A deceptively dynamic universe
"We are very very small. But we are profoundly capable of very very big things."
Stephen Hawking
This evening, I watched Hawking, a dramatized story of the disabled cosmologist's early life. It is an exquisitely rendered movie, redolent of A Beautiful Mind, the filmic biography of mathematician John Nash. The movie, i.e. Hawking, although complete on its own, is held together by flashes to a 1960s interview with Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias who, in 1965 and using a powerful microwave antenna, stumbled on an inexplicable radio noise emanating from 'out there'.
Through this simple dramatic device, the increasing import of Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the strange static hiss, too strong to originate in our galaxy, gives Hawking added edge. It plays, on an old tape recorder, throughout their interview. Much like Stephen Hawking's search for a thesis, Penzias and Wilson's mystery searches an answer.
The film's content and direction outshine any small flaws it might have and, with the credits rolling, I snuck onto the balcony for a smoke.
Over the past year, I've been deep into therapy. Driven to the edge of insanity, by nature and choices made, I found myself a space where I could start putting myself back together again. So far, it's been a wonderful, if often painful and confusing trip. It's given me insight into why I admire Nash and Hawking and relate so strongly to other, perhaps more 'ordinary', people like them.
I've been exploring my constant struggle to find my own equilibrium, my accommodation of a universe marrying contentment and chaos. The battle continues but, over the year, I've come to appreciate the enormity, savagery and depth of the conflict. It's cost me friends and relationships, which I regret, but it's been worth it.
"How frequently have you experienced psychosis?" asked my therapist.
Let it be noted I am not clinically psychotic.
"Only when drinking," I replied.
And here, let it be noted I'm proud to have stumbled into AA at around the same time as Chris Locke, some 21 years ago.
"Why'd you say that?" she asked. "Why 'only when drinking'?"
And we went into it. I had, of course, experienced psychosis of sorts when tripping on acid. But that was different.
When psychotically drunk, I felt unbound but not all there. I was aware of my immediate actions, but I was not aware of me. I was, while sowing chaos, comfortably numb. By contrast, I felt myself present during experiments with LSD, and the Black Hole I knew lurked at the back of my consciousness was a frightening presence I'd have fled had I the opportunity or capacity to do so.
My acid highs were boundless and frequently fun, but always—and like life—paradoxically fear filled.
Today, addicted to respectable drugs dispensed by drug lords in suits, I still live too intensely. Sleep is a dreamless black hole into which I fall, exhausted, late at night. It relinquishes only fleeting images and scattered symbols of fragmentary dreams but, heeding Donald Rumsfeld, I work with them.
"Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"
As Hawking unfolds, Penzias and Wilson relate how they had had to eliminate 'clutter' from their antenna, including nesting pigeons, that might have caused the static they were receiving. They ruled out the possibility it was caused by the bright lights and noise of the big city, New York. Meanwhile, around the same time, Hawking, a friend of Roger Penrose—a man who lends new meaning to 'inversion', finds himself increasingly at odds with cosmologists holding to the Steady State Theory, and tries to unseat them. Friend and supervisor Dennis Sciama advises him to do something original.
Somehow, and most of the time, I live in the spaces between memories. I think it's called the present. But it leaves little room for recall and I remember little of things I might have done an hour or two ago or, indeed, of the details of the film I saw earlier this evening.
I'd be concerned about pre-senile dementia or early Alzheimer's were this 'forgetfulness' of day-to-day mundanities a recent development. But I've always had it. I cannot remember lyrics, books, films, songs, names... fuck, virtually everything. But I do remember the obscure, those things of little interest to people concerned with keeping the world spinning in an orderly fashion.
It makes life interesting.
My internal points of reference are perhaps more widely spaced than those of most I've met. I understand an all-consuming passion for the infinitely small or the immeasurably large. I appreciate what it is to live a mix of the two at the cost of taking care of in-the-world details important to the bureaucratic minds of so-called balanced people.
My life and the enormity of the world cannot possibly fit a nine-to-five regimen. As far as I'm concerned, most should lose their blinkers and live in awe.
While yes, I do take choice seriously, I also believe people genetically predisposed to their peculiar world views and I have mine. While not a lazy person, I'd forgive others for thinking me so. It's just that blogging this is perhaps more important to and for me than filing my tax return, renewing my license on the car, or standing in a queue to apply for a new ID book.
I'm able to appreciate the link between global and local, but I'm unable to feed myself.
There is always a bigger picture and I like to see it.
Residual memories...
