Reflexivity

“Are you speaking English?” asked the marine biologist. (I get that a lot.) NGO told me about dynamic semiotics while The Woman from Ghent provided commentary on the group’s unique social interaction – not to mention demonstrating the lesbian walk. Several times! Meanwhile, Irish informed me she’s “not really a tight bitch.” (I didn’t know that I was wondering!)
The length of my stay, age, and relationship status was determined (and double-checked), not to mention how I knew who. I was spared “change the subject” moments since none of my ex’s are known to this community. The night was divided quite evenly between laughter and dancing.
Yes, the work switch was definitely turned off – how else could I have arrived to my hosts’ place at 4:15 thinking it was just a bit past midnight?!

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The park is magical. As are all the public, cultivated spaces here: I’m given the sense of a holodeck – programmed to appear wild but the evidence of human design remains.


Doesn’t that remind you of the lamppost on the other side of the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe? (I have refrained from watching the movie, so this is my imaginary correspondence from a reading many years ago.)
We picnicked and talked about the seasons. Liesbet looked at me with incredulity when I said it is a fairly recent phenomena for me to actually consciously register the duration of seasons. (She thinks I’m a treehugger!) I mean, yea, of course I always knew the seasons change, but to have that deep embodied awareness that one season follows the next . . .

and each lasts about so long . . .

Yea, that’s a perceptual kind of awareness I’ve been growing only since the last five years or so. I’m always pleased when spring arrives, but I never trusted the end of summer. Fall, for nearly all my life, seemed to hurtle into winter. When autumn started slowing down – meaning, when I realized there would be some months of fall between the first cold night and the onslaught of snow – is when the reality of the seasons as a cycle dawned.
I know. How is it possible to have been so clueless for so long?
I was raised among people who weren’t noticing those things. Or, if they were, it was a private matter, not discussed. Education was abstracted, even hands-on activities. (Not that I recall very many – which isn’t saying so much, as I don’t remember much of the first half of my life…) Reading Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home, sheds a certain kind of strange light on my own childhood. I realize that there was a singular focus that bounded most of my family’s doings… no wonder I still struggle to spread perceptual awareness as broadly as necessary, and so often get lost in the resulting complexity!

Anyway, we took off our shoes and spread our toes in the cool grass, comparing seasons in Egypt, Belgium, and various climes in the U.S. There is no twilight in Egypt, for instance, only a day/night transition lasting less than half-an-hour. You feel the seasons there by the temperature. Here in Belgium, as in the US, I tend to smell the season first. There is also a quality of air – probably a function of humidity? – but it seems secondary to me, whereas in Egypt (so says Mahmoud) the feel of the air comes before the nose detects a difference.
There are American sayings about the seasons….I have a vague recollection…”April showers bring May flowers” is the only one that comes to mind. Appropriate! In Dutch there is a saying about the moodiness of the weather, apparently Arabic has one as well, but for a different month… correspondence, but not an exact alignment: synchronicity is variable, huh?

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Luiza could not believe her ears. “We’re on the grounds of Fontainebleau!”



“What now” is a question I borrow from curricular design, social justice style. First cover the what, then the so what, and finally now what. What is the subject matter? Why should we care about it? How are we going to use this knowledge?


I was ready for three days in France, away from the halls of the European Parliament and the concentration of stimulation. “Scientists,” Luiza quoted the director of her thesis, “throw away the most interesting stuff!” I needed the change in place for perspective, knowing that whatever I encounter has the potential to enhance or distract my focus from the essential elements and determinative dynamics of the system of simultaneous interpretation in such a concentrated center of global influence. “What do you think of France?” she asks me. I cannot give a discrete answer: I am treading water, immersed in a sea of history, currents of contemporary discourse, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. The evidence, I think, displays a need to worship and the desire for control.
This is not unique to France, of course – it is the story of Europe, perhaps of homo sapiens.

