How To Exist Everywhere (Greek travelogue #3)
I am in Greece. By virtue of this, it is safe to say that I am not in the United States. I am not in North Carolina, where my house, my mother and father, my school, friends, cats, acquaintances, books, and dog, the people I’m not talking to and the people I want to be talking to, my bedroom, my car, and my winter clothes are. I am here, where the 5,000 miles of Atlantic space that exist between me and my life can feel at once insignificant and insurmountable. It is easy to look at pictures of my friends back home or video chat with my parents, easy to forget that they are, to me, here, nothing but glittering 1’s and 0’s. A beautifully, intricately simple code that allows me to poke my head back into their world while leaving my feet planted firmly in this one. Despite instances of mind-blowing technological innovation like this, though they are many and, at times, staggering, I remain detached. There is a binary that settles in the instant you step off the plane: I am here; I am not there. I am American; I am not Greek. I am a traveler; I am not a tourist. For everything I am—a girl, a student, a writer, a wonderer—there is some equal and opposite thing I am not.
This kind of binary exists outside of travel, of course. When I’m at home, there are still plenty of things I am and plenty I am not. But here, it is more palpable. Here, I can feel the physical distance that stretches between my body and the bodies of my friends at home, as well as the cognitive distance that manifests between my experience and the experiences of the Greeks around me. I see entire families piled onto one moped, I see women wearing nazars to ward off the evil eye, I see young men who live with their parents and their parents’ parents. When I walk through Athens and spy the Acropolis, lofty and marmoreal in the distance, no longer a monument to Athena but to the splendor of history, I am instilled with a crippling sense of awe that does not extend to the Greek woman who walks beside me. When I stop by the harbor in Poros to talk to the fisherman tossing broken-shelled lobsters back into the water, I hear him say that he slept two hours last night, that he works late in the restaurant and rises early to cast his lines. I can see, hear, and touch these people, their lives, their customs, but not really feel them—I am trapped, I think, in my own experience. Here is the binary in action. I am in Greece physically but I cannot be here wholly. I can, as the Greeks do, hang my laundry from the balcony to dry, but I cannot climb inside the mind of the old woman who does the same thing across the street. Similarly, or perhaps inversely, I can hear the comforting tone of my mother’s voice over the phone, but I cannot lean my head on her shoulder when I feel alone. Here, I feel caught between two places, not fully immersed in either. I am here and there. Neither here nor there.
It is an addictive concept, the notion of being nowhere, and one that has gripped philosophers and clerics and scientists since the days they were laureled and toga-ed, possibly in the very same place I am writing this now (technically, togas were worn in ancient Rome, but you wouldn’t know what I meant if I wrote chiton-ed or peplos-ed). How utterly terrifying, how incomprehensible, how humiliating, not to exist anywhere at all. We have written entire mythologies, waged wars, toppled civilizations, to dispel the idea that it is even possible, that one can simply cease to be. Far more interesting, in my opinion, is the notion of being in two places at once. When I lie on my bed in my hotel room here, laptop screen glowing ghostly blue before me, it is easy to inject myself into the home planet it presents. I can coach my friend into talking to a boy, and I can wish another one happy birthday. I can watch snapchat stories from three different friends on a road trip together, and it’s as if I am there. It’s like double exposure—if I hit that mental camera shutter one more time, suddenly I’m a part of the picture.
“But it’s not possible to be in two places at once,” I can hear you saying. Maybe you are rolling your eyes as you say this. Bear with me, Reader, because I’m about to show you how it is possible, or at least how I imagine it might be, but first I’m going to have to relate to you my very limited and likely very inaccurate understanding of quantum physics. Consider, for example, Schrödinger’s cat, a famous paradoxical thought experiment. I am not a physicist, but from what I am able to glean from the Wikipedia article and from foggy memories of years-ago late-at-night talks with my dad, Schrödinger suggests that, if our current understanding of quantum mechanics is applied to everyday life, it would possible for a cat to be simultaneously dead and alive. The idea is that the cat is placed into a box with a radioactive source and a bottle of poison, that the radioactive source has the ability to release the poison and kill the cat. As long as the box remains unopened, the cat is alive and dead, at once. This is quantum superposition—the idea that particles exist in all possible configurations simultaneously, and only at the moment of measurement, or observation, do they settle into one reality. So, if I were to go unrecognized, unacknowledged, might I then exist in multiple configurations, multiple realities, until the moment that I am realized?
