14
What of DreamsЧNow?
Over a decade and a half has passed since I last spent
time with Professor Efremov. He is gone, and so are Ernest
and Wade. We still visit the red beds of Oklahoma and
Texas, making small discoveries and fitting in the pieces of
the ancient course of life on the once great delta near the Permian landmass.
A period of 15 or 20 years is such a short time in
history, even in man's written history, that it can hardly be
of any great significance. Still, if the studies of the
ancient past can be trusted, it would seem that sometimes seeds planted during
a very few years become catalysts for major events that
follow, often chaotically non-predictable. The effects of some
monнstrous cataclysm that may have hastened the
extinctions of the great reptiles of the past and paved the way for our own
group, the mammals, seems to be one example. The "big bang" origin of the universe is
another. But these are dramatic, and much more subtle events, recognizable only
in retrospect, may also lie at the base of
pervasive change. The early forays of our reнmote ancestors in search of food on the ground, or slight changes
in the suspension of the upper jaws in bony fishes, fundamental to the great spread of modern day teleost fishes in the waters of the earth, are of this kind. One
cannot presume to know that the decades of the 1970s and early 1980s have spawned
such seeds, although there are those who feel this to be true, but so much has happened during this time as we plunge
blindly at an accelerating pace into the future that the acceleration itself is at least a cause for
concern about the fate of the old
ways.
The course through our times seems to travel along two contrary pathways, the one marked by a burgeoning
and overнwhelming complexity of human
affairs and the other an impelнling
roadway to comforting simplicity. The elated hopes and scientific dreamers of
yesteryear, once public property, have now carried beyond common comprehension,
parcelled out in necessarily
simplistic abstractions by willing but handcuffed interpreters. Ideas, for the
most part expressible only in matheнmatics,
lose their intrinsic sense and mislead in articulate lanнguage. But the language and the world of science
is, now more than ever before, mathematics girded by obscure acronyms. Perhaps a new literacy is emerging from the rise
of computers. We seem to have made
the circle back to the Pythagorean-Platonic world of "idos."
The dreams of the few who extrapolate from the
equations into simpler dimensions, and their followers, seem to
fight a losing battle, for now at least, against something mysteriously dubbed
"nature" and a headlong, sometimes guided, withнdrawal
into myth and mysticism. Science, objectively searching for
"reality," has been probing once "forbidden" areas, at
least in our society, coming closer to the ultimate
reduction of all phenomena to a common minutia of particles,
ultimate atomism, energy and time, where forces strong and weak
merge confusedly and are sensible only mathematically.
Reducнtive analysis seems to flaunt holistic concepts both
in biology and physics. Do we touch the unanswerable? Or is the very human source of the construct itself a bar to
evaluating it? We unravel the
mechanistic fabric of life and its origin, and life itself without a subjective sense seems nothing but a
particular manнifestation of a
special set of molecules and catalysts. By treating, rearranging and putting together foreign fragments
we alter old forms of being and
create new ones. Yet, at the same time, in science we retreat from mechanisms
and causes into a probнabilistic or
stochastic world of laws and chance. Is this the stuff of new dreams? Perhaps,
but the puppeteer can hardly but conнfuse
his audience.
A unity pervades the universe. The same matter-energy complex and the
same laws apply throughout, and the lumps of
matter and spots of energetic outburst are perturbations in a slowly subsiding burst. The "ultimate"
origin of our universe in a "big
bang" looms more and more probable. But what in the
"instant" before, or what after? Or was there such an "inнstant?" Allegedly, by some, the "big
bang" is the equivalent of the
Biblical command, "Let there be light," as the struggle to bridge the gap between scientific and revealed
knowledge finds it all to be clear in the Bible, the Koran or some other source
of ancient interchange between God or
gods and mortal interнmediaries.
Perhaps this conflict of the two is necessary for comнfort.
None of this, of course, is new. The roots of our
present scientific era date back to Copernicus and Galileo, followed by DesCartes, Newton
and Darwin and recast anew by Einstein. And
they go back to the Ionians through Muslim interнmediaries. Each new
surge of ideas has been met by moveнments to
retreat into the mold of the past. Only recently, howнever, have moon landings, planetary explorations
and radio and X-ray studies of the
outer reaches of the universe, with its quasars and black holes, perhaps
galactic cores, shown us so graphically how
insignificant and possibly alone we may be on a temporary speck of dust in a seething maze of energy and near absolute zero "empty" space, all of
which too must cease. Must we dream of other intelligences, even populate our
skies with their vessels, and
explore extragalactic future homelands to
stay sane? Or shall we dream of intelligent robots, succeeding their
imaginative but less intelligent creators and penetrating where carbon-based
organisms cannot go?
Or shall we say, "Let's stop this, it's false; we
live day-to-day and year-to-year and man is better for not
knowing." Or again, "Let's remember, it is all filtered through our
receptors and transmitters and created out
of our own being, just a necessary construct to our existence and not
necessarily real at all." The universe,
thus seen, is our own creation, to die when man dies. Such strong disillusionment, such alienation,
somehow seems to have intensified
after the initial elation following the moon landings. The small window to space turned inward to the disнturbingly isolated white and blue sphere of earth.
Dreams began to dwindle. Grand space
dreamers still existЧRay Bradнbury or
A. C. Clarke among the fiction writers, Carl Sagan and John Ball among astronomers, Stephen Gould and
Isaac Asimov among biologists. And to
me, Professor Efremov, as well, was one
of these. But his dream was covered by his own odd dialecнtical blanket
and was totally anthropocentric in the sense of universal mission. All intelligence must be in man-form. Now, however,
even some of the writers of science fiction and fanнtasy, who form the free, fanciful vanguard of the
future, have tended to turn inward,
following and even setting the earth-centered, humanity-centered trends.
