In my last entry, I introduced writer Cormac McCarthy and a science, non-fiction article he’d written for the Nautilus Magazine about a specific dream. The dream, however, wasn’t his.
McCarthy’s article, “The Kekule Problem,” starts with the story of Frederick August Kekule, a German chemist who is recognized for establishing the foundation of organic chemistry. One evening Kekule sat by the fire struggling to figure out the chemical structure of benzene. He fell asleep. He dreamed of a snake swallowing its tail. He awoke suddenly with the great revelation. It's a ring! The benzene molecule is a ring. The experience became known as the Kekule Problem.
McCarthy then wrote that the question Kekule’s story presented us with wasn’t Kekule’s problem at all, but ours. Since the dreamworld, or the unconscious, appears to understand language, for if it didn’t it wouldn’t be able to understand the problem Kekule was trying to solve in the first place, why didn’t it just reply with the answer—a ring?
McCarthy continued. Why is the unconscious so elusive about what it seemingly wants to tell us or wants us to know? What is with the pictures and images we dream about that come to us in symbolic and metaphor-like ways. Why won’t it speak to us in terms we can understand when it knows we have a problem? Why be so mysterious and difficult?
There is so much in this essay to unpack, which I have come to expect with Mr. McCarthy’s work. But this time around, my 900-word piece will do little more than introduce an idea.
There was some background revealed about Cormac McCarthy that was new to me. I have read some of his work like All the Pretty Horses, which I included in an article I wrote for The Globe and Mail, “Books That Inspired Me.” I’ve also read his masterpiece, Blood Meridian. But neither intimated his deep interest in subjects like mathematics, quantum physics and the nature of the unconscious. I felt an unexpected kindred spirit having worked in engineering for much of my life. Almost ninety, he’s been a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (a science research center) for years. Maybe some of this has subliminally attracted me to his writing.
Why does his essay interest me? Because I think it is the third, and possibly the most important part, of my changing frame of reference in understanding where we came from and who we are.
I’ve written about Downey and Burnett’s “The Bible” TV series, Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods and Jordan Peterson’s series on the psychological significance of the Bible, in my three previous entries. Together they helped give me insight into the mental and physical aspects of where we came from and who we are.
But what I saw in Mr. McCarthy’s essay, I think for the first time, was a purpose for language other than what we use it for in communicating with each other. As he wrote, “the other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it.” Why us? McCarthy introduces the idea that language came into us, not to enable talking to one another, but to help us explain and understand the unconscious.
His essay also prompted something I wrote about in my second instalment, “Things Are Not What They Seem,” where I questioned that “seeing is believing.” I wrote that from a young age we’re made to feel foolish if we believe in something we don’t see. But isn’t not seeing what belief is all about? What is there to believe in, when we’ve seen? When we’ve seen, is belief even required? Seems redundant, doesn’t it? What we’ve seen now “is,” and once seen then, “exists.” When we know something exists, isn’t belief over? It’s when we think something exists, yet haven’t seen it, we need belief.
The unseen here is the unconscious and McCarthy theorizes that the purpose of language is to help us describe what we can’t see. Is not what isn’t seen, an important part of our existence, like the unconscious? How much of our existence is spent in our heads, in the not seen? Language helps us with the not seen—the unconscious—and surely all that is in our heads. We don’t know what the unconscious is, where it is or how it even got there, wherever “there” is. But most believe the unconscious is there.
And so, the unconscious—or if you like the spirit or the soul—and our connection to it, needs language to recognize its existence.
I would say the three—mental, physical and the unconscious, or mind, body and soul—make up what we are. Some of a religious bend might equate this to Father, Son and Holy Spirit but that is for another day.
My head was swimming with all this when the “Tower to Babel” story came into it—inside my head that is. I reread the “Babel” story. McCarthy seems to reflect it in his hypothesis without stating as such, that language was used wrongly. Genesis 11:7 are the directions attempting to redirect language: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” If McCarthy’s essay is even close to gleaning the truth of this verse, wouldn’t a clue as to what language was really for, been useful. Something like, “until they understand the purpose for which it was intended.” Of course, as already acknowledged, the unconscious seems loathe to make itself understandable to most of us.
With this triad, this triune, this trinity, of mind, body and soul, I feel ready to go where my changed frame of reference seems to want to take me; a new frontier.
I’ll take a break from this part of “A Changing Frame of Reference” and give you Christmas story next and another shift to my frame of reference.