The Nature of Matter and Its Antecedents
By Steve Martin
 

I was taking a meeting with my publicists, trying to figure out what to do next. Marty suggested that the audience wants a Steve Martin to be doing a comedy right now. Tony said that a Steve Martin should do a nice cameo in a drama, "kind of an award thing." Michelle's idea was different, "Jack has a Legion d'honneur; let's get you a Nobel. Why not make a profound scientific discovery and then write an essay about it? This is what the public wants right now from a Steve Martin." I had never thought of myself as a Steve Martin before, but I guess I was one, and frankly, it felt good.

"Go on," I implored.

"Well, maybe you could write something on matter, or the nature of matter. Cruise is doing something on reverse DNA. You could do something too. Maybe better."

"The problem is it's not matter I'm interested in. It's prematter. The moment when it's 'not soup yet,' when it's neither nothing nor something."

"Steve, isn't that really just semantics?" said Michelle. "You're talking about something existing prior to existing." I looked at her and though how stupid she was.

"Now you're talkin' like Bruce and Demi, " I said. "Did you see their piece in Actor/Scientist? I would love to attack their semantics angle."

Michelle inched forward. "Why don't you, Steve?" I realized she had maneuvered me into acceptance.

I remembered when Stallone turned in his first Rambo draft. Through all the rewrites, he was also quietly conducting experiments on the irregular movements of explosive sound. He conjectured that explosive sound will travel faster through air already jarred by another explosion, with the bizarre effect that between two simultaneous explosions, a perceiver will hear the farther explosion first. The studio head told me later that the studio wasn't too confident in the script at the time, but the scientific work was so fascinating, they decided to let Stallone keep writing. Sly asked for no public acknowledgement of his work but diligently spent hours editing to make sure the movie's sound corresponded to reality.

The next day I had my noon shrink appointment, and luckily we got into Spago at a corner table. I talked openly of my fears of winning a Nobel, and I also admitted my concerns about getting airline reservations and decent hotel rooms in Stockholm during prize season. My shrink reminded me that there were personal rewards for writing a scientific essay: the satisfaction of doing something for no other reason than to do it well. My other shrink disagreed. I have a call into my third, "tiebreaker" shrink.

That night I was in a limo with Sharon Stone having sex and I stopped for a minute with the question "Can something be in a state of becoming but not yet exist?" Sharon crossed her legs as only she can and said something so profound that everything in me tingled. "In Swahili it can. Now where were we? In her words was my answer to Bruce and Demi: Only in English and other Germanic derivatives must a thing exist prior to its existence. Sharon's publicist leaned forward. "Go on, Sharon, I'm very curious about what you're meaning." Sharon explained further: "After all, you're not talking about a grape becoming a raisin; you're talking about the interstitial state between pure nothing and pure something." I looked down. I was still tumescent. Then she added, "Who made your sunglasses?" "They're Armanis. I saw them at his store in Boston, but they were on sale so I waited and got them at Barney's at full price."

We finally arrived at The Ivy, where we were to meet Travolta, Goldie and Kurt, Tom and Nicole, and Sly for dinner. Our table wasn't ready so we yanked some tourists off their table and took their food.

We talked through the evening. Sly astounding us by coming up with 9 anagrams of the word Rambo, Travolta amused the table by turning our flat bottle of Evian into gassy Perrier by simply adding saltpeter and rubber shavings. Kurt and Goldie discussed their cataloguing of "every damn grasshopper in Colorado." Tom mentioned that he could cure a common cold in four seconds with a vacuum gun, except for a pesky weakness of the eardrums, which tended to dangle outside the head after treatment. Our publicists behind us as we ate, and one of them wiselynoted that it renews the soul to do something for yourself, something that you don't market in Asia, and we all acknowledged the truth of that. Of course, every time the waiter or a fan would approach the table, we quickly turned the topic of conversation to Prada leather pants, because for that night anyway, we decided to keep our little secrets.

I drifted off for a few moments and thought about my paper. As much as I wanted to be known for my science writing and and for it to be published under my own name, I also knew it might cost me the Nobel if I did. The committee would probably be disinclined to give the award to any man who has worn a dress to get a laugh from a monkey. I thought about publishing the essay under a pseudonym, like Stiv Morton or Steeve Maartin, in order to deceive the Nobel committee. My reverie was broken by Nicole, who asked the table, "Why do we do it, this science?" No one had an answer, until I stood up and said, "Isn't there money in a Nobel?"


* From Pure Drivel (the paperback version -- New York: Hyperion, 1999), p. 42-45.

NOTE:
This is one of only two non-New Yorker pieces to make the book. There are some interesting differences from the original. Certain things have been added, and the ending was changed. I have wondered if Steve changed the pieces in the book because of his own desire to tinker with them and improve them or if it was editorial urging. I suspect the former. One interesting contribution, however, is the change in the tenth paragraph: it now says "Only in English and other Germanic derivatives ..." The New York Times version said Latin derivatives. After the original piece appeared, a letter to the editor took Steve to task for his focus on Latin. The writer insisted that the correct answer was Germanic. I guess Steve pays attention to his critics. The letter is shown below.

From a letter to the editor:
The New York Times, March 23, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition, Section 6; Page 18; Column 5; Magazine Desk.

THE NATURE OF MATTER AND ITS ANTECEDENTS

Much as I admire Steve Martin's science, I must point out his weakness in historical linguistics (Lives: "The Nature of Matter and Its Antecedents," March 2). English is not a "Latin derivative." Like Latin, English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, but its more immediate heritage is Germanic.

ROBERT DEMARIA JR.
Poughkeepsie, N.Y.