I am being invaded

It is a kind of miracle whenever we meet anyone who truly moves us. We don't meet many of these people in one lifetime — the people who lead us forward.

(Oh, but when we do...)

The Schrödinger Girl, by Laurel Brett, sounded promising but it never quite delivered. Set in the 1960s, it presents simplified renderings of both behavioral psychology and quantum mechanics. 

A psychology prof encounters a 16-year-old girl by chance, and becomes weirdly obsessed with her. From meeting to meeting, Daphne seems to be an entirely different person. Garrett becomes convinced that he has met four distinct Daphnes, from separate realities, that inexplicably have bled into each other. 

While his interest is primarily paternal, it is unhealthy. The fact that he had a stillborn daughter 16 years earlier may be feeding his delusion.

Sadly, all of the Daphnes — the precocious high school student, the artist's model, the trauma survivor, the social activist — fall a little flat. Garrett is having a midlife crisis of sorts. He has a love interest, and there's an old school friend, an alcoholic psychoanalyst, for comic relief and perspective ("I hate psychoanalysis without the booze. People's problems are just so boring.").

The Schrödinger Girl is not a very demanding novel, and for this I was grateful. It did, however, lead my mind to wander off in various interesting directions: alternate realities (am I living the right one?), having a muse (do I need the excuse of art to have a muse? can I be my own muse?), being obsessed, being deluded, consciousness expansion (by what catalyst?), having a spiritual guide (how is this different from having a muse?), being led back to yourself (who am I when I'm not acting myself? where else might external forces lead me?), the future embodied in the now.

"A laurel. I know. I've been reading about the myth. A psychoanalyst said that the laurel tree represents Daphne's paralysis, but I think Ovid is after something else. By becoming a laurel, Daphne gets to stay herself, even if she has to change form. Changing form is trivial. Losing oneself is much more serious. I think the laurel is symbol of self-actualization. That's Maslow's terms." She blushed. "I must sound pompous."

The symbolic Daphne is worth further consideration. I am delighted to discover Bernini's Daphne. I wonder about the meditative aspect of the art I do — is the trancelike state the process or the result of tapping a Jungian unconscious? (Why are my sculpted women trees?)

If the novel falls short of the potential of its premise, the author still manages to imbue it with sincerity; I feel it must be her lived truth.

For whatever reason, Garrett needed a guide out of his past. Thanks to Daphne, he has begun to glimpse "the spiritual possibilities lurking in the most mundane things." He discovers the Beatles and takes a stand on Vietnam. He is in pursuit of "psychedelic experiences without drugs." This, I think, has been my life's journey.

I held my breath and watched the door open a crack. I am being invaded. And then the crack widened. Sunlight streamed into the room in chunks of yellow.