Adorno said there is no love that is not an echo

Adorno says that the failing of science is in believing that one can simply make connections to create something new. He says that there has to be a jump, a divine inspiration, something that creates a connection between two things we believe to be separate that it creates a new reality. Helmholtz said that the best way to solve a problem was by walking up a slow incline.

Thus divine inspiration is what always struck me to be the basis of love.

I imagine Jesus of Nazareth thrashing on the ground in The Last Temptation of Christ. Was the fire he saw in front of him God? He can separate it because he was the person who personified all people, the person who could feel everyone and then make them feel him at the same time. Looking into his eyes, you can feel the human spirit local in everyone and then you become connected, entangled permanently in that moment of time. Even if your spirits unravel, you will never forget what it felt to be simultaneously everyone at once. Sometimes I wonder what everyone is, or the meaning of forever.

What I believe is in the action that transcends time to communicate between two particles, and then that’s how the two entangled particles change each other, even across space and time. Okan said to me that there are a million electrons that will fly around above us and will never ever interact with us. Millions of electrons we’ll never ever see. Where do they go? Should we care about them in the first place? I think briefly of my body, everything that keeps me grounded, human.

Love and violence. That is very human. For the love of the action, we commit violence. Interiority, or whatever that means. I wonder how to separate the inside from the outside. I want to hurt someone just for the sake of hurting. What lies beneath your skin? When I pursue the interiority you have, I know I am destroying you to create a concept of you in my mind, an idea of you.

You were so busy thinking about whether you could that you forgot to ask whether you should.

Similarly, because I know that I can, I feel like I should. I choose to believe. I want to believe in you. Is it wrong for me to want you because I need to know what else is inside of you? How do people resist the urge to pull someone apart? It's like those "cannibalism as a metaphor for love" folks, except far less grotesque. When I love you, it’s because I know there’s something under your fibers, and science acts the same way. I want to capture you in a way that I can always return to, where your concept will always be something completely new again. Rebirth, I say, or something.

For example, when Oppenheimer is watching the millions of raindrops hit the ground and scatter, does he feel the joy of creation? Or does he just feel like himself, the same man he was before?

Adorno says that you can’t consider what the action from the thought will be. Sometimes the thought itself is enough. But what do you do when you are compelled to take the action? You need to stop and think, Adorno would tell me, but the rush in my head is just the millions of raindrops that splash and hit and refract. There is no space in my head. I have many thoughts that don't move me forward towards my destiny, of course, and I feel deeply uncertain about them.

When your mind is so preoccupied with the images God sends to you, it seems like a given that you must follow the angel he sends down to guide you. I don’t know if I can blame Oppenheimer for developing the bomb if the messages in his head told him to. He saw the atoms crashing into each other and suddenly a mysterious benefactor came down to him, said I will allow you to chase these dreams absolutely. Maybe it was the only thing he could have believed in in his entire life.

My head feels empty when I don’t have something to think about. I know whether I will like someone or not, or something or not, because I can read the entire thing in one look. I am directed to love or hate by something inside or outside of me, something I can't name or place.

Science is the core of my purpose. It’s a love affair that I am not particularly loyal to, one that waits for me regardless of how good I am with it. It’s the only thing that forgives me totally. The need to create something, to mold something, to become something that is inexplicable in how it was made; all of it defines my soul. I am a conduit. My body is all in service to that deep compulsion that has no explanation, except a thunderclap that makes me realize that I must do it no matter what.

Your calling will be your calling until you go deaf.

Even when philosophy is destroyed, Adorno said, we must continue to create a philosophy beyond philosophy. We destroyed physics and put it back together to make something to destroy to playfulness of quantum. What could Oppenheimer do after he created the bomb when science itself felt forced to reject him? Will I be rejected like that someday? Will I find a deeper purpose like that again?

Love is the feeling of shock. That was why Oppenheimer was so compelled to move from person to person, because he couldn’t help but try to unravel the things that created this new sensation. There are similarities in my own human experience. His atoms moved in a new resonance, as mine do. We didn’t know was a physical possibility, the high and feeling of being torn apart.

I will let myself collapse in the face of something totally beautiful and holy. I have found myself here many times. With my limited human ability, I reach out my hand. I try to believe.