PL42 - Under any sun

Strange celestial tidings

Quickly: I’ll be in Cambridge Thursday to Sunday for an exciting interview and the literary festival, if you fancy we could have a cup of joe, and I plan to make the Canterbury Tales pilgrimage from London to Canterbury Cathedral in summer; if you fancy you could join.

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Strange celestial tidings this week. Katy Perry went to space and we found our best ever sign of alien life. I like Katy Perry, and to me the only sad part of that story is that she was only up there for the equivalent of ‘Hot N Cold’, ‘Thinking of You - Acoustic Version’ and 89 seconds of ‘The One That Got Away (TikTok Sped Up Mix)’. But the aliens prompt a longer melancholy.

Scientists detected, on a planet 124 lightyears away, signs of molecules only produced, to our knowledge, by organisms. Here, those organisms are made by plankton. K2-18b may be home to something like plankton.

Something, realistically, quite a lot like plankton. There is a passage in Richard Dawkins’s The Magic of Reality which, if not intended to be so, is quietly heartbreaking. Dawkins explains why alien life would not differ very much from the life we know.

Seeing, for instance, would probably evolve: life needs energy needs a star which means light, which means an evolutionary advantage to seeing. But we know all the ways to see. They’ve happened here. “There are only so many ways to make an eye, and I think every one of them has evolved somewhere in our animal kingdom.” Eyes have evolved independently dozens of times and the types recur. Cameras (vertebrates, octopi), strip retinas (jumping spiders), compounds (dragonflies), and telescopes (scallops). “It is a good bet that, if there are creatures on other planets that can see, they will be using eyes of a kind that we would find familiar.”

Likewise with other types of seeing: sonar has repeated itself four times just on Earth. A trick of creating an electric field and following its distortions evolved in some African fish, and in a completely separate group of South American fish.

Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy was thinking about hot mamas when he described the uncontrollable “desire continually burning within for the new, the wild, the unthought-of and, if you can imagine such a thing, the undreamt-of.” But we all like to believe that somewhere our dreams, knowledge and realities are exceeded, that something stays free of apprehension and of life’s limits.

Outer space is a natural hiding spot to stash such hopes. But they may not be safe even there. Only eyes anywhere, everywhere eyes, nothing unseen, nothing new under any sun, for man nothing “commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” We’ve heard Philip Larkin’s cry: “Where can we live but days?” How can we see but eyes? How can we live but energy, gravity, molecules? “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable” seem to Hamlet “all the uses of this world!... ‘tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!”

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Three methods tell which way time is moving. First is the size of the universe: it expands with time. Second is human memory: the memorable direction is the past. Third, and here comes still more cosmic plangence, is whether things are becoming more or less ordered.

If a film shows shattered pieces gathering back into the cup, you know it is playing backwards, because shattered comes after whole. Stephen Hawking explains that because there are more ways for things to be disordered than ordered, disorder tends to increase with time. A jigsaw can be whole only one way, but incomplete many ways, so shaking the box is unlikely to solve the puzzle.

Art is perhaps not loads more than the project of fixing the jigsaw. It ‘makes sense of’ or ‘gives shape to’ chaotic life. We order life by memory. Philosopher Kierkegaard said we can understand life backwards.

But such efforts just hasten disorder. Recording a single binary with a bead an abacus contributes more disorder than order to the universe, because of the energy you spend moving the bead. We consume order and excrete disorder. Even if you remember every single word of A Brief History of Time, the order created in your brain is ten million million million times smaller than the disorder that the sweat and breath of your effort contributed to the universe.

When god spoke at the beginning of the world, Paradise Lost has it that “Confusion heard his voice, and wild uproar Stood ruled…darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung”. If it happened then, it hasn’t since. The future is the more chaotic time, as surely as it is not the one you remember. Your efforts to order it have as much hope as your efforts to stop the universe expanding.

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Of course some things are real as soon as they’re felt. My very bad dissertation argued that so an amputee feeling pain in his lost arm is really in pain, so a human feeling free will is free. The pleasures of art are real for us and definitely no knowledge can quench the wonder you feel at the stars. I spent both the last two weekends in the country, at the beach, under visible stars, and they remained firmly awesome.

That good mood was helped by all your nice feedback on the Gatsby essay. Thanks so much. It was discussed in two roundups, listed atop RealClearBooks over the weekend, and even got a comment from a knight of the realm and Guggenheim winning critic who literally wrote the book on the topic. Much better than what happened among my friends:

“Come on, tell us, we care!” one coaxed in a Kentish Town pub.
“It’s really not that interesting to the layman,” I demurred.
“If you like it, we want to hear it!”
“Ok, fine. Well I think my most significant original intervention is to argue that what Gatsby wants to recover is not a past, but pastlessness…”

I looked up here, and every single face at the table, each of the four, was mouth open in full yawn!

This weekend I hope you have a great Easter and double bank holiday. By his chosen rostrum, we can praise the king’s cathedral taste!