Author Ciarán Ó Néill on the ideas behind and the inspiration for his remarkable new book, A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being . . .
Ever since I rediscovered the joy of reading while avoiding my studies in Galway, I have wanted to do what writers do. I have wanted to be a creator of worlds, a spinner of yarns and a voice in your head. But there is always so much to want, and as it turns out, my ambition often outweighs my capacities. Consequently, though I have followed many paths from there to here, any writerly trails along the way have proved short-lived diversions, or dead ends. Until now.
As I cruised into deep middle age, hormonally and chronologically inclined to look back and take stock, but also prey to an urgent desire to manifest and endure, I decided that it was now or never: if I didn’t write a book, that book, my book,now, I never would. And so this small winner’s memoir of failure was born.
But is an urge to manifest and endure enough? Having discovered in the meantime that I could neither create worlds nor people them, or spin a yarn, all that was left was my snobbish coveting of the aura of intellectual allure that came with the label “writer”. What about serving humankind? What about Truth and Beauty?
Truth and Beauty
Truth and Beauty being easily dismissed as totalitarian concepts, I thought that if I wrote honestly and humbly, I should publish and be damned. The resulting pared-back and de-populated memoir is an attempt at gaining some understanding of myself, of my being and doing, and perhaps of being in general. It is a homage to humanity’s creativity and a lament of its cruelty. It is a record of my bumbling journey from the categorical certainties of youth to the fuzzier heuristics of maturity. It is maudlin midlife reminiscence and the adumbration of the discomforts of old age. It is a celebration, and a statement, an acte de présence. A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being is my attempt at creating one small sliver of meaning.
And if all that tortuously wrought rationalisation wasn’t enough to justify wasting my time writing, then the contemporary flooding of the zone would be. Today’s hallucinating chatbots and gaslighting tyrants, fake news and mis- and disinformation, and its black-is-whiteism, has made writing an urgent business. I see it as my duty to resist, and the only tool at my disposal to that end, is my pen.
In Ukraine, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands in a war that is not a war. In Germany, Jews are being arraigned for anti-semitism. In Britain, little old ladies are being imprisoned for expressing solidarity with the besieged Palestinians. In the US, people who displease The Clown, from data scientists to talk show hosts, are being removed from their posts so that he can impose his Truth on our reality.
In Gaza, we are told, the use of hunger as a weapon, the bombing of schools and hospitals and homes, the harassing and murder of the civilian population, and the wholesale destruction of a people and its physical and social infrastructure, is not genocide.
How to resist this deluge of mythomania? If I were witty enough, I would assume the role of Shakespearean jester, of the fool at the court of the modern counter reformation, with its motley melee of fantasists, sycophants and self-proclaimed seers. I would surreptitiously but stubbornly pepper my nonsense, my fictional ramblings and my low down jokes, with jibes and jabs that would poke holes in their outlandish articles of faith, and ridicule the lies that they want us to tell ourselves.
Quantum Mechanics
What has any of this got to do with quantum mechanics? Precious little. Depending on your perspective.
One of my earliest formative failures was as a scholar. Instead of spending my time studying physics and maths, and chemistry and electronics, as I should have been, I browsed the shelves of Charlie Byrne’s (original location, just off Nun’s Island) for novels and biographies, for history and politics and psychology, in short, for any distraction from the hard sciences. Quantum mechanics was not the only area of my studies that defeated me but over time it came to represent my generally disappointing spell in academia, and as such, grew into something to be resolved, something that demanded closure.
In seeking that closure, I made a surprising discovery. I learned that people and quantum particles are somehow similar. That is to say, I came to believe that the vast recursive networked network that is a person, and the inscrutable scrap of being that is a sub-atomic particle, share behaviours and can be modelled, metaphorically at least, on the same principles.
I also learned that I wasn’t the first to sense these parallels. Not by a long shot. Far more qualified individuals than I had come to much more rigorously stated conclusions along the same lines many times already. I forged ahead nonetheless, in the hope that I might state this ghostly correspondence uniquely – in poetic prose, lyrical and light – to the edification of my fellow man, and the greater glory of yours truly,
This, and all of the above, is A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being.
(c) Ciarán Ó Néill
About A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being:
A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being is an attempt to make sense of the world – via advanced mathematics, philosophy and quantum physics. Along the way, it takes in many of the vicissitudes of life, including the need to earn an honest crust. By turns darkly comic and mildly heart-breaking, this remarkable book is a portrait of a life well lived – against a backdrop of ever-moving, and often frightening, world events. Who are Alice and Bob – not to mention Alice’n’Bob?
Part memoir, part novel, A Quantum Metaphor for Human Being is a book about the human condition – and has to be read to be believed.
Order your copy online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
