Wave and Particle: Liza Lou's Garden, and the Light of Day

There is a remarkable young sculptor from California named Liza Lou. She creates installation sculptures in the form of everyday places constructed entirely from beads. The subject is usually commonplace, often a kitchen or a garden, but every three-dimensional piece is made of tiny, shimmering glass beads strung together. Once, I saw a garden created by Liza Lou. The part of the sculpture that most captured my imagination was also the most ordinary. I was drawn not to the dazzling bead-flowers, or the bead-constructed park bench. What I could not look away from was the grass. Each individual blade was made glass beads in various shades of green, strung on wires and moving exactly the way that grass moves in the breeze.

The Liza Lou sculpture made me think about the tiny amount I know about molecular physics. When I was a teenager, atoms were old-hat and quarks were the rage. Today, quarks are “so 1970’s,” and matter has been subdivided much further, down to components whose names read like an excerpt from Finnegan’s Wake or “Jabberwocky”: fermions, bosons, neutrinos. Every time scientists identify smaller components of physical existence, they subdivide again and slip through humanity’s fingers. More and more, it begins to look as if matter – everything that is deemed “real” by empiricists and materialists – is nothing more than ever-smaller particles, vibrating in a way that creates an illusion of solidity. The properties of light hint at this, as well; light is both wave and particle. Interestingly, light is an almost universal metaphor for God, as well.

I thought about that garden the only time was ever been with a person at the moment of death. It was at my aunt’s bedside at St. Mary’s Hospital in October of 2004. I lived with her when I was little and we were close all of my life. In 2004, she was 81 years old and knew that she was finally going to succumb to the combination of ailments that had gradually consumed the life of a formerly fiery and inexhaustible woman. As she was trying to speak in the last minutes, I could see that the effort was exhausting. I held her hand, which was as fragile as a dried flower. I told her not to say words, but instead to speak with her heart. She died in silence. At that moment, I was covered in goose bumps. My immediate, almost instinctual, thought was, “Well, somewhere in the world, a baby was just conceived. Aunt Day’s soul will come back again in that body to finish its work on earth.”

It’s a nice thought, I suppose, but I am not sure it's accurate. I have since begun to think of death as a release of the spirit as pure energy. No longer confined by the restraints of the body, the energy that once animated it goes . . . I don’t know where. Perhaps it goes into a new body. Maybe it moves to another realm. Maybe it stays in this realm and forms part of a spiritual vortex of powerful spiritual energy – the kind of thing that people describe sensing in Sedona, Arizona, or in holy sites like Angkor Wat, Chartres, or the Wailing Wall.

The moment of death seems to me the moment when the particles that form the matter of the body begin to slow down and stop vibrating. The energy within that had given motion and life to those specks is released, almost as if invisible spaces between the particles of our bodies are formed once they are stilled. Although it is no longer needed to animate our bodies, that energy is not destroyed; that would violate all of the laws of motion that we know. Instead it expands and moves, somewhere in the distance -- and that is closer than we think.