“Susanne Antonetta’s latest masterpiece is a divinely composed ode to the ‘ungovernable emanations’ that are our selves. Gorgeously poetic, deadpan and inquisitive, terrifying and engrossing, The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here bridges the distance between physics and the occult, psychology and spiritualism. Antonetta’s road trip to a Summerland of the soul is inspiring, unforgettable, and indispensable.” —Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
“In mesmerizing and gorgeous prose, Antonetta tackles nothing less than consciousness and existence, employing an amalgam of science writing and mysticism. It’s hard to imagine another writer who could not only make such a project work but also make it seem natural and necessary.” —Robin Hemley, author of Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood
At their family’s New Jersey seaside cottages, Susanne Paola Antonetta’s grandmother led seances, swam nude, and imaginatively created a spiritualist paradise on earth. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Antonetta chronicles how in that unique but tightly controlled space, she began to explore the questions posed by her family’s Christian Science beliefs, turning those questions secular: What is consciousness? Does time exist? And does the world we see reflect reality? In this book, scientific research, family story, and memoir intertwine to mimic the indefinable movements of quantum particles.
Antonetta reflects on a life spent wrestling with bipolar disorder, drug dependency, and the trauma of electroshock treatment—exploring these experiences alongside conversations with some of the world’s leading neuroscientists and physicists, and with psychics. The result is a meditation on the legacy of family, on thought and being, and what we humans can actually ever really know about our world
Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of Make Me a Mother, Curious Atoms: A History with Physics, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, a novella, and four books of poetry. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Orion, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I The Summer Land
Unstuck
Who Loved Her
For One
Ars Poetica
Ars Poetica II
Resemblances
Immortal Truth
Spirits
Mortal Error
Stakes
Entangled
Chattel House
Person Details for May Louise Radford
Wasps
A Stellar Key to the Summer Land
In the Summer Land
Girls
7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
The Slow Lobotomy
Immediate Reprogramming
Are You There
Strange
Norms
Face as Interface
Engineering
Night-Swim
Loosed
Cousins
Her Beliefs
Outside the Concert Hall
Mind
Satellite
Pulling Off the Skin
Just Strange
Wandering
Her World
The Prophet of Poughkeepsie
The Univercoelum
Bruce and Me in Summerland, Known as the Summer Land
Teaching
A Sheet of Glass
Meta-Shame
The Origin and Philosophy of Mania
Angels and Demons
Observable Consequences
At the Summer Land
My Grandmother and Madame Blavatsky in Heaven, Known as the Summer Land
Mind
Wendy
Wanted
Vertebrae
Mayism
Point No Point
Aftermath
DIY
A Thought Experiment
Dr. W
Future Tense
Rewinding
Says
Part II Interrogations: Hard Problems and Harder Problems
The Red Perception
The Problem of the Five Hundred Millisecond Delay
The Jam Thickens
Constructor Theory
The Hard Problem
Views
The Problem of the Observer
The Problem of the Two Paths
Conscious Agents
The Problem of the Past
Phi
Look
The Wave Function Collapse
The Problem of Zombies
The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here
Phi II
Fallibilism
Another Thought Experiment
Afterward
Getting to Know
Her Return
-Algia
The Art of Conversation
The Luminiferous Ether
The Binding Problem
My Grandmother and Andrew Jackson Davis in Heaven, Known as the Summer Land
No Take Back
Bruce and Me in Sedona, Known as the Summer Land
Girlie: To Begin
Recreational Hiding
1899
Boxills and Binaries
Part III The Terrible Unlikelihood
My World
Would It Matter If I Said It Did?
Even a Man
Command
Angelo-Andrew
Entangled Particles: My Father and My Different Father
Spooky Action
Trying Belief
The Magnetic Sleep
No Matter
Back Door
As Good as Any
Her Practice
Back Door II
The Start of the Rest of the Story
Part IV Smithereens
Barely a Game
That Modernity
Smithereens
Playing
Saw
If a Lady Had Not Forgiven
Playing Categories
A New Game
Louis
Stakes
Maps and Bayonets
Simon
Here Bullet
Matrimony
First
Sponge
Rapunzel, Rapunzel
Ravished
A Thingamajig
Conundrums
All the Fault of the Zombies
Addiction
Advertising
Heaven on Earth
Six Wings, Four Faces, Many Women
Such a Thing
Smithereen
Not There
Endure
What She Carried
Planet Zombie
Blizzacane, S’noreastercane, Frankenstorm
How to Die Knowing That You’ll Live Forever
Part V Remains
Remains
New Things
The Smile Fades
Apparently I Am Hiding in My Mother’s Room
My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me in Heaven, Known as the Summer Land (A Proleptic)
Question: What is the scientific statement of being?
The Binding Problem, Again
An Endless Feedback Loop
Here Bullet II
There
Superposition/Storm Surge
