The Problem With Relativity by John Sokol

The Problem With Relativity
by John Sokol

"So Harry, what does E=MC2 mean?" Janice asks me one day after I have finished my first week in a course on Einstein. "Well, energy equals mass times the square of the velocity of light," I answer. "I guess the most important thing to remember is that all energy has mass, and all mass has energy." Janice smiles. "If that's the case, dear, why don't you have more energy?" "Funny, Janice. Very funny." * Customarily, when I get home from work, I take my daily crash course on Newtonian theory as I fall thirty-two feet per second onto our couch in the library. I turn on the stereo and play the recording of Vivaldi that Janice gave me last year. I play it because it helps me focus on my evening class at Bowman Hall, where I listen to a simian-faced man of sixty give a lecture on Einstein. Afterwards, I usually meet Caroline McDowell at Orville's Cafe on Water Street, where we have a few drinks and discuss our disintegrating affair. Caroline teaches Elizabethan Poetry at the same university where I teach philosophy to whiney freshmen. I often wonder whether Janice knows about my affair with Caroline, whether she has discovered the reason for my odd moods, my remoteness. Caroline, in her turn, has told me that this one question, more than anything else, gives my life a sense of plot. * "Einstein? Why Einstein?" Janice asked when I first started the course. "It will round me out," I say. Then, I think to myself: as if with my growing girth, she doesn't think I'm rounded out enough. I know my excuses for rendezvous' with Caroline, have -- in my explanations to Janice -- taken the shape of lies; white though they are. The lies seem more theoretical than substantial, like the controversial white holes that supposedly abscond out of the back sides of black holes; those sharply funneled and dished-out shapes.

* I listen to Vivaldi and recall Einstein's analogy about time spinning faster at the outer rim of a record than it does around the inner axis. The diamond needle in the arm of the turntable circles in on an adagio. My problems seem to dwell in that movement, where I picture Janice stepping casually around the axis of life, very near the spindle, where I think real tranquility must surely exist; yet I see myself running frantically at the outer rim of it all, running, running, running, just to keep up. Then my mind wanders and rambles as it often does at this hour. The evening soliloquy begins. Where does this ride take us; this plane ride, this train ride, this same ride, untrained ride, insane ride? Where does the distance, for instants, disappear? Is it gone forever, or will it emerge in some other plane of time? Is it possible that memory has four dimensions; tangible, physical, at the same time ethereal? Is there some-thing to nothing? Surely nothingness embodies something. Most importantly, is this all there is? Is this it?

* I sometimes feel that Janice married me simply because the ring I gave her one day was a half size too small and taking it off would have been more of a chore than it was worth. I fear that Janice and I are like two collapsed stars, one orbiting the other; that the mass of one of us will implode, become a black hole, and the intense energy of that compression will pull the other helplessly into a nothingness where time stops and no light exists. I wonder if nothingness has shape. Newton, I recall, thought that space was spread-out, flat, therefore universal. The post office, however, seems to have proved lately that space is relative. They're holding a letter from Caroline in their space instead of sending it to my space. I haven't seen Caroline at the university lately because she took her senior class to Washington for some literary reason. She promised she would write. She promised.

* My mind spins faster and faster these days. For now, the pluperfect harmonies of Vivaldi cause a pleasant sort of vertigo. Soon my thoughts find their habit. Why no letter from Caroline? Maybe the letter (matter) has been caught in the phenomenon described by Schopenhauer whereby space and change in time . . . . each preserving its own condition and course, negates causation. If it is true that causation constitutes the essential nature of matter, then there may not be a letter. Caroline wrote, but the letter doesn't exist. More plausible, the letter exists, but Caroline never wrote it. It is trapped in a plane between existence and non-being. It is becoming, but will never be. Damn Schopenhauer! Oh, stop it, Harry. Lighten up. In the whole scheme of things, who cares. You solopsist. Don't you know, logic is an invention of humankind. It is not inherent in the universe. Even Immanuel Kant argue with that. Get a beer. But even this, this "get a beer" solves nothing, for regrettably, it is this phrase, with all of its ramifications, that has become the tautology of my life. Vivaldi finishes in perfect mathematical resolution; all musical corners squared off. Silence reigns again. I succumb indifferently to the few more minutes I have aged, get up from the couch, and go into the kitchen for a beer. My son, Charlie, isn't home from school yet, and Janice is still at work. I think of Caroline; the time she came home with me at this tender hour and we made love on Charlie's unmade bed. Must get that kid to make his bed.

