Residue Theorem
On repetition and attaching strings to your joy
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RESIDUE THEOREM*
When I started writing these letters a few years ago, I has a strict schedule. I had a newsletter writing night and a newsletter sending day. They meshed nicely with my work nights, gym nights, farmers market mornings, seminar afternoons and so on. Now that schedules are both essential and completely meaningless, I am writing in a looser way, in-between dealing with leftover research obligations, freelance writing assignment and ever intimidating course design. I keep a document where I make note of things I have read or listened to that might be worth mentioning in my next letter and I try to put down mostly scattered thoughts that show promise for growing into a future essay. When the panic of counting days elapsed since my last letter creeps in, I consult that document and try my best. The scattered thought portion of it for this week stayed mostly blank.
It’s been another chaotic, saddening, cruel week in the United States, painfully marked by the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. More lives were lost, more lies were told, we were all yelled at through screens and many were yelled at on the streets. Fires burned, storms hit, schools threatened to re-open and many threats of violence came true. We have seen all of this before, over and over again, so often in the past year, but also in past years that now establish an awful pattern. I can’t decide whether it is more devastating to be numb to sights, sounds and reporting on it all or to be fully disheartened, shattered and hopeless every time those news break through. The pandemic has been something of a crash course in dealing with opposing feelings for me, and I guess this week was in no way different. Can you be both numb and heartbroken? Of course you can, this is 2020.
Among the terribleness of this week, I managed to have one of the best days of the year so far, finally making it to the beach with my partner and some friends. We walked on the sand with our shoes off and watched a friend’s toddler discover his tremendous strength over it when grains spilled from his small fists with any application of pressure. We had to chase a colorful beach umbrella that mysteriously came with no anchor and quickly got overtaken by the wind, rolling away from me like a lopsided circular rainbow. We ran into the water and splashed at each other and let the waves carry us away from the shore. We drank sandy margaritas from a thermos and ate a slightly unripe pineapple we tried to let soften with lemon juice and only made it more sour, but no one cared. We talked to friends about how nice this all was much more than we talked to them about how precarious everything else is. We took pictures of each other as if we had gone to another planet and not just on a ten-minute car ride away from our home.
Photo: Rockaway beach earlier this week
I don’t think I knew that I needed a beach day so badly. Getting dressed in our basement room and catching sight of my terrible running gear tan-lines and the body that to me always looks at least slightly misshapen did make me anxious. But sometimes things do go right, and you do get over whatever is holding you back and the sun, the salt and the sand make you feel more alive, more embodied, more light. Later, with matching salt-fluffed hair and suspiciously reddened skin, we took ourselves out to dinner, to an Italian restaurant staffed and frequented by mainly Russian-speaking folks, next door to a Greek restaurant that loudly plays polka music, and laughed over Aperol spritzers when a storm hit and we all got a little wet because, of course, we are eating outside. We remembered another trip when we got rained on over falafel and another when we first figured out what those red drinks actually are. In remembering, and in soaking it all in, I briefly forgot everything else that was weighing me down.
There is not such thing as joy that comes without any strings attached. All of the conflicting feelings I have felt this year, all of the tensions underlying the unstable equilibrium I have found myself in, have made the connection between feeling temporarily good and more generally frightened potent for me. Being outraged by the government, but incredibly privileged to have a job and a place to stay. Being mad at biased family members, but grateful for their day-to-day, very concrete support. Being boxed-in, muted, stifled by quarantine, but also finally given the chance to spend every moment with someone you love to the point of a craving. It is not so much that the anger, the frustration and the sadness should corrode the joys and silver linings that do come our way, as much as we need to re-frame them as something to fight for, something worth holding on to as a glimpse of a better future.
In part, I struggled to put something down on paper this week because it seems like I have already tried to muddle my way through so much of it before. Even this feeling of time being stuck, of loops of bad news looping around loops of even more bad news, is something that I have written about just as I have written about needing to practice hope, to invest in community and exercise imagination past our current dreams constrained by the broken and violent systems we live in. So, what more is there to say? And why even keep saying it?
If we stop talking about the things we believe in and want to build upon, it is not some prospect of oblivious joy that benefit but rather those wearing us down with the insistence that their freedom and a more genuine, authentic kind of joy for the rest of us cannot exist at the same time. There has been so much talk this week of safety and order. If we make the wrong call in November, we will lose these things and the American Dream will die and the world will burn. Those saying this fail to mention that this death and destruction have already happened and many of them were around to if not cheer it on then at least let it happen to others. The politics of the rest of the year, much as they have been all summer, will be that of fear and anger. That fear and anger will be based on a ruinous alternative reality that disregards the actual reality which is ruinous in a very different way. An overblown, mythologized story of danger and fear for a subset of the nation will overtake the more real struggles of other parts of it and paint their pain over with a dangerous façade of agitation or betrayal or thuggery. In the face of that, it may be more important than ever to just keep repeating ourselves, to keep talking about humility, about creativity, about imagination, about togetherness and about joy. Even if it has started to sound hollow to say that every good moment, every bright side of a terrible situation, is an incentive to keep going and building, an investment in imagining a better future, it is still the best inoculation from the second season of this American carnage.
