I’ll be frank: I don’t understand quantum mechanics at all. Or much of anything else, either, when it comes right down to it, and it makes me extremely uneasy to know that here I am walking around at a total loss, yet apparently there’s an explanation right at hand for the entire universe. So naturally, I read the piece about quantum mechanics that my browser displayed recently on my laptop’s screen.
I have to assume that such articles, which have been selected, I’m told, for me, or, I suspect, for someone “like” me, by some involved set of processes, are intended to edify or entertain me only in order to extract my money. And although that’s a little depressing, I’ll admit that these buffers between me and whatever it was I’d been intending to do are often very welcome.
Anyway, this particular brief, and I mean brief, article was from Scientific American. And if I had paid more attention to its title—“Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics”—I might have gone no further. Because, let’s be blunt, who needs more to come to grips with? But the very brevity of the article was enticing; how often, I reasoned, would I get the opportunity to understand quantum mechanics (or QM. as its authors clubbily call it) in seven or eight paragraphs?
The authors refer to experiments indicating that “…the everyday world we perceive does not exist until observed…our argument for a mental world does not entail or imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination. Our view is entirely naturalistic: the mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche.”
So I still can’t understand quantum mechanics, nor even why it takes a singular pronoun. But although the authors claim that their conclusions are “counterintuitive,” when I finished the article I experienced the shiver of sorrow that occurs when a splinter of hostile alien thought lodges into an embryonic intuition of one’s own, and I realized that I had just been hurtled through a foggy landscape on twisting roads toward the brink of an abyss that for a very long time I’d been wandering aimlessly toward on my own terms.
It’s easy to think of abundant causes of anxiety, abundant reasons for experiencing it. But at this point, causes and reasons seem more or less extraneous. And do we need an evolutionary biologist to tell us it has a function? Okay, so it has a function! But maybe—it occurred to me, as I finished reading the article on the screen of my laptop —anxiety is more fundamental than some functional attribute that fires irrepressibly at any excuse. Maybe it’s part of some much larger scheme.
In short, I don’t really know what the authors thought they were talking about, but what they told me was pretty clear: Yes, your body, subject as it is to the laws of a certain type of time, is all yours—or anyhow is composed of materials that are on a lifetime loan to you. But all that stuff housed in it—a mind, or whatever, that you insist on believing is yours—is in fact all gummed up with everything in the universe, so you can just forget about some notion of “identity.”
We’ve understood for a long time that we’ve got sheaves of incompatible selves that compete for dominion; we’ve understood that one’s psyche is subject to disparate roles, such as roles in a family, at a job, as a lover, as another lover, in the community, in the hidden recesses into which we ourselves, outside of dreams, are rarely granted a peek. And on top of that, that one’s psyche must also find a footing, moment to moment, in the slippery sedimentary layers of our past and memories.
And only rather recently we’ve learned that, furthermore, we’re each host to hordes of micro-organisms—some of which share their host’s interests and some of which evidently do not. And added to that particular insecurity is the insecurity concerning personal information and behavior. We might regret that we bartered all our privacy away for the luxury of, say, getting some amusing clippings on our computer screens, but it’s far too late to do a thing about that.
We’ve understood all that, and it’s not easy. But what came as a real shock to me was the clarification that it’s not merely the conflicting roles mandated by my life and psyche, plus every commercial interest for which I’m a target, plus every microbe near or in my body, that impinge on the integrity of my so-called self. It’s also that I, “myself,” am subsumed within a transpersonal mind that comprises absolutely everything and is occupied with manifesting itself to any observer that comes along, including me. No wonder I, and maybe you, feel so exhausted, uncertain, conflicted, vaporous; no wonder we experience a constant ambient unease. How to escape the grip of absolutely everything? Everything is us.
We know all too well that anxiety is as virtuosic in presentation as Satan. It can arrive as paralysis or, conversely, as a frenzy of pointless activity, or as the certainty of just having made the wrong choice—of having always made the wrong, the fateful, choice; as a profound experience of not being properly situated, of not exactly conforming to a clean outline or solid volumetric form, of being composed of tiny oscillating dots, of being an inchoate substance with no core and no control over any feature of even one’s most immediate environment, as sweats, chills, the struggle for breath, as nausea, dizziness, a pounding heart, a migraine, an overwhelming disorientation, an apprehension of impending disaster, of annihilating inadequacy, of doom. Anxiety not only embraces but performs multiple conditions, including ones that would seem to be mutually exclusive.
“To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, each toy seems prologue to some great amiss…,” as William Shakespeare put it. Admittedly, he believed he was describing guilt, but as we now know, he was describing anxiety. Though, to be fair, he was also describing guilt, which like every awful feeling is sort of a subset of anxiety. The word doesn’t matter. We never even needed to learn it—from the time we were first asked, “Are you feeling anxious?” we knew that the correct answer was always going to be yes.
Deborah Eisenberg’s most recent book is Your Duck Is My Duck.
