We Living Clumps of Ash

Some of my skeptical blogging friends might be interested in Krista Tippet's recent interview with theoretical physicist Janna Levin on Speaking of Faith. Listening to it in the dark at 5:30 a.m. on my way into work really got to me. They tackle several ever-present questions for me: what do we really know about our world? are we really free agents? how far should we go in our pursuit of truth and how do we balance this out with the everyday "constructed" realities of life? And it offers stunning passages from her new novel (when do you get a chance to read a novel by a theoretical physicist?) A mad man dreams of Turing machines.

Here's one of the passages from her book that connected for me:

"I approach a man and a woman on a park bench. His glasses, her handbag, her umbrella. They're as still as stone. They're in front of me and then, within a few strides, I pass the green-painted bench with its concrete feet. I turn to watch them but they are swept along by time, unable to stop, dragged away along with the street and the wind.

I see them everywhere, my two mad treasures. An elegant man in a hat with an able, stocky woman at his side. A solitary black-haired boy with a peculiar stride. I am looking on benches and streets, in logic and code. I am looking in the form of truth stripped to the bone. Truth that lives independently of us, that exists out there in the world. Hard and unsentimental. I am ready to accept truth no matter how alarming it turns out to be. Even if it proves incompleteness and the limits of human reason. Even if it proves we are not free. [I love this bit though even in the loving I recognize that part of my love is not about the mere dedication to truth but also the romantic image of a brave soul pursuing truth.]

They are here in our minds, Turing's luminescent gems, Gödel's Platonic forms. There are no social hierarchies to scale. No racial barriers. Given to us along with our brains. Built into the structure of our thoughts — no bullying into blind faith, no threats of eternal damnation — just honesty, truth, and reason. [Again I'm motivated, motivated to know and focus on this truth: all these hierarchies are constructs which hold no reality to the being-me who is connected to the cosmos.]

I am here in the middle of an unfinished story. I used to believe that one day I would come to some kind of conclusion, some calming resolution, and the restlessness would end. But that will never happen. Even now, I am moving toward a train. My heart is thumping. My lungs are working. There is a man, a woman, a bench, the glasses, the smooth hair, an umbrella. We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy — a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that we were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us — funny and lousy and great all at once." [I'm reminded of a passage from a Dillard's unofficially entitled "Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak" from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "We little blobs of soft tissue crawling around on this one planet's skin are right, and the whole universe is wrong." Later she dismisses this view, instead deciding that we are indeed freaks. Both authors confirm that I too will always be restless, always peering out there, often aware of the planet's skin, compelled to consider the biggest possible questions I can fit into my puny head.]

If you haven't had a enough yet, check out the "Program Details" for this episode. It's a multimedia retelling of the interview with links to the music used, YouTube videos explaining dark matter, the text of the passages read, and more details about the two scientists from the novel, Godel and Turing. Sometimes, I really love the Internet.