Do We Know Why We Know?

Fifty cartons of books showed up on our doorstep the other day. That might seem like the end of the story but it's only the beginning of this one.

A little background first. My wife and I moved from Ontario to British Columbia last year. Why, you may ask, were we crazy? We didn’t think so. We’d honeymooned at Expo 86 Vancouver and fell in love with the place. It just took us thirty-five years to get here.

Our daughter moved here in 2011 to go to college. Why? She would answer that the West called her. We’d been called a few times over the years too; we just didn’t answer.

After many visits over the past 10 years, everything seemed to line up: the book tours were at an end, the price of our house had increased and the West was calling, again.

We packed up and moved—moved everything but my book collection. The books would stay. We didn’t have room for them where we were moving and it seemed senseless to move them out only to keep them in boxes until we found a permanent residence. Besides, I had a place to store them in Ontario.

I made a deal with a friend where he could have most of my collection of CDs, DVDs and albums if, in exchange, he would store my books for a couple of years. Our plan out west was to rent until we were acquainted enough with our new location to buy the house we wanted. Things haven’t quite worked out that way—they never do if you look close enough.

Now back to my book collection, right. Why did I move the books now?

Unexpectedly, my friend decided to move. He would accommodate my books by moving them into storage. I was a little reluctant with the idea and decided to call the movers who had brought us to British Columbia on the off chance they could fit fifty cartons of books in a trailer load that might be headed to BC. This time, as luck would have it, the movers had room, offered me a deal and my books had passage.

Why am I telling you all this?

Outside of helping the mover unload and stack the fifty or so cartons against the wall inside our garage, I hadn’t looked at what had shipped. I had numbered the cartons, noted what was in them and recorded the information before moving them to my friend’s place so I had a good idea of what was there. I didn’t feel the need to open the boxes and check but I was interested in one particular box that I’d packed my collection of Rush books in.

If you know me or follow me on social media or have read The Actor, you’ll know I’m a fan of the Canadian rock trio, Rush. They’ve inspired me throughout my life.

I looked at my list to see what box the books were in. To my amazement, they were in the 40^th box. This was not intentional; simply the next number that came up when I’d been packing the boxes. I’d never noticed. The number 40 is significant as it was a show on their 40^thanniversary R40 tour that I’d attended and was the last tour the trio would perform together. Sadly, Neil Peart, the band’s drummer and lyricist died early last year just before we moved out west; the reality of Rush was over. My son, along with the friend who was storing my books and his son, had accompanied me to see the show at what was then known as the Air Canada Centre in Toronto in 2015.

And why am I telling you this?

In my last blog (seen Link) I wrote about Graham Hancock’s book Fingerprints Of The Gods and opening my mind to what is and isn’t known about our ancient world. I wrote specifically about three of many topics Mr. Hancock covered in his book: the Great Pyramid, precession and Younger Dryas. (Refer to my previous post for more.)

I also wrote about post modernism and metaphysics. Post modernism being largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of the scientific, and objective, efforts to explain reality while metaphysics refers to studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality.

Here, was kind of a case in point of having marked the carton holding my Rush books with the number 40, unexplainable by what we know of reality outside of using the word “coincidence.” I’ve noticed such things, because I’ve started to, and how such things happen much more regularly than I would ever have guessed. Was this telling me something more than what I was already aware of? I don’t know. But it did seem odd. 

I’m not finished yet though.

Rush inspired me—particularly Geddy Lee and Neil Peart. I learned how to play the bass to start a band in high school. I bought a blue Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar because Geddy played one. I was astonished by his ability to sing different notes than what he was playing on the bass simultaneously. But it was the Professor Peart and his writing that affected me most, and one of several writers that inspired me to write. His influences got me reading Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand and Cormac McCarthy (“Cities on the Plain” appears in the Rush lyric for the song Distant Early Warning).

I’d been reading an essay by Cormac McCarthy, the day before, from the Nautilus Magazine titled “The Kekule Problem.” The piece was McCarthy’s first published science non-fiction work. I had read his All The Pretty Horses and what is recognized as his magnum opus Blood Meridian. I had seen the Coen Brothers movie, No Country For Old Men. I was particularly interested in this essay dealing with the unconscious and language.

I learned that in addition to writing novels, McCarthy was deeply beguiled in subjects like the history of mathematics, quantum physics and the nature of the unconscious. For years, he’s been a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a science research centre dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems. He revealed that he has few author friends and mostly hangs out with scientists.

