While writing my previous blog (“Inspired choices of music”), I had a feeling that I’d written something very similar before. I checked previous blogs – no nothing there. I searched all my documents saved on my laptop – including archives – and found an essay I had drafted in 1998 while living in the US. It was almost published in a prestigious magazine, nay TWO prestigious magazines, but the first rejected it after a monumental tussle between two editors, and I rejected the second when the editor said he liked the essay’s first half but not the second so could I re-write it. No one tells me what or how to write, so it remained unpublished and I forgot about it …
“You can analyse the pants off it in the most scholarly, imaginative way, but at the end of the day it boils down to your instinct. Your soul. A religious experience. A certain piece of music just does ‘it’. What’s ‘it’? Ask your soul,”…
… which sent me on the above treasure hunt and the discovery of what follows. It does indeed presage the above thought, but is rather pompous. If I were to write it today, I’d like to think I’d be more relaxed (as evidenced by the use of the subjunctive at the start of this sentence, but never mind).
As a child and young adult, I
ignored the arts as a source of knowledge, exiling them to the realms of entertainment.
I also spurned religion, burying it in the grave of irrationality. To me, religion
was as much a form of quackery as was astrology. I viewed the world through
black-and-white spectacles, a world of scientific fact, artistic irrelevancies,
and supernatural fiction. I absorbed just the scientific teachings of the
greatest minds, allowing their extra-curricular reflections to languish on the
bookshelf. I even interpreted Einstein’s premise, “The most beautiful and
deepest experience a man can have is the Sense of the Mysterious. It is the
underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and
science,” as the fanciful musings of a tired, ageing man whose greatest work,
The General Theory of Relativity, was behind him.
While studying physics and chemistry at university, I developed a cosmology to explain the countdown to the Big Bang. My theory was based on accepted scientific teachings, plus logical deductions to fill the gaps. There was no need to introduce anything of a supernatural nature into the equation. I believed my cosmology was scientifically watertight.
Notwithstanding this initial confidence, each passing year and life-experience nurtured black holes of uncertainty in my reasoning. I tried to bridge them by extrapolating the theorems of which I was sure while refining others. My task was all the more difficult because these uncertainties kept shifting; the black holes were not static. They rotated, they drifted, and they multiplied. During this struggle to find solutions to my shifting quandaries, I kept returning to Einstein’s “most beautiful and deepest experience” – his “Sense of the Mysterious”. I began to understand that perhaps his mid-life musings had been an attempt to climb above the plane of prosaic thought to the pinnacle of inspiration where he hoped, futilely as it turned out, to formulate a Unified Field Theory. By understanding just this much, I had moved closer to a world of grey, but when I saw the edges of black and white begin to blur, I decided I did not like the imprecision of the colour scheme, so I turned and walked away.
I was forced to turn back when I learned that some respected scientists actually believed in the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin – the burial cloth stained with the supposed image of the body of Jesus. For many years I had followed the conveyer belt of published papers about this enigma, and concluded that for every theory authenticating the Shroud, there was an equal and opposite theory dismissing it. Like many non-believers, I chose to rely on Carbon-14 test results that proved the fabric was no more than 650 years old, and I scoffed at counter opinions that claimed the test samples were taken from a medieval patch-repair.
Every time the believers claimed a victory, I threw my hat into the ring of the counter claims. Except once. There was one area of debate where I inexplicably found the science authenticating the Shroud more convincing than the science negating it. The debate centred on the transmission of the image through the cloth in a manner inconsistent with any known medieval methods, and using a stain devoid of natural or manufactured oils or dyes. Devotees of the Shroud insisted a burst of radiation had passed through the cloth, scorched it, and entered the body of Jesus, giving him life where death had previously conquered. This was their science behind the Resurrection, an unproven science. Nevertheless a wave of scepticism in my atheistic beliefs washed over me like a surge from the Red Sea, and I scavenged my knowledge of conventional science for an explanation to disprove the Resurrection yet still account for the image penetration.
After what seemed like a lifetime of personal conflict, I finally conceded that radiation was indeed responsible for the image. My radiation, however, originated from within the Shroud, not from without. Jesus, I argued, was not dead when removed from the Cross; he was in a coma. He was wrapped in the Shroud and only then did he die, did the energy of his weak heartbeat and feeble brain impulses escape from his redundant body according to The First Law of Thermodynamics. This law states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can be converted from one form to another. Any living creature would therefore leave an imprint on a shroud when it died. There was nothing special or different about the death of the ordinary man we call Jesus. My hypothesis, as far as I knew, was untested and no more convincing than the theory of the Resurrection, yet I clung to it as a drowning person clings to a leaking life raft, for want of anything else that could save the face of science.
