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Experimental Fiction

Quantum Poetics

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Definition of Quantum Poetics :

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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.

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In poetic terms, here is another attempt to define Quantum Field poetics :

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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.

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Essays and articles

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  • 1999, Pour une géométrie de l'intime : la science et la poésie se rencontrent (in French)

    • Towards a Geometry of the Intimate : Poetry and Science Come Together (translated from the French)

  • 1992, Le champs poétique : les échos d'un scientifique (in French)

    • The poetic field : a scientist reflects (translated from the French)

 

Conference proceedings

 

 

Short stories

 

  • 1987, Changement de phase (in French)

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Novellas

 

  • 1987, Fonction d'onde (in French)

  • 2018, Wave Function (translated from the French)

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Novels

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  • 1987, An Introduction to Modern Physics (fragmentary manuscript)

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Anthologies

  • 2018, "quantum flower", submitted to Mutations : Art, Consciousness and the Anthropocene, J. Johnson (ed.), collaboration with Heather Fester and Marco Morelli, October

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