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Holograms

October 15, 2007

Warning: I know nothing about holograms. I'm not a scientist or a photographer but I do have this butterfly mind that flits from place to place and then turns into a caterpillar mind that can spin a cocoon out of anything. Yeah, I know that means I'm going backward in time but at this point that wouldn't surprise me either. The images on my credit card and my driver's license are holograms; I know that. But what I love about holograms is what I once heard someone say about them: that each part of a hologram contains the whole thing. I just went Google-searching for some evidence that I didn't hallucinate this idea. Nada. What I did find, in Wikipedia of course, was evidence that what I heard (or thought I heard) about holograms was actually about the holographic principle. This is how the Wikipedia entry on the subject begins:

The holographic principle is a speculative conjecture about quantum gravity theories . . . claiming that all of the information contained in a volume of space can be represented by a theory which lives in the boundary of that region. In other words, if you have a room, you can model all of the events within that room by creating a theory which only takes into account what happens in the walls of the room.

Maybe holograms illustrate the holographic principle. I didn't read far enough to find out. For now I'm going to proceed as if illustrations of the holographic principle are called holograms. What I'm actually talking about is Martha's Vineyard. My theory is that if you understand one aspect of the place -- "all of the information contained in a volume of space" -- very well, you are well on the way to understanding the whole thing. (Living on the boundary doesn't hurt.) And if you understand Martha's Vineyard really well, you are well on the way to understanding the whole United States of America. Once upon a time I believed that Martha's Vineyard was the most uniquely organizationally impaired place on the planet and that hence understanding Martha's Vineyard couldn't possibly help you understand anything else.

I was wrong. In my first year or so living on Martha's Vineyard, I was struck over and over again by its resemblances to the lesbian community of Washington, D.C. Heading the list was "insularity": the lesbian communitarians and the residents of Martha's Vineyard tended to see themselves as special, maybe even unique, and to have fairly coherent explanations about why they were right. When a bunch of very out lesbians have something significant in common with a bunch of people who can't manage to say the L-word out loud, you have to be on to something important. That was twenty years ago, of course. These days, when someone says "lesbian" out loud, other people no longer stop dead in their tracks so they can hear what comes next. Which is to say that things have changed, and that plenty of the impetus came from off-island. Which is to say that we aren't as insular and unique as we're sometimes inclined to think.

Having been both a lesbian communitarian and a resident of Martha's Vineyard, not to mention a teenage Arabist and a born-again horsegirl, I know this. From the outside my life might look like a hodgepodge of wildly inconsistent flipfloppery, but from the inside it all makes sense -- at least to someone who spends as much time trying to make sense of it as I do. What I'm really trying to explain is why I think the person with this peculiar trajectory can have far-ranging conversations with people elsewhere on the planet with whom she has nothing obvious in common.

* * *

Believe it or not, the above started out to be a blog about the pace ride Allie and I went on yesterday. The pace ride is sponsored annually by the Martha's Vineyard Horse Council, which has been a source of low-level frustration all the nearly eight years I've belonged to it and which lately I've been thinking of as the most organizationally impaired group in the most organizationally impaired place of the most organizationally impaired country on the planet. None of this is true, but it's not exactly false either.

For you who are wondering when I'm going to come across with part 2 of my "In Theory" blog of four days ago -- it's coming. This thing about holograms is sort of part 1a.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: Elaine and I came in second. Our friends Margaret and Stephanie and Chris came in first. It was wicked close: the pace time was 1:49.10, Margaret's team clocked in at 1:47.56, and Elaine and I at 1:47.18. Rhodry spent most of the day hanging out with Tillo.

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