The John Greeley School of Quantum Awareness

It's a well-kept secret that John Greeley--a man of many talents--in addition to performing weird poetry in the BistroScene also proposed a new school of quantum theory, as an alternative to Niels Bohr's better-known Copenhagen Interpretation and N. David Mermin's Ithaca Interpretation. Greeley's scheme slyly bypasses quantum theory's conceptual paradoxes and focuses instead on direct experience of the quantum world. While searching for something else in my files I discovered today this early draft of John Greeley's seminal contribution to quantum thinking and decided to share it.

THE GREELEY SCHOOL OF QUANTUM AWARENESS
The Greeley School of Quantum Awareness is modeled after the zen monasteries of Japan where the goal is to experience transcendent awareness by means of a sudden awakening, sometimes at the end of a stick.

To understand quantum mechanics is, in the Greeley School, analogous to sen awakening, but it must not be a shallow understanding in the manner of classroom rote learning, but something which is directly experienced, requiring, as an absolute requisite, freedom from the spell of language.

All discussion in the Greeley School is conducted only with action verbs, with hand signals, or by direct contact with nature. Naming any "thing" (which mistakingly localizes "objects" in space) is a punishable offense, the worst offense being to apply a name to a living creature. Matriculants are encouraged to use art, poetry, music and mathematics to express themselves. Anyone who quotes an author will likely be kicked or struck, have cold water thrown in his or her face, or be sprayed with a CO2 fire extinguisher, which makes a terrifyingly loud roar that tends to freeze misconceptions. Matriculants may in turn attack the teacher if his or her approach is found wanting, but a false attack is a CO2 offense.

Students are encouraged to wrestle, eat, drink, smoke, laugh and play games. The highest goal is laughter, but one of the worst offenses is shallow laughter.

If you are in doubt about your sanity or your emotional stability, do not attend the Greeley School. Anyone claiming they have found or "got something" will be expelled. Only those who have already gone past psychologism, or who have never been involved in it, need apply.

The objective of the Greeley School is simply to understand quantum mechanics. Since such an understanding is admittedly indescribable, and since there is no agreement as to what it means anyway, this would seem to be an impossible task. Therein lies the paradoxical lesson of the school, which, if you already understand, means you need not take the course.

There is no pretense of "experiencing the eternal Now" or any of that mystical sounding stuff. However, one of the greatest attainments is to stretch time, which is conceived of as a malleable function of consciousness, through the creative process. "Abandon all thought of past, present, future, ye who enter here."

Greeley himself is a tolerant man, but there are several things he will not endure, and which are strictly forbidden as subjects for conversation or artistic expression. These include patriotism, love of technology (especially computers), love of some saint or savior, and what the prices of things are when you go shopping.

The central message of the Greeley School is embodied in the following words: "The particle is a misconception; the wave is a misconception; likewise, the notion that particle and wave are misconceptions is also a misconception."

Whoreson Crawl

A few years ago I spoke at John Greeley's funeral which was held not in a church but in a second-hand furniture store on the fringes of Santa Cruz. John's friends knew him as an entrepreneur and avid baseball player but few suspected that he was a closet poet.

And not just a poet but a supremely weird and twisted poet. As a prime denizen of the Middle and Late BistroScene, John produced some unusually moving verse but his most notable accomplishment was his co-editing (along with Stephen John Solberg) of a small red book of poetry allegedly composed by lunatic Polish poet Ladislaw Tzestrczyk (LAD-is-lof dez-DARE-shik).

In the preface to this collection the editors describe how this book came about:

Sometimes the experiences of a lifetime can explode through the dikes of the conscious mind in a flood of feeling. Such was the case in the creation of this volume of poems. The entire outpouring was the result of a single 36-hour drinking and drug-taking binge during which the editors attempted to dissuade their friend, little-known Polish poet Ladislaw Tzestrczyk, from committing suicide.

Hence the origin of Whoreson Crawl which is defined on its title page as "a type of surreptitious movement performed on all fours by an illegitimate person, usually resulting in negligible gain."

Shortly before he died, John Greeley was busy composing an opera about this obscure Polish poet and would play tape-recorded arias from Whoreson Crawl--the Opera at some of our later gatherings. Here are are two examples of Tzestrczyk's verse from Whoreson Crawl, the book.

I DID THESE THINGS

I climbed Olympian mounts of yore
And drank the piss of the Minotaur
On leathery wings I soared above
The Citadels of Ovid's love
I swam the streams of forest gloom
Arm-in-arm with the she-wolf's groom
I dug beneath the Trojan earth
And dined on Helen's afterbirth
I walked the roads of Leningrad
And pinched the sluts my father had
For you, my friend, I did these things
For you, my friend, I did these things

WHAT IF I SHOULD DIE

If I should die tonight
Would not the sun still rise
Would not the markets open
Would not the world spin
without a halt?
You probably wouldn't care
"Ladislaw Tzestrczyk is dead,
so what?"
But if you should die tonight
The sun would not still rise.
would it?