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.