Clint Irwin: Mad World

The Quantum Moment

The smallest moments are the largest, yet least recorded, least understood. What is the smallest moment when something huge begins, the quantum moment when an idea, a relationship or a disaster begins? The birth of ideas is so complicated that we are often compelled to come up with a fable like Newton and the apple, where everything comes together. But the idea had existed beforehand, in a million notes, observations and contemplations. The apple is just a way of simplifying the introduction.

In relationships, the introduction between two people is usually given as the quantum moment where it began. The trope of love at first sight is often trotted out, but was that really the apple? Did both parties instantly feel that lasting connection in that moment? It is hard to say since this is the least recorded event in any relationship. A person does not go into it expecting a life-changing event. It is just another introduction until it is not. What exact words were exchanged afterward to kindle the first spark into a flame? Was one party instantly in love and another on the fence until a moment fifty-seven days, six hours, twenty-seven minutes and three seconds later, while sitting on a couch watching a movie with a friend—the moment of certainty arising in the brain randomly, with the sting of a vinegar-and-onion Dorito on the tongue? By the time the relationship is widely celebrated and recorded at a wedding, all of the key moments that had led to it are left to the slipshod recording methods of human memory.

And human memory can be a challenge. At my graduation, I had no friends or family attending because they were all in another state. I felt so anxious to go up and get my diploma because I was terrified that there would be this awful silence. As my name was announced, and I started to cross the stage, I heard someone shout my name. I cherished that one little piece of support for many months until a video arrived and I heard that my name had not been shouted at all, and that the cheering was standard. Even now, though, some part of me insists on believing that that shout was real, from someone in the audience that cared about me personally, but somehow it was just not recorded. The fact that the memory of an event and how one’s feelings relate to it can alter it, even when the event is recorded, is a problem.   

Consider Frenchman, Jules Naudet. He and his brother were filming a documentary about a rookie firefighter in lower Manhattan. He was on a truck heading toward a routine call, when the thunder of a low-flying plane caused him to turn his camera into the beautiful, ignorant sky of a Tuesday morning and record a quantum moment, which would explode into the most heavily recorded event in the history of mankind. What he recorded was the first plane, Flight 11, crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Although it was recorded by at least two others (interestingly, both of them born in Europe as well) he would also have the only footage of men who would die because of that day, at a time when they were not supposed to be a part of history at all, just a small film project. Compare that to Pearl Harbor, where there is little but pictures of burning ships long after the planes were gone, or the assassination of JFK, which is nothing but a grainy home movie. Even the broader event of 9/11 is useful, here. We can easily forget the plane which crashed unseen in a rural, Pennsylvania field, leaving nothing but a charred hole, or a few frames of Flight 77 taken by a security camera as it plowed into the Pentagon.

Osama bin Laden had a stroke of genius in New York, striking a monumental milestone in a densly-populated tourist and media center, where the event was guaranteed to be recorded by residents, sightseers and news cameras from all over the world. The confusion, the panic, the horror—all of it from beginning to end was recorded, but this did not stop the conspiracy theorists, people so desperate to avoid stomaching the idea of a universe so chaotic that they would try to erase the experiences of that day, claiming everything was faked. Worse, it was seized on by opportunists in the Bush administration as a pretext for a pre-existing idea to invade Iraq, until the whole reason why the United States had invaded Afghanistan in the first place was lost and is currently equated with the Iraq skullduggery. 

This points to the futility of recording any event, whether the birth of an idea, a relationship or a historical disaster, where humans and the way they want to see something, in spite of all evidence, arises. It points to the idea in physics, where an observed phenomenon is altered simply by the means of its observation and how it is recorded. This is the ghost that haunts the house of my mind. Sometimes it is in the front yard for all to see and other times it is in the basement, but it dwells in everything I write. I am haunted by the notion that in every nanosecond is a potential singularity, which could go big bang at any moment. If fiction is a lie that tells the truth, to paraphrase Picasso about art, then my fiction is a lie where I pretend I can catch a singularity, a small moment, and slowly track its inexorable expansion, its big bang into another universe, whether in the mind of a single character, or into the world around him or her, or both.