Category: Issue 93

93 Uncertainty Principle

by Dani Kopoulos

Another dream. This one with her head in a physics book. In the dream she is desperately trying to measure a very small thing. The thing is floating and inchoate, in front of her and then behind. She refers to her notes for instructions but when she looks up again it moves away. She pokes it and it disappears. She gives up trying to locate and record it. But as soon as she gives up observing, she’s overcome with the sense that it’s there after all. And that it’s looking at her.

When you try to observe and locate a Friend of God, he moves. But he’s there all along. Focus the microscope, bounce the photon and it’s another jump, a different momentum. The ultimate trickster, playing hide and seek between the human intellect and the human imagination.

 

PHOTO © JALAL SEPEHR

93 Observing From the Inside Out

by Ansuman Biswas

I quickly realized that Aristotle’s pithy aphorism that “Nature abhors a vacuum” holds just as true in art as it does in science. I was invisible and inactive. There was nothing to see. And yet I found that people flooded the nothingness with their own stories. Sometimes the less you do the more people see. Just as air rushes into a vacuum so people fill space with imagination. Many people perhaps imagined I would be found crumpled in a corner of the box when it was opened, an anguished skeleton. Others might have imagined I would flutter out on angelic wings with a beatific smile. Some told me that my incarceration threw into sharp relief the number of dinners they ate or TV shows they watched during that ten-day period in March, 1998. Even my own imagination played tricks on me.

 

93 Featured Poet

EVE POWERS is an award-winning poet whose work has
appeared in California Quarterly, Rockhurst Review, Purpose
Magazine, Sufi Journal, Third Wednesday Journal, Lalitamba,
Hawai’i Pacific Review, Atlanta Review, Archyopteryx: Th e
Newman Journal of Ideas, City Works Literary Journal, Kerf
Literary Journal, Whirlwind Review, and Muse Literary Journal.
Her fiction has been published in Writing Our Way Out
of the Dark, Scent of Cedars: Promising Writers of the Pacific
Northwest, A Cup of Comfort for Sisters, The Broken Plate Review,
and Slab Literary Journal. Her creative non-fiction has
appeared in Drash literary journal. She is listed in the Directory
of American Poets and Fiction Writers.

93 Featured Artist

BARRY UNDERWOOD received his Masters in Photography
from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work is situated at
the intersection of land art, staged photography, and Minimalist
sculpture. He strives to foster awareness of environmental
change by engaging viewers in playful interactions,
offering a novel lens through which to consider the impact
of human action on our surroundings. Barry has been an
artist in residence at the Banff Center for the Arts and the
Center for Land Use Interpretation, among others. His
award-winning work has been exhibited, reviewed and collected
in a wide variety of contexts in the US and abroad.
barryunderwood.com

 

93 Truth Matters

A Discourse

by Alireza Nurbakhsh

In a time when fake news, climate change denial, and conspiracy theories loom large in our lives, it is important to remind ourselves that the driving force behind both our scientific enterprise and spiritual awakening has always been our search for the truth.

Truth matters not simply because we want to have an objectively correct view of the world and ourselves, but because a worldview based on falsehood will eventually lead to our demise. Truth also matters as the basis of scientific inquiry.

In Sufism, the aim is to experience the truth of the divine through love, not the falsehood of thoughts and actions that stem from the ego. The goal is to realize that we are part of the whole, to experience the Unity of Being without seeing ourselves as different and distinct from the whole. For the Sufis, the truth lies hidden within oneself and therefore the seeker of the truth is ultimately on a path of self-discovery.

ARTWORK © MICHAEL MAPES