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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
There was a time when religion (read as: spirituality) and science nary met. We know the tale of Galileo and the Inquisition, but I'm thinking more of William Blake v. Isaac Newton. Blake saw mugumbo danger in the Newtonian ideal of the universe, the ideal of quantitative, empirical reality - measurable, predictable, stable. Newton's work helped us along with the screwed-up scientific assumption that we can know everything. Blake preferred a revisionary version of things, a universe like Warner Bros., where Sylvester can fly as long as he thinks he can (as long as pansy-ass Tweety has nothing to say about it), where Urizen of The Four Zoas only has a wife the moment he forgets her, where Tharmas turns around the Circle of Destiny and sinks into the sea, and then Enion creates the Circle of Destiny from his bodily fibers. The fact (or idea) that the Circle of Destiny existed before Enion created it becomes irrelevant, for in the moment that Enion is creating the Circle of Destiny there is no such thing, despite the fact that Tharmas was just turning around it before his hydrophobic seizure. For Newton, the past affects the present, the present the future, everything linear and straightedge. Blake, creator of his own universe, Gods R Us, didn't even take the opposing angle - for Blake, present affects past, or future ignores past, or past has nothing to do with present, or more precisely the present moment affects everything. For Blake, what is now is what is possible now, and all laws of probability, and even reality, succumb to that present. Fuck linearity - A.D.D. rules the universe. It doesn't matter if it fits logic or stringent physical law: if the time is now, all possibilities exist. How is the present moment controlled in such a fashion? I doubt Blake had any presumption of knowing. The beautiful thing is that science has been coming around of late to the same spiritual end of things. Chaos theory, with its concept of strange attractors, says that we can know something of the overall pattern of a chaotic system, but of that system's individual events we can make no predictions. We can predict, but we can't control, and even our ability to predict has its limits. Weather is the indicative chaotic system - we can predict, though only to a certain extent, but even then we may be caught in the rain without our rubbers. On a quantum level, we have come to grips with the uncertainty principle. Science, previously pigeonholed into the stuffy rhetoric of solving everything, has made a remarkable breakthrough of saying finally that there are things we cannot know. If we know the speed of a particle, we can't know its whereabouts. If we know its whereabouts, we can't know how fast it's going. God doesn't just work in mysterious ways - the great Unnamable makes sure He's got an in to keep one high holy step in front of you. Oddly enough, this unknowing only helps us understand the universe all the better. Quantum mathematics has provided the most consistent and flawless mathematical predictions to date, and yet we're able to do this without really knowing how these quantum principles work. Unknowing has always been a vital area of spirituality and creativity. Ba'hai's maintain that we cannot know God, while Moses nearly went mad at a mere glimpse of His Reverency's bathrobe (totality would have put him in Cronenberg mode to be sure - his cranium popping like M&M's in a microwave). A famous koan has the student asking his master if a dog has Buddha nature; the master says "not yes nor no," basically telling his young dweeb, "How the fuck should I know?" Sam Beckett said of his most renowned drama, "If I knew who Godot was I wouldn't have written the play." Donald Barthelme wrote an exquisite essay on the value of not knowing in the creative process. John Cage never knew where a piece of music was going to take him, and often he let that remain in his work to the point where only the performer (or, in his more hardcore work, the audience) could make any connections in the work. But this spiritual connection to science is not new. In past times, scientists were mystics of their own sort. The astrologist (much more like an astronomer in ancient courts than today's money-grubbing tabloideers) was prophet (skewered for incorrect readings, but still). The alchemist was emissary. Mr. A2+B2=C2 Pythagoras had the Pythagorean Brotherhood, vegetarian mathematical monks (and nuns, though they weren't differentiated so) who avoided foods that resembled testicles and once drowned a poor boob who revealed to the rest of the world their discovery of the dodecahedron. Only recently have we come back to such a possibility. Physicist Richard Feynman is revered as a shaman in Tuva. For enlightened centuries we've shunted off revering scientists as holy men as barbaric superstition and primitivism, but shouldn't seekers of the great keys of the universe (the greatest being the unattainable one) be worshipped, and shouldn't we give them our daughters and sons? How else are we going to pass on their wisdom? The Dark Ages have only been lifted in this past century, when we finally came back to the creative source of the scientific mind. |
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