Entanglement
I often encounter Reno, a friend, while attending to reading and writing at Starbucks. We’ve shared satisfying exchange of stories on a number of occasions. Certainly we do not know a lot about each other. But the insight gained through the story telling has effected a change within my personality, my mode of being.
Reno offered a photo of his friend and companion, a poodle depicted in proximity with another canine. The animals are obviously different as to breed, physical size, strength, and according to Reno, temperament. Reno’s dog, the poodle, is shy, cautious, non-aggressive in temperament. She has on occasion been in the presence of the other animal, who is more dominant, and expresses it’s intention of play. The dogs live in neighboring households. Reno described for me the negotiation between the mismatch in being of the two animals.
In this recent photo one can see the tentative visual, aural, the field-effect of engagement between the two animals. They are accommodating themselves, finding adjustment, each to the other, in a measured, incremental manner. Each brings to this encounter memory, the trace effects of past encounters. Another layer of memory residue is being laid down as result of the encounter which we see captured in this photo.
This photo grabbed my imagination the moment that I saw it. I was reminded of how we are changed in more ways than we know by experience of the external world. Space-time is encapsulated within memory. Residues of past encounters, even old encounters which we personally did not have but received from others in story-form, constitute my personhood, a self always becoming.
This morning I glanced at the cover of the latest Bloomberg Businessweek. I read the title of a major article within the magazine. The article treats the hands-off, laissez faire development of Houston (bad city planning) as contributory to the hurricane Harvey disaster. Does the flooding of Houston have anything to do with me?
Most certainly it does.
(My apologies to Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr for using “entanglement” as the title for my post.)
2 thoughts on “Entanglement”
My sense (and I may be incorrect here since I’m not a scientist) is that this posting involves more the theories surrounding cause and effect rather than quantum mechanics. The tethers that wrap us all together in this piece can be followed and examined, prodded and explored, whereas with quantum mechanics those attachments are much more ethereal and seemingly random. How we interact with each other and with our environment is (at least to me) anything but random. The consequences of our interactions with one another and with everything around us are both predictable and quantifiable. It is our choice to either embrace those connections or to deny them. The outcome of choosing one path over the other are indeed grave, but we are who we are and time will reveal the answers we have all been debating. Hope this makes sense within the context of your posting.
Yes, in general I agree that the story is mainly about cause and effect. Since college days I’ve been awed by the discoveries of Heisenberg, Bohr and company when the foundations of matter/energy were being explored. Until now, I’ve held to the notion that there is “magic” at the foundations of “reality.” Can we ever exhaustively know the real? My hunches tell me that there is unlikely any randomness. There is just a great deal that we do not, and perhaps cannot know. And I think that is the case with every encounter, from that between two canines, to that between persons. So as a metaphor, entanglement seemed about right.