Now we have to wait for the handout.
OK.
All right.
There is more to say before I start reading it,
so I guess I could go on.
"As a child I tried to have experiential knowledge
of religious doctrine.
Never wanted to give up and back I
tied to somehow ground abstract physics in human psychology.
I do so feeling that the two are somehow incompatible
and that they will clash in tragicomic ways."
So here's the poem.
"Back."
"The teacher said two mirror images could
come into being by borrowing from zero,
but only if they agreed to cancel one another out.
We followed from inert matter by offering to eat each other up.
What sort of place is existence?
Since we can come into it.
A point coincides, it has no dimension.
Some say matters really energy and energy
is force of law and law is just tautology.
We were taught to have faces by a face looking back."
Back begins in what seems to be the voice of an algebra
teacher discussing equations.
Beneath this, though, is the theory of the quantum vacuum
in which supposedly virtual particles and their mirror
image antiparticles constantly pop into existence
and then annihilate one another.
How can we understand this?
By imitation?
Living being survived by canceling out,
by gobbling one another up, by turns.
I as the speaker in the poem offered
this imperfect and grotesque metaphor as a tribute
to particle physics.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Formula seemed to express physical laws by putting
an equal sign between things.
But what is the single thing?
Does it come down to the point particle
which is said to somehow exist without any dimension?
That's true by the way.
That is what they say.
In the third section of the poem,
the mirror image particle has become the Lacanian mirror
stage in the child's development.
I wonder if we exist only as paired, entangled, tautological
images, do we exist at all?
Of course, not all my poems call on science.
But in recent years a surprising number have.
I think this is because contemporary science not only
gives us provocative things to imagine,
but also leaves us with more questions than answers.