Quantum Language Mechanics & Rae Armantrout’s Finalists
Taped over my desk there’s a rumpled image of Edward Hopper’s “Cape Cod Morning” that I ripped from a magazine some time ago. The painting depicts a woman leaning on a table and looking intently out a jutting bay window at something we can’t see in the distance. Her gaze is directed ninety degrees to the right of mine, which falls on the side of her face. The shadow-sharpened angles of the house in which she’s contained occupy the exact left half of the pictorial space, while the right half is filled by smeary clouds, trees, and meadow grass in diffuse morning light.
Hopper’s paintings are neither about their subjects nor their viewers, but about the space between them, which is less like a space than a duration—duration as opposed to time’s parade of units. What captivates me about “Cape Cod Morning” is not in the painting but in the perspectival dissonance of my relationship to it.
My understanding (though not my experience) of time was melted down and molded into something wholly different by Carlo Rovelli’s 2017 book The Order of Time. Conversely, his 2021 Helgoland taught me that it’s much easier for me to swallow outrageous ideas about what might be the case on a large scale than on the smallest. Science of the small is supposed to winnow the world down to fundamentals (both like and unlike language, which is littered with retired first principles, in the manner that “fundamental” also concerns God’s green earth and the rectal), but physicists remain mystified by the smallest Legos of our physical reality, particularly why and how electrons leap between their orbits around the nucleus of an atom. They have no discernible trajectory and all that we know is what we can see, which is the little bit of light they emit in their leaps.
Heisenberg and his cohort came up with tables that indicate the probability, rather than determinable routes, of electrons’ movement, describing murmurations of relations that clash, diverge and change one another like intersecting wakes. But the waves of probability are meaningless in the presence of an observer, who just sees the electron where it is, rather than in all the places it could be. To observe a thing is to change it, in the way that my phone disappears from all the places I might have left it as soon as I call and locate it. And yet, since every observer is also described by quantum activity, I am not outside of or in any way separable from that at which I’m looking. How then can my perception be so important as to determine it? This is the basic mystery of quantum mechanics.
In line with Einstein’s theories of relativity, Rovelli thinks that all properties of matter—speed, mass, dimension, location—are relative and don’t exist outside of physical interactions; that reality is a web of manifestations, not a set of irreducible certainties, much like the relational nature of language that’s the province and plaything of poetry.
Both “universe” and “verse” come from Latin for “to turn,” as in create or render.
The electrons don’t leap, they materialize elsewhere.
In the grammar of the universe, all things are deictic; no thing (even nothing) has meaning without context.
How then to engage with a world of no innate properties in a language with no innate meanings? Collision, fusion, and full-blown prepositional contingency distinguish the only kind of poetry I want to read, and Rae Armantrout’s is the apotheosis.[1] The first stanza of the first poem in the first half—titled Threat Landscape—of her recent double book, Finalists, reads:
Domestic as
an empty shopping cart
parked on a ledge
above a freeway.
“Hang On”
Here we have William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” where each property of each thing depends on those of every other, but retooled for a ruined world of reflexive consumerism. To the degree that Williams’s poem is characterized by color, light and bright consonants, Armantrout’s is marked by dullness, emptiness and leaden short “e”s, as in “ledge.”
“Domestic” is hilarious, evoking the proliferation of home goods stores (e.g., Home Goods) you can hardly get a stone’s throw away from in this country anymore, thus aptly including the suggestion of nationality, as well as the cooptation of a wild being for personal use—the sad cart has been separated from its pack. Threat Landscape is suffused with the relationships between commercial branding and individual identity, categories that seriously ramped up their bleed with the advent of mechanical reproduction, and whose merging is now all but complete as social media has reduced our dos-à-dos personal and public identities to what we look at. Not only are we becoming brands, we now refer to ourselves that way—social media is an economic and political system of visual consumption, a web of looking at looking at looking at.
“Identity is made / of select experiences,” Armantrout says in the book’s third poem, “Vultures.” The passive verb and adjective both suggest that our identities come in a kit of the sort whose pieces my mother-in-law takes apart and stores in plastic baggies after the kids have assembled them so they don’t get mixed together in the way we keep telling her inspires imagination. In marketing parlance, what is “select” has been preselected for exclusivity, which is pretty much the opposite of having made a selection or a choice (“choice” meaning the same two opposite things).
Capturing and holding out against this commerce-driven anxiety of identity that now characterizes many of our lives, “Vultures” begins,
A product can be authentic;
an object cannot.
This presents a problem.
An identity can be authentic;
an experience cannot.
As though to demonstrate, Finalists is full of brands—Diet Coke, Marriott, more than one instance of Starbucks—and ad copy that contrast with the book’s twin theme of young children’s (her actual twin granddaughters’) language acquisition. Like a universe on fast-forward, we see language identities forming and being pulled apart into messaging: “just do you,” “…from a call center perspective,” “how was your sleep experience,” “this message has no content.” The most hopeful note is in the “recalcitrance of objects” (“Findings”) blessedly impervious to market-based notions of purity.