Upon return to Luiza’s mod flat, I retreated from the day-trip’s high-speed (time)travel to recharge my introvert self. I soaked up the smell of melting then baking chocolate, absorbed the sounds of Dvorak’s cello concerto and Yann Tiersen’s juxtaposition of strings and piano (Sur le fil), wondered at the juxtaposition of Flemish musical history with Romania’s inability to develop (so-called) high culture (”we were too busy being invaded”), and read:

‘Is it to be believed . . . that an island abundant in all things necessary has been leveled to this wasteland through the making of a Stone God and then by his destruction?’ (2007, p. 133)

Who builds in stone wants to be remembered; no other monument lasts so long or so well. Yet people (governments, organizations, groups of all kinds) also try to fix social reality – relationships, communication itself – as if hardening the rules will determine outcomes, enabling the assertion of final control by banishing all possible space for anarchy.
We hash over linguistics while we eat: attempting to digest the cognitivists, distributionalists, generativists, structuralists, psycholinguists, and sociolinguists all at one go. We sleep. (No one reports dreaming.)
The Islamic Arts Department of the Louvre is closed, so I opt for Near Eastern Antiquities. I learn about the land “between rivers” (Mesopotamia), known to us through the “archeological fortune” of remains from Girsu/Telloh and Mari and (particularly) the reign of Gudea, who poses in all statues with hands piously held across his heart. In one statue, Gudea holds a “gushing vase” from whence stream fish, invoking Geshtinanna, “the goddess of the reviving water.”


I note references to Ishtar and Inanna, figurines of women, and circles. I am fascinated by the “oscillation tendency” of the city of Susa to be both “the eastern extension of Mesopotamia” and “the western expression of Iranian mountain civilization.” I am as repulsed by the ancient rite of hierogamy as Luiza was by the relatively recent public birthing of royalty. The art of engraving stones, by the way, is called glyptic.


Then, we tiptoed through the Tuileries, sauntered the length of the Avenue de Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, past Place de la Concorde, La Madeleine, Napoleon’s burial site at the Dome des Invalides, and Grand Palais. We failed to find socks but did stop for sweets at Paul, before heading to The Lab.

The Lab is a treat. Jose dives into musical history, demonstrating how each of the old instruments work and explaining the way scores were written. We even get to see one of the earliest precursors of today’s synthesizer. Then we walk through a quiet residential area, hearing birdsong en route to the Eiffel Tower – another impressive artifact of manmade worship. From viewing angles underneath, it looks like a spaceship. How many wonders can a single day hold?


We passed the Pantheon (smart dead people buried here) on the way to dinner (which was absolutely scrumptious), and afterwards the fountain at Place Saint Michel and Notre Dame. Charlemagne looks like the WitchKing of Angmar; there were many times these past few days when I felt as if the statues atop eaves looked down on us mere mortals with bloody demand. How does it come to be that a quote by Napolean accompanies Barack Obama on the cover of Vanity Fair? Riding the Thalys back midday, I read:

“the regrettable acts of war . . . to the broken and the dead, the wounded and maimed, to the exploded and shrapnel-shattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tears can wash away, it hardly matters that the dead language of war repeats itself through time. The bodies that can say nothing have the last word” (p. 233-234).

I wondered where we were, as the train hurtled at top speed across a plain toward France’s border with Belgium. What “regrettable acts of war” had occurred here, and what can be done to ensure that such “regret” becomes a thing of the past rather than a recurring motif of human history? I know the notion is counterintuitive, but interpreters – professionally trained, ‘conference’ and ‘community,’ of any and every language combination – are poised at a liminal opening to societal self-organization that structures difference and equality within the most basic component structure: that of language-based interaction between human beings.

Continuing to gaze out the train window I see the first fresh hints of spring; the trees tinged bright green appear aglow. Earlier, Jose had noticed that the conductor addressed passengers in the language of their destination. The only way to avoid war will be to intertwine economies and social relations so densely that no class interest can benefit from disruption. To keep the system vibrant, differánce must be celebrated in core institutional processes.

