The Hum of Invisible Wires

A number of years ago I read a book titled Fire in the Mind. George Johnson wrote it. At the time he was a science writer for the New York Times. He lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Maybe he still does. I may have lived there when I read it, but I live a long way from there now.

I had been interested in science in the same way I had been interested in a well constructed sentence. I'm certain there has to be at least a minor connection. An ordered thread connecting the two.

Johnson's book - maybe the whole idea of the book - was based on the seemingly incongruous conceptions of creation and the universe shared by the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute and the Tewa Indians who live in the the pueblos of northern New Mexico.

The Santa Fe Institute is a quirky thank tank nestled in the Sangre de Cristo's north of Santa Fe. Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark was there, as were two fellows who thought they discovered the underlying laws that govern the rise and fall of the stock market. They also came up with a system to beat Roulette, or maybe it was Blackjack - I forget which. This is only to say that the scientists at the Institute were not your typical academics. For a time - perhaps he still does - the writer Cormac McCarthy kept an office there. He liked the science. The scientists, I guess, liked his sentences.

Much of the science Johnson described in the book, especially the quantum-mechanics, passed right over my non-scientific head. But I was able to to grab onto just enough for it to feel exciting, to fill me with wonder.

The Tewa natives I knew a bit more about. I'd been to the pueblos - Santa Clara, Santa Domingo, Tesuque, Taos, and San Ildefenso. I spent a good amount of time at San Ildefenso. I dated a woman who lived there - she was Hopi but had been married to a man from the pueblo, and her sons were young and living with her, so she was allowed to stay. For a pale guy from Chicago I ended up knowing a lot of Indians (they preferred being called Indians, trust me), and their Indian ways.

What attracted me to scientists and Indians was the sense that they carried the secrets. Secrets that explained things I felt, but could not explain. I imagined the universe to be layered in strata to which I did not have access. I wanted in.

My Hopi friend tolerated my questions. They were a game we played. I'd ask, and she would say, "I can't talk about that." And then she would, but in sentences that had their own strata for me to puzzle through.

From the science and my Indian friends, most deeply from my Hopi friend, I came to see what they held in common was their belief in connectivity. The living to the dead. Present to past. All of time the same time. How a person moves through it both as particle and wave which brings me to the hum. How could it not? My living proof of what the Tewa and the Hopi know from birth - before birth. What some physicists learn in other ways: the hum of invisible wires. Which for me is the invisible connection I have felt and sometimes still do.

I don't know the exact math, but I have met a good number of people. Some of them pleasant, some less so. Some just plain toxic. But with a few there is a hum. It can be with a man or a woman. It can be sexual or not. But there's the hum. The hum that connects. At the level of the quark, the big bang, the Hopi mother, the thread that is thrown out across space and time. And from time to time you get lucky enough to find what you have broken off from. You reform that invisible connection. And it hums. You meet someone and they can be so different - so unexpected, and yet there's the hum. Listen.

Steve Job's Sister Liked Me

A friend who otherwise meant well, sent me an email to say she had been reading articles about Steve Jobs and his passing. She said an article in the Times mentioned his sister, the writer, Mona Simpson. And how seeing Mona's name made her think of me. What she meant was the me I used to be.

In 1994 I was living on Tulane NE in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'd landed there after quitting a life I'd had in Chicago and decided one day to take a drive. The thought being not unlike the title of Simpson's best known novel, Anywhere but Here. I rented a casita from a daffy, bead-collector, who was a former-Chicagoan herself. I wrote stories. I did not work. The not working and the writing stories and and the much bigger sky forged for me a different me.

I sent out the stories to literary magazines and sometimes to the glossies. The stories, some quickly, some slowly, were returned with the thanks but no thanks. Sometimes an editor took the time and the care to write a few lines. Some of the lines were encouraging. The wildly eccentric Gordon Lish sent me a couple of bizarre notes from his The Quarterly. I've saved those. One I seem to remember began, "This starts good."

I digress.

That first summer was nearly over when I saw NPR was soliciting stories for their show, The Sound of Writing, which was sponsored by PEN's Syndicated Fiction Project. If a story was purchased it was to be read on the show and then having that pedigree, they would shop it around. I sent them two and one day my bead-collecting landlord brought me my mail, two of the manila envelopes I used to send out my stories. They had made their way back home.

Except one had found another home. A nice home. Mona Simpson, the final judge that year, picked my "Helpless" out of the slush and said, yes. I forget how many stories were chosen that year - twenty-something, I want to say - out of maybe a thousand submitted. Many were writers I'd read and admired. Writers with multiple books and New Yorker cachet. And me. And Tess Gallagher.

Tess Gallagher, the poet, and sometimes short story writer, and I had been corresponding. She had been married to Raymond Carver, a hero of mine, when I still had heroes. From him I learned some things about writing. What to put in, and more importantly, what to leave out. The power of the unsaid.

Carver had died six years earlier and I wanted to find Tess and tell her what he meant to me. I went to a reading she gave in Chicago at Barbara's Bookstore, but I was too timid to approach her. But after I settled in New Mexico I wrote her a letter and mailed it to a bookstore in Port Angeles, Washington where she lived. I probably wasn't the first to do so as the bookstore passed the letter on and soon I received one back. In it she told me that shyness was for cats, and should our paths cross again I needed to make myself known.

And now we had both been lucky enough to have won the PEN award. Luck meant a lot to Carver - he wrote about it often - the good and the bad of it. The crazy ways it shaped a life. Having my story chosen seemed, at the time, the good crazy. Mona Simpson had been a friend of Raymond Carvers- he had even written a poem for. She knew Tess well. And somehow I found myself a part of that circle.

I wrote Tess to say how great it was that she won, that I won. I wrote to her on my birthday - and she wrote back saying she hadn't heard, and to thank me. She said she had been out of the country but now she was back and was writing me from Ray's grave - it was the anniversary of his death. She liked to read to him, she said. He loved to hear good news.