Beyond the few grand dreamers are the
religious cults of a thousand sects, meditation, terrorism, scientific creationism, extremes of wealth and povнerty, cultish environmentalism and the flowering
of comforting myths of many sorts.
Together they form a devastating mix with lines not clearly drawn, but mostly one way or another seeking explanations and reasons for being in semi- or
pseudo-scientific sources.
Has all of this, which seems to have intensified
during the last two decades and to be heading for a climax, any
significance beyond today or tomorrow? Can we find in it any
of those vague seeds which will flower either to roses or
weeds? The obvious key to significance, which dates somewhat
farther back, may lie in the added factor of man's newly
acquired capaнcity to unleash immense amounts of energy in
great, unconнtrolled blasts. This casts its shadow soberingly
over all phases of our life, both physical and social, and
likely lies at the base of some of the restless
searching for refuge in myths. A present danger
to our "speck of dust" which did not exist before now looms
as a power to destroy and becomes ever more a common property.
I would dearly love to sit with Professor Efremov, in
his booklined little apartment on Gubkine Street in
Moscow, with a "few drops" of cognac and talk of
these things as we once did. Or, if not to talk, to
write and get his reactions in his colorнful,
often obscure English. I can't, of course, but I might be permitted to imagine some of his comments, knowing all the time
that they reflect my own sense of the words he might use.
"I like
your mixture of cults, terrorism, science, sociobiology and mystics, but don't
you read my Edge of the Razor? It's all
there, the linear mixup of undigested opposites with nothing of understanding of
balance of the two sides. We must merge sciences
and the arts and psychology. But I am horrified by your 'scientific creationism.' You wrote earlier,
but I hardly beнlieved it could be today, certainly not here. What on earth
kind of balancing is this? What is the
matter with you there, can't you
kill them off dead like old Texas outlaws? What on earth is this sociobiology? You have sent me the book by
Wilson. Has it passed now? He is a
very wise man, but like you western scientists
sees just one side. Maybe he is too much with ants. The twin studies you
sent me from Science, how the pairs beнhave
so much alike though long separated is puzzlingЧwhat about the others who don't behave alike? Are all
these ways built in the genes? Maybe we have got Ardrey and Lysenko mixed
together. You can't breed out 'cors serpentis.' It will go away as society not genes is so made over that the
need of a person to win in combat is gone. But this is 'heady stuff and you probably can't understand my badly put
wanderings.
"You keep talking
about retreat to myths. This is very wise, but
remember Homo is too young and embryonic in new conнsciousness to exist
without them. Your western science and ours,
too, is full of the greatest myth, that reality can be exнpressed and explained in mathematical equations.
It's going the wrong way, we can pick out anything from the complex and prove it, but alone. The two sides of the equation
are not equal explainers, but what I call 'linear tautologies.' It's dangerous,
of course, without balance and synthesis. You say we are rushing headlong
into the future and I agree, but on one-track rails without merging the parallel tracks of science and technology and
arts and psychiatry. To the one end of the material scale, the spirit is missed. Tell me what you think.
"Humanity and spirit
you say show in kindness, charity and an effort to make all men equal. Now you
retreat to the 'Great American Myth' like
we French say egalite. This is a monнstrous falseness. Look back
through your 'sociobiology.' Askа your retreaters to nature, our modern Thoreaus, to
look to their model. Where is the guide? A horrid dangerЧas I write youЧ is in the growing monoculture, the attainable egalite
reduced to the level of the least. No! Spirit, soul if you want, is all
life, not just man, and the task of evolution is to accomplish this end of materialistic and dialectical scale. Spirit is the
key to the meetнings. Being and awareness balance perfectly the other mechanнistic end and then the goal of homeostasis is
reached. Not at a low level. But not
yet.
"You drew back or
came to ignore,а quite right, your 'mathematical
animals' in your Morphological Integration. Stochastics
and mathematics only are helpful tools in getting to reality, but what of
history? It never went a one-line path. With mathematics you make the
universe what you want and the choice is in
your bases and rules, mostly man made. We lose ends and aims;
homeostasis is not a one-track process.
"You are wrong, I am
not one of your dreamers, but a 'turned
in' earth dreamer. My stories, dreams if you want, are put in the future or the past, in outworld space, but only in fantasy. The ridiculous space warp must be, but
just to make possible the return to
earth of travellers with their lessons. Rel-ativistic travellers can't come back like that. There would be no one to share their wisdom. Once, at first, I did
write to escape my boring, but later
mostly to tell my people things they needed to know and could not hear
in our insane destruction by what you call
communism. But you are right, man must have grand dreams, even if only of God and Heaven and now we
seem to have lost them and even our formal religion is a misleading farce. I came down with the same worry in my Edge
of the Razor but showed the way out. This was with some personal
worry with me too, but nothing came from it. It will be a long way ahead, but like I have wrote you so many times,
it is a dangerous trail and maybe
only you of us will see to which way it goes. I think it to be soon, maybe in the 1990s?
"But enough of this, you must be tired of my
wandering.
I
agree things are changing very fast, too fast. But you are not excited like I know you? Do you work too hard and maybe lose dreams too? Maybe, like I, you get old, too old. Maybe it is just today. But
it is good to wonder and dream. Right now, it's
a beautiful day out the window, but don't forget reality is only the moment. So let's stop and have just a few
more drops and this time I say to
hell with the heart and I join you ..."
. . . Old Efraim