Get ‘Entangled’ in poetry by local pediatrician

Middlebury poet and pediatrician Jack Mayer has published another collection of poetry. “Entanglements: Physics, love, and wilderness dreams” is now available at The Vermont Book Shop in downtown Middlebury. Independent photo/Steve James

Addison Independent - November 10, 2022
By Elsie Lynn Parini

When Jack Mayer is walking alone on the Long Trail, he carries a small notebook — a place to jot down whatever comes to his mind.

“When I’m walking alone, I’m not distracted by conversation or worldly concerns… I’m available for whatever percolates up,” explained Mayer, a long-time pediatrician who established Rainbow Pediatrics in Middlebury. “I very quickly feel this change come over me… I start to feel my interconnectedness and interdependence with the world. It’s a sense of meditation and an opportunity for metaphors to become manifest.”

For more than four decades Mayer has been walking and writing; leaving first drafts of his poems at shelters along the trail. Next week, Mayer’s most recent collection of poetry, “Entanglements: Physics, love, and wilderness dreams,” will be released.

“I am fascinated by the compelling strangeness of sub-atomic physics and quantum theory,” Mayer wrote in a statement. “I am a retired pediatrician and a writer, not a physicist. I hear poetry in particle physics, which is all about entanglements and relationships.”

This collection of poetry draws on decades of Mayer’s writings. He divides the collection into themed sections — Doctor Poems, Quantum Entanglements, Covid/Plague, Love, Wilderness and Dreams — with a delightful “intermission” poem that reaches back to his days in Gross Anatomy as a medical student. 

The collection starts with poems inspired by Mayer’s pediatric practice in Franklin County, Vt. “I take the reader into the heart and soul of a healer inspired to find meaning in my patients’ often difficult lives,” Mayer wrote. “Unique connections are unearthed.”

Mayer remembers vividly a time when he was making weekly house calls to a family of a newborn with a terminal disease. She lived for six months. 

“I was so moved by this family,” he said. “That’s when I started dipping my toe into this poetry pool.” 

“There is also a ‘micro’ world,” Mayer’s introduction reads, “grounded in Cosmology, in the fundamental laws and theories of physics, the very boundaries of existence, and in the quantum world of particles: quarks, Higgs bosons, muons, neutrinos, and those yet to be discovered. Each is bounteous with metaphor and wonder; another world of connection and relationship.”

But don’t worry, Mayer assured, “there isn’t one physics equation in the whole book.”

In fact, Mayer didn’t even like physics when he was in school. But somewhere in his 20s or 30s, he encountered the concept that the table he was sitting at was made up of mostly empty space and he recognized it as a table because of his relationship with the atoms — well, that made him think.

“What is this thing we call reality?” Mayer asked. 

“I am continuously drawn to articles about the quantum world; in contradistinction to Newtonian laws, quantum theory is based on probability and uncertainty… It allows a space for wonder and perplexity without coming to conclusions or solutions.”

Consider love at first sight, Mayer offered, pointing to the poem “Spooky” Entanglements. 

“… In the weird world of quantum physics,

A particle on one side of the universe

Simultaneously effects a particle

On the other side of the universe.

A long-distance relationship.

Physicists call it “simultaneity”

And “quantum entanglement.”

Einstein had his doubts.

“Spooky action at a distance,” he scoffed.

Something has to exceed the speed of light,

And that is forbidden, a civil violation,

Three points on your license

And a warning not to reoffend.

And talk about a long-distance relationship.

Lovers connected by something unknown,

Something more than banal electrons, photons, 

particles and other barely visible 

and invisible “spooky” stuff.

What Einstein didn’t appreciate,

Much less understand,

Was love at first sight,

Recognition of soul mates

From opposite ends of the universe

And in 11 dimensions.

“Spooky” is another way of saying,

“I love you.”

— Written by Jack Mayer on the Vermont Long Trail, Cooley Glen Shelter, May 19, 2021.

Mayer calls himself an “untrained poet,” and takes a “non-academic approach to poetry.” The result is a collection of poetry that reads with ease, humor and accessibility — a comfy companion to quantum physics. And for those readers more keenly involved in all things quantum, Mayer’s work is vetted by Rich Wolfson, an Emeritus Professor of Physics at Middlebury College. 

“I refrain from taking the universe personally or seriously,” Mayer recited one of his affirmations. “Another is: ‘I practice mindfulness moment to moment, non-judgmental awareness.’”

Simply put, Mayer writes his poems from his spectrum of experiences in the wilderness, as a parent and as a doctor. 

“I have discovered a durable thread that connects these musings on entanglements — our fundamental connections,” Mayer summarized. “Our quest for meaning depends on relationships, the matrix within which we endeavor to understand. Like the fundamental physics that defines the mechanisms of life, we are entangled.”

Editor’s Note: “Entanglements” is available at The Vermont Book Shop in downtown Middlebury.