This all became interesting to me as it fit in with what I introduced in my last blog article of learning or relearning and why we think what we think and how we know what we know though the truth may still elude us.

His essay starts with the story of Frederick August Kekule, a German chemist who is recognized for establishing the foundation of organic chemistry. One evening Kekule was struggling with the chemical structure of benzene. That night he dreamed of snakes swallowing each other’s tails, forming a ring. He woke realizing the ring was the structure he was looking for. The experience became known as the Kekule Problem. How do our dreams connect us to the unconscious and the difficulty we have in understanding what the unconscious is trying to tell us. McCarthy hypothesizes that language may have come to us as a way to explain what the unconscious is trying to tell us.

If you’ve read any of my novels you’ll know that the mind and the unconscious intrigues me to no end. In The Actor, Ethan Jones’s mind takes him through a delusion that helps him overcome the debilitating tragedy of his murdered love. The Musician continues Ethan’s story through the real and unreal, using music to express what language seems unable to reach, taking Ethan through some extraordinary experiences of love, joy and horror. 

Also, in my last blog I listed the books I’d read or was reading that included The Bible. I’ve been fixated on this book for some time as being an ancient record passed down to us through the millennia as a religious text that I see increasingly as a means to help us understand who we are and possibly clues into the unconscious. I bring this in now in reference to McCarthy’s essay around language providing humanity a means into explaining what the unconscious is trying to tell us and a reason to try and understand whether it is or not. Art (a novelist in this case) and science combining to help us to bring light on what it is we’re being told by the unconscious.

From Mr. McCarthy’s essay, whether language is biological or not there is apparent need for it in our remarkable species unlike the other over five thousand species of mammals. If language were purely a utility to enable communication between other humans it would have been unnecessary to learn speech and language, as all other mammals demonstrate, seeming to communicate quite adequately with each other through their other senses.

But McCarthy’s essay extends language as having a much grander purpose, whether desired or not.

I think we may have been told this already through the ancient text of The Bible. The Old Testament starts with Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” A force “which transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) that created everything from nothing including the unconscious: like a big bang so to speak.

No one has ever seen this force (God) according to The Bible.

The Book of John in the New Testament starts: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Could this be God’s (the unconscious) desire to “speak” to us through his son Jesus as language? “He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” Theologically, this is God appearing to us in the form of a person, a person who can talk and explain things using language—“the Word”. God is giving us a chance to understand him—the unconscious—through speech and language, often in parable form.

McCarthy’s essay brings science back into the fold explaining that language came to us quite quickly. He writes that language has taken approximately a hundred thousand years to come to us, a “blink of the eye” compared to two million years, the time “our unconscious has been organizing and directing our lives.” Genesis and John’s text do not have such a timeline but time seems almost irrelevant because of our only recent ability to even measure it. Egyptians were the first to measure time around 1500 BC with the sundial.

There’s so much more to this subject that I’ll write about in future posts but I need to wrap up. Besides I haven’t finished the story of what started this whole thinking exercise—the shipment of my book collection and the carton marked with the number 40. Possibly a clue into how we know what we know or why? To be sure the unconscious was involved.

Going downstairs to the garage, I fully expected to find the carton of Rush books I wanted to open, to be at the bottom of the stack (Murphy’s Law). But when I got to the pile, I turned one of the boxes on the top of the stack and saw the number 40 I’d written on it over a year ago. In disbelief and relief that I didn’t have to start moving boxes around, I carried the box upstairs anxious to see what was in it. As I cut through the packing tape and pulled open the top flaps, like in a David Blaine illusion, right at the top of the box was Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.

I wasn’t dreaming. I hadn’t fallen asleep. I wasn’t pursuing a foundation of science. But the ease of finding something I knew about, leading me to what I was looking for and potentially to another piece of the puzzle I’m trying to understand was quite stunning. You know what I’m reading now.

If you’ve read The Actor, you’ll know the quote that precedes the Epilogue that is quite apropos for this article. From Rush’s Clockwork Angels album, the first stanza of the song BUB2 (Brought Up To Believe): 

I was brought up to believe 

The universe has a plan

We are only human

It’s not ours to understand

 

* * *

More about this and other things will be coming in my next post.

I’m still doing my best to live up to the moniker The Globe and Mail gave me—the hardest working novelist you’ve never heard of.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what many readers have already discovered. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

A Changing Frame-Of-Reference

I was going to call this post The Fallacy Of Choice after waiting in line to order my Grande Pike at Starbucks. Seems we've made ordering a cup of coffee quite complicated in an apparent attempt to make the mundane more interesting to fit in with our incredibly busy lives, "I'm working don't you know." But we've all bought into the scheme. Only, it's still just a cup of coffee. Enough said—for now. I decided to address a more appropriate subject in that it's been almost a year since my last update.

