Brian Clegg's "Before the Big Bang": Book Review

Clegg combines a history of myth ("a story with a purpose") and science as they struggle to come to terms with creation. His lively narrative strives by frequent metaphor and short chapters to convey an incredibly difficult topic. I never thought I'd be able to understand such astrophysical speculation based on quantum theory and thought-experiments, but thanks to Clegg's clarity, I could, more or less.

Parts of this study will inevitably cause the most nimble mind to quail, given models based on our universe being a 2-d holographic projection into 3-d for us to observe, or a "bit-it" parallel that imagines information itself becoming the building blocks of a universe constructed as we learn to conceive it, or one that is a "multiple universe" one based on the "choices" that a light wave may "make" as we watch it and try to measure it. Not to be confused with multiverses!

That Clegg shows us how this all came to be in the minds of astronomers over the centuries, especially most recently as satellites and telescopes begin to combine with CERN to hint at the previously unimaginable, is an achievement. He tells in a dozen relatively snappy chapters the pre-history of the theories that led to the Big Bang, and then the fudge-factor of lambda added by Einstein as he resisted the quantum mechanics that led to the breakthroughs that eventually eroded the Steady State Fred Hoyle theory in favor of the Big Bang.

Yet, the holes punched in to this model by math and logic, for some astronomers, have then whittled away even this paradigm. "Groundhog Universes" along the Big Crumple, the dodahecadron-shaped possibility of a universe that eludes our whole perception due to our inability to "see" some of its directions, may indicate Clegg's favorite model's replacement of the Big Bang with the Steinhardt-Turok "bouncing branes" set-up. See more about this elsewhere, but this may show another universe a millimeter away from ours with enough ripples in the space-time fabric to allow for gravitational anamolies and a sort of mirror-pattern that shows perhaps a universe previous to the creation of our own.

Such ideas are hard to sum up, but Clegg does his best. This book may often retell the familiar and he has written often on the history of astronomy; he may repeat much, taking about two-thirds of the book to get to where I figured, with the Big Crumple, he'd have arrived far earlier, but much ground for him is smoothed out and worked over before he gets to the latest suppositions. This does slow the book down markedly, but aimed at non-scientists such as myself, such elaboration may be necessary given the immense difficulty of laying out in comprehensible terms (no formulae here) the research of experts.

I do think he gave short shrift to Buddhist cosmological conceptions early on when dismissing these as possible patterns of early thinkers, and he could have also slowed down to dig deeper into the plasma explanations that account for a significant foundation for the multi-dimensional membranes. And, I aver that Clegg needed to flesh out the "universe in a black hole" theory more fully; some of his major points get not lost in the cosmic shuffle of "what-ifs," but they do flash by for the less-skilled layman's eye rather quickly and can be missed too easily.

All in all, a lively primer that as a non-scientist I found answered many of my questions about a question that always fascinated me, and that I did not know had so many analogues. Others more versed in astrophysics may well contend with the devils in the details; to me on the outside, I think Clegg keeps his own biases clear and allows for the chance that as with all scientific theories, nobody can cling to one explanation for such a vast and nearly unprovable subject. The sheer headiness of the glimmer that we can see past our own universe's beginnings is itself cause for the most rarified delight. Clegg keeps his sense of humor, his balance between rigor and skepticism, and his own sense of wonder shows. I recommend this book and thank him for his considerable efforts. (Amazon US 8/09)

Before the Big Bang: "ex nihilo" or eternal, cyclical Void?

John Milton opposed the "ex nihilo" theory; recently two cosmologists advance an "ekpyrotic" or cyclical model of our universe that's always been imploding and expanding. No Creator, no anthropic principle that sets us up as evolved by the Divine to marvel at His Universe, and no worries about how time or space began. Believers, such as Milton then or a few now, may find such a theory more compatible with assumptions that nothing could emanate from nothing, even by an Almighty, and that perhaps rather than a God who made us so we could praise His Creation and find our fulfillment within this "ex nihilo" universe, we may be living and dying in an endless circle that every few trillion years also ends and begins, eternally. Akin, of course, more to conventionally Eastern swirls rather than Western linear directives.

I find such speculations fascinating, and while no physicist, I've long struggled through studies on the topic of origins. I also find here intersections with theology instructive; Gerald Schroeder plotted in his 1991 "Genesis & the Big Bang" a secular six-days-as-stages over eons equivalent overlay for the six-day creation. He combined the biblical languages and Torah with science in a way that I suspect few scholars since, say, Milton, may have been able to do, and Milton for all his erudition never saw the Hubble Space Telescope or quantum theory. Still, as Milton found himself in trouble once again for his refusal to accept "ex nihilo," and many skeptics as well as most scientists presumably by definition would eschew the miraculous allied with even the Omnipotent Prime Mover and First Cause, methods that try to align our soul's yearnings with our mind's cautions seem scarce when it comes to outlasting passing fancies, theological explanations ignorant of pre-Copernican let alone Planck constructs, uncertainty principles, and cosmological advances.

