Lila, an Inquiry into Remembrance

I've just finished The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco and this even more than his other novels leaves me rolling it around in my head, probing it as you do a missing tooth.

It's a beautiful book, not just in translation but in that its an illustrated novel, illustrated from the comics, woodcuts and images of western civilisation available around before the War and during the 50's.

It's the interior experience of a man that awakes with no personal memory, no personal history but a complete and encyclopedic knowledge of all the books that have ever passed through his hands, which is pretty much all of Western culture since he's a dealer in rare books.

In his character Yambo's attempt to rediscover a personal history by following the trail of books and comics stored in an abandoned family residence Eco takes us through the popular culture of pre-war Italy how it lived with Fascism and even in the midst of the propaganda of war a curl of the truth of events can be disclosed.

In this process Yambo also learns that he was continually in pursuit of his first and unrequited love, Lila. All the women in his life, and he was not unsuccessful with women remind him of some quality of this unknown girl. Lila disappeared from his life and shortly afterwards died without him knowing and so his search was always going to be fruitless.

At almost the culmination of this recapitulation of his own unknown life he discovers a First Folio Shakespeare in some trunk and has a final stroke. In the midst of this stroke he recovers his personal memory and recapitulates the emotional history of his life. The book ends in darkness, whether a darkeness of sleep prior to waking out of a coma or a darkness of death we do not know. But the Broadway Melody feel of the final part of the book where all of the comic characters make a final and interconnected bow does imply a termination.

The use of the name Lila for his Beatrice, his unrequited and unmet love interested me, it reminded me of Lila by Robert Pirsig where he approaches Quality from degradation and the collision of pleasure and guilt. But Lila in that context was from the Hindu Lila, the play of shadows in the cave of Mara.

So, I'm left toying with the idea that that is what Eco meant that we inhabit our own solipsistic Universe in the end as Yambo does, not knowing what is real and what manufactured by him or that the novel itself is just playing with the ideas of idea.

The alternative is that Lila is Night, which is its Arabic/Phoenician meaning, and Delilah a version of it. Though Yambo is no Samson, even if he is eyeless in Gaza at the end.

Read it and see for yourself. It has lots of pretty pictures if nothing else, and there is a lot else.

The Gravity Mirror

Originally posted February 2003 Apropos of the post yesterday on The Enormously Small Universe.

When we discovered that gravity was more a mirror than a wave and that the Universe was ever so much smaller and knowable that we dared hope things changed in ways no one could ever have considered. That light which seemed to betray our tiny existence had become parochial, timid and bent by the tiniest quiver of matter. That all those stars that seemed to taunt us with their distance and their magic were just the myriad reflections of a few fireworks cast around us.

The Universe became more our size and we seemed all the more important. It was no longer incomprehensible that we were the only beings to know and be conscious. In such a smaller space, God seemed so much more reasonable. The Universe became something we could know and almost touch the edges.

Yes, it is true, the Universe was still enormously large, and with the repeating reflections in the gravity mirror it would always be no more than a guess as to where it began and where it stopped. But we knew now, it did stop. Infinity was still there, still infinite, still present in the mirror of gravity but unimportant.

We did not think though that this realisation of the basis of the Universe would sap us, would stop us from reaching out. There were some, many (and many of them despaired and suicided rather than accept it), in fact that thought the Universe was once as it was and now had been changed, closed. Their desolation at the idea of the infinity of space being removed from them, even when it was patiently explained that the Universe was as it always was, created such unrest that riots and wars and all the misery that humans can bring upon themselves was vented in the name of Freedom to be Small. All that had changed was our perspective.

Now that we were Large, and palpably alone we should have become responsible as well. This though we failed at. We were more interested in the doctrinal implications of stars studded in a velvet wall seen in reflections upon reflections in mirrors and which religon it best described. Science, the once great religon and method was discredited even though it was Science that discovered that gravity was a mirror in the first place.

There were always those that doubted it of course, White Lighters, those that still saw an immense blackness rather than a concave nearness. And they did not stop at simply disagreeing, they applied their Scientific Method and proved and demonstrated such and this was not so and simply a mistake. But the mirror gravity answered them all and when they left and were lost in the mirror themselves they were quickly forgotten.

So, whilst we may not be better people than we were, we might fight the same kinds of wars make the same kind of mistakes we are happier. We know we are important, we are just waiting to find out what it is we are important for.

