The Voltage Gate

I've finally had a chance to do some reading. Every October I tend to reach for Bradbury (mostly because of our shared obsession with autumn), and I polished off The Martian Chronicles last night, a depressing but highly entertaining look at how the colonization of a habitable Mars might proceed. The book is really a chronological series of short stories, rich and imaginative, full of his reverence for the unknown and the mysterious, moral plays in a strange world filled with strange beings but ultimately not so different from our own.

In one of the stories, about the fifth expedition to Mars from Earth (the other four were decimated in one way or another by the Martians), one of the explorers goes crazy (sane?) after taking a walk through some of the Martian ruins and starts killing his friends, afraid that they will ruin Mars and all of its beauty as they had ruined Earth. The leader of the expedition, Captain Wilder, has a few moments to talk things over with Spender, the "madman", and through their conversation, Bradbury shares some of his thoughts (from the late 1940s, mind you), about science, art and religion.

Spender says, regarding the Martian civilization:

They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion...

Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life and possible...

They quit trying too hard to destroy everything, to humble everything. They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle. They never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful. It's all simply a matter of degree. An Earth Man thinks: "In that picture, color does not exist, really. A scientist can prove that color is only the way the cells are placed in a certain material to reflect light. Therefore, color is not really an actual part of things I happen to see." A Martian, far cleverer, would say: "This is a fine picture. It came from the hand and the mind of a man inspired. Its idea and its color are from life. This thing is good."

Spender is shot and killed in the end, of course, but not through the head, as the captain insists. The colonization of Mars proceeds as planned.

Bradbury's idealism can be seen as somewhat naive (which, by the way, he readily admits through Wilder's retort, "...the Martian's were quite naive"), but I think he hits the mark on science and art. I don't understand the deep chasm of understanding (and sometimes of respect) between science and art, as I have mentioned at times before. It is sad and discouraging to meet a working scientist or an artist who knows nothing about the other's field, especially since their particular philosophies can lend much to the other's work, beyond the respective creative impulse.

Art can teach us the importance of personal truth and the significance each of us gives to the things in our lives. Before I am strung up for using PT on a science blog, let me clarify: To me, a personal truth is is not dogmatic and conformist (is that a personal truth in itself?). A creationist's personal truth is based on a denial of fact. The kind I am speaking of has nothing to do with fact at all, but of human perspective, an impression or understanding stemming from pure aesthetics or a feeling of connectedness through a shared feeling or event, without a deep understanding of the complexity or systematics. That is what makes an artist or a writer great, their ability to embrace our feeble perspective of nature and make it beautiful, revealing, to connect with the observer on that level.

There is a balance that has to be maintained, however. Science reminds us that, underlying our subjective world of human perspectives and interactions there is a primal existence that is and perhaps ever has been, with or without our species and its impressions. This should not negate the importance of our little cocoon we call civilization, but instead give us a deeper understanding of its place in the natural universe, as one diminutive but sapient collective on a swirling arm of one small galaxy.

Back to PA tonight. I'll have more on this later this week (especially since Heather's other print will be finished by then).