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 40th 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 40thanniversary 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.
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