Experimental Fiction
Quantum Poetics
Definition of Quantum Poetics :
General Idea : Text can be viewed as activating a broad field of meaning and resonance, itself grounded in day to day experience, and that attending to both the text itself and its associated field can be productive.
In field poetics the text describes an underlying reality directly. There are several defining characteristics of the notion of field : interconnectness, continuity, self-referentiality, time-freedom, non-hierarchicality, boundedness, generative of forces. For example onomatapeia expresses self referentiality, while alliteration expresses interconnectedness and continuity. Regular metric forms may be viewed as fields with wave-like properties, and additional regularities such as end of line rhyming may then be viewed as interference patterns where the repetitions result in enhanced semantic effects.
In Quantum field poetics, text is the result of applying a “quantum of action” principle to an experiential field, intermediate between text and reality, leading to a mix of text-meaning effects. The experiential field is viewed as ineffable, numinous and feeling-based. Some additional properties of quantum field poetics : coupling of words and meaning in an uncertainty principle ; virtual semantic clouds ; propagating boundary effects ; metastable states, repetitions and triggers ; meaning construction via inter-sentence exchanges ; degeneracy of meaning ; and thoughts and feelings as forces.
In poetic terms, here is another attempt to define Quantum Field poetics :
What is the field?
when a smile loops back on itself,
when it lies flat but alive with movement,
when it abuts against its own limits
carried there by fe-lines of force,
and then leaves its subtle body
as flotsam in the receding tide.
What is the field?
when I sit at my loom
the thread crosses itself,
weft and warp intertwined -
past and future come together
in a surface that drapes
around your shoulders,
- another kind of crossing.
What is the field?
when words shadow each other
dancing delightfully in digital declamations ;
when sentences rub against each other,
cats upon an etherized table,
wrapping their tales around fluid space
like some oceanic clapotis.
Then, field and stream,
Flick and jump within the current;
Or simply watch and dream,
As words and winning whys
Drop to the electric ground,
Preparing the way
For the Holy Quantum.
Let us play...
Vibration tunnelling its way
from the numinous to the indescribable.
An oscillation between wave and particle,
idea and event, soul and body,
Verb and noun.
It’s not so much a matter of probability,
As it is a quest for the liminal,
the interstices between reality,
and expectation.
It’s some kind of dream space,
a vast atrium
where spirit rubs shoulders with time ;
the bound and the boundless
caught inside our private animal paradoxes.
The quantum shudders within its own ambiguity :
Whether particles or words, clusters
Gather us within their potent velocities.
Energy or meaning, two equivalences.
Both partners with time,
Heisenberg pairings, without a doubt!
Each takes root in the other
and resounds.
While the field prepares for :
Ruptures! Breaklines! Cracks!
These things radiate
Across an ocean of verbs,
Carrying awareness forward.
Abrupt changes in direction,
Echoes and half homonyms,
These also syncopate across multiple dimensions
And resound.
Aperspectival
In the immediacy
Of life interleaved
With godstuff.
Integral
In the beyond
Of ten thousand forms
All meaning the same.
Degeneracy, not in the sense
Of vagrancy or the delinquent,
Although these are no strangers
To the rejection of structure,
But rather, a collapse of the many dimensions
That shape our inner lives.
Just as this poetic field
Is pulled and pushed
By your thoughts and states,
Not to mention e-motions,
So all fields are molded
By such photonic mediators.
Art is nothing else
But a trace of hidden forces
Acting in the pastures
Of someone else’s garden.
Essays and articles
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1999, Pour une géométrie de l'intime : la science et la poésie se rencontrent (in French)
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Towards a Geometry of the Intimate : Poetry and Science Come Together (translated from the French)
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1992, Le champs poétique : les échos d'un scientifique (in French)
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The poetic field : a scientist reflects (translated from the French)
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Conference proceedings
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2018, Quantum Poetics and the Aperspectival in Writing Fiction and Poetry - Crossgrains, 48th Annual Gebser Society Conference, Boulder, Colorado, October
Short stories
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1987, Changement de phase (in French)
Novellas
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1987, Fonction d'onde (in French)
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2018, Wave Function (translated from the French)
Novels
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1987, An Introduction to Modern Physics (fragmentary manuscript)
Anthologies
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2018, "quantum flower", submitted to Mutations : Art, Consciousness and the Anthropocene, J. Johnson (ed.), collaboration with Heather Fester and Marco Morelli, October