* Janice often lectures me about my responsibilities. Although she never utters the word moral, she implies it as an adjective to precede responsibilities. She corners me and tongue-lashes me so thoroughly of late, with such systematic and blind optimism, with such confidence and alacrity, that I have begun to dream of a doppelganger, paranoiac and timorous, tiptoeing in the night to the library to see if Janice has recently dipped into Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. I look for dog-eared corners, asterisks, or brackets penned or penciled into the Science of Logic. Then I wake up, relieved that I have only been dreaming. I get quietly out of bed and go to the kitchen for something to eat. I sit at the table and wonder how I can stop all this shop talk of the mind. Take a vacation. Go fishing with Charlie on the weekends. See more of Caroline. See less of Caroline. Something. Something has to give. Eventually, I go back to bed, fall asleep, and wake again in time to turn off the alarm before it rings. I lie awake and whisper my name in the quiet room. The strange, almost funny words fall to the floor like stones. I marvel at how quickly the days in my life have passed, yet I can't remember how many years I have spent as a rational being, how long I have been married to Janice, the age of my son, nor the number of years I have taught at the university. I often forget how old I am and when waking from a dream in the early hours of the morning -- truly unable to remember my age -- I wake Janice from her sleep. "Janice, how old am I?" Janice has put up with this banal question enough times that she doesn't even bother to appear indignant. She assures me I am thirty-eight and goes to sleep. Quiet mornings in bed are precious times. I stare at the ceiling, intrigued, yet pained by the silence that surrounds my world like a cloud. Eventually, I roll over on my side and watch for the jackals that scurry through the forest of hairs on my wrist. I follow the strange fish that swim through the blue rivers of my veins and I wander aimlessly in the endless winding canyons of my thumbprints, along the cracked roads of my skin that lead from one crater to the next. I trek across the crease-filled desert of my hand and I know that time has cut deeper into the ravines. Finally, in the few minutes before I must get up, I invariably conclude: Harry, you think too much!

* Charlie is home from school now. He bounds in through the kitchen door just as I am closing the refrigerator. "Dad," he says, heaving his words at me between short breaths, "we were throwing a football on the way home from school and Michael Landers pushed me down and made me tear my pants." "Well, Charlie," I say calmly, as I uncap my beer with the corner of my T-shirt, "don't get so upset. Your pants can be fixed. It's not the end of the world. Don't always think the worst. I'm sure Michael was just playing. He didn't mean it." Then my conscience speaks. Teaching your kid meditative thinking already, huh Harry? You ought to teach him how to defend himself; he's not ready to transcend. Calculative thinking (Heidegger would agree, Harry), especially at his age, would be the proper stuff. Before I can sit down and talk to him about the matter in detail, he's out the door again. Just as quickly, he runs back into the house. "Dad, the mailman told me to give you this letter. He says it's Special Delivery." Charlie runs back outside and the sound of his gym shoes slapping the stone walkway along Depeyster Street quickly fades. I tear open the envelope (theory of cosmic disintegration) and unfold the pretty paper. Dear Harry, I've thought about it for some time now, and I guess this trip crystallized it. Our relationship isn't going to work. I'm afraid it's over. I'm sorry -- but this is best.

Caroline

(Theory of cosmic disintegration squared). I go to the stove, turn on the front burner, and transform the blue paper into black ashes. I take the ashes and throw them into the waste basket by the sink. Out the window, I see Janice walking slowly up the driveway. Her face glimmers; she looks a little drawn, sad, as she approaches the house. When she is tired, her body has an unreal look, an absence of togetherness that gives her movements a rather disjointed locomotion; like the peculiar way she moved right before she was ready to have Charlie -- her bowlegged, laid-back way of walking. I remember the way she walked a week or two after Charlie was born -- as if she had had something torn out of her. But she has gotten older, too. Darwin says that's what comes of listening to too many records. Not good or bad. Simply evolution. Or did he say revolution? Janice comes into the house, acknowledges my presence with a tired smile, and sniffs the air in the kitchen. "Harry, have you been burning something?" "Notes, "I say. "Just some notes." Janice puts her package of groceries on the table and starts taking vegetables from the sack and placing them in the refrigerator. "Harry, who's Caroline?" she asks out of the blue. "Caroline?" I ask. "Caroline who?" "Harry, that's what I'm asking you. Last night after you fell asleep, I heard you saying, 'Caroline, Caroline.' Is she someone you know?" Janice says this with her head bent over the vegetable bin, where she is rearranging heads of lettuce to make room for the carrots and peppers. Crucial decision, Harry. Determine whether this line of questioning is a priori or apropos, whether she is kidding or serious, or whether she is kidding and serious. Is this question based on empirical information delivered in the simple guise of intuition, and if so, should it be answered in the same spirit? I decide this can't be just a simple question. There are innuendoes lurking behind that question mark. I realize, therefore, that the ramifications of my answer are all-important. I draw a deep breath and pause. When I finally answer, my words seem flat and worn, yet somehow universal, final. "I don't know."

(originally appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Vol. 1, # 4, Fall, 1991)

The Greenwich Village Gazette