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“Are you blogging?!”
Patricia busted me right in the middle of Nederlands 1.2; I was taking notes on the confusion, even in the official language course, between languages. We are not being taught the local Flemish dialect, although Flemish versions sometimes appear in the midst of the officially-sanctioned Dutch. A French word had appeared on a worksheet instead of the Dutch term and the teacher drew our attention to it: this has happened before – not too often, but occasionally. I imagine that this is exactly how the languages are mixed in everyday use outside of the classroom.
Five of us from Cursus Nederlands 1.1 survived to 1.2 in the same classroom, same schedule, with the same stellar teacher. Six if Amin gets his act together and registers! Mahmoud got a job, Bouchra and Tolu have left us for higher levels – following Marse who is so far beyond us now we are lucky to get glimpses of her in the school cafeteria. I am still celebrating the small miracle of passing the level one test!
My struggle with learning Dutch (”very hard for Americans,” says virtually everyone) is somewhat similar to the experience of being on the outside of a conversation in a language I don’t know, as occurred several times last week in Strasbourg. Usually the other language was French – and I am reminded of the strategic decision last summer to start learning French, and then the practical choice of choosing Dutch because my residence in Antwerp enabled me less-expensive access to high quality intensive lessons. Not that I’ve been able to take full advantage of the lessons – I may be lucky to consistently attend 1/3 sessions per week this term. During pessimistic moods, I wonder if I was wrong to have prioritized the lessons over tramping the halls of Parliament last fall.
The social (and socializing) function of being with my fellow students in the cursus Nederlands, however, is vital for my sanity. Some of it is pure silliness, such as learning that Topi wears insulated socks (!), and some is wonder at the diversity of human experiences represented by our particular biographies. Marinella, for instance, saw the world as a youngster doing competitive sportshooting before moving from Bulgaria to South Africa for 19 years prior to her arrival here in Belgium.
I also admire the curriculum, and the ways Anne delivers it. Level 1.2 zeros in on two crucial skills: listening and grammar. I was annoyed and grudgingly impressed by the audiotrack we listened to (for answers to fill-in-the-blank questions on a handout) for including a low-level music background track. It was totally distracting – which forces you to concentrate while mimicking life in the real world, where there is always background noise of one form or another. As for the grammar, well, Topi was elegant as usual: “Dat is speciaal.” Patricia agreed, “Moelijk!” The entire array of language-learning services is impressive. Amin was very excited about all the resources he had learned about from Atlas, a social service organization whose mandate is to facilitate the acculturation of immigrants into Belgian society. (He enjoyed his appointment with Natalie, especially her enthusiasm.)
In terms of the research project that brings me to Belgium, having one foot in the community of everyday people and the other in the elite reaches of European governance helps me maintain a holistic perspective on the research objectives. How do attitudes and experiences with simultaneous interpretation serve as a lens for comprehending the role of language in Europe today? Is it possible to locate and describe how present-day policies and practices may play out over time? I believe it is possible to make some predictions, because the information about how current policies are affecting current practices are readily available – if we choose to recognize them.
Or are perceptually attuned to recognize them – which is the first matter of concern. Not only am I experiencing the limitations of my own mind to take in and process new information, but I am also observing non-verbal and discursive evidence of other people’s inability to either perceive or process new information. For instance, as I talk with Members (of the European Parliament), I am struck by how few of them have ever considered the system of simultaneous interpretation beyond echoing the usual litany of complaints and de rigueur compliments. It is not that they are un-thoughtful, far from it! Their responses when I question the practical realism of the expectations that inspire complaining are quite insightful. But some of the ideas I pose are outside their areas of knowledge – most of them simply admit this (a candor I find appealing and hopeful), some smaller percentage gamely go on along a path I find minor or tangential to my primary point (but nearly always in sync with a concern the Member had previously expressed), and a very few carry on in a way that leads me to suspect they are unaware that another way of thinking is possible.
I do not believe this is a matter of intelligence, at least not in most cases. I think it is a function of (lack of) exposure to different discourses. There seems to be only way to talk about simultaneous interpreting in the European Parliament; other ways of talking elicit responses ranging from curiosity to dismissal, from intrigue to risk – as if talking about interpreting is, in-and-of-itself, a threat.
Anyway, as other friends and I discussed last night, I have neither a magic blue diamond nor a genie to wish worries of “bad karma” away, only the goodwill of friends and those who do sense some value in the knowledge I seek to construct, even if my manner is clumsy as hell.

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I left Mumbai pretty much as I arrived: pressed in a sea of people. I boarded my flight (departure 13:35) at 13:32. The long lines for security screening before and after each stop (check-in, immigration, boarding) reminded me of the bureaucracy in Belgium, in which you think you’re on the last step only to discover that there’s another one, and then another . . . and another . . .
Still, I made the flight and the entire visit in Mumbai was perfect. Well, we did miss most of the actual marriage ceremony (oops) but they were still unmarried when we arrived! Who kept re-setting snooze? Couples. You gotta watch out for them.

