Prospero's Books

Leaving out a lot of reality

Sunday's LA Times carried a fascinating op-ed piece, by Seed magazine editor Jonah Lehrer, on the limitations of contemporary neuroscience. He writes:

The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method: reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to solve a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The mind, in other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The intangible beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in the first place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most elemental details. In other words, reductionism can leave out a lot of reality.

Lehrer isn't a fuzzy-headed idealist. He credits reductionist neuroscience with, for example, great and beneficial advances in pharmaceuticals. "A work of art," he writes, "obviously isn't a substitute for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac." But, he continues:

the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.

As a lover of Joyce's Ulysses, which traces many of the thoughts of a character during a single day, I am grateful to Lehrer for a quotation I didn't know about:

Virginia Woolf . . . famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."

And as a lover of Shakespeare's Tempest, which gives this blog its name, I especially noted Lehrer's conclusion:

Unless our science moves beyond reductionism and grapples instead with the messiness of subjective experience -- what James called a "science of the soul" -- its facts will grow increasingly remote. The wonder of the brain is that it can be described in so many ways: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. What we need is a science that can encompass both sides of our being.

In between the passages I've quoted are many more I could have. In my browser, the essay is less than four screens long; you'll be rewarded for the time you spend.

(Thanks to Seed magazine for the link.)

Holding our pattern in the divine memory

In Joyce's Ulysses, both leading men reflect on whether our identity remains constant while almost everything that is physical about us changes. Stephen wonders if he can avoid repaying a debt on the grounds that he is not really the same person who incurred it. And Bloom wonders if he is still the same man with whom Molly fell in love.

In the Fall 2005 issue of Parabola, John Polkinghorne, particle physicist and Anglican priest, raises the same question in an article "The Pattern That Is Me." He writes:

We live in a state of atomic flux, and the ageing, balding academic that I am today [That hits very close to home, John] is essentially anatomically distinct from the schoolboy with his shock of black hair in the photograph of sixty years ago. What does connect me today is the almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern, carried at any one time by the matter of my body and continuously developing over time as my experiences and decisions mould and form my character. That pattern is the soul--an idea at least as old as Aristotle, who thought that the soul is the "form" of the body.

After exploring that idea further, he closes the article:

The information-bearing pattern that is me will, as far as science can tell, dissolve at my death with the decay of my body. Of itself, the soul, therefore, possesses no intrinsic immortality, but as a Christian I believe that it is a true and coherent hope that the God who is faithful will not allow that pattern to be lost, but will hold it in the divine memory, with the intention of re-embodying it in a final eschatological act of resurrection (81-82).

A message in the formless flow of things

In tonight's Joyce seminar, I read my students a passage from No Souvenirs, a twelve-year journal by religious historian Mircea Eliade. The passage describes well the day-long journey of Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses, but it also describes the well-lived life:

1 January 1960
    Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods of everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren't there; if one sees them, one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts (84-85).

In this life we are all exiles. Knowing that, and reading the signs, can help us find our way home.

Ulysse

From my friend the Montane Vole (forwarded from his friend Michael) comes a link to a hauntingly beautiful French homage to Joyce's Ulysses. Be sure to have your stereo audio on, and explore the Flash site with your cursor and your left and right mouse buttons. I'm sure I haven't yet reached the depth of the artwork.

If you know anything about the site, I'd love to hear from you.

The circle of Yes

My friend Bill has just forwarded to me this numerological analysis of James Joyce (which I haven't confirmed):

In Ulysses, the word yes [the last word of the book] appears 360 times, making a perfect circle.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the word up appears 223 times and the word down 137 times, for a total of 360.

Bill adds, "And then people wonder why Joyceans are referred to as 'the Trekkies of the profession.'"

Addition: My friend Bill (the Montane Vole) writes that credit for the numerology should go to his friend Michael. Bill adds:

A long and fascinating essay on what else such counting can reveal in works by Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett can be found as the essay titled "Lisping in Numbers" in Hugh Kenner's book Historical Fictions (San Francisco:  North Point, 1990), 151-157.

Thanks, O Vole!