Contrarily, the neo-atheists Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins dutifully deny any marriage of science to its former queen of knowledge, theology. They often dismiss any good religious adherents have accomplished; they insist that secular ideals could inspire similar ethics free of guilt, oppression, or coercion. Having dethroned theology after the Middle Ages, rationalists refuse to reconcile cosmological models with "sky-god" origin myths.

The Talmud claims: "God roams among 18,000 worlds." I know Kabbalah interpreters have dabbled with such reconciliations now, with the Ein Sof and the unknowable essence beyond divine emanations, and talk of light and shattered vessels and recovered fragments of glimmer providing tantalizing hints. Hints that make me wonder if even scientifically ignorant shepherds and desert-dwelling scribes (much derided by Hitchens and Dawkins) inherited Wordsworthian or Neo-Platonic types of yearnings that point, as with Eden and Eve, back tens of thousands of years to some fundamental insight instilled in humans at the dawn of self-consciousness that tells, somehow, where we came from and how our world burst into being. Yet, you can see by such imagination, that I fall here from empiricism back into supposition.

Yet, these ambitious explanations trying to reconcile heartfelt yearnings of divine reunion for a fallen creation or a sundered humanity with the constants of numbers may seem, as always in our standoff between the Enlightenment of Reason and the Enlightenment of the Soul, doomed to be apart. We find in the tension between Collins and Dawkins our own split selves. It's a psychomachia. We're divided within our psyche, two partners as ornery and as yoked as our body and spirit, our heart vs. our mind. I note in passing: Stephen Unwin's book "The Probability of God" uses five Bayesian mathematical models to arrive at apparently 67%!

I reviewed Francis Collins' "The Language of God," on Amazon US along with those four neo-atheists, and found his assertion that in DNA coils a divine plan far less persuasive than the latter quartet's rejoinders; I've kept a very open mind towards all in this perpetual disputation. Atheists who remind us how in God's plan we have "kluges" or jerry-built inelegant solutions to biological problems a half-baked rather than gourmet level of care raise objections that I have not found matched by compelling deist rejoinders. "Mysterious Ways" may work for a U2 title, but for a theodicy, I find the tune grates on my own jutting, whorlish, curiously evolved ears.

I find the anthropic fallback that we cannot have been created with love and wonder unless a Creator meant us to share His qualities with a grateful and co-dependent congregation of us as believers inspiring, but not persuasive. Much as I sympathize with Teilhard de Chardin's mystical culmination of a singularity that brings into the noosphere the union of created with Creator, even that Jesuit paleontologist's splendid vision may not nudge me logically towards a position closer to theologians. My heart may still move in the direction of the faithful, eager for proof of belief, but my brain, as predictably, follows my training to not take the Bible as a history book, or a scriptural story as proof-text for a scientific quest for elusive truth.

Tony Bailie's ""Zen & the Art of Astrophysics" post June 2, 2009 alerted me to "Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang" by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok. (I saw in upcoming summer books another from Brian Clegg, "Before the Big Bang," which excites me!) Bailie and I agree that in such encounters of the spirit and the concrete, the mathematical and the speculative, we may be groping towards a Unified Theory That Explains It All, or sort of, given our obtuseness and ignorance about what Beckett belittled as "always the big questions," and our tiresome "big answers." Perhaps we are meant to languish in culpable ignorance, but those who insist that prelapsarian myths need not keep us away from the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge appear, in science if not always in schools or houses of the holy, to prove otherwise.

Steinhardt and Turok propose the cyclical model as an alternative that may solve what the Big Bang paradigm accepted for the last half-century has not been able to figure out. By removing the problem of accounting for a start or finish, they sidestep the Big Bang expanding forever[***] or collapsing into One Big Crunch. Rather, in a flash, literally, every few eons, it ends and begins again. Their cyclical model may also account better for what's been elaborated since the acceptance of the Big Bang-- such as gravitational fields, dispersion of even material in less than a nanosecond after the Bang across the universe all at once, string theory, and why dark matter and dark energy seem to make up most of our universe.

From the nineteen reviewers at Amazon US, Steve Koss (1/3/08) sums up this 2007 book best:

In a book that challenges its readers' scientific capacity while remaining within a layman's grasp, Steinhardt and Turok eschew the Big Bang singularity for what they term an ekpyrotic or cyclic model. Derived from underlying principles of advanced string theory, they posit our universe as a three-dimensional brane that co-exists with another, mostly parallel brane of more or less equal size. The two branes are separated along an unseen fourth dimension, although the distance of this separation is small and alone among all known physical forces, only gravity can travel this fourth dimension and exert an attractive force between the branes. The authors use this model to posit a trillion-year process in which the branes collide and then separate to their maximum distance apart. During the collision, a birth process for both universes takes place in a manner that looks like the Big Bang. Radiation gradually gives way to matter, allowing stars and galaxies to form, until finally dark matter exerts itself and accelerates the universes' growth and spreads out the galaxies. The branes then become increasingly flat and parallel (as opposed to having been wrinkled but not intersecting as a result of their last collision), allowing the interbrane (gravitational) force between them to begin pulling them back together for another collision.