I was there at the beginning. Maybe not the very beginning, but I was around when the light began to dawn. I had already seen the signs: “it seems you are giving each other a lot of comfort.” Nonetheless, who would have guessed, even a year ago, that I would be attend a Brahmin wedding between two dear friends – and in Mumbai, no less? Peak experiences are infrequent, but yesterday was a sixteen and a half-hour nonstop wonder. The whole trip has been great: my senses were unable to sustain the full onslaught of constant stimulation but I did fairly well considering I was hardly there long enough to get over jet lag.
Being with such close friends eased much of the culture shock I might otherwise have felt. Against the backdrop of stark poverty, a bewildering maze of trains, auto rikshaws, and busses, with barefoot people everywhere (even running jackhammers), there is an organic self-organizing system of constant commerce, from evening train carriage entrepreneurs to millions of home-cooked lunchbox deliveries.
The city surges in huge gulps and massive swallows. Need to get off the local train at rush hour? Just wedge those hips into the tiniest crevice and wiggle open the gap. Like mudwrestling without lubricant, bodies morph around each other like blood squeezed through a capillary. As long as you plan ahead, you’ll be close enough to the doors to be disgorged, to all extents and purposes simply ejected in the periodic spasm of rolling stops and abrupt starts.



My friends’ wedding unfolded in delightful contrast. More a relaxed social event than the solemn witnessing characteristic of U.S. weddings, people chowed breakfast and caught up on recent news while others showered rice blessings on the couple as the priest made stuff up.



Laughter and goodwill permeated the crowd. It was a crowd – approximately 350 for the marriage proper. This was primarily the groom’s side of the family, although a solid contingent of the bride’s side did make it all the way from Chennai (and Sydney, among other globally-scattered locations). The bride’s side gets their turn on Sunday: another three hundred or so will gather to eat, toast the new couple, and eat. Did I mention that food is really the main event?
I ate much more than seems reasonably possible. It did not help that the US version of headshaking “no” translates pretty closely to the Hindi headshake for “yes.” Then there are the sortof rolling headbobbles that look like yes/no at the same time. No wonder the general attitude about nearly all things is a relaxed, “whatever!”
Although it felt effortless, there was nothing casual about the ceremony and rituals. The groom’s parents began planning last summer, setting aside enough mangoes to make the most delectable mango dessert imaginable. I can’t name the dishes, but I can say every single one was delicious and abundant. Between dinner the night before, breakfast during the morning rituals and actual wedding ceremony, and lunch afterwards, I could have eaten comfortably for a week. Everyone’s finery was on display, including some brash young men who sought to compete with the groom for splendour. (They had permission, outfits purchased with groom in tow; mine excepted.)



Still, the ease with which the women navigated in their saris, and everyone circulated among familiar relatives and strange foreigners was delightful. You wouldn’t know, for instance, that the bride and groom didn’t really want to sit in the royal chairs, so carefully maneuvered were they into conforming to tradition. Parents are definitely dangerous. The bride’s dad, in particular, pumped us for incriminating information on the lucky couple. Some people cooperated. Ahem. This is what happens, I think, when the entire sociocultural structure is designed to make relationships work. Whether the goal is to prevent divorce or promote harmony is beside the point: everything is geared to keep the couple together – even if “and happy” is a contingent on a variety of circumstances and conditions.
Which is all rather different than queer folk who pretty much have to make a relationship work on its own merits, often against overt hostility and nearly always against the subtler forces of indifference. I was stared at a lot, but only aggressively by one person (that I noticed). Others were curious: but then again, being American is an excuse for all kinds of strange behavior.
Did I mention how cool my friends are? They are the greatest.

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Meanwhile, we devised a (level 2) test for the Shiva, and noted the building next door . . .

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Does he know where to look to find his name?


Does he know he’s supposed to?!


“They do this in the south . . .”

Fringe benefits:

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The first view out the airplane window was of a massive rock formation, then an expanse of land interspersed with building complexes, and then the low-lying shanties with their grey-brown roofs and liberal patches of blue tarp.
I started grinning as I walked off the plane, and continued to feel good, even as my fellow passengers surged to the immigration queue, propelling me forward at their pace! A random stranger placed a call to my missing friend, and I settled down to wait under the yellow fever vaccination sign, content that I’m really here.



