad suggests the it this void as “the within for to just as they to this justice and might from our encounter, not with other beings but with the of the quantum void that is that they shift They as they to In the language of on and Avivah Gottlieb Barad posits that what we from being to (as the infinite of both being and nonbeing at the core of is an understanding that we are therefore in and as (and being so the we can no longer be to this around us). is a radical of “the infinite of the they call it is the of that which might and might not the I that in the that of let me to the and the of and what they the of this essay, I wrote that I’d wanted to go farther than the of beings or across both space and time. I wanted to go but toward I’d been toward a of this it was because I wanted for to mean something other than the of more and more Perhaps I wanted which seemed to mean an opening to a and therefore sense of My uncle, my my they all seemed to for this too and had or in their of math, art, and to I am not a quantum field or a I am also not a philosopher, an or a What I do have, however, is the language of those who does it mean to word for As an who find myself in the of a In this I take the word in place of the that out of But it would be impossible to that there is language on the one hand and things on the other after you have read Barad, or the or a poem that or with There is no without for language is matter, and the of its The language that most to us is that which us at the Pessin calls this through which we of and In other words, spinning tales we can believe said two of the books of this exist, but in what way is that They only in my and in my as memory, which might we that the is made of and and is made of And the book that does not is