The Pandemic. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said already but with bookstores and movie theatres closed I had an unprecedented amount of time for writing, reading, thinking and observing that was accompanied by the thrill of discovery; also decided to move across the country (but that’s a story for another time). I’ve decided to use this forum to talk about what happened and is happening. If you like it, cool. If not—c’est dommage.

I am still represented by Max Alexandre Tremblay who is now with Westwood Creative Artists based in Toronto, an agent and agency to be reckoned with.

 

    My writing space is why I’m here and this is what I’ve been at work on:

·     I finished the third book of The Ethan Jones Trilogy, which began with The Actor, titled The Reality of Delusion. I hope it finds a home in the not too distant future. The Musician, published in 2018, is the second book. Leave it to say, there is much more to Ethan’s story.

·     Something of a follow-up to my short story collection The Drive In, with almost twice as many stories, the work is titled If You Could Read My Mind. What would you do if you were imprisoned for life for a crime you didn’t commit?

·     Next is a 10-episode script for the second season of a space-oriented Netflix series I'm hoping will get picked up. It's about what’s really likely to happen in our efforts to colonize Mars.

·     A poetry collection. I’ve been writing poetry and lyrics for most of my life. Why I never thought to put them together, I don’t know, but many of them are together in this compilation. There is no particular theme to the work other than thoughts I’ve had and written as poems. A personal retrospective of different styles and subjects titled Penetralia: A Secret Place.

·     Finally, I’m at work on a new novel in the science fiction genre that's been fascinating to write. There's our plans and then what happens which are almost never the same—Intentional Serendipity. The first draft is complete and I’m in the first rewrite.

My reading space takes me places I never knew I’d go and here are the books in no particular order since our last meeting.

·     Catch-22 by Joseph Keller

·     Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill

·     The Martian by Andy Weir

·     Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

·     On The Road by Jack Kerouac

·     The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson

·     Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America by Annie Jacobsen

·     The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

·     A Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

·     The Haunting Of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

·     Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

·     Animal Farm by George Orwell

·     The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner

·     The Bible

And now about that title, frame-of-reference thing …

Much of what I observe and think about seems to gravitate, in an unplanned way, to what I read (and write) about and vice versa. I rarely know where my interests will lie when the time comes to choose a new book to read. This was the case a couple of years ago when my son introduced me to The Joe Rogan Experience. I rolled my eyes, “The host of Fear Factor?” I said. “Give him a chance Dad,” my son replied. I did and was immediately intrigued by some of Rogan's guests. One of the first I listened to was Graham Hancock on his book Fingerprints of the Gods.

Hancock’s book was never on my list of books to read but after hearing the podcast, I knew it would be my next. Fingerprints of the Gods reignited interests I’d held since a child on discovering the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci and Abraham Lincoln. The book helped changed my way of thinking and gave substance to what had already started to occur to me.

There was many things I took from the book but I’ll talk to three here: pyramids, precession and Younger Dryas. Like most, I knew about the Great Pyramid of Giza but I don’t ever remember learning or even hearing about precession or Younger Dryas.

The Egyptian pyramids are famous and estimated to have been built as tombs some 4,500 years ago for Egypt’s pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure except, as Hancock points out, there was no representation of these individuals inside the tombs when modern explorers discovered them. One would think they’d be full of articles to honour and identify the pharaoh in the after life. The assumption made by experts was the tombs were robbed of their artifacts long before the explorers’ discovered them. Was my supposedly factual education based on assumption? The pyramids were supposedly built by hundreds of slaves hauling monoliths of limestone that weigh up to 200 tons—an unimaginable weight to move even by today’s standards—up dirt ramps. I started to think about the idea of using hundreds of people with ropes and primitive tools to move these leviathan stones. Ever tried to organize ten people to move something heavy like a slate pool table? The concept certainly raises questions in my mind. And why is there no mention of the pyramids in the Bible? The giant Nephilim people are included. The pyramids were certainly around based on the time estimate of when the pyramids were built. And pyramids were not only built in Egypt but in Mexico, Peru and Mesopotamia. Those parts of the world weren’t even supposed to be known to exist let alone have technology able to construct such enormous edifices. On closer scrutiny, Pi appears to have been known by the ancient designers of the Great Pyramid as dividing the perimeter by its height results in a close approximation (too close for coincidence) to 2 x Pi. Archimedes of Syracuse was supposed to have discovered 3.14 in 250 BC over 2,000 years after the Great Pyramid was supposedly built. Hmmm. Mathematically, the Great Pyramid could be a representation of the spherical earth. Coincidence is a little too hard to believe. But why suppress the information.