Airport observation amused me for awhile, but that perfectly pleasant 80 degree (27 C) early afternoon shade was lulling me to sleep when who should appear? And then we were off! It is not apparent to me that Mumbai roads have lanes. Rickshaws compete to squeeze between cars, not to mention buses and trucks and that cow walking the wrong way up the middle of the road! I was so stunned I did not recover in time to snap a photograph! “Don’t worry,” Puru said. “There will be more.”

He brought me to the tree-lined campus of the India Institute of Technology, where we enjoyed a yummy tofu-and-vegetable curry with naan. We were not the only ones interested in lunch:

IIT is next to a wildlife preserve, they get all kinds of company, from monkeys to snakes to the occasional leopard. (So I’m told. Maybe they say that to all US Americans?)
The professor had to go off and do a bit more work, so he left me alone in his office. Hehehe.

At least it looks like he’s busy, huh? And still keeping up the activism: his office door displays a “Bush lies, out of Iraq” sticker, news articles on rural farmer suicides (rates increasing today) and victims of the DOW chemical explosion in Bhopal (still no justice, since 1984), a sticker supporting public transport, and a nice spread on novel ways the poor are organizing for electrical power.

Feels like home ~ or, at least like the good old days.

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“Mahmoud is een wonder!” Anne teased him at the moment when comprehension dawned: the lightbulb went off and Mahmoud got it: heel goed! I can tell you that I need a few more miracles if I am going to pass de examen in Januari.
I agree with Amin, who said “remembering” when we were discussing our various challenges with learning Nederlands last week:

“Heb ben jullie problemen?”
“Amin hebt een probleem speciale!”
“He’s so young for Alzheimer’s!”
Maar Amin is niet alleen.
Me too. :-/

Marinela answers questions on my behalf when I am too confused! (Even though a few weeks ago she was, like, uh, “How many different ways are there to say the time?!”) Bouchra lets me look at her huiswerk. Excellent examples of teamwork! Topi is my role model: she thinks for awhile to see if she can figure out what Anne is asking, then she asks, “Wablieft?” Come again? Yea, and if you repeat what you said about zeven times maybe I will get it. Misschein. (sigh)
The propaganda about America and the European Parliament that I distributed for fun is obviously not enough. Papa Obama or not: ik weet het niet = nul! And I’m referring only to the vocabulary – the grammar is totally guesswork as anyone with a smattering of Nederlands is painfully aware. :-/
Marsi – even though she abandoned us to jump to level 1.4 (!) – has dropped in twice: once with candy from Sint Niklaas and just before the break (eergisteren) with cookies she says she baked herself. Uh huh. (Mahmoud had to be convinced to share them with the rest of us . . . ) Meanwhile, Tolu tells me I look like a teenager (?!) and Patricia says, “Steph is a teenager.” The nerve!
My accent is also awful. Tim had to ask me, “Wat?!” after nearly everything I tried to say in Nederlands. “You think I can jump that high?” I asked him. “I hope so,” he replied, fervently. Jammer! I did give Susan a double take when I pronounced “Daag” properly – a feat I am not sure how I accomplished and probably cannot repeat. Marsi will never let me live down that I said smakelijk is the opposite of moeilijk. (The right answer is gemakkelijk.) [You understand why she is amused: easy, not tasty, is the opposite of difficult.]
The three days I was absent hurt. Gewledig! Big time problem. Although I did realize our infamous soap opera was poking fun at Amerikanen, even before Anne reminded everyone that I’m American. Neemt u mij niet kwalijk! We’re not all bad! Then the soap turns and makes fun of itself, touching on very politically incorrect topics with the kind of humor that would not find its way into most language classes in the United States. The videoprogramma generates a special voor buitenlanders (that’s us in this level one course: strangers from another land) to address kultuurimperialisme and profile the karacter op de Belg.

positief karacteriesteken op de Belg:

• diplomatic talent
• anti-authoritarianism
• respect for privacy

with accompanying negatief karacteriesteken op de Belg:

• indirect communication (niet zo open)
• separated (individualistic rather than communal)

All of this talk of stereotypen led our conversation back to kultuurshok. I realize part of my trouble with the trams and trains is that I am used to driving – which requires paying attention. When someone else is ‘driving,’ my mind goes elsewhere – with a book, writing, or daydreaming – then whooooooooooooooosh those stops just fly right on by! I’m amused by the supremely ordered traffic lights – specifically designated signals for automobiles, bicycles, and pedestrians – which nearly everyone obeys! There is no “language of klaxons” as Mahmoud labeled the incessant honking he, Amin, and Patricia miss from Egypt, Iraq, and the Dominican Republic. The food, we agree, is good and (!) – nearly everyone has a dish or several that they miss from home. Except for Bouchra. No kultuurshok. Grrl got it all together.