As writer Raechel Anne Jolie says in one of her recent radical love letters
“We need to name what’s wrong, but we also need to urgently and joyfully and persistently name what’s right. We need to offer our attention to what we want to grow, we need to train our brain to notice those moments when we or people we love act as free as we would in a liberated world. We have to notice them, replicate them, encourage them, demand conditions for more of them, until suddenly they are everywhere and all the time. ”
Those are the strings attached to our good moments: the urgency of not discounting their power, and the urgency to not keep quiet about our ability to still feel things other than fear and anger. It is not correct to say that joy and hope can be weaponized in the same crass way that fear and anger so often are, but they are the best tool we have to prop ourselves up during weeks like these when it feels like everything is wrong and there is nothing new to be said or done.
In his rather powerful letter to the mayor, chief of police and commissioners of his city of Portland, my friend and creator Christian Sager writes
“Across the street from my house is Vernon Elementary School. Its playground has a painted pie chart (pictured above) listing ways for children to respond to conflict. It features options like “apologize,” “talk it out,” and “make a deal,” showing that my neighborhood’s children understand how to resolve conflict better than the adults we’re paying to do it in our community.”
While the framing of this in the actual letter is appropriately grim, it reminded me, for the billionth time, that I have to believe in the future even when I have nothing new to say about it. Not necessarily for myself, but for those who are learning about the world right now, the kids that are presented with a more hopeful vision of the future than the one I can see after months of doom scrolling. It is remarkable that adults do not have the basic skills we try to teach to our children, but it is also inspiring to think that they might actually learn them. Maybe they’ll even get to use them sometime if we do not give up on talking about the world that we want to see for them. Those kids have to do so much better than we did, and they will if we do not let the apparent futurelessness of this moment prevent us from seeing those successes as possible.
Best,
Karmela
*In complex analysis, the residue theorem is a tool for evaluating integrals of certain functions along closed curves. It relates the results of integration to the residues of the singularities of the function being integrated. More simply, thinking about an integral as a very special kind of sum, its value becomes determined by the places were the function misbehaves or breaks down.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING Since I am a co-author on two papers that are still caught up in the peer review process, I am periodically pulled back into research and presented with excavation tasks involving either pages of analytical calculations or long files filled with code. I had a few of those days this week, staying up late to run a simulation a referee asked for and calling into an impromptu collaborator meeting the next day. I got to see another recent doctor’s new couch on Zoom and confirm to myself that me and coding are not friends, but we can make do when we have to.
In my other physics modality, that of a teacher, I am still trying to barrel through the syllabus I have set for myself and making slow progress. Other teachers that will be teaching the same set of courses at my new school have been helpful and encouraging, and I am being pulled into more and more conversations about coronavirus safety. Beginning of the school year definitely still looks like it will be an emotionally charged event, and I am anxious about it as much as I am excited, but at least I get these periodic reminders that it is not just me that’s worrying about it.
Beyond physics, I have been working on a few items for the news portion of the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology Center (IQUIST) website and trying to pitch more stories of my own to other outlets. Science writing continues to be a really fun and exciting use of my time, and I really hope that continuing to find time to work on it is also furthering my writing skills.
READING Jeff Chu writing about the post office. I know so much has been written about it and the challenges it faces at this critical time, some probably more informative than this newsletter, but something about Chu’s framing just struck me as so simple and emotionally impactful. He writes:
“Stamps tell stories of colonization and nationhood. You can trace the British Empire’s decline by the gradual disappearance of the silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II from postage all over the world. And across the map, territories have traded colonial-era names for new ones: Nyasaland became Malawi, Portuguese Timor became East Timor, and Ruanda-Urundi became separate countries, Rwanda and Burundi.
Stamps reveal something about what a nation values; almost all countries like flowers and animals and dead celebrities. But only China has issued a stamp backed with adhesive meant to taste like sweet and sour pork; this was for the Year of the Pig in 2007, and, thankfully, I do not believe China has done this with the zodiac’s other creatures. And only the fishing-dependent Faroe Islands have produced stamps made from codskin.
Stamps record social change. The only woman to appear on a U.S. stamp before the turn of the 20th century was Spain’s Queen Isabella, in an 1893 set marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Western Hemisphere. Martha Washington got a stamp in 1902, followed by Pocahontas, the first Native American ever featured, in 1907. The first Black American to be so honored was Booker T. Washington, in 1940.”