I kept trying to work out alternative explanations, but I felt as if my life raft had landed me on a desert island where I searched the horizon for non-existent ships to rescue me. I had lived my life until then on the bedrock of scientific logistics. Paradoxically, the uncertainty of Heisenberg and the probability of Schrödinger were comforting because I could still define, measure and calculate their anomalies. But after Einstein and the Turin Shroud had opened my eyes to the leaky life raft and desert island, I realized that my mathematical understanding of, for example, curved space and time was insufficient to paint a picture of the physical reality. I was unable to see beyond the formulae on two-dimensional paper.
This inability, my instability, carried
the raft to a new world – to the rolling hills of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, the
quirks of Jane Austin’s friends and neighbours, and the intimate world of Emily
Dickinson. These were antidotes to inanimate equations – poetry where there had
been prose: harmony replacing unison. I even began to write my own poetry to
exorcise the onset of hitherto unheard imagery and wordplays dancing inside my
head. As I constructed the lines and verses, the exhilaration drew me further
into a grey world, a world where someone other than Einstein himself or
Heisenberg or Schrödinger had written the laws governing this tempestuous
universe.
I read avidly and wrote passionately, searching for something – ‘Something Mysterious’. Occasionally I found it – just for a second – but the fleeting successes were worth the hours, weeks, months of haphazard, unscientific rummaging. Once, I found it in a novel and I sensed the author had found it too; his book was beyond analysis, beyond criticism, beyond being just a novel. The book was A Prayer For Owen Meany. John Irving’s 1989 novel tells the story of an extraordinary fictional US soldier, Owen Meany, who believed he was the product of an Immaculate Conception and was put on this earth by God so he might die while saving the lives of innocents. As I progressed through the novel, each word, each thought, every one of Meany’s spiritual encounters massaged my tongue like a good wine. I read it countless times and it became without doubt my favourite novel.
I usually rank books in their respective genre such as romances and thrillers. Consistent with this policy, though unable to decide to which genre Owen Meany belongs, I rank Irving’s masterpiece as my third favourite romance, second favourite on the humour list and second again in the suspense category. Yet I have no doubt that overall it is my favourite book. I could, scientifically, run through a checklist of what-makes-a-good-novel and discuss in more detail the plot, character development, humour and prose, but all superlatives I could use would apply to hundreds of other books. So what makes ‘Owen Meany’ so special? I don’t know, and it’s because I don’t know, it’s because there exists a Sense of the Mysterious, that it’s such a special book. The loosely based film Simon Birch fails to capture the magic of the novel. Something – ‘it’ – is missing.
A Prayer for Owen Meany filled me with wonderment and punched holes in my atheism. It also helped me rewrite the premise by French mathematician Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) that “Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a home.”
My version reads: A work of art is built up with imagery, as a house is with stones. But a collection of imagery is no more an art form than a heap of stones is a home. In other words, a work of art needs something else – Something Mysterious. ‘It’. A Prayer for Owen Meany illustrates this, as does my Dad’s favourite anecdote from his youth.
His tale takes place one rainy
afternoon in 1946 at Oxford University. Cricket was cancelled, the local café had
sold out of scones and jam, so he and several friends returned to his rooms and
took turns to play their favourite pieces of piano music. Dad chose the slow
movement to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the Adagio Sostenato. Everyone was
transfixed. When the final notes had drifted away, no one was in the mood to
sully the moment with any other piece of music. They all wanted to play the
Beethoven, discuss it, analyse it, and discover why it made their toes tingle
and their hair curl. For the rest of the afternoon and evening and well into
the night, they took the music apart. They discussed every note, every phrase
and sequence, the gradations, accidentals and modulations, bridge passages, departures
from the expected, and so on. Until, in the wee small hours, they knew
everything there was to know about the Adagio. Except one thing. This one thing
was the whole. The complete movement. It dawned on them that the sum of the parts
was less than the effect of the whole. There was something missing in their
analysis – something those remarkably brilliant young men could not understand.
Could this something, this je-ne-sais-quoi, be God?
Dad’s tale suggests an irrational technique in the composition of a piece of music: the same technique that elevates a novel from a story into a higher art form; the technique that will one day answer my questions about the Turin Shroud, where carbon-dating and radiation theories have proved inadequate. Perhaps there are no absolute answers.
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