My literary/relational mind is poorly suited for certain types of science. When I first heard of string theory, I personalized – and simplified – it; perhaps this is what non-physicists do. I like the idea that people and objects are more than random particles, and that instead, something exists in the in-between, connecting bits and pieces of things. That people and objects are threaded together – a sense that matches my conviction that each experience I have ends up strung along with all the look-alike experiences that preceded it. My whole life history is one long strand of pearls, shiny opalescent orbs of memory and meaning, strung together with an unbreakable thread of what I’ve come to believe is my identity, winding around and around and around, spiraling up from my toes to the top of my head, adorned with its own coil of curls.
I’m no better off understanding chaos theory (which I know I cannot stoop so low as to claim is a metaphor for the clutter of the writer’s mind), quantum systems, or meteorological prediction, even though I passed a full semester 100-level undergraduate course in meteorology and space science. The class was pretty much all about clouds and rain but I sat in the back row next to my boyfriend in the one and only science class that would satisfy his pre-business and my liberal arts degree plans. We whispered and sipped coffee and fed each other muffins and bagels and granola bars and anything else we could stuff in our pockets from the breakfast line at the dorm, creating our own cumulonimbus haze of dense, secret, humid love, rubbing our legs and sneaking kisses under bulky winter coats, while the professor showed slides of precipitation charts and cloud formations to the students who shared his weather zone.
Edward Lorenz’s 1972 presentation of Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set a Tornado in Texas? might have caused quite a stir in meteorological circles, but my undergrad course was in 1980, and for all who know how long it takes for concepts from scientific meetings to trickle down to the college lecture hall, I can’t fault the professor for omitting this from our curriculum. Nor can I be sure it wasn’t in the curriculum, since my attentiveness was shaped by the back-row whirlwind of two 18-year-olds in love.
Many before me have poeticized The Butterfly Effect. We like the idea – when we’re done scorning it – that the flap of a butterfly’s wings can be felt halfway around the Earth. That the interconnectedness of all on the planet can be imagined dramatically and beautifully as the faintest movement of air, not only the brutish blast of missile strikes and bombs.
Still I find I must personalize The Butterfly Effect, a theory that starts with the premise of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Then finds that a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. Oh, do I know the Butterfly Effect. I have been impacted by large and small disturbances of air flow, from the people around me who have flapped their wings and their tongues, disturbing every ion in the space around me, changing my inner and outward state in a nonlinear, nonpredicted way. I want to run outside, flap my arms wildly like a jacked-up road runner and then dash back inside and wait for the news. Will it rain in the Midwest tonight because of it? Will crop yields change? Could it have been my galumphing around the block that stripped Tropical Storm Karen of its power, stalling and disintegrating what was heading toward being our next hurricane?
Where is that old boyfriend? Will the pressure of these keystrokes reawakening his memory in me reawaken me in his memory? Will the precipitation of old love fall on him tonight? He’s one of those perfect ex-boyfriends, one I never stopped loving, one who never turned into a dangerous storm or tornado. We were just too damned young and the pressure system which once built us up to a frenzy slowly faded. Our ions and fibers and strings separated, dissipated, joined up with others, dissipated who knows how many times again, coming together over time and love to be what is now.
Connected by string, connected by air. Doesn’t matter, really. Science just keeps confirming all the ways our actions impact everything around us. We must rest lightly on boughs, alight carefully when it is time to leave, flap our colorful wings slowly, rhythmically, so that the whoosh of air is soft across our cheeks, the colorful arc of our flight soothing to our eyes. Flap our wings, sure, but never our tongues, as the air this unleashes can only knock our delicate sensitive dependencies flat.