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Barbara Capogrosso-Sansone defended her dissertation this summer, and I was lucky enough to wangle an invitation. What follows are the thoughts of a wannabe social scientist/activist who imagines significant connections between the languages of math (especially quantum physics) and human words as they are spoken and written in intentional conversation with one another. You may decide that the t-shirt John wore for the event describes me perfectly:

On the off chance that I might be on to something, well, you’ll read what a mishmash I’ve made of Barbara’s quantum Monte Carlo study of ultracold bosons in optical lattices. My attention was captured immediately because she’s working with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Some folks have suggested that something like a BEC might be responsible for consciousness. (It can’t be an actual BEC, because our brains – let alone the rest of our rather incredible bodies – cannot live at the supercold temperature involved.)
The general thing that I’m thinking, as I mentioned to Don in my exuberance that day, is that we are all really talking about the same thing, we’re just using different languages to do the talking. “We” who? What “same thing”? Ah. I can’t quite answer that, yet. The “what” is something along the lines of spirit – but it goes by many, many names: energy, power, life, creativity, inspiration, vision, to name those that leap to mind today. Perhaps it is the answer E.O. Wilson seeks, a theory of consilience. Perhaps it is the miracle Wendell Berry argues can never, ever, be captured by any equation humans are able to devise. Berry, btw, is also a fantastic resource on living in the presence of fear.
As to the “we” – I’ve got a rather broad criteria that includes anyone/everyone trying to find solutions to the challenges that face humanity today. Specifically, though, I aim to include the people I’ve met at UMass Amherst, in all our varied fields and disparate ambitions. In the midst of Barbara’s exegesis on the dipole interaction and quantum phase transitions, she said there’s something intriguing occurring in these optical lattices:

Mathematicians (perhaps more than any other kind of physical scientist?) deal with the observable, the measurable, the essentially reliable. Social scientists, on the other hand, strive for the predictable but are constantly having to engage the sheer diversity of actual human responses to living, i.e., the social implies the unbounded. There may be parameters to the “hopping” we can do, but the rules that determine these parameters are not yet known.
Honestly, I’m not sure I want those parameters defined too accurately, but I do think we (humanity) need to figure out the forces that can be used to alter the realities we live in, largely because the current conditions are frightening to those of us with relative privilege and still totally suck for the majority of the world’s population. My basic thesis is that language is the tool.


