18-6-13

In 1963, when I assigned the name “quark” to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been “kwork”. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word “quark” in the phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark”. Since “quark” (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with “Mark”, as well as “bark” and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as “kwork”. But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the “portmanteau” words in “Through the Looking-Glass”. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry “Three quarks for Muster Mark” might be “Three quarts for Mister Mark”, in which case the pronunciation “kwork” would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.

It seems to me that things move forward in part through the interpenetration of contradictory elements, and that sometimes there are different meanings embedded in one and the same thing – which constitutes one of the “laws” of poetry as well as dialectics, and of life itself. What Morris Stein (Lewit) said in 1944 he would not have said twenty years later, when the context within which he lived had radically altered, and it certainly was not the kind of thing he was saying in the 1980s and early 1990s when I knew him. To say such things in the later contexts would have been false, and in important ways to say “we are monopolists in politics” was false in 1944 as well. But to grasp the meaning these words had for Morris and his comrades we must give attention to the experience and context shaping that formulation.