A few more pages of Gravity’s Rainbow, a very minor advance against the book’s intimidating size.
LISTENING The more I write, the more I listen to music instead of podcasts (a hallmark of my calculation-heavy days). This past week my mood changed a lot so my choice of artists changed a lot too. I went from The X-Ray Spex’s anthology Germ Free Adolescents to T-Rex’s Electric Warrior to Orville Peck’s Pony to Burd by Wilma Vritra and Reflections in Real Time by Kilo Kish. The heterogeneity of this list, female-fronted punk, flamboyant glam rock, corny and melancholy queer country and dreamy experimental hip hop, probably speaks to how all over the place this week had me feeling more truthfully than my words can. Music is like that most of the time anyway.
WATCHING We have kept up our watching schedule of mostly Halt and Catch Fire and some Too Old To Die Young here and there. Neither has really confronted us with anything particularly unexpected or new. Too Old To Die Young continues to be prettily shot but hard to watch and often unnecessarily violent. It borders on nonsensical in a way I am consistently not sure can be justified by its presumably satirical bend.
Halt and Catch Fire has me fully hooked on the strength and appeal of its characters, but I am starting to get somewhat tired of how rarely they are actually afforded good moments. The fact that something bad happens to a character the moment you start believing in them gets you invested in the show very effectively, but it would be great if the writers of the series utilized some other kind of story telling device as well. This show, for all its mostly progressive values and willingness to center women more and more in every episode, also suffers the common problem of including queer characters but only giving them tragic storylines. I know this is an 80s period piece, but queer folks that did not die, get sick or get beat up must have existed back then as well.
It seems like talking about sports as entertainment or sports as an exercise in running a business and utilizing statistics (and these days also as an arena for making political statements) has become common during quarantine. Our household is not immune to that, especially since my husband has a penchant for fantasy sports and statistical know-how due to his doctoral training, so we dug somewhat deep in this well and chose the 2011 film Moneyball as a movie night effort. This is a movie many critics seem to like and since its cast is quite impressive and Aaron Sorkin co-wrote the script, I expected it to be filled with snappy dialogue and show-off-y performances. Instead, this is a fairly quiet and claustrophobic movie that does pack some punches, but mostly comes off as a very subdued challenge to a more traditional sports movie. There is little to be inspired by here and I was not surprised to learn that in some very early version, it was going to be a documentary cut together by Steven Soderbergh instead of the dramatized account of Michael Lewis’s non-fiction bestseller book of the same name we ultimately got. Maybe this ever-so-slight underwhelm is the correct representation of how sports became as mathematical and calculated as they are these days, but I wanted this film to give a bit more life to its characters and drive its points home a little more forcefully.
EATING After spending a weekend visiting family and eating take-out my husband and I teamed up to make a home-cooked meal and settled on giving some more Indian recipes a try. We made this bhindi ka salan or okra in gravy (I added green bell peppers since I had fewer potatoes than the recipe called for and the peppers were looking quite sad in our fridge) and some chickpea flour pancakes or besan chilla. We served these with a fresh tomato, cucumber and peach salad garnished with chopped scallions, jalapeno, cilantro, roasted cashews, lemon juice, maple syrup and a good sprinkle of chaat masala for a really fresh, vegetable-heavy meal. I am on a bit of an Indian food kick these days and I am certainly enjoying learning new techniques and dishes instead of just calling any old spiced stew a curry.
We undertook two other team cooking efforts during the week. In one, we very clunkily rolled some air fried tofu and zucchini together with avocado and seasoned brown rice into nori sheets for something in the spirit of sushi. The other was a vegetable fajita spread with drunken soy chunks. I meant to make drunken beans according to this recipe but realized we did not have any after the sauce was already cooking on the stove. Reaching for dehydrated soy chunks I had picked up at an Indian store a while back instead proved to be a great idea. I adjusted the sauce some since they are very absorbent, and the overall result was deliciously chewy and umami. I will have to give this another try and write everything I do down.
Finally, I caught a glimpse of someone marinating watermelon cubes in order to make poke bowls on Instagram and was intrigued enough to try it. As with any other bowl meal, poke is about piling stuff on top of stuff until you hit every color of the rainbow and any texture that might taste good, so I assembled quite a few components as well. We had tempeh marinated in ginger, garlic, soy sauce and maple syrup then seared on the stove, homemade lime pickled daikon, a carrot and cabbage slaw seasoned with scallions, lime juice and sesame oil, a creamy carrot, ginger and miso dressing, some roasted then marinated garlicky eggplant slices, and a whole lot of rice seasoned with toasted sesame seeds and torn up seaweed. Together with the watermelon, which was quite good but probably needed even more aggressive marinating, it all came together for a slightly unorthodox take on what may be my favorite assemble-it-yourself fast food.