One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin
The cracks in materialism did not just appear in science. 1900 was also the year in which Freud published his first and still most revolutionary book, The Interpretation of Dreams, which was certainly analogous to Einstein's revolution, in that it showed that the mind was not a repository of pure reason, but governed by unconscious and irrational drives and impulses just under the "civilized" surface.
It was also in 1909 that Picasso began his experiments in cubism and other forms of abstract art (thus breaking up the continuity of space), and between 1914 and 1921 that Joyce composed what was then a radical departure in literature, Ulysses. In fact, Ulysses seems to simultaneously incorporate ideas of Einstein, Freud, and Picasso, since it largely consists of a non-linear stream of consciousness of the three main characters, who are in turn symbolic of the Father (Bloom), Son (Stephen), and Holy Ghost (Molly). The book takes place on a single day in Dublin on June 16, 1904, and one of Joyce's points was to show how dense, resonant, and "full" time was.
In other words, time is not merely abstract and linear duration, à la Newton, but filled with a kind of infinite archetypal meaning that fractally resonates with all of human history. This is why the book is entitled "Ulysses," since the idea was that just underneath the surface, our lives are resonant with the universal and archetypal myths of antiquity; Bloom's wandering about the streets of Dublin resonates with Homer's Odyssey, as Ulysses tries to find his way back home (a myth also resurrected in the Coen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
To cite one obvious example of this fractal resonance, when you take communion, you are tapping into a resonant "timeless time" that connects with Jesus and is "always present." But in reality, this applies to all rituals; when you get married, you are Adam and Eve back in the garden; when you celebrate Christmas, you enter a time that is resonant with all past Christmases, both individually and collectively.
It wasn't until 1975 that Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term "fractal" for the self-similarity that arises at every level of existence. Of course, he was taking about geometric self-similarity, but what if the cosmos is temporally fractal, i.e., self-similar in the manner suggested by Joyce? If this is true -- and I think it is -- then the realm of religion would actually constitute a dimension of archetypal truths that order temporal reality in a self-similar way. And this would explain why you cannot "escape" from religion, any more than you can escape from geometric order... posted by Gagdad Bob at 6/30/2007 07:58:00 AM 16 Comments:
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