Poetics
Notes Toward a Skeptical Mysticism
I was on a call with five scientists. One of them accounted for an instance of synchronicity. He had been reading an author for over a decade, and been heavily influenced by one of his books. One day recently, he’d written about him for the first time — a blog post that he was just about to publish. Stepping away from his draft, he checked his email and Lo! Therein was a message in which the aforementioned author was copied. A mutual wanted to get them in touch with one another to provoke conversation.
That is one helluva coincidence. So what?
One of the scientists on the call said “what are you suggesting, that there’s some kind of secret sauce?” The “secret sauce” would be what some call “God,” to which some attribute the kind of agency that humans have — with intention and intelligent design.
While the professor did not walk back his comment about synchronicity, he did get into a little science talk wherein he qualified what he terms his “Transcendent Naturalism,” to specify that there was no Woo going on. He was just as hard-nosed and skeptical as ever.
But there was an opening there, and I’d like to capitalize on it.
A moment of synchronicity need not point to an anthropomorphic God to be mysterious. The person who had sent him the email happened to know the same writer. As he had been influenced by the writer, it was not strange that the reader detected parallels in his work, and overlapped them. It was an accident that he happened to email him at just that moment. But what a pleasant surprise! And what a meaningful one.
I would like to suggest that the occurrence was significant. That is, it was noteworthy, and it brought a sense of meaning and import to itself. That’s not nothing. Lewis Carroll used to write in his journal of a particularly important day “I mark this day with a white stone.”
I mark it. I note it. I sign it. Important.
Port, as in “portal.” As in, it takes me deeper in.
Our word “miracle” comes from the same root as our word “mirage.” It’s something wonderful, something which brings us wonder. Something marvelous, at which we marvel.
I fail to see the problem with this.
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
— Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning” (italics mine)
Why shouldn’t we allow for wonder, even awe, in our daily lives? What irrational belief are we afraid of, exactly?
People who are fully engaged in science, working in labs or university departments where there’s a social structure supporting their worldview, often don’t have much use for meaning. They want to achieve observable, predictable, repeatable results in the material world. They get enough meaning from their families and friendships, and leave considerations of the ultimate for lesser minds like mine.
I’m glad that works for them. But most people aren’t scientists.
Most people have to find a how and why to get them through the workday. Some of them have to find some sort of logic or practice to prevent them from committing suicide.
There’s a large swath of people who have turned to marijuana and the occult as their methods for coping. It’s fine by me, so far as they’re not hurting anybody, but I wonder what this skeptical scientist would say about them. Perhaps I’ll ask.
From my vantage, it is good to notice the seemingly mysterious aspects of daily life. I get value from savoring the fruits of coincidence, and enjoy charting patterns, noticing where ideas which interest me pop up and how. I like making connections, and I adore figurative language.
But what is language other than a figure (Latin — a sketch or drawing)? In Greek the word graphein means both to write and to draw — to graph, to chart. Isn’t language in its essence simply a tool to try to point to something else, something which evades it?
In Science, they work around this problem by trying to pin down the meaning of the language as best they can, striving to use it technically. That is to say observable, predictable, repeatable. When this is done well, technologies emerge which can solve problems — vaccines, satellites, nuclear bombs and whatnot.
That’s fine in the lab, but I have a concern that, when it leaves the lab, it can impinge on our sense of Value.
All sorts of people believe irrational things, I get it. And there’s a semi-anti-science culture war raging right now in which masses of distraught people are favoring biblical truths over scientific ones. This affects how we vote, and what policies are implemented by those representatives. I get it.
But we’re not going to overcome that by abolishing meaning. We need to allow for wonder, awe, marvel, and significance to survive and thrive. It’s part of what it means to be a human animal — a sophisticated social primate who thinks in terms of symbols and images, and strives toward ideals.
To strip this would involve not a little suicide. The ostensible goal of mental health is to find ways to reinforce the human mind so as to be resilient against the constant and inevitable stress of the world, our (social) environment. Happy to have skeptics around to be a part of the dialogue — it can be an antidote to bullshit. But skepticism is like black pepper. A little dab’ll do you. Let’s not over-spice, lest we spoil the dish with cynicism.