vintage poster by Stanley Mouse
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1936 essay Crack Up. But in an age when the production of information far outpaces the ability of an individual to develop expertise, it might be amended that true intelligence it is the ability to hold a hundred opposing viewpoints in your mind. We live in an age of Newtonian polemics: paradigms are judged their ability to knock another billiard ball belief off the table rather than their ability to truly nourish and sustain our bodies and our communities.
Yet everyday scientists find that the world is not articulated by simple Newtonian equations, but vast undulating swathes of uncertainty. It turns out our shadows are not cast behind us, but are the very connective tissue of our corporality, composing upwards of 85 % of the universe. Photons resist our categorical impulse, flickering between punctuation mark and fluid event. Viruses weave together an inter-species tapestry with their replicating threads. A galumphing macroscopic civilization is brought to a halt by microscopic choreography. If there is a zodiac under which we live it is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle itself. First proposed in 1927, the quantum theory demonstrates that the position and velocity of an object cannot be calculated simultaneously. The precision of one fact negates the possibility of confirming the other. How like our current cultural conundrum where the desire to attach to one political, moral, or spiritual certainty undermines our ability to engage another equally important facet of reality. We now know that our attempt to measure any subatomic particle interrupts and transforms its behavior. The desire for an answer transforms the available answer. The experiment reflects back the experimenter more so than it does the subject matter. The answer we land on is always transformed by our desperation for an answer in the first place.
When I’m asked for a solid answer to anything, I find myself laughing. If I learned anything from living with chronic illness, it’s that an answer is a bad floatation device. It might keep you floating in a choppy sea for a day, but eventually it will deflate, lose relevance, and sink, leaving you to drown or learn how to swim towards a shoreline that is neither close nor certain.
The only thing I am certain of right now is that I am constituted by a generous uncertainty. An uncertainty that gestates miracles I could never have expected or authored. I am certain that I am not the most reliable narrator. I have found that the space I hold for being wrong acts like a freshly mulched garden. Relationships sprout there, in the connective tissue between opposing ideas, that would never have grown in the relationally sterile bounds of a well-defended belief.
We are entering an age of increasingly unpredictable climatological change. We are entering an age when we must remember that the most important ideas may not belong to human beings, but to bacteria and insects and entire geographies.
“Try to love the questions themselves,” the poet Ranier Maria Rilke advised. “The point is to live everything. Live the question now.” How can we develop an empathy for other belief systems? A muscularity for changing our minds? The more generously, joyfully uncertain we become, the more we will create ecosystems rather than malnourished houseplants. Questions, unlike answers, are relational. They involve another person, another landscape, another being. Like mycorrhizal systems below ground, they stitch plant to tree to dirt to bacteria. They create resilient community. Let us learn to live interrogatively. Let us, like electrons, live between energy levels, between particle and wave, self and ecosystem.