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Tuesday, March 14, 2006
I said over and over to myself, latent histories, latent histories, all time, I said over and over
I read Jonathan’s post this morning, couldn’t think of anything, then - oddly - googled up this, while looking for something else entirely. I’ll just tuck an excerpt under the fold. Click the link to read on to the bit where the trollish Schwäbin harangues our narrator about how Americans are mad to read Rorty and Dewey.
... Then today, but only today, today for the first time I turned to my neighbor on the S-Bahn in the underground between Hauptbahnhof and Stadtmitte and said, “History isn’t really my subject, but you don’t have to be a physicist to see that at the quantum level exist latent histories.”
At the time I said this, I didn’t even realize that I was speaking German, I who up until this point had been able to produce only rudimentary mutterings in German now was speaking fluent German, albeit touched with a slight Texas accent.
“Was sagen Sie, man?” the woman said.
She was a large, frumpish, sixtyish woman with what I took at the time to be a friendly face, a bit worn, a bit pocked, the skin loose around the heavy jaws, the eyes recessed.
Again in fluent German, a language of which I did not understand more than a few phrases and some basic grammar, my vocabulary well beneath the threshold level, I said, “Whether on the S-Bahn or the U-Bahn or the bus, whether staring at the window on Königstrasse advertising flights to Morocco and Iran and Malaysia and Cuba for 89 euros or at the mannequins in lace bras and panties, pink, pale green, transparent lingerie, you know what I mean, yes, I’m sure you’ve seen them in the store windows on Königstrasse, forgive me, whether here or there, wherever I look and am, I know that at base the universe is really a multiverse, that histories exist within every moment, that at the quantum level stories are unfolding, and within those stories the traces of an infinite number of other stories, and within those stories, und so weiter, and that this ‘I’ I hear speaking to you is only one of a multitude of ‘I’s speaking to a multitude of other ‘you’s.”
“Sie sprechen gut Deutsch für einen Amerikaner,” she said, closing her copy of the Stuttgarter Zeitung and folding it on her lap, then brushing it with her hands as if she were smoothing her wool skirt or trying to brush the words off the page. I do not remember what article she had been reading, whether one about politics or sports, in part because I still, even after today’s encounter, read no more than a few words of German, and I do not recall even glancing at the headlines in the paper this morning on the train as I talked to this strange woman, because suddenly I thought, This woman is strange, she’s truly a strange woman, I’d never met any woman like her before, so I said, “You are a strange woman, aren’t you?”
She looked down at her paper and I with her and saw the leg of a football player kicking the ball. “Nächster Halt, Feuersee,” the conductor’s voice crackled over the sound system as we moved into the station. But no one got off at Feuersee, no one got on, the passengers sweated in the subway’s fetid, wintry heat, and we moved out of the station toward Schwabstrasse, my stop.
She raised her head again, and I looked into her eyes tucked deep away in her face framed by her stiff gray hair that sat on her like a helmet, like a cliché, but I refrained from telling her this, in fear that she would mistake my meaning.
“Ja,” she said, “ich bin eine sehr seltsame Frau, ich verstehe Sie. I, too, have felt the same way about time and history, many times, in fact, though I admit it has been years since I’ve thought about such metaphysical fictions. I was in my early twenties at the time and surely as irresponsible then as you are now at what I would say must be sixty-five or perhaps a little older.”
“No, Madame,” I said, “You are grotesquely mistaken. Perhaps it’s the dim light here underground. I am fifty-four. But please continue.”
She took a deep breath. Her fat shoulder pressed against my ribs. Then she exhaled and I slipped my sigh of relief into it.
“In simple terms,” she said, “what you are saying is that all histories are present, all paths both open and closed at all times. The question is how to believe this when it’s surely as rewarding in every sense to believe in its impossibility. As a young woman right after the war, diagrams of what I took to be absolute reality blossomed on my bedroom wall in my parent’s three-room apartment here in Stuttgart West. We were one of the lucky ones after the war whose home wasn’t entirely destroyed during the Allied bombing because the bombs only sheared off the front of the house, as if a scalpel had sliced away the alcoves and then gutted the rest.”
The expression she used for gutted ausgeweidet meant truly gutted, disemboweled, eviscerated, and I savored its sweetness for a moment, then asked her to continue.
“I suspect you’ve been reading pop physics, whereas I was reading Leibniz and Berkeley and Bergson. But whether monads or Planck lengths, string theories or Berkeley’s epistemological dualism, we all want to believe with Bergson that consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates.”
As she spoke, I became more and more conscious of this peculiar woman’s body, its thickness, the sour smell that seemed to emanate from her wool coat, her helmet of gray hair, the pores in her bloated skin. A troll, I thought, yes, another Swabian troll, like all the Germans I encounter here in Swabia. Grotesque, squat trolls that bulb up from the mountains all around and end up here in the valley, this kettle of pollution where I now make my home while my wife works all day translating official documents from one language to another and back again, until all that is left is the pure nonsense that German at base is, though a nonsense, I noted once again, that suddenly I could understand ...
Comments
I’ve always thought that people who dislike Dewey are monstruous trolls.