Categories: uncategorized
Date: 22 September 2006 12:07:46
I learnt of the Joyce-Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
It wasn't called that, and it was only Joyce's thoughts that I was reading about, but it put me in mind very much of Heisenberg and the two almost seem to be two sides of the same coin. Essentially they both say, in different ways, that you can't have your cake and eat it. Heisenberg wanted to know where something was and where it was going (rather like the parent of a teenager) and found that the more precise answer he got to one of those questions, the less precise an answer he was able to get for the other. Joyce wanted to feel deeply and express those emotions, and he found that those who felt emotions deeply were unusually unable to express them and those that could express emotions didn't actually feel much that was worth expressing. In Heisenberg's principle there is an explicit play-off between the two - you can know a mix of both things but the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Joyce just considered the two extremes, but I think there is a continuum between them - and it's a continuum I feel I journey along quite frequently. Oftimes I find myself feeling something deeply (often a frustration, sometimes a love) and utterly incapable of articulating it. And at other times I find myself able to articulate well some things which are completely mundane and uninteresting. And probably most of the time I dwell somewhere in between, neither very interesting nor very well put.
I'm not sure where I read about Joyce's thoughts (or Heisenberg's, but that could have been in any number of science lessons or popular science books), but it was probably in the introduction to one of his books, and probably Ulysses. I remember buying that in a bargain bookshop at a time when the world of proper literature seemed like a new, exciting and inviting world for me. Now I feel the pressure of having to keep up with people who've read things that I haven't, but back then I had more time and enough money to buy lots of books, so if I felt I needed to have read something then, well, I'd simply go out and buy it and read it. Ahh, such simple times.