River is a dreamlike dialogue between two men; Matt (River’s partner) and Earl. The conversation takes place in Japan where Matt is on a quest to find River, who decided to cross the Pacific from Seattle a few months beforehand. River often used to tell Matt about her beautiful childhood in an untouched village of Japan and it is near this village that Matt meets Earl. The men enter into conversation in a small café after Matt approaches Earl with a picture of River. The moment Earl recognizes River, from the photograph, the men begin to talk in Matt’s fantasy. As his imagination starts to wander, the two men begin shape a story which brings River back to life intertwining the subconscious mind, memories, dreams and harmonic representations of reality in a sort of mystical forest… Where vivid sounds, music and vibrations retune Matt’s body, mind and spirit and allow him to consider new possibilities.

 

(Narrator/Matt: It occurred to him that you had discussed Kandinsky. Unsurprisingly. So I described to him how you used to perceive the world, how you painted pictures using music as the least representational of the arts, and sing or enter a state of deep meditation once discussions about quantum physics were over. 

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You no longer pursued political debates. Convincing others seemed futile. To you, it was better to simply inspire; create a pacifist society, a society built on the foundations of individual happiness. You dreamt of a human revolution, believing that if negative forces were to be eradicated the only way was maybe to ignore them. But that was not easy to accept.)

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Earl: And so we were able to explore the issue of dark matter. I was so happy to meet someone who was interested in this subject. 

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Matt: Because you are too? 

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Earl: Once you become a musician it’s difficult not to be taken aback by the energy created by certain harmonies. The ‘Harmony of the Spheres’ is an idea that goes back to ancient times, at least as far back as Pythagora. He believed our existence was linked to the great Whole. According to his theory, the universe is governed by harmonious numerical relations with the distances between the planets distributed according to musical proportions. 

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He said it was as if these distances were the equivalent of musical intervals, each one subject to the laws of harmony. Everything together formed a huge, lovely-sounding instrument with circular strings.

 

Matt: A kind of celestial harmony? 

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Earl: Exactly. To call this approach avant-garde was an understatement. The fact he found the linkages between two seemingly unrelated sciences - astronomy and musical harmony, was quite remarkable. Also, in his idea of an ordered, harmonious universe, he used the word cosmos as opposed to chaos. 

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Yet, today scientists see that order is present in the Universe, that some unstable systems can in fact feed phenomena of spontaneous self-organization. And in connection with that, thermodynamics and communicating vessels, River adheres to the hypothesis that gravitation arises simply from the system's tendency to return to a state of equilibrium. A radical thought. After all, why would gravity be a force? 

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Matt: You know I still don't understand much about quantum physics. 

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Earl: She never wanted to explain to you? 

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Matt: She tried a bunch of illustrations, but nothing helped. I just remember her telling me that in order to exist objects had to be white, and that a proton must contain one quark of each color- red, green and blue, to be white overall. 

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Earl: White. Interesting for a photographer like you. 

 

(Narrator/Matt: He came back to your exchange on dark matter which makes up to eighty percent of the Universe. For him, for you, everything there was at stake.)

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Earl: If matter had taken precedence over anti- matter, it was perhaps through observation, which we had wanted to see. But the matter that manifested itself while remaining invisible in this hidden mass was such that it could allow harmony. 

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There was surely incarnated the God particle, imperceptible but infinitely receptive to its environment, therefore capable of materializing ideas... the worst as well as the best, hence the importance of beauty in each being. According to River, the Higgs Boson had solved nothing. On the other hand, neutrinos - sterile - could be this particle, because they had the characteristic of being elusive, of passing through matter at vertiginous speeds without encountering any obstacle. 

 

When physicists indicated that the mass of neutrinos was too low for the force of gravity to be perceptible, it seemed to her above all that mass and energy were one and the same thing, that the vacuum was not nothing but full, that by constantly emerging from the recesses of space-time to disappear even before having materialized, neutrinos interacted little but had a certain impact. 

By inhabiting 80% of the Universe and subtly distorting space-time, they appeared to her as the factor of return to balance, gravitation.

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(Narrator/Matt: Earl stopped there, satisfied.)  

 

Matt: And so, Earl? What should I think about it? 

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Earl: That ultimately, Matt, anything is possible. You just have to invent your own reality.