Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I love talking to scientists even if I only understand a fraction of what’s said. One of my more memorable conversations occurred over a decade ago with a particle physicist who previously worked at the Fermilab outside of Chicago. Alongside a group of astrophysicists, she sent atoms flying in a four-mile accelerator hoping to reproduce the effects of the Big Bang, to recreate the instant when matter formed in our universe. The conversation blew my mind.

I claim no special interest in quantum mechanics, but like anyone who, as a kid, consumed massive amounts of comics and movies, naturally I was curious about this seemingly fantastical science. I went all in, asking questions about protons, string theory, and wormholes.

Most of the conversation… well, exceeded my high school physics class. But, just as much as I had struggled then to make sense of theoretical equations and thought experiments involving cats and boxes, my mind still sparked like flashes of lightning in a cloud. I could feel my brain churning to grasp large, abstract ideas associated with an event that occurred 13.8 billion years ago. All manner of images and language ignited to accompany notions of expanding universes, the God particle, and space-time continuums. I embraced what was elusive and latched onto the puzzle pieces that revealed themselves most to me. In short, I was thinking like a poet. So much of the gift of talking across disciplines and whole fields of research is the generative powers of metaphor and language to explain cosmic phenomena and the theories that inspire them.

Today’s compelling poem makes an implicit argument—that evidence of a parallel world might just be in front of our eyes. Instead of smashing atoms, we merely need to observe and record our daily singularities, which feel, at times, surreal and otherworldly. As with life, every decision made in a poem creates a new universe.

If There Is Another World
by Malena Mörling

If there is another world,
I think you can take a cab there--
or ride your old bicycle
down Junction Blvd.
past the Paris Suites Hotel
with the Eiffel Tower on the roof
and past the blooming Magnolia and on--
to the corner of 168th Street.
And if you’re inclined to,
you can turn left there
and yield to the blind
as the sign urges us--
especially since it is a state law.
Especially since there is a kind of moth
here on the earth
that feeds only on the tears of horses.
Sooner or later we will all cry
from inside our hearts.
Sooner or later even the concrete
will crumble and cry in silence
along with all the lost road signs.
Two days ago 300 televisions
washed up on a beach in Shiomachi, Japan,
after having fallen off a ship in a storm.
They looked like so many
oversized horseshoe crabs
with their screens turned down to the sand.
And if you’re inclined to, you can continue
in the weightless seesaw of the light
through a few more intersections 
where people inside their cars
pass you by in space
and where you pass by them,
each car another thought--only heavier.

“If There Is Another World” by Malena Mörling from ASTORIA © 2006 Malena Mörling. Used by permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.