Blue Manifesto Letter from the Editor
Playlist
Not Full Enough
Henri Bergson on Possibility and Creation
The Drunken Walk
Robert Pogue Harrison
Since amor facti emanates from the human psyche, it has the power to liberate therein the finite fact's potential for expansive spiritual meaning. A great many facts possess latent psychic energies that await activation through our face-to-face encounters with them. I borrow that figure of speech from a sentence in Walden, where Henry David Thoreau writes, “If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a scimitar, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.” When you appropriate the meaning of a fact, its objective truth and subjective implications form the laminated edge of a single blade. Amor facti begins with the realization that an impersonal fact can provoke a revelation in the inner recesses of one's being. The sharpness of the blade's edge comes from the electromagnetic energy-release, so to speak, caused by the encounter between mind and matter in their apparent difference from one another—"apparent" because the difference in fact disappears in the event itself.
Thoreau says the sun glimmers on both of the fact's surfaces. Since the sun is the ultimate source of insight here, let us consider the simple fact that the sun shines; its photons illuminate the world. Then let us ask: how much has to happen before we see the sun glimmer on the surface of a scimitar? What must a photon go through—how many thresholds must it in fact cross—before it reaches us in the form of visible light? This is a question that calls for a journey of the mind into the sun (an itinerarium mentis in solem, as it were). Such is the potential force of a fact when you stand fronting and face to face with it—it can send you into alien realms millions of miles away, even as you stay put facing it.
So let us set the controls for the heart of the sun, as the Pink Floyd song has it. As we approach the star, we pass first through its corona, then its photosphere, then its convection and radiative zones, and arrive, in thought, at its inner core. Here, the temperature and pressure are unimaginably intense—intense enough to force two protons to overcome their natural repulsion and succumb to the indignity of fusion. For some reason—no one knows exactly why—the weight of two fused protons amounts to 99% of their combined weight. It is a law of nature, not a consequence of a law of nature, that protons lose 1% of their mass when they combine. The lost mass resulting from nuclear fusion becomes energy according to Einstein's formula E=mc2. Multiply that 1% loss of mass by the speed of light squared, and it amounts to a staggering sum of energy. Our universe as we know it, along with all life on Earth, owes its existence to this fusing of protons in stellar interiors. E=mc2 may be the most elegant equation in the history of science, yet its equal sign masks the enormity of violence that converts mass into energy at the center of stars.
That conversion creates the massless packets of energy we call photons, which can exist as particles, waves, or excitations in a quantum field. It's not surprising that the product of something as extreme as nuclear fusion should produce highly restless quanta that remain indeterminate in the forms they assume. Let there be light, and there was light. Alas, it takes a lot less time to utter that phrase than for its fiat to become reality. The photons engendered by nuclear fusion have a long, errant way to go before they are released to their freedom as visible light. They must first undergo an immense struggle to break free from the cauldron in which they are born. The estimates among astrophysicists vary considerably, yet it takes anywhere from 170,000 years to millions of years for a photon to make its way from the sun’s core to the photosphere of the solar surface. The odyssey could not be more arduous, for at every turn the photon gets absorbed and reradiated by the atoms it interacts with, which is why astronomers refer to it as the photon’s “drunken walk” through the body of the star. A poet might compare it to a gestation—I have just done so myself—yet a more apt comparison would be to a penance or mortification, since the photon encounters only obstruction in its outward drive, so much so that, by the time it completes its journey, it emerges at the star’s surface in a bruised and battered state, no longer a high-energy gamma ray, but a much weaker ultraviolet and infrared light. Let there be light, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years later, there is light.
Nothing could be more antithetical to the photon’s drunken walk than its subsequent rectilinear dash through interstellar space at 300,000 kilometers per second. It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for a photon to reach Earth from the sun’s photosphere, and if it should happen to find its way to your eyeball, then a new stage of its odyssey begins. It first passes through your cornea, then through your lens, and then onto the retina at the back of your eye. On this thin layer of tissue, with its light-sensitive nerve cells, the photon impinges on either a cone or a rod, which converts the packet of light into an electric impulse that is conveyed to your brain by the optic nerve. Once it reaches your brain, the photon’s trek comes to an end. Its massless energy now gets absorbed into your living matter. About 500 million photons enter the cornea of a human eye every second, either directly or by bouncing off objects and thereby rendering them visible. Half of those photons reach the retina and enter the brain as electrical impulses, bringing with them a flood of kinetic visual images from the external world, images made possible by only a tiny quotient of the electromagnetic energy that swirls around those images, and around the universe as a whole.
What cuts sweetly through our marrow about the facts I have laid out here is that the inner coils of human vision connect with the inner core of our fiery sun, lending credence to the ancient Greek doctrine that "like is only known by like," i.e., that the eye's "internal light" correlates with the sun's external light, making sight and images possible. In The Republic, Plato claims that the eye is ἡλιοειδῆ, "like the sun." In Timaeus, he says eyes are "light bearing," (φωσφόρα ὄμματα) and in order for us to see something, their inner light, like a fire but milder (φῶς ἥμερον), has to flow out through the eyes (διὰ τῶν ὀμμάτων ῥεῖν), and, along with the sun, co-illuminate the object. To Plato's doctrine of ocular radiation, I would addeidetic or phrenic radiance, for the photons that reach us from the interior of the sun make human ideas possible, above all our ideas of the inner self, whose life begins with, and depends on, its sensory access to the external world, sunlit world.
I would go even further and say that, through its continuous intake of sunlight, our living substance—in both its psychic and organic components—is essentially solar in nature. This spiritual fact—that the most intimate recesses of human selfhood connect with the deepest interior of the Sun—calls out for a name, so I will baptize it our Theian intimacy. Theia was the Greek goddess of light, in particular of the ether, or shining blue of the sky. She was the daughter of Uranus (sky) and Gaia (Earth), and associated with sight. Helios, Selene, and Eos—Sun, Moon, and Dawn—were born of her union with Hyperion, the god of celestial light. Thus every time an extraterrestrial photon reaches us from her domain, we receive the goddess into us. That is fact enough to cut through your marrow and conclude your mortal career.