Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

"Hey, no offense," the speaker said. "I got a business proposition for you." The midget looked at him sharply; he didn't look at all as shady and unsavory as a person should look who was offering a business proposition on the corner to a total stranger.

"What are you selling?" he asked. "Not selling," the friendly giant said. "Giving away. One hundred fifty dollars."

"And what do I have to do for it?" the midget asked warily, drawing a little closer.

"I'm a butler," the man said-and, in fact, he did not look like butlers the midget had seen in movies. His face was much longer from the nose down than most people's; it gave him a permanent look of one who smells something but hasn't found it yet. Most Chicagoans, Chaney had noticed, look like they'd just found it and it was worse than they'd imagined. "The lady I work for is very rich. And very eccentric." He tried to leer suggestively; the effect was like a bishop winking. "She has a thing about m--… about you people of less than average stature." Markoff Chaney felt his heart leap. Could it be true??

"One hundred fifty dollars?"

"That's right. She gets these moods and sends me out looking every so often."

"I'm game," the midget said, deciding. He could feel the pulse in his temple. Au revoir, ma cherie, he thought, firmly convinced that was French for "good-bye to virginity."

"There's just one thing," the butler said as they walked along. "You've got to do just what I tell you. Don't be afraid; she's not a real kink-no whips and chains or anything of that scene-but, well, her tastes are a little peculiar. I promise you won't be hurt."

"Tell me," the midget said.

"It's like a little drama or charade," the butler said, lowering his voice. He explained certain things.

"What?" the midget asked. "I don't get to fuck her?"

"But it will be enjoyable, nonetheless," the butler said, "and you collect one hundred fifty smackers for it, remember."

"Oh, well," Chaney said, quoting one of his basic axioms for Guerrilla Ontology, "insanity is another viable alternative."

In an apartment in the east village off St. Mark's Place, Tibetan posters and astrological charts gaze down on the couch where Joe Malik and Carol Christmas are engaged in erotometaphysical epistemology.

Getting a hand inside her panties was easy enough and Joe Malik thought he was home free, but then a snag appeared, an emotional problem that verged on full-blown lunacy; it had to do with Carol's third ex-husband, a Puerto Rican poet who claimed to be a Santaria initiate, whatever that was, and couldn't adjust to New York. He said that magic was impossible in New York because the intelligentsia were all Jewish atheists-"but I'm not a Jewish atheist," Joe protested, "I'm an Arab agnostic," wondering what the hell this had to do with a simple lay, but Carol's third husband, who might as well have been on the couch with them, also said that Carol could help him to write again if she believed in magic, and it wasn't much different from being an actress, anyway; Santaria, whatever it is, is just like method acting, Carol explained, but Joe was meanwhile from the context deciding it was more like Christian Science, but what it all came down to, the hand out of her panties by now, since to pressure her at this point would be coercive and chauvinistic, of course, the Puerto Rican bunofasitch had put a loa on her when they separated and she couldn't relax until they did an exorcism of the apartment… "Oh, bleeding Christ!" Joe gasped, both balls like boulders.

"It's just like method acting, honey," Carol repeated hopefully.

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"You mean," Natalie, dressed, asked, awed and full of hashish, "that this whatchamacculum, this state vector, collapses every which way?"

"No, no, no," Blake Williams hastens to correct. "That's only the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model, and it's obviously nonsense. It means that in the universe next door, Furbish Lousewart is President instead of Eve Hubbard. Pure science fiction and I, um, wonder what Everett, Wheeler, and Graham were smoking when they thought of it. What I'm trying to explain, my dear, is the most plausible alternative theory, which comes from taking Bell's Theorem literally."

"The ripple theory," Natalie prompted.

"But the ripples are all-over-the-universe-at-once," Williams explained again. "It's called the Quantum Inseparability Principle, or QUIP. Dr. Nick Herbert calls it the Cosmic Glue."

"Just like ripples in a pond, Jeez." Natalie Drest was bemused. "Parts of us are still interacting with Joe Malik and all the other people at the party. This is superheavy."

"Yes, but QUIP acts nonlocally in time as well as in space," Williams went on. "You've got to think of time ripples, as well as space ripples, to grok the quantum world…"

There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinion as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

–eric temple bell. Debunking Science

There was nothing really weird about Blake Williams, except that he was passionately in love with a dead man. This great, if somewhat bizarre, passion was entirely platonic, of course-nothing queer about good old Doc Williams, except his head. With his six-foot frame, his neatly trimmed gray beard, and his heavy black-rimmed spectacles, Williams was the very model of a modern major generalist. Due to the incident of the Gansevoort Street incinerator, he had learned to keep his mouth shut about his more outlandish ideas and obsessions.

The man Blake Williams loved was Niels Bohr, the physicist who had chosen the Taoist yin-yang as his Coat of Arms when knighted by the Danish court-which was rather far out back in the 1930s (before Taoism became faddish with physicists). Bohr also added nearly as much to quantum theory as Planck, Einstein, or Schrodinger, and his model of the atom-the Bohr model, it's called- had been believed literally by a generation of physicians before Hiroshima. Bohr himself, however, had never believed it; nor had he believed any of his other theories. Bohr invented what is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which holds in effect that a physicist shouldn't believe anything but his measurements in the laboratory. Everything else-the whole body of mathematics and theory relating one measurement to another-Bohr regarded as a model of how the human mind works, not of how the universe works. Blake Williams loved Bohr for the Copenhagen Interpretation, which had made it possible for him to study physics seriously, even devoutly, without believing a word of it. That was convenient, since Williams's own training as an anthropologist had schooled him to study all human symbol systems without believing any of them.

On a deeper level-there is always a deeper level- Williams was a scientist who didn't believe in science because he had been cured of polio by witchcraft.

But Blake Williams didn't believe in witchcraft, either. He didn't believe in anything. He regarded all belief systems as illustrative data in domesticated primate psychology.

"The study of human beliefs is an ethologist's heaven and a logician's hell," he liked to say.

Actually, Blake Williams hadn't been cured of polio by witchcraft, exactly. He had been cured by the Sister Kenny method.

But he grew up thinking it was witchcraft. That was because all the experts in Unistat at the time-the members of the American Medical Association, who would not admit there were any other experts on health-claimed the Sister Kenny method was witchcraft. They also said it didn't work.

Since the Sister Kenny method obviously had worked in his case, Blake grew up with the gnawing suspicion that the experts didn't know what the hell they were talking about. He was also intensely curious about all forms of witchcraft, which eventually led him to become an anthropologist.