The simple answer to this is no, because: I am not a quantum particle; I am a human girl. I must behave like one (i.e., bound to the laws of classical physics). Incidentally, it is also not realistically possible for me to exist in an incognizable state. But, does that mean that I cannot exist in multiple realities? Theoretically, no, not necessarily. There is no evidence to suggest that the universe has an edge (or, for that matter, a center). We know that it is constantly expanding, faster than the speed of light. What we don’t know is whether it is finite or infinite—many suggest that it is infinite (if it’s not, what else is there? What is beyond its nonexistent edges?). If we assume, as many do, that it is infinite, then it is fair to say that, yes, I can be in two places at once. Because infinity, by definition, includes everything (everything!!!), and everything (everything!!!) includes an infinite set of parallel universes. This is called the multiverse, and its existence is supported by many very smart people, like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking.
In the multiverse, every decision that every being has ever made since the big bang has spawned another reality. There are an infinite number of realities, then, where almost nothing is different—in some, I’m simply wearing different shirts, or have different haircuts; in others, maybe I’m sitting a few inches to the left of where I’m sitting in this one. In an infinite number of other realties—a much greater infinite number (and yes, some infinites are greater than others—this concept was proven by mathematician Georg Cantor in 1874 and made famous by lachrymose young adult author John Green in 2012), reality is vastly different. In those ones, maybe I’m a boy, or a Greek, or an actual physicist who could explain this all much more concisely. In some, I am already a wildly successful writer or comedian. There are infinite universes in which I, much like Schrödinger’s cat, am dead, though I am most certainly alive in this one. In even more, I never existed at all (and you, too, Reader. How does that feel?). Some universes operate under totally different physical laws and constraints—in some of those, maybe every person on earth is me (seven billion communication majors waxing on about quantum theory, can you imagine?). In some, maybe every person on earth is a floating cloud of interconnected thoughts. In some, maybe Donald Trump is running for president (only joking—that hellscape has managed to worm its way into our own reality) [1]. When I explained this idea to my friend, Anna, she asked immediately, “Is there a universe where I’m an asshole—literally?” “Yes, Anna,” I said, “There is a universe where you, and I, and everyone else, are, quite literally, sentient sphincters.” At least, that’s my understanding.
The point of this lengthy and meandering explanation is that it is, in fact, possible for me to exist here, in Greece, and there, at home, at once. While I am here, eating olives and drinking wine, looking out over the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean, there is a phantom me who is there, in Chapel Hill, eating peaches and fried bread on my back porch. That reality is stacked right on top of this one, mostly translucent, like opening a new layer in Photoshop. This seems right, as it feels impossible for me to truly leave home behind, just like a month from now, I’m sure, it will feel impossible to say goodbye to Greece. I will carry a part of it with me, somewhere inside, and I will leave a part of me here.
It is not necessary to apply the binary code to my reality, spatially or in terms of my identity. I have the tendency, even when I am home, to define myself in this way—if I am funny, I must not be serious; if I am smart; I must not make mistakes; if I am strong, I must not be weak. Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself,” “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” While I am here, I must remind myself that I contain multitudes—that I can be homesick and ecstatic with the joy of novelty, at once. That I can live life here and attempt to experience Greekness, though I am, intrinsically, unshakably American. That I can allow myself the pleasure and pain of trying and failing and expanding, rapidly and immeasurably and unendingly. I must remember this when I return home, too. The universe does not exist in binary, nor do I. We (the universe and I) are not just large; we are infinite.
Chloe Anderson Ladd (June, 2015)
Póros, Greece
This essay was written on the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. A sick, twisted joke in retrospect.