A Trip to the Shore, and the Wave-Particle Duality of Words

By Cybele Elaine Werts

A strange thing occurs in quantum physics called Wave-Particle Duality, which is that "light and matter simultaneously exhibit properties of waves and of particles."* On the one hand was Fresnes and Young’s experiments which clearly delineated the wave nature of light. On the other hand Newton observed that light has the properties of particles. Can both of these be true? Not being a scientist, I can’t really say, and from what I’ve read, the scientists can’t really either.

There’s a bit of this duality in writing as well. The first time I observed it in my little word microscope was during a visit to my friend Cricket’s beach house. One morning as I was leaning out to smell the salt and sting spit out from the waves, she asked me about the feeling of leaning over that window versus my writing about that experience. She was concerned that I might be writing it in my head while I was in it, which would by definition take away from the whole beach gestalt. I assured her that I usually waited for a few days to process things before writing about them. As she saw it, the deep base tones of her coconut suntan oil, the sun streaked in her wavy blond locks, the tinny "twist and shout" from her cheap beach radio were the main thing. Writing about those things was somehow, well, less "real."

She was right about one thing; it would have been a whole different experience had I been there in body, but not in mind and spirit. I don’t have to have been at the beach to write about it, but I do have to be living in this world – listening, tasting, touching – to write at all. She was wrong about the other thing though, maybe because she’s not a writer herself. Writing is far more than a recording media like videotape, it is in itself an experience. I may be "documenting" the froth meeting my toes at the edge of the ocean, but I’m really doing something totally different. Totally different from the sand, and not quite just typing either. Writing is a bridge from my essence to yours, a spiritual lusting of connections and wild entanglements. It is the vehicle which takes my ideas and my dreams to the air, far away to strange and mysterious places. Only the writer can invite that slightly gritty suntan lotion, the wind-tangled hair, that radio static into your head.

The idea that writing is somehow not real is similar to that annoying refrain we all heard in college, that we weren’t yet living real life, presumably because we weren’t yet paying our own bills. Those naysayers were wrong though. We may have been in college, but the crux and soul of living - love, loss, passion, fear – all were there. Those things are there at the shore, and they’re here in my words too.

I came to see writing not as an add-on experience to real life, but a different flavor like that of the beach near sunset, intoxicating as crunchy fried oysters bought hot off the boardwalk, impatient lemons squeezed into lemonade as I wait, foolish strands of cotton candy reaching from the paper cone to my tongue. I might even venture that it is a reflection of how God is immanent rather than transcendent, just as present in the act of writing as in when I am wriggling the sand out of my toes as I type. Just as present in the tree falling alone in the forest or the seagull landing on a lone driftwood so far out that no one sees. Just as present when a reader smells my sea air for the first time.

One day they’ll discover another way to measure light, and then there will be another duality. It’s not so much that we are wrong about light being a wave or a particle, but rather the limitations of our technology and our minds only allow us to see one or the other at a time. Cricket could see only my fingers waggling on the keyboard, but I know they are spinning a web of translucent cotton candy strands. Even as you read these words you might feel a remembered breeze of one of your own long ago ocean days, so close you can lean out and feel the sun warming your cheeks as you wave to the clouds one last time before nightfall.

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* Wave-particle duality From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Modified 19:00 12 Apr 2003. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-Particle_duality 

Copyright 2003

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