For the most part, Penzias and Wilson's interviewer remains a disembodied voice, unseen behind the camera. He takes an unnatural interest in Penzias's past, probing his German origin. One suspects he suspects something. Penzias, while sticking to his subject, introduces autobiography and relates how his family was separated when forced to flee—via Kindertransport—Germany at the outbreak of WWII. Back at the movies, Hawking finds his focus in a quest to provide support for the Big Bang Theory. All he needs is residual evidence of it, about three degrees Kelvin.
Recently, dissatisfied with nothing in particular, I've been exploring deep-seated feelings of entrapment. One of the things to come out of this exploration was an image, as if seen through a camera lens shooting skywards, of myself in the wilderness. I become smaller and smaller and, as I finally disappear into the vastness of the wastes, I realize myself to be behind the lens.
I am nowhere present but, in a strangely peaceful and together way, am everywhere at once.
My friends, weirdoes all, are wonderful, sainted people. Freed of life's day-to-day entanglements, they too seem to seek the big picture and soar the wide spaces of their and others' beings. Of the conventional world, they remain true to their idiosyncrasies and passions and find themselves in nature. That's what these pictures are of, a weekend spent at Uilenkraalsmond, blogged a week ago. Amé took them, and sent them to from Trondheim.
We are ourselves through each other and feed, in each other, a curious spontaneity. As we learn ourselves, we learn our friends.
Does all this smack of avoidance, evasion, or escape? I find the notion of avoiding life through an escape to nature somewhat ludicrous. No. Avoidance arises from depression. I know it well. What I'm speaking about is different—a view of the world with which I feel comfortable.
Stephen Hawking dealt with his disabilities in order to live his life, not to escape it. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all Hawkings. We seek life in the spaces between words and worlds, memories and measures, people and paradigms, facts and faces, feelings and formulae. We do not escape; we journey. Often, we pay mere lip service to the inanities of the ordinary. We tip our caps to convention, barely acknowledge its existence, and immediately forget its passing.
'...we are profoundly capable of very very big things.'
Turning the camera, we realize Penzias and Wilson's interviewer is no Nazi hunter. He's a German trying to lay unspoken claim to Penzias's good fortune. Life's not always as it seems. Either way, the two physicists had stumbled on the residual microwave activity, measuring around three degrees Kelvin, Hawking needed to complete his thesis.
He did so in 1974. As for that hissing, unintelligible static from deep space that so intrigued Penzias and Wilson? Agreeing with Leslie, I like to think they were listening to Bob Dylan.
On the balcony, I stubbed out my smoke and came in to write this.
"Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?"
Stephen Hawking
Some time ago, my youngest daughter walked in as I was listening to Where Did You Sleep Last Night? [mp3]. "Hey, that's not Nirvana!" she exclaimed. "Nah, it's Leadbelly," I answered, cranking it up. And that's it about Bob Dylan. You listen to that guy, you're listening to Leadbelly, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, T-Bone Walker, Woody Guthrie, Memphis Slim, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee... hell, you know the names better than I do.
In fact, you listen to Dylan you're as close to listening to American music as it gets. Yeah, I know I'm virulently anti-American, but I have to admit it — that's about as close as you'll get to listening to yourself breathe.
An' dat's jus' de blues, bro'. Myriad other styles, genres and influences seep from the Dylan sound. In fact, it's downright weird and unnatural. Now, appreciating this as a South African, I frequently wonder why so many Americans and other so-called civilized people just don't get it.
This note was a time a'postin' [ehem]. I found a site offering a load of free, predominantly blues, mp3s.
Witnesses on the shore, quoted by CNN, said the accident had occurred as the boat turned to shore and listed to one side, causing some of the passengers to fall into the water. The boat was said to have capsized and "bobbed like a cork" in the water for about 10 minutes. Some of the passengers had apparently managed to clamber on to its hull before it sank.
Reporters at the scene said they had seen bodies being dragged out of the lake and left on the shore. There were chaotic scenes as police, fire departments and ambulance workers helped survivors. A temporary morgue was set up at a nearby campsite.
Guardian Online | 21 die as wake capsizes US tour boat on lake outing
Well, I soon lost track of m' kids 'n' wife, | So many people there I never saw in m' life | That old ship sinkin' down in the water, | Six thousand people tryin' t' kill each other, | Dogs a-barkin', cats a-meowin', | Women screamin', fists a-flyin', babies cryin', | Cops a-comin', me a-runnin'. | Maybe we just better call off the picnic.
Bob Dylan | Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues
Ermm... sorry about that. It was irresistible.
