Steven Schneider's Blog: The Unreadable Book Blog - Posts Tagged "god"

Here's an early version of the story submitted to Quantum Shorts competition for 1,000 word fiction about particle physics:

SWEET CHARLOTTE IN THE HIGGS FIELD

Her name was Charlotte. In high school she looked like Audrey Hepburn. She was alive then, then dead, then a potentiality of the Higgs Field. In the future, in a moment of despair, he put out his hand and the probability of her existence became very high. Observing through closed eyes, in the corner of his peripheral vision she appeared, took his hand and turned to face him. "It's ok" she said "I still love you."

He had a theory about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. Tongue in cheek, he explained: "If I can't be certain about the location of any one particle in the universe, then there's no reason why my brain cells should be confined to my skull." A mind comprising physical states of individual neurons is therefore, also not confined. This explains why he wakes up right before the alarm goes off; his wandering mind checks the clock. ESP and the soul then both consist of the realized potential for all the particles of his macro brain to be coherent anywhere at any time. A joke with a germ of truth. Among all possible universes, this must be true.

In 2012 he learns that Charlotte died in 1997 at the age of 41. Then, in Jungian therapy, guided imagery, she appeared to him unbidden, the Sun’s messenger, clothed in the robes of a Renaissance angel. Among archetypes however, she misbehaved. She appeared in her overalls, sat on the kitchen counter, ate cereal from the box, laughed and talked with her mouth full. He began to think she had arrived from outside, that she was real.

He asks: Are you an angel?
What’s the definition?
A bodiless spirit with work to do.
Ok then, I’m an angel.
What is your work?
To tell you that here, on this side, it’s not that complicated. I spent so much time reading theology and trying to get a glimpse of God, so much concentration, so many words, but it’s more like slipping into a warm bath. I wanted you to know.

He says: I don’t want to take up all your time, though.
She laughs: Eternity is all moments at once, omnipresence is easy. I’m infinitely dispersed. All I have to do is be.
Like when Allah made Adam, he just said “Be!”
Exactly, and I am closer than your jugular vein, like it says in the Qur’an.
And did you find your Encounter with your Maker?
Not exactly.

He knows now that particles arise out of "nothing", the field of potentialities. It is the ether between and within all things. The Deep of Genesis is Tahom in Hebrew, linked linguistically to Tiamat, the Babylonian mother goddess out of which all the other gods were born. The Babylonian captivity informs Genesis with a word literally pregnant with potential, the Deep. Potential, the prime mover, precedes the Creator. The Rig Veda asks: Who made creation? Maybe the Supreme Being knows, maybe he does not know.

Gradually, he begins to understand, she hasn’t met her Maker, any Maker. She has found the Deep. Does Charlotte sail the Ether Deep, the new Quintessence? Does she feel the neutrino wind, deriving her mass and force from the medium that buoys her in the middle realm like a diver without need of breath? Is she without entropy, infinitely timeless and eternal? Among all possible universes, this must be true.

On the actual, realized beach, in the heat and light, he closes his eyes, turns his head to see her at his side and offers his hand:

Charlotte says: Why would He create the universe, anyway, just to watch it?
No: he answers.
Because He’s lonely?
That doesn’t sound like God.
To experience oneness with a created being?
Too needy.
To learn from an uncreated being?
That would make human Encounter impermissibly necessary for God.

She asks: What can we tell from our senses?
He says: That we don’t normally perceive God.
Right, so what do we do?
We pray to induce that perception.
Before that, something happened to us that we did not control, something from outside of us that we did perceive.
A theophany, the perception that throws us to the ground, like Paul and Mohammed?
Yes. So, is a Creator required for us to have that experience?
No, only suddenly the unseen seen, the unheard heard.

She continues: Creation is too messy and awkward to insist that it was created.
He agrees: True, maybe it was inferred, like dark matter.
Maybe something became aware of this dark matter and wanted to know it.
So, if we are not created, but yet are creatures, what are we?
She said: I think we were found.

Dark energy, dark matter, these are speeding through us here and now, but unseen. Perhaps we are God’s dark matter, unseen, occupying the space of God’s coffee table, a constant required by an equation, a theory descending from His blackboard, the subject of His Nobel Prize, regarding which He intones in Sunday morning interviews, for a news cycle or two. He says thirty per cent of the matter in our Universe, we do not see, do not interact with and yet it is right here, closer than your jugular vein.

As He dreams of book tours, Charlotte nods in silence and believes she knows the truth of the semantics of love and grace and pushes off from the shore of life to meet her Maker, Himself seeking only tenure and perhaps Encounter with a grad student whose equations have so far evaded His solution.
In the World, scientists under mountains still forge golden rings of power. Tristans projecting their anima on the stainless ISOLDE, they search for Charlotte in the Large Hadron Collider. She smiles and says to the first boy that worshipped her as a goddess, and to the equidistant fallen God of Abraham: “I still love you.” Both lovers close their eyes and promise to wait for her, in the Deep. Among all possible universes, this must be true.