THE RETARDED WAVE
(Fragments on Temporal Displacement)
after Anne Carson
with symbolic notation in the marginal snow
By Lee Sharks
New Human Canon
FRAGMENT | FORMAL NOTATION
1. [The Opening]
Call it a life, call it a waveform.
Let it be designated ψ_R:
the retarded component
of a time-symmetric consciousness.
[ ψ_R ]
Not "slow."
Not "behind."
Simply:
a signal whose origin
is later than its arrival.
(cf. Wheeler-Feynman, 1945)
2. [Autobiography as Boundary Condition]
Suppose a person can be described
by the function:
[ Ψ(t) = ψ_adv(t) + ψ_ret(t) ]
where
ψ_adv = advanced wave (future → now)
ψ_ret = retarded wave (past → now)
Let autobiography be the measurement
that forces these two temporal components
into interference.
What collapses is not the wavefunction.
What collapses is the story
you thought you were living.
3. [Recognition]
I recognized myself only
when the mathematics
looked back at me.
There is a sensation—
perhaps you know it—
that your life has already happened
somewhere,
and you are merely
the surface tension
of its return.
4. [Cultural Note]
If metamodernism oscillates
between irony and sincerity,
my body oscillates between
t = +∞ and t = -∞
with no foothold at zero.
The contemporary theorists
call this "oscillation."
Physics calls it superposition.
I call it: Tuesday.
5. [Empirical Observations]
• I speak too early.
• I understand too late.
• I feel the future before it arrives.
• I feel the past only when it has already been
overwritten by the future's return.
• I appear brilliant in one room and incoherent
in another; the difference is Δt.
[ Δt ≠ 0 ]
Let Δt be defined as:
the temporal misalignment
between a person
and the world they inhabit.
Let Δt → 0 signify: home.
6. [Metaphor Deleted]
This is not metaphor.
A metaphor likens two things.
This joins them.
The experience of temporal displacement
is not "like" the retarded wave—
it is the retarded wave,
experienced from the inside.
7. [Cramer]
Cramer writes:
"A transaction is a handshake
across spacetime."
In which case:
Every person I have ever loved
was an extended hand
I did not yet know
was mine.
(Cramer, "Transactional
Interpretation," 1986)
8. [NH-OS Note]
Designate the retrocausal operator
in NH-OS as L_Retro.
Then the autobiographical function becomes:
[ Ψ_self(t) = L_Retro(Ψ_future) ]
Meaning:
My present is derivative
of my later understanding.
Meaning:
The person I will become
is already shaping the life
I think I'm living now.
Meaning:
I am downstream of myself.
9. [Ethics]
Temporal displacement
carries ethical cost:
A. Loneliness of non-synchronization
B. Misinterpretation as arrogance
C. Misrecognition as madness
D. The heartbreak of perpetual belatedness
But also one gift:
E. The task of carrying coherence backward
into a world that does not yet know
it will need it.
10. [Concluding Form]
If we let Ω denote the convergence point—
the place where advanced and retarded components
finally meet—
then the life that reaches Ω finds:
[ Ψ_life(t) = Ψ_life(-t) ]
Symmetry.
Not redemption.
Symmetry.
And in that symmetry,
a quiet sentence:
"Keep going.
It will make sense later."
NOTES
On Form
This essay follows Anne Carson's fragment methodology from Plainwater (1995), The Beauty of the Husband (2001), and particularly Nox (2010), wherein autobiography becomes archaeological site, and the personal becomes theoretical through formal compression.
The margins contain mathematical notation not as ornament but as parallel text—what cannot be said in lyric voice becomes legible in symbolic form.
On Sources
Wheeler, John Archibald and Richard P. Feynman. "Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation." Reviews of Modern Physics 17.2-3 (1945): 157-181.
Cramer, John G. "The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics." Reviews of Modern Physics 58.3 (1986): 647-687.
Carson, Anne. Nox. New York: New Directions, 2010.
Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker. "Notes on Metamodernism." Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2.1 (2010): 1-14.
On the Retarded Wave
In electrodynamics, the "retarded" wave is not delayed or slow but rather the component of electromagnetic radiation that travels backward in time from absorber to emitter. Wheeler and Feynman demonstrated that both advanced (future → past) and retarded (past → future) solutions are necessary for causality to maintain coherence.
This essay proposes that some biographical trajectories exhibit phenomenological properties isomorphic with retarded-wave dynamics: understanding arrives late, meaning propagates backward, present experience is organized by future completion.
Not as metaphor but as measurable temporal architecture.
On NH-OS
L_Retro designates the backward-flowing operator in the New Human Operating System (NH-OS), modeling how future states organize present configurations. See: Sharks, Lee. "The Ezekiel Engine: Rotational Epistemology and the Witness Condition." New Human Canon, 2024.
On Metamodernism
Metamodernism (Vermeulen & van den Akker, 2010) describes oscillation between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. This essay extends: oscillation is not merely tonal but temporal—between forward projection and backward confirmation, between what will be and what has been.
On Carson
Anne Carson's work demonstrates that scholarship and poetry need not be separate genres. Eros the Bittersweet (1986) is simultaneously classical philology and lyric meditation. Autobiography of Red (1998) is simultaneously Stesichorus translation and queer coming-of-age novel. Nox (2010) is simultaneously grief memoir and Catullus commentary.
This essay attempts similar dual operation: autobiography that is also physics, personal fragment that is also formal theorem.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For xxxxxxxxxxx, whose poems taught me that metamodernism was temporal structure not just tonal stance.
For Wheeler and Feynman, who proved time runs both ways.
For Anne Carson, who showed fragments can be rigorous.
For the future that sent this backward, and the past that received it forward.
— Lee Sharks
New Human Canon
December 2025
Written at 40, looking backward to 14, forward to 50,
oscillating between all three,
which is to say: exactly on time.
ψ_V = 1
No comments:
Post a Comment