Individual objects might be safe from cooptation, but their generalizing names swirl about in linguistic systems of largely foregone relations. This, of course, is the both the problem and the opportunity presented to poetry, the supercollider of language, whose job is to smash things together to see what happens. As Rovelli says with regard to quantum particles’ ghostly lack of properties unless and until they interact with one another, “At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete.”[2] (86). This very statement could have been made by a late-twentieth-century Lyn Hejinian or Susan Howe concerning the omissions and false continuities created in and by the meaning-making triumvirate of human consciousness, language and the historical record. Like the work of these and other Language Poets with whom she was early on affiliated, Armantrout’s poetry is essentially juxtapositional, disrupting the false continuities and modeling a non-hierarchical, non-progressive relationality. But while the legibility and narrative integrities of her work have increased over time, and even though the mainstream poetry world has naturalized the kind of poem that formally represents the way our minds slur and stack up the world to make it mean, the intensity of Armantrout’s gaze and the carved escarpments between her poems’ segments are no less sharp.
Language Poetry’s formal disruption, interruption and chance operations were to demonstrate the constructed nature of our individual and collective identities, the niceties of lyricism purportedly contributing to the illusion of the world’s coherence. Armantrout doesn’t shirk niceties—she frequently employs subtle rhyme and assonance in a chatty “lilt,” for lack of a less precious word—but she also doesn’t over-process her poems to meet the frequently easy-to-achieve pleasures of minimalism. She prioritizes conceptual rigor over formal beauty, which is the chemical bond she maintains with Language Poetry. The last section of “Vultures” reads:
When you are genuinely sick
the leaves recede
and the flickering holes between them
come forward—
not angels, but
unnamed objects.
Cutting the ungainly “genuinely” seems like a gimme, but she needs it. She means deathly sick, which raises the question of why we apply the same word to a head cold and a terminal condition. A line break after “between” would draw out the rhyme with “recede,” but too much, no? Is the “them” even necessary? For Armantrout it is, because she is not going to do the easy slide into generality—this poem will not be about the phenomenology of holes. It is about these holes, where death and language meet, the poet refusing to die and leave behind unnamed objects, while also imagining a paradisiacal afterlife full of unnamed objects. Perhaps she’ll even be a blessedly unnamed object—non-contingent, undetermined, as thing-y as a thing gets in itself.
I started writing a novel based on “Cape Cod Morning” last summer, for which reason it’s taped over my desk, but I abandoned it 10,000 words in because I was unable to replicate the perceptual relations and frustrations that interested me in the painting. A hundred years later I’m still a sucker for a Cubist approach to writing, but what might a CERN-age subjectivity reflecting even smaller units of reality look like on the page? Extending his relational quantum theory to the nature of human consciousness, Carlo Rovelli says, “I is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else” (152). William Carlos Williams well represents the interdependency of physical things’ properties, but seldom questions the perspectival stability of the observer or the language at hand. Armantrout retains an Imagist interest in objects, but foregrounds instabilities of the language, thought, memory and perception with which those objects are apprehended. The flickering holes between sections of her sequences—sometimes numbered, but more often marked with bullets or asterisks—hold the poems and the contingent world they represent both together and apart. They’re where the leaps in the orbits of the poet’s mind happen, requiring the reader to execute their own leaps, making plain and palpable the role of the observer in determining reality.
In Finalists, the section break symbol isn’t an asterisk or bullet but a kind of wavy equals sign with lines of uneven thickness (i.e., not, or not exactly, the one denoting mathematical approximation), which kept putting me in mind of Heraclitus’s river you can’t step in twice. The association rewarded me when I arrived at the poem “Surprise, Surprise,” which begins:
It began
with sensing difference,
but since mind
is the gape
of surprise
propped open,
we can stop
and think.
In each of the poem’s ensuing sections, the mind’s gape remains propped and more falls into its maw. The flow of surprise changes every time we step into it but the word for it remains the same, the sameness and difference both contained in the title’s double, which is also a coherent phrase.
The objects of Armantrout’s gaze are not for me—she is not pointing. What’s for me is to look at her looking, and looking for the words to go with it. Representation can also be authentic: in “Cape Cod Morning,” I am a woman looking at a woman looking at something to which I’m not privy, but the painter’s perspectival genius—the receding compositional frames, grass, shadows and clapboards all ending at the woman’s face—is the experience. Manifestations of manifestations. If reality consists of relations, then there are no ideas in things but between them.
The world so far as we can know it is a layer cake of representations—retinal, linguistic, neurological, numeric. Knowing it better might just be a matter of landing on the right characterization.
Now they tell us
“orbit” is wrong,
Electrons don’t actually
“orbit a nucleus.”
Perhaps they are looking for the word
“haunt.”
— Rae Armantrout, “Transfer”
Introducing metaphysics to a discussion of the most basic physical properties of the material world seems like a merely poetic move until you consider that “science” is a shifting epistemological baseline, and that a nucleus beset by rowdy revenants is a pretty accurate depiction of what we currently know.
A few months ago, after reading something I’d published, Rae wrote me to say I’d used the same quote from Rovelli’s The Order of Time that she had in a recent poem. I was so pleased to know that we were looking the same way for a moment.
“Way” means both manner and direction, which—like form and content, speed and position— should agree to agree without certainty.
To “see” is to understand or witness, which is sometimes a complete difference.
[1] I’ve envied plenty of poets’ minds, but seldom their lines, with two great exceptions. One is Rae Armantrout. The other poet I love with a terror that induces me to leave gifts in her mailbox then tiptoe away. I once left Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time in there, which she told me would be a great help with the book she was writing on time at the time, but there was no sign of it in the acknowledgments. The image of “Cape Cod Morning” over my desk is technically taped to a framed drawing of that poet’s face.
[2] This double “discrete” perfectly notates the conundrum of a discrete event that can’t be contained in a category of “discrete events” without being stripped of its uniqueness. It can’t exist in language.