The secondary thesis (if you’ll just go along with the first one for awhile), technically an hypothesis, is that language is energy – quantum energy, in fact, full of potential that can be experientially realized. The energy is in the transformations created through the assignment of meaning – both to things said and to things perceived but unsaid. Barbara spoke of the Bose-Hubbard model (1989), and mentioned a kinetic energy term, “hopping matrix element” (”t”). Does it work as an analogy? Language operates within fields of understanding and mis- or non-understanding. We in the West, especially) tend to privilege “understanding,” but misunderstanding is a potent space in-and-of-itself (see Chang).
Listening carefully to the language of math (especially by teachers of math and scientists using math), I hear metaphors of social interaction: “onsite repulsion” (e.g., prejudice?) “localized atoms” (e.g., jargon, culturally-specific terminology?), “zero compressibility” (no range of possible interpretation?), superfluid state (meanings in flux?) “Each line,” Barbara explained a graph, “represents a particle, [these are] world-lines.” Sounds like discourse trajectories to me! There are “hopping events” and “periodic boundary conditions in time.” Could these be akin to particular complexities in conflict negotiation and other difficult forms of problem-solving?
What I find most instructive concerning the language of math that I think social scientists could learn from, is that when mathematicians come up against a dilemma, they invent a way to deal with it. Tell me the truth, what is the correlate in real life of imaginary numbers? Barbara’s work goes even further than imaginary numbers, she is working with imaginary time.* Her atoms, somehow inversed in temperature, move in imaginary time, then hop to their nearest neighbor even though they could go somewhere else. Now, I do not know the significance of this in terms of physics, but if I extrapolate to the ways that discourse works, I would say something is indicated to the effect that simply reversing the conditions leads to a similar effect. Am I interpreting accurately enough? Flip the dynamics of oppression, it’s still an equation of privilege/disadvantage. I know I am reaching here, so some of you that KNOW the math might explain how well the analogy does or doesn’t hold. Basically, (it seems) some attractive force remains at work and effectively reduces the range of possibility to only that which is closest, even though more distant positions are possible (and, socially at least, probably more desirable).
Ok, I admit I’m straining a bit since so much time has passed since the event. My thoughts now are based on interpreting my notes, rather than recalling what excited me in the actual moment. Still, Barbara is working with mechanisms (a worm algorithm, winding numbers, superfluid stiffness) that enable the sampling of topologically different configurations, generating “a mass in order to calculate superfluid stateness.” Again, it seems there is a calculation occurring across time and space that allows the identification of relativistic behavior, specifically, particle-hole symmetry.
Let me return to language, meaning, understanding and its opposite. What I say (these words I type) could be imagined as “particles”; they can only be understood if a suitable “hole” exists for reception. Gaps are crucial, of course, and low energy levels always seem a good idea (especially as we enter the age of conservation). Which means, as Barbara says,

If I wasn’t excited before (i.e., driven to a higher energy state!), I got moreso as Barbara continued. Because even though the work begins in imaginary time, “the system of effective action” is translated into real time. Keep in mind that I am not making an atom-person comparison, but an atom-language comparison. “The transition,” continues Barbara, “is driven by adding or subtracting a small number of particles…[This is a] different physics – quantum fluctuations, at some point it becomes more favorable for the system to delocalize.” In other words (I think!), it becomes possible for atoms not to choose their nearest neighbor, but to behave in a truly alternative fashion. Amazing transformations then occur, such as the velocity of sound replacing the speed of light!
A bunch of people had questions at this point in the presentation; which was only (!) laying the groundwork for the discussion of results. Somehow along the way Barbara established a three-dimensional description of ground state properties, coming up with a phase diagram, information about strong coupling expansion, and a surprising finding concerning the critical region – which was bigger than predicted. What happens is a special kind of symmetry – based on the numbers (visible by graphing) and the relativistic behavior of sound itself. The symmetry is the crux (if I’ve got this right) of the transition from the mathematical world of the imaginary to the real, physical world.
WHAT IS INTERESTING?
The math and physics proper implications are far beyond me, but the pieces I grasp for language involve the importance of temperature (emotion may serve as the social science equivalent?), the changes from a homogenous to non-homogenous system (monocultural to mixed/multicultural?), and this discovery: “two bosons cannot occupy the same site.” Again, a reach, but no two words – even the same word – can never occupy the precise same spacetime with exactly equivalent momentum. “This model,” Barbara concludes, “is different than before, [which was] hard-core = only one (_____?) per site, and the interaction is long ranged.” The gist I took away from the presentation is that added dimensionality matters. The parameters of various electric fields (imagine the matrix of social/cultural factors that generate belonging or identity or community) can be tuned independently, via this knowledge about the hopping matrix element, such that “there is only a three-body repulsion…. [in this] system, meanfield predictions show the system undergoes a solid-superfluid quantum phase transition, [which effects the]
• Charge density wave, and the
• Bond order.”
Stick with me – or rip me to shreds! We’re witnessing (and probably participating in) huge “charges” of social density in waves (dare I say) of anti-Palinism (to give the most prominent current example). A transition resulting from this wave would be most welcome, would it not? (Well, if it goes the way we desire – I’m not sure the model provides the tools to predict which way a wave may break, yet.) But such a transformation will alter the social order – the relational bonds that tie us into certain elemental states will be disrupted, allowing the possibility for new and different bonds to form.
A Footnote:
*Stephen Hawking describes imaginary time as a “kind of time in the vertical direction,” which is “not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time.” The Beginning of Time, a public lecture by Dr. Stephen Hawking.

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