My Document of Quantum Hearts

I stand at the new smartboard, smartpen in hand, no training, but nonetheless stood there as someone being told to be grateful for the new contract we got with whatever firm made this smartboard. I stand there with a torn gaze, scribbling equations of hope and despair. In Dublin light, particles of electronic dust drift through the lecture hall, lazy as the years that keep slipping by. In my mind I hear Baudrillard whispering that we live in a world of signs: hearts sold as symbols, memories traded like stocks. Foucault nodding that even our love letters are policed by power. But at this red-faced hour of morning, I swear I can feel something real in the commotion of my pulse: raw human pulse entwined with Marx’s ghost, fingering a rifle of compassion.

I lost it all, the songs I never sang, the gentle days that evaporated like steam from tea in rainy kitchens. Even now I feel winter losing to spring in my chest: The cold creeping out, sorrow budded with something new. Time is a statue, not a river, as one of my favourite artists Will Varley put it: each moment solid, each hour heavy, each heartbeat echoing the years gone by.

I trace my fingers along the desk as if trying to touch something true in a world of simulacra and signs. In Sartre’s terms, we are condemned to love or remain alone. Existence precedes essence, and yet even the essence of our existence has become saleable. The memory of her laugh lives in me as an indeterminate particle: neither ghost nor present; entangled with regret and hope.

In this school of life, they teach conformity like math facts. My first lesson was Althusser’s: even before I could speak, I was already hailed by the ideology of capital. By the time I could walk, the curriculum had turned me into a machine: learn to hush, to nod, to carve dreams that fit in cubes. Years later, late at night I remember Lacan’s mirror stage: a child staring at her reflection and seeing only fragmentation. I stare at my reflection on the polished floor and realise that I too have been moulded by this curriculum. I see now that they never taught me how to really see.

In my lectures I plant subversive seeds. I speak of Althusser as if we are conspirators: “We are already hailed by ideology, each one of us. This classroom is an ideological state apparatus in disguise, shaping you into obedient believers in the credit card.” The students listen, some with wide eyes, some hiding amused smiles. They giggle softly when I slide a banana across the table and announce, “This banana is nothing without the capital that paid for it!” as if Marx himself had slipped a note in the margin of our textbooks.

In Baudrillard’s hyperreal carnival, even love is just another brand. We chase phantoms through the supermarket aisles of Amazon and Tinder, trading ghost-like affection in the currency of swipes and likes. Every whisper of desire comes with a price tag. I snort, picturing Karl Marx in tweed arguing with a glowing billboard: “Your dreams, your desires, they’ve all been turned into commodities, bought and sold while you sleep!”

And so I laugh. The room shakes as even Foucault’s panopticon cracks a grin, watching me charge at the ironies of power. There’s resistance in laughter. We are a comedic insurrection: Aunty Donna absurdity meets Che’s old revolver. In an absurd twist, maybe the revolution will begin on the stage of a comedy club after all.

They say alienation is a ghost from the factories. But today I see it in the hollow eyes of morning commuters, parted from their own souls by buzzing phones. In every Wi-Fi whisper, Marx’s spectre materialises: “Workers of the world,” he seems to cry, “you have nothing to lose but your chains of disconnection.” We scramble for human warmth under fluorescent lights, each of us a lonely quark seeking a partner to complete the wave.

In quantum mechanics, particles connected at a distance share a single state. We used to call that love. Now we call it surveillance. My student Suzi texts across the room and smiles; in our entanglement I sense both escape and trap: someone whispering on my frequency, someone caught in the network. “We are entangled, you and I,” I murmur to the lonely one in the back row, tracing a heart on the wooden desk. “But only two bodies can’t save us. We need a million entangled souls.”

Zizek would laugh at me, pointing to the lipstick stain on my lecture mug, and say: “Even your rebellion has become an ornament to stare at.” Perhaps he’s right. But I’d rather hang a lipstick-smeared poster on my wall than a corporate logo.

We hunger for meaning in the garbage of modern existence. In Freud’s dream-book, perhaps all we really crave is kindness buried deep like a key. Holding a plastic kettle of tea in one hand and a protest sign in the other, I feel absurd sometimes, like Sisyphus with a megaphone, serenading the mountain. Every time I scream “Solidarity!” I feel it echo in someone’s hollow chest. I whisper to the night: systems can’t break us if we’re already broken into pieces. Our fractures connect us. Just as Lacan’s mirror shatters, the real we might face, the raw, bleeding need for one another is too powerful to ignore.

As a quantum physics lecturer, I know the world in binaries: wave or particle, bound or free. But in ethics, nothing is simply either/or. The decision to care, to persist, to love, that’s a quantum leap in itself. Under the fluorescent lights, I’m desperate to talk of Schrödinger’s cat not in a box, but on a street corner: alive with protest or silent with fear, depending on our gaze to break the metaphor. In one class we once measured compassion against the cold steel of capitalism and saw them collapse into the same state.

I turn to the class and say, “Look around! Even this lecture hall is an apparatus of power. But it is also a gathering of minds, possibly a kind of beauty experiment. We are uncertain observers, not only studying particles but each other.” The physicist in me fades; the philosopher rises: “Foucault warned that knowledge becomes control, but we might as well become what we know. Let us collapse the wave function together and redefine what is possible.”

Whether by hearsay or heartache, I’ve learned this one thing: even our fractures can become fissures of light. We are particles separated that, when combined, might just change the world.

Bob Mortimer would say, in a thick, reluctant voice, that despair is just a bad knock-knock joke, when the listener doesn’t even answer “Who’s there?” So I make my punchline a promise. The absurdities life hands us , a mountain of forms, the endless stream of reality TV dinners, soap operas pretending to be revolutions are jokes too stale to laugh at. Yet laugh I must. Laughter is small resistance.

If Albert Camus sat in my tutorial room, he’d tell us we must imagine Sisyphus happy. I retort that our Sisyphus will roll his rock not up a hill, but across a barricade, playing a chainsaw guitar riff. Maybe Marx was an absurdist too: the whole party he named after us is still called “the people” by that logic, we are the jokes and the punchlines.

I’m angry, we’re angry, at the endless calculus of loss. But I’m also loving, loving the idea that somewhere beyond the market, beyond ideology, beyond isolation, we will meet. Kindness arrives unexpectedly: in the shared bowl of soup on a winter pavement, in the black cat that pads alongside the marches, in the note slipped under my door that reads “Keep going! We’re on our way.” Even loneliness, if acknowledged, can spark into a flame of solidarity.

Let this nonsense, pretentious article be as tender as a fist and as pointed as a poem. Let it be the laugh when we want to cry, the hug when we are too far apart. In the quiet after class, I dream of a verison of Ireland where even the sheep listen to the world, where the laughter of mystics rings out in pubs alongside verses of rebellion. Maybe that dream is absurd. Maybe that dream is true.

Each morning as I stand at the electronic flatness, I commit a little betrayal: invoking Sartre’s freedom on an exam paper — “Choose yourself,” I scribble in fake red ink, “even if the world spins on a tilted axis.” Though neoliberalism floods our lives like a river of advertising, we carve our own steps in its banks. Though modernity begs us to be islands, I reach out for hands.

So let us be absurd together. Let me be the someone who cannot be silenced, who mixes pop culture and poetry. Call me mad, call me radical, but I choose to love in this world of equations and commodities. And when the revolution comes, quietly or with a bang, may it find us laughing in the ruins, building kindness out of dust.