“Do you know physics, sir?”
“Hell, no. Do you?”
“Does he.”
“Why?”
“Quantum Cuentos.”
“Oh, that. Don’t be deceived — just alliteration.”
Quantum Cuentos, a volume of sudden fiction he thinks of writing and, always the one to compulsively talk about something he still has to write, thinks aloud one time in the fatal presence of the two, both of whom appear to possess a photographic memory when it comes to things you say (just a feeling on his part) whereas his memories of the odd couple, a thumbnail two or three, tend to the photogenic.
“It’s sudden fiction because it’s really nonfiction; i.e. autobiographical in the extreme and suddenly, with a sudden twist it becomes fiction.”
“Biglang liko,” he adds, but only to himself.
And what he does go on to tell them is how an alternative name for the thing could be All-Of-A-Sudden-My-Heart-Sings Fiction. The aesthetic moment in his reading when the reader of a short-story feels himself seized by, when he sees, what James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, calls ‘epiphany.’
Pop music heroes in the time of his teens, Paul Anka and Johnny Mathis. (Joyce’s fellow singers!)
“I bet you don’t know those songs.”
“I do, sir. My father likes to sing along. We have cassette tapes of hits from the Fifties in the house — the Platters, Elvis, Pat Boone, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka…”
“Did you know that your Heisenberg liked Johnny Mathis?”
“This I’ve got to hear says physics freak Dennis.
“At the waning of the 40s, Heisenberg lectures in Cambridge, England, then in the first half of the 50s, in the US. Finally, in 1955-1956 at at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, the Gifford Lectures. He has nurtured in his heart an affection for English in the course of these dozen or so years. Thus it comes to pass that in his fifties, which are also the 1950s, Heisenberg born in 1902, hears a song: A Certain Smile sung by Johnny Mathis, that makes him smile all the way to the waning of the century.
A certain smile, a certain face, can lead an unsuspecting heart on a merry chase… Although not hard of hearing, what Heisenberg hears is Uncertainty, uncertainties, can lead an unsuspecting heart on a merry chase. Now, darned if that isn’t his Uncertainty Principle set to music!”
“Is that a quantum cuento, sir?”
“But in the hush of night exactly like a bittersweet refrain comes uncertainty to haunt your heart again.
“A pity Einstein never gets to hear Johnny Mathis. He asks Tagore if one can really listen to a song without words, since Indian music is supposed to go that way — no lyrics, just melody. I imagine him struck by the songs of Johnny Mathis. Like the one that so engrosses Heisenberg. I should say the ones. Because there’s more than one Johnny Mathis song that alludes to the physics of Heisenberg. The year after he sings Uncertainty — beg your pardon, A Certain Smile — he records another all-time hit: Misty. Everything is relative, uncertain, misty. Then comes another song that becomes a movie theme, Wild Is The Wind, in 1960.
“We’re creatures of the wind (read quantum), and wild is the wind (quantum).
“But not any of these could have prepared Albert Einstein himself for the physics of Johnny Mathis’ final movie theme song: The Best of Everything.
“We’ve proven romance is still the best of everything.”
“You mean he would have found The Theory of Everything!”
“No, he would have found out that the Theory of Everything is just a romance.”
“Ha-ha-ha!”
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Author’s email: cezaruis@gmail.com