Stay with me, I’ll get to where I'm going soon.

Precession, or the earth’s precession, was a difficult concept to grasp but I learned that as the earth rotates, the axis it rotates on wobbles a bit—23.5°. The wobble takes 26,000 years to complete its full revolution all the while orbiting the sun along with all the other planets. There’s much more to this but it’s science that has helped us understand some of what exists and it’s difficult for me to peek into something like precession and not get a sense of a much grander master plan and power that is simply beyond human understanding. Could this entire spectacular machination be accidental? That’s a big pill to swallow, red or blue.

Just a little more and I’ll be there.

I had never heard of Younger Dryas before reading Fingerprints Of The Gods and although I don’t think it’s mentioned in the book but has been in others and comes up in Hancock’s interviews. Take it to say, it’s a warming that took place in the Northern Hemisphere about 12,000 years ago. It’s important, as research has shown that the Sphinx at the site of the pyramids shows erosion markings that far exceed wind and weather and is more representative of flooding and water flow that is believed to have occurred during the Younger Dryas period that puts into question the age of the Sphinx at 4,500 years. Again, makes me wonder.

Why is this important to me? Part of the reason is that what came out of writing The Actor: is anything what it seems? We’re constantly faced with what to believe from our numerous information sources; the truth often seems nearly impossible to get. This is not a new thing but you’d think we’d get better at it.

I began to have conflicted feelings as to what I was supposed to know about and what I wasn’t, that seemed to be decided or regulated by someone else for reasons that I’ll leave to future posts. Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Ballad of East and West and the line “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” has begun to haunt me.

Rudyard Kipling interesting to note crossed my education world of science and engineering and established knowledge. Kipling was requested by H. E. T. Haultain of the University of Toronto to create “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer” that is part of, and was part of my, engineering graduation in Canada. The purpose is for the graduating engineer to recognize the responsibility of their work to society.

My observation here and the purpose of the examples from Fingerprints Of The Gods is to help understand why I’m beginning to believe a better conception of our existence may be best learned  through the concepts of metaphysics and postmodernism and not just science.

Metaphysics refers to studies of what cannot be reached through objective studies of material existence and postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, and objective, efforts to explain reality (I’ve been helped here with definition by www.pbs.org). Both are beginning to figure more prominently in my thinking that was not always the case. Unfortunately, I saw postmodernism as an apocalyptic view of the world connected to chaos and free living, while metaphysics was centred on mysticism, the occult and pseudoscience. Both seemed to promote mayhem, destruction and the deterioration of society. My views of both were seriously wrong and quite misunderstood. Judgment or pre-judgment is a terrible thing but coming from the scientific and engineering community, much of the perceived non-science view is frowned upon and defended by attacking and discrediting the author followed by weak, if any, defence of the assumed certainties. Yes, there are crazies, but discerning crazy from fact is not necessarily easy but ignoring well thought out reasoning is not the answer, and why real science is so important, hard and, come think of it, its purpose. Daily, I am becoming much more aware of why this is, some of which is in my novel The Musician which I’m coming to believe is much more about postmodernism than was ever my intention.

Having spent much of my life in the science world, which I’m pleased to have, I’m beginning to see and feel a transformation and a change to my frame-of-reference. While, science helps keep planes in the air, explains planetary orbits and allows us to communicate faster, at greater distances, with more information than ever before—science doesn’t explain everything. In fact, I’m beginning to think, explains little of the human experience and close to an infinitesimal amount of the full scope of existence. While we seem to learn more and more, at the same time, we seem to learn massively more about what we don’t know, yet struggle to admit it. “I don’t know” seems to be an unacceptable answer today and a made-up answer preferable to the admission of not knowing. Two quotes come to mind here: Einstein’s “I learn more and more about less and less until I’ll soon know everything about nothing” and Socrate’s “the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Yet  I contend, I still find the pursuit incredibly fascinating.

More about this and other things in my next post but now time for that coffee.

~ ~ ~

I’m still doing my best to live up to the moniker Canada's The Globe and Mail gave me—the hardest working novelist you’ve never heard of.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what many readers have already discovered.

You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.