{"id":60,"date":"2017-03-03T14:22:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-03T14:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iceboxstudio.com\/bowl\/?p=60"},"modified":"2023-07-27T14:56:57","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T14:56:57","slug":"physics-meta-physics-contact-and-contact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iceboxstudio.com\/bowl\/physics-meta-physics-contact-and-contact\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics, meta-physics, contact, and Contact"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Frieda A. Stahl\u2019s 1987 article, \u201cPhysics as Metaphor and Vice Versa<\/a>,\u201d is a reassuring, well-constructed, and excitingly cross-disciplinary piece of text. I say reassuring, because for many years now, I have used (or been tempted to use) various concepts and constructs from quantum physics (and classical mechanics) as metaphors for different themes within gastronomy. I do this because it seems both useful and necessary, particularly when other modes of interpretation from, say, the social sciences and humanities, don\u2019t express what I think is so extraordinary and transverse about food and food systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet because there aren\u2019t a tonne of people who have both chemical physics and food studies in their backgrounds, I more often than not shy away from making such parallels, worried that they will seem esoteric, pretentious, or simply not very understandable. Dr. Stahl\u2019s article in Leonardo<\/a> was therefore a pretty great find for me, 30 years after it was published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(A quick note, sent off to the one email address I could find for her, was responded to within hours. Dr. Stahl retired 25 years ago, but is still, in her words, alive and kicking. Must say, it\u2019s a bit of a thrill, sending a fan letter and hearing back from one\u2019s focus of admiration so quickly.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In brief, the \u201cMetaphor\u201d article pokes around at some of the ways that bits of physics terminology have come to be used to express ideas about other forms of lived experience, sometimes to useful effect, and sometimes problematically. It also gives a number of nice examples of crossings and connections between literary forms and scientific language, including the tight parallels between poetry and physics. But what is most broadly compelling to me about the piece is the introductory section, which outlines a history of linguistics and objectification, and the underlying difference between seeing the world as an grouping of noun-forms and seeing it as a sequence of verb-forms. Objects versus processes; things versus becomingnesses. As technoscience became a dominant global knowledge framework, Dr. Stahl says, languages around the world adapted to follow suit. Esperanto may have failed as a universal project, but object-centered ontology didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my favorite drag queens, Katya Ekaterina Zamolodchikova, has expressed an ongoing obsession<\/a> with the 1997 Jodie Foster movie, Contact<\/em><\/a> (directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on a story by Carl Sagan). For Katya, a whole series of conceptual motifs from the film serve to inform her interpretations of the world\u2014whether it\u2019s about drag, commerce, reality, contouring<\/a>, or parental relationships. (This is one of the reasons for which we love Katya<\/em><\/a>\u2014that huge brain of Brian\u2019s, which makes unrestricted connections among culture and nature, science and humanity, the mundane and the marvellous.) I had already been a fanboy of hers, but the Contact<\/em> connex kind of wowed me. See, I myself have often drawn on that film for references to the hard-to-make-tangible quality of food. When Ellie Arroway (Foster) arrives at the tropical-beach-illusion interrealm that the aliens have set up for their interaction with her, she takes off her space glove and tries to touch the oh-so-close blue-purple sky<\/a> above her. As she does, it flutter-jiggles, like a projection of an upside-down bowl of Jell-o. It\u2019s an illusion, but not. It\u2019s substantial, but amorphous. For me, there is an identical quality to gastronomy, and to what makes food so foodish.<\/em> There is something there that is not only scientizable, not only poetic, not \u2018magic\u2019\u2014it is just beyond our current ability to conceptualize or sense. Yet it will<\/em> come in time, just as the aliens\u2019 reality in Contact<\/em> was to be eventually conceivable by Ellie and the other then-humans. For now, however, things remain floatingly and frustratingly unspoonable grape gelatin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like the \u201cMetaphor\u201d introduction, the recent film, Arrival<\/em><\/a>, also deals with the linkages between language and perception of reality. In the story, Louise Banks is a translation professor (tremulously played by Amy Adams), who has to figure out how to communicate with alien beings who have just arrived on Earth (well, just a few meters above the surface…) They express themselves in inky, spewed pictograms that, unlike human sentences, do not seem to have a starting or ending point\u2014they are circular rather than linear representations of meaning. (Aha! A clue to the key theme of the film: time<\/em>.) At the film\u2019s climax, Banks suddenly understands the whole of the aliens\u2019 language, and thus comes to perceive reality (time) in a wholly non-linear way. [Sorry, that was a spoiler.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as I was with the tangible-intangible beach-scene sky in Contact <\/em>20 years ago, I have now become captivated by Denis Villeneuve\u2019s time-perception construct in Arrival<\/em>. Whether or not the language-reality-perception linkage is \u2018scientifically credible\u2019, it resonates with me. It makes me feel less alone with my hard-to-express sensibilities about gastro-perception. As before, I have a feeling that we are on the brink of some kind of new way of sensing-knowing-understanding things (about food or whatever); it is painfully far and close at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Notably, Katya recently moved on from her Contact <\/em>fixation\u2014officially, anyway\u2014also now adopting Arrival <\/em>as her go-to metaphor source for interpreting human realities as well as providing makeup tips. I need to follow up with her on that.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So where are we with all this? Mostly that, yes, physics and gastronomy (and drag) can usefully meld together, informing each other through metaphor, if you let them, and if you are caring with them. I will continue to do so, and I have Dr. Stahl and Dr. Katya (not a doctor<\/a>) to thank for inspiring my non-linearly parallel imaginings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P.S. Arrival<\/em> was released in 2016, but I saw it in 2017. That means that the three reference points in the above post date to 1987, 1997, and 2017. Following the non-linearity-of-time theme, it likely means that something else pretty good must have happened in 2007. Wait, that was the year I moved back to Montreal and perceived Hochelaga-Maisonneuve to be exactly the same as NDG-Hampstead in 1977… Oh. My. Gods. Seriously though, I\u2019m serious. That\u2019s weird<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can\u2019t wait for 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frieda A. Stahl\u2019s 1987 article, \u201cPhysics as Metaphor and Vice Versa,\u201d is a reassuring, well-constructed, and excitingly cross-disciplinary piece of text. I say reassuring, because for many years now, I have used (or been tempted to use) various concepts and constructs from quantum physics (and classical mechanics) as metaphors for different themes within gastronomy. I…Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historic-posts"],"yoast_head":"\nPhysics, meta-physics, contact, and Contact - bowl<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Frieda A. 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