BARBARA GAIL MONTERO - ON TIME - POEMS

Barbara Gail Montero is a Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York and former professional ballet dancer. Her 2016 book, Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (Oxford University Press), explores how the body and mind intertwine in highly skilled actions.

The Eternal Return

The eternal return
The idea that everything,
Including your life
Exactly as you have lived it,
Will recur innumerably many times.

Joys,
Terrors,
Terrors,
Joys,
Joys,
Terrors,
Sorrows,
Endurance.

There is beauty in that which is necessary.
The future that beckons us
With uncountably many lines of symmetry.

​Nietzsche and Woolf Walk into a Bar

We know that if spacetime curved
and Nietzsche and Woolf were to meet,
they would dance.

What more could a philosopher want
than to be a good dancer?
An Ideal, as well as an art.

Profound knowledge
Dancing, shaking,
All alive, but controlled.
If only God had learned it better.

​General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

General relativity
a world of gently curved spacetime
a seamlessly woven fabric
warped by the massive objects
that set our spiral galaxy in motion

its articulation is legato
its purview, the large, the stately, the sublime

Quantum mechanics
a world of discrete,
jumpy,
jagged events
a discontinuous world of Heraclitean Becoming
rather than Aristotelian Being

its strings are plucked rather than bowed
its purview, the very small—the nano, the pico

General relativity’s language is geometry
it rules over its four-dimensional spacetime manifold
with absolute authority
it is a game of skill.

Quantum theory is a game of chance
Its players, irresolute and unpredictable
Outcomes, undecidable

Whereas general relativity uses mathematics
to describe a world beyond its equations
the quantum universe is nothing more than equations
its inhabitants,
matrices
probability amplitudes
imaginary numbers