We need another viewpoint

This is immediately prompted by a discussion on the Today Programme this morning on alternative theories to the Big Bang which meshes quite closely with that solidifying idea of a book which has been hanging around for quite a while now.

The alternatives are fuelled by a couple of things, anomalous observations of the Universe and the longevity of the theory itself. Some of those anomalies pick at people, such as the rate of inflation and the requirement of dark energy (or even darker mass).

Now there's been some statistical work done on the background microwave radiation which has been identified as the remnant, or the shadow of the Big Bang itself and in that statistical work they've seen directional patterns and not random events. Now it could be that its just a random pattern that happens to have some self similarity or it could be saying something about the Big Bang which starts to call into question its happening from that sudden inflation where gravity flipped and instead of sucking, blew.

I'm not sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that the discussion then turned into the nature of the scientific method rather than more detail about the findings but I can't ask for too much even of the Today Programme. It did though underline the difference between the usages of the word belief that people have.

Very often that word gets used in entirely different ways to prove whatever those of religious belief wish to prove. The Evolution versus Creation or Idiot Design or whatever. Because scientists believe a theory religonists treat that as the same kind of faith as they have in their God and religon. Whereas, the scientist uses it as a measure of their skepticism and whilst a religonist shrinks or is fearful from having their belief lost or torn down (or even criticised), the scientist welcomes attacks on whatever the theory is. If the attack succeeds, belief isn't lost, knowledge is gained and that replacing theory will itself be tested.

That digression over with i'll go back to the itch the radio piece gave me. All of the cosmological theories we have we've created even though we're in a single relative position. All the star light and electro magnetic energy that comes to us comes to just our single large yet in relative terms sub-atomic point of view. Even so we have discovered marvels of theoretical and practical knowledge.

The Greeks took the geometry of the two dimensional figure and projected a cosmic geometry that was only skewed because of the seeming centredness of our viewpoint, but even then there were those at the time that considered the Earth as a satellite and not the centre.

Newton also used geometry and then the calculus of geometry to show how the inverse square worked to show the practical effect of gravity, even if the why was beyond him (and us).

Einstein used a thought experiment to open up the non centred view of the Universe and then logically derived the Energy Mass and the velocity of the propogation of energy equations which are the bedrock of physics now.

Now we use the massive collectors of data, Hubble, the land based observatories and increasing use of different ranges of bandwidth in the electromagnetic spectrum and with all the mass of data the Universe is looking more complex and more complicated (two related but differing states), and we're using ever more sophisticated statistical modelling tools to just get a grasp of the data.

But in this booming and buzzing confusion we know that there is still not enough data to account for how the Universe appears to be. Not without adding in vastly more unknown stuff, black, invisible stuff, invisible not only to light but all radiation, gravitically null or negative yet existent.

So, here to my theory, my fictional theory admittedly, of the Enormously Small Universe.

The Enormously Small Universe still begins with the Big Bang, it still inflates and gravity still inverts its sign, it probably still needs its 11 dimensions to stay together.

But, the theory relies upon the observations of someone, and then many someones, realising that there were repetitive patterns in the night sky. That if you take such and such a section and map it and then turn in perspective to another section of sky you will see the same pattern but slightly diminished in magnitude (or increased) and possibly red shifted as if it were so much further away.

And the spark, the intuition, is that they were not separate sources, not individual and remote Galaxies and continents of Galaxies but the same source, the same Galaxy and that the perspective of our observation of the Universe is much the same as one at the end of a Hall of Mirrors where a few lights are placed here, there and over there and at the far end of the Hall there you are receiving the manifold reflections, reflected upon another and then again and again and so be dazzled in the numerous lights.

Of course in the real Universe there are still many, many Galaxies but far fewer than the seeming infinite amount we see as we look further and deeper into space.

How to test such a theory? Well most obviously if one sent a friend to walk into the Hall to navigate around the mirrors their enumerations of the light and their position would change and in reporting that change the truth would become clear, even though the Hall was still drenched in the light.

Similarly in order to know whether our observations are unavoidably biased to the point of leading us into error because we make those observations from our singular point of view we need to find another suitably different point of view. Then we can test the Universe more sensibly and until we can arrange our laboratory to properly test and re-test we can not claim to be a successfully scientific species.

But then this is fiction of course.