One hundred generations

As a writer and (especially) as a writing teacher, I am fascinated by the way Harold J. Morowitz expresses how recent an invention writing is:

Formal pictographic writing probably goes back over 5,000 years, to be followed by syllabic writing in the Fertile Crescent. After the development of writing, there was constant intercultural exchange among the various societies. A fully alphabetic writing seems to have developed in Greece about 2,800 years ago, and the system has become almost universal. This is only 100 generations into the past (Emergence of Everything, 168, emphasis mine).

After chapters featuring numbers in the millions and even billions, the number one hundred is petty cash. One hundred is a number I can get my mind around. And the fact that we went from the first alphabetic writing to Shakespeare in fewer than ninety generations, and to James Joyce and the World Wide Web in about a hundred, astonishes me.

I also realize that it's no wonder writing is so hard. We've just now begun learning how to do it.

An ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity

I've been rereading parts of James Gleick's 1987 book Chaos (see What I've Been Reading), and I'm blown away by two sentences about Edward Lorenz's equations that gave birth, in 1963, to chaos theory:

Years later, physicists would give wistful looks when they talked about Lorenz's paper on those equations--"that beautiful marvel of a paper." By then it was talked about as if it were an ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity (30). (emphasis mine)

Although I had completely forgotten that simile, it may well have been what started me on putting "signs, stories, systems, spirit" together in my writing, my teaching, and, more recently, this blog.

The work being done on complex, nonlinear systems has, for me, the same quality I find in the Book of Ezekiel, The Gospel of Thomas, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, The Zohar, the rituals of Freemasonry, the Divine Comedy, the plays of Shakespeare, Joyce's Ulysses, Meditations on the Tarot. That quality is the sense that these books--Prospero's books--both conceal and reveal the deep hidden truths of the Cosmos.

What the author sees and can show us

"We are . . . living," says Stephen Sicari, "within a culture of critical attitudes in which one is not to look for something permanent in literary art, but rather to discover the historical basis for what the author may have believed was permanent."

He continues:

I do not say that this approach has been wrongheaded in its entirety, for it has exposed as partial and relative what was often uncritically accepted as transcendent and absolute; but I do wish to argue that this approach, applied uncritically, leads to a critical blindness that denies out of hand the possibility for art to transcend its culture and reach a level of reality that may indeed be permanent and absolute" (Joyce's Modernist Allegory, 4). (See What I've Been Reading.)

And later,

Without giving up the strengths poststructural methodologies have gained for our reading, we must learn to do more than note what the author is blind to but seek to ascertain what the author actually sees and can show us. . . . We ought not limit ourselves to debunking and demystifying because that greatly limits the scope of what literature can be said to present as valuable. We ought to allow the possibility for the author to be a controlling presence leading the reader to a positive lesson about values and ideals (18).

(For more on this point, see my earlier post from Sicari.)

Jung, Bloom, and Molly's Yes

Near the end of his Jung: A Very Short Introduction (see What I've Been Reading), Anthony Stevens writes:

"Man," said Jung at the end of a famous BBC television interview, "cannot stand a meaningless life." Where does meaning come from? Jung's answer is through an unequivocal affirmation of the Self (157).

In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom affirms his Self at the end of the Cyclops episode:

—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

—He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.

—Whose God? says the citizen.

—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.

But the greatest "unequivocal affirmation of the Self" in the book—perhaps in all of literature—is Molly Bloom's, in the novel's final words:

first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The supreme fiction

Stephen Sicari closes his book Joyce's Modernist Allegory (see What I've Been Reading) with a discussion of Joyce's fellow modernists, including Wallace Stevens, from whose poem "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" he quotes:

We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Sicari continues:

The imagination may not be God, but when "we say" that they are one—when we posit that fiction—the darkness of the world is broken by "that highest candle," a candle that gives a high and holy light to the world. This light allows us to make a dwelling, a home, where we can experience what it feels like to have enough, to be enough. The supreme fiction is that we have an imagination that is God-like and that can light the world with a loftiness and nobility that makes our individual lives worth living and that makes the world our home (208).