Day & Night and Schrödinger’s Cat
Thank you for following these excursions into my metaverse. Today I want to look at day and night, and at something that matters increasingly in my painting: a form can suggest an object without becoming fixed as that object.
Does my metaverse even have day and night? I could say yes, no, or perhaps only in places with solar systems like ours. But those answers are less interesting to me than the question itself. Can a painting hold apparently opposing possibilities together?
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger’s cat comes to mind, although the comparison needs care. In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger used the imagined cat to expose the difficulty of applying quantum superposition to an everyday object.[1] It is not a scientific explanation of day and night in a painting, nor a demonstration that Zen and quantum mechanics say the same thing.
What attracts me is the disturbance of an easy either/or. Shunryu Suzuki’s writing on body and mind also asks us to reconsider such divisions.[2] For my purposes, these are different sources of questions. I do not need to turn one into proof of the other.
My knowledge of quantum mechanics is modest. And although a Zen painting struck me powerfully when I first encountered one, roughly fifty years before writing this in 2022, I would not call myself a Zen Buddhist. These interests have nevertheless stayed with me and shaped how I look at a painted mark.
When I began this project, I decided to understand “metaverse” as a metaphor. Day and night can therefore become metaphors too. The following descriptions should be read with a little humour. I am letting the images suggest a world, not drawing up its laws.
A typical morning in my metaverse might look like this. With the first rays of light, its animated forms seem to stir, play and gather energy for the day. Or that is how I see them this morning. What do I know?
Night
Evening and night are a little closer to what we know. The day’s last thoughts recede, leaving room for the hours when the subconscious entertains us. Some of the original’s nuances and depth are lost on a screen.
Look at the suggested creatures. Is that a bird, and that a fish? The marks remain open enough to be seen otherwise. A fish and a not-quite-fish can inhabit the same shape. This is pictorial ambiguity, rather than quantum superposition.
Someone might object that this is simply what abstract painting does. Yes—but I enjoy the point at which the painting is abstract and not entirely abstract. Something recognizable appears, then slips away. I do not want to settle it too quickly.
Bonus Material: Other Beginnings
In the previous post, I chose a dragon/chaos image to suggest a beginning. I had painted several versions. This earlier one has qualities I like, but it seemed too abstract for that particular role: even the dragon would be difficult to recognize.
Another attempt treated the beginning as an ecstatic event. Yet too much already seems to have taken shape for it to feel like the very beginning. It belongs somewhere further along in my imagined world.
Extra Bonus Material: Something to Listen To
For many years, one of my favourite records was Tony Scott’s Music for Zen Meditation, made with Japanese musicians. I offer it here as a personal listening suggestion. It has accompanied my interest in these questions for a long time.
Footnotes
[1] Schrödinger’s 1935 thought experiment concerns a cat whose fate is linked to a quantum event. It raises the problem of how a superposition relates to definite outcomes at a macroscopic scale. See the Nobel Prize’s explanation in its 2012 physics background. ↩
[2] Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. My original reference was the German edition, Zen-Geist, Anfänger-Geist, Theseus, 2016, p. 26, discussing body and mind as both two and one. See also the San Francisco Zen Center’s introduction to the book. ↩
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Metaverse (III): The Beginning and the End · Metaverse (V) · Cats in Chinese Painting
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