For Want of Richard Feynman and Finding What Is True
She tried to tell him what she thought
she wanted to do. He said her idea was dumb.
It was like: “Do you like collards?”
She didn’t understand how collards
fit what she wanted or didn’t want
to talk about on any given day,
even Sunday, outside the First Baptist Church,
and he explained that you either liked greens
or you didn’t, and it was like you were saved
or you weren’t; no room for doubt.
She was reading an account of Richard Feynman
who won the Nobel Prize in physics
for a relativistic quantum theory
of electromagnetic interactions,
and she was trying to wrap her head
around “interactions” and people
who interacted or thought they did
when the Invitation was issued, and the preacher
promised she’d see Jesus if she came,
and she tried to correlate His long brown-gold locks
and beard clumped and matted with dirt from the tomb
and being dead three days with scientific experiments,
with Dirac’s number, 1.00115965221 (with an uncertainty
of about 4 in the last digit). The theory
puts it at 1.00115965246 (with a certainty
of about five times as much). Feynman explained,
though not about Jesus, and said that if you measure
the distance from Los Angeles to New York
to this accuracy, it would be the exact
thickness of a human hair.
She said she felt she had the answer:
the true correlative interactive
certain uncertainty of transcendent
hair, her own, Richard Feynman’s,
and that of Jesus, yet she still had trouble
determining what she did want, truly,
and how to get it, and how that correlates
with getting what she didn’t want and didn’t ask for,
brushing it off, then, like a stray hair listing
on her cashmere sweater.
Editor's Note: Don't miss "Why Poets Sometimes Think in Numbers," Carol Dorf's introduction to math poetry in TW.
Art Information
- “First Baptist” © Eric Allix Rogers; Creative Commons license
Sue Walker is the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama and Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama. She has published nine books of poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as critical articles on Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Marge Piercy. She is completing a critical book on James Dickey that has been accepted by Mellen Press.
