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Now, where do missing words go?”
“Maybe you’ve been trying too hard. Or looking in the wrong place.”
“The Island of the Dead. What better place to look for missing words?”
Mind and words are time being. Arriving and not-arriving are time being.
A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose name it was, survives in these pages. —Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé
When no one was looking, I slipped some Melty Kisses into her hand, too. Zen masters don’t usually take chocolates with them to the Pure Land, since they’re supposed to be so unattached to things of this world, but I knew how much old Jiko loved her chocolates, and I figured it wouldn’t matter.
I remembered the karaoke party we had, when Jiko sang the “Impossible Dream” song. Somehow, I connected that song to her vow to save all beings, and as I watched her lying there, I felt sad for her because she had failed, and the world was still filled with creeps and hentai.
we call an Adam’s apple in English, but in Japanese it’s called the Throat Buddha, because it’s triangular and looks a little bit like the shape of a person sitting zazen. If you can find the Throat Buddha, then the dead person will enter nirvana and return to the ocean of eternal tranquillity. The Throat Buddha is the last bone that goes in, and you put it on the very top, and then they close the urn.
And others disagreed, claiming that writing life at the moment of death meant that she understood that life and death were one, and so she was fully enlightened and freed from duality. But the fact is, nobody understood what she really meant except me and my dad, and we weren’t saying.
So let’s assume this Jungle Crow is your familiar, your totem animal, just like the cat was Oliver’s.”
“my theory is that this crow from Nao’s world came here to lead you into the dream so you could change the end of her story. Her story was about to end one way, and you intervened, which set up the conditions for a different outcome. A new ‘now,’ as it were, which Nao hasn’t quite caught up with.”
“I see. So what’s your second theory?”
“Well, it’s akin to my reader’s block theory. That it’s your doing. It’s not about Nao’s now. It’s about yours. You haven’t caught up with yourself yet, the now of your story, and you can’t reach her ending until you do.”
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die. And maybe you’ll be glad to know that for the first time in my life, I really don’t want to die.
at least not until I’ve finished writing old Jiko’s life! I can’t die until I do that. I have to live! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!
Oliver looked up from the magazine. “‘Quantum information is like the information of a dream,’” he said. “‘We can’t show it to others, and when we try to describe it we change the memory of it.’” “Wow,” she said. “That’s beautiful. Did you make that up?”
“That’s what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can’t ever get it back.”
“You were speculating about multiple outcomes, right? Multiple outcomes imply multiple worlds. You’re not the first to wonder about this. The quantum theory of many worlds has been around for the last half century. It’s at least as old as we are.”
Maybe he’s figured out how to use quantum entanglement to make parallel worlds talk to one another and exchange information.”
Please try it, she said. Did you snap? Because if you did, that snap equals sixty-five moments.
Quantum mechanics is time being, but so is classical physics.
superposition: by which a particle can be in two or more places or states at once (i.e., Zen Master Dgen is both alive and dead?)
entanglement: by which two particles can coordinate their properties across space and time and behave like a single system (i.e., a Zen master and his disciple; a character and her narrator; old Jiko and Nao and Oliver and me?)
A cat is put into a sealed steel box. With him in the box is a diabolical mechanism: a glass flask of hydrocyanic acid, a small hammer aimed at the flask, and a trigger that will either cause the hammer to release, or not.
The cat and the atom represent two entangled particles.
superposition and the measurement
superposition: that a particle can be in all of its possible states at once. (Think of a superimposed photograph of a pacing tiger in a pen, taken with a shutter that exposed the film every couple of seconds.
We know that on account of the measurement problem, the moment you open the box to measure the cat’s state, you will find the cat either dead or alive. Fifty percent of the time the cat will be alive. The other 50 percent of the time, the cat will be dead. Whichever it is, the cat’s state is singular and fixed in time and space.
Hugh Everett published what came to be called his “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1957, in Reviews of Modern Physics, when he was twenty-seven years old.
He worked for the Pentagon’s Weapons System Evaluation Group. He wrote a paper on military game theory, entitled “Recursive Games,” which is a classic in the field. He wrote war games software that would simulate nuclear war, and he was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Mark went on to have a successful career as a rock musician, but Liz’s life spiraled downward. When she finally succeeded in killing herself with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1996, she wrote a suicide note that said:
Please burn me and DON’T FILE ME . Please sprinkle me in some nice body of water . . . or the garbage, maybe that way I’ll end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up w/ Daddy.
