Dei Layborer

My previous post ended up being disproportionately about the media I’m consuming, strangely enough. While that’s not typically what I like writing about, it’s still on my mind for different reasons.

A slow night, albeit unplanned as such. It was supposed to be an evening for Ving Tsun training, but the overcast sky meant that my eyes had other ideas. For whatever reason, I’m quite sensitive to certain types of gray or dim days, such that they wear my eyes out no matter what I’m doing. The result of this is nausea and dizziness, meaning I unfortunately was not in any condition to train. Having a good amount of ambient light in the room I’m in can help, but there’s something about the quality that needs to be just so rather than it solely being about quantity. After a couple hours’ listening to a podcast with my eyes closed, I’m at least at a point where dark-mode windows are tolerable.

Returning to the thing about the media I’m consuming, I was thinking today about why I’ve been drawn to what I have been, lately. I finished Annihiliation and am well into its sequel, Authority, which centers on the Southern Reach organization itself. If you’re not familiar with the trilogy, it deals with this strange area (dubbed “Area X”) that appears on the southern coast of the U.S. and attempts to explore or just generally understand it.

I’ve also begun Un verdor terrible (A Terrible Verdure, released in English as When We Cease to Understand the World) by Benjamín Labatut. I learned of the book thanks to an episode of the TrashFuture podcast on it, although I haven’t listened to the episode since I haven’t finished the book. At least so far, it’s an exploration of the contradictions inherent in the stories of the scientists behind some of recent history’s biggest discoveries. For example, it tells the story of Fritz Haber, a German chemist who helped develop Germany’s chemical weapons program during World War I, who invented a pesticide called Zyklon (which would go on to be used to murder some of his own family during the Holocaust), but who also developed a process for extracting nitrogen from the air to be used in fertilizer, which was so effective that some estimates put 50% of the world’s food supply at his feet.

Even though I haven’t been back to The Three Body Problem, it does still fit in with these others. After all, it’s named for an unsolved problem in physics, namely how to model a system of three objects that have their own gravitational fields.

These books all touch, in their ways, on something beyond just an unsolved problem: instead looking at the limits of human understanding. What happens when we hit that wall in one way or another?

This question is so attractive to me, ironically, because I think on some level I’m hoping to gain some deeper understanding from it. I love few things more than having my mind totally blown, to have some new mental avenue be opened. It’s something that is increasingly difficult to find in my own day-to-day life; I’ve mentioned in the past that during a free-association exercise a couple years ago, I saw myself in this huge idyllic field, and hated it. Maybe it’s as simple as wanting to be reassured that there really is more out there than what I can see out my window.

I think too I want to be reminded that there are people thinking past what passes for epistemology in the broader culture. Science (or at least popular science) and politics (or, here too, its broadest incarnations) have become our new god. As Labatut said in a recent (Spanish-language) interview: “For better or worse, today science is the form in which human beings interact with mystery.”

Nonetheless, he also touches on where science and more transcendental things or practices do overlap. These scientists, he says, “[a]re possessed by doubt, they suffer their desire to know like those who suffer from love, and many times they lose their souls as a result, or burn themselves, or condemn themselves, or are condemned as a result of what they brought into the world.”

God knows I can relate. For me, my “desire to know” is usually less focused, which is itself something I wish I could change sometimes. If I had to specify what desire to know tortures me, it’s the desire to know what questions to ask.