Truth, Beauty and Above All Quantum Superposition

Sud­denly I’m at an ima­gin­ary party.

“Nice party,” I say to a passing poet, rather lamely. She nods politely. I look around, a bit lost.

“Listen,” I say, “do you know why I’m here?”

“I don’t even know why I’m here,” she says crank­ily. “Why am I a poet? You’re mak­ing me up, you tell me.”

We look awk­wardly into our punch glasses while I guiltily try to work out what kind of char­ac­ter she should be. I decide that she has just seen the film Moulin Rouge, and have her sud­denly demand of me whether, like fam­ous artists Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Ewan Mac­Gregor, I am pas­sion­ately devoted to Truth, Beauty and Above All Love.

I quickly nip off to the kit­chen to refill my glass.

Hid­ing cas­u­ally under a kit­chen table, I con­sider her ques­tion and my response which, star­ing up at the passing knees, I can’t defend against a charge of panic. It was a fair, if slightly florid, ques­tion to ask a writer, and the kind of thing about which a writer might reas­on­ably be expec­ted to hold strong opin­ions. I run through mine.

I’m all for Love. Couldn’t fault it. And if you’re after some­thing to put Above All, Love’s the very chap. No prob­lem there.

And if you’re will­ing to accept the vari­ous crys­tal­line glor­ies of Geor­gian folk har­mon­ies, my six-year old niece and the career pitchmap of Glenn McGrath, I’ve got Beauty knocked into a cocked hat.

I ima­gine some chew­ing gum stuck to the under­side of the table and frown at it. It was Truth, then. Why?

I write fic­tion, which means that although much of The Last Monk, for example, is based on real things and places, it is almost com­pletely made up. None of the people exist and none of the events ever happened. It’s fic­tion, and I work damn hard to make it stranger than truth.

Yet I’d like to think that when I write I am try­ing to find out the truth about things: about the baff­ling ways people act, how the world works and, in my case, the way it feels to talk to dust bun­nies or start a civil war in a march­ing band.

So my book is sim­ul­tan­eously true and false, real and made-up. How?

The poet’s Doc Martens swish by the table on the way to the door, appar­ently fed up with being called into exist­ence then aban­doned in the lounge room. I poke my head out from under the table.

There is a the­ory of quantum mech­an­ics which states that, until observed, a sub-atomic particle may be in two dif­fer­ent states, even two dif­fer­ent places, at the same time, and that this is noth­ing to worry about, even though it sounds like it should be. Think of Schrödinger’s Cat, sim­ul­tan­eously alive and dead in a box until someone opens the lid. Per­haps there is a way for some­thing to be both true and fic­tional, at least until someone reads it and decides in their own frame­work of ref­er­ence which it is. In these cir­cum­stances, I real­ise, I can stop wor­ry­ing about verisimil­it­ude and just go for it.

A giant monkey-lobster creature in har­le­quin tights enters the kit­chen in a dune buggy at that moment and asks me what I am doing under there. I say I am hid­ing in a fic­tional party in order to con­tem­plate Truth, Beauty and Above All Quantum Superposition.

He says great and could I pass him a Bac­ardi Breezer.