Ten years ago I had successful open-heart bypass surgery. For several hours, with my heart stopped, I knew only black. “I” was outside of space time, “dead to the world”. When I awoke on the ICU gurney-bed with my mind returned to me, I laughed. I might have been Schrodinger’s cat (1935) in a closed box, dead and alive, a quantum entanglement. Now, in Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series we have our first quantum poet, who can be both within the physical/mental world of human history, as well as outside with the dead, “painted black” (as one early jacket sleeve of “Paint It Black” had it, the Jagger/Richards-written Rolling Stones hit of 1966).
The physicist ranges widely from black holes to Buddhism to climate change in his new book, “There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness.”