I've been making a very slow progress in a work similar to Tony's immersion in "Endless Universe" alongside a book on Zen by a pioneering popularizer of Buddhism in Britain, Christmas Humphreys. With a few dense pages at a time when I have no distractions, almost as if I meditate, I'm facing "Beckett & Zen" by Paul Foster, a formidably challenging work on two immensely difficult conceptions, one from that fearlessly inquisitive but honestly unbelieving writer, one from millennia of authors known and unknown also distinguished for their refusal to speak but of the ultimately Unnam[e]able, of our fragile place in this enigmatically silent universe.

Foster borrows the image employed by the once-fashionable other British pioneering popularizer of Buddhism, Alan Watts, who suggests that we are like two faces on opposite sides of a coin, subject-object attempting to figure each other out. Stuck in this binary opposition, the "coin's faces" wind up failing to realize the thickness, the whatness, the "quidditas" of the coin's hidden dimension. (This term, borrowed from Aristotle's Greek, was employed by Scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. A salutary reminder to even the neo-atheists that we cherish knowledge wherever it rests, under whatever guise, on whichever shelf.)

This third, unseen dimension for Watts (if not Beckett's searcher, dim-bulb as we all are "Watt") equally runs in both-- and permeates all-- directions inside the coin to unite its two sides. The two sides do not know of another way out; locked side-by-side but on opposite ends, they lack understanding of unseen unity. A new perspective extends the coin's definition beyond obverse-reverse dichotomies. This awakening may then truly join us to what we live within but we mistake as without.

Foster tackles the definition of the Void, and corrects earlier Beckett critics who misunderstood this notionless notion as if synonymous with nihilism. A Zen practitioner, Foster argues that the Void nears more Nirvana or better, what's beyond that extinguishment of categories or oppositions that we can conjure up from our Cartesian dilemma, this subject-object divide that traps us in "samsara" and prevents us from attaining awakening into "samadhi" that in Buddhist philosophy will eventually pull the disciplined and undeluded seeker into realization of release from our body-mind problem. Liberation that allows neither God nor universe, self nor soul. Perhaps an indescribable realm, but we are scared because we stay ignorant, small, and frail. Beckett's terrain crawls with stammering, cowed figures.

I wonder, then how the Void that Foster finds Beckett and his characters wrestling with-- Jacob in an endless night battle with his assailant angel, dawn breaking not with deliverance but death-- fits into this cyclical universal model? The place that we may "know" or posit that we cannot grasp. It's in this seeking that a Buddhist tries to reach the breakthrough beyond time and space, mind or body. Perhaps this can be an analogy dimly echoing this Big Splat, this spiralling and colliding universal, eternal dance of not the spheres but these ethereal planes, these branes?

The other universe, the other brane near our own universe that by "quidditas" or whatness lies nearly at our own point of entry but which has been pulled apart from us by our own incomprehension or inarticulation to utter it and to frame in words what cannot be perceived let alone conceived within language. Out of this encounter we cannot witness for in it lies our own formation and annihilation, we can't help but look back and wonder where we came from. This irreconciliable search for our meaning, our purpose, our existence fits neatly with Beckett's own bold if quixotic quest, to explore what we cannot explain but what we're compelled to attain. That is, what makes us human inside impels us to try to escape our human limitations.

Photo: Only 450 light years away, this planetary nebula is known as NGC 7293, or the "Helix Nebula." This 'eye in the sky' provides an anthropomorphic, or perhaps theomorphic, image to gaze back at. Meister Eckhardt mystically mused over a century before Copernicus: "The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love."-- Sermon IV

[***]P.S. For the Big Fade, see Dennis Overbye, 6/3/08, NY Times. "Dark, Perhaps Forever."

Lawrence Krauss' "A Universe From Nothing": Book Review

I waited eight months for this from the library: was it worth it? Krauss handles the physics for poets approach with expected results--I assume if Ian McEwan provides the top-of-title cover blurb and Richard Dawkins the pithy and profound afterward, that Krauss aims at a general audience. It's how we came to know about the Big Bang, to "weigh the mass of the visible universe" against what we know now as nearly 30% dark matter and 70% dark energy, and how cosmic background radiation proves the expansion of our universe, along what appear to be "flat" directions for light, rather than a closed or curved model. 

Featuring early on Fr. Georges Lemaitre--whose theories helped establish the Big Bang, along with Einstein, Paul Dirac, and the familiar Copenhagen crowd who discovered quantum physics provides a broader survey than some other books. Krauss takes on the anthropic principle that we are in the universe we were meant to appreciate, and he accepts the limits of what we can know even as he insists that there's no way other than the Big Bang, the flat universe (at least for now), and verifiable particle physics to document the truth. 

Despite his subtitle "Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing," rather than ask "why" as that implies a purpose, we need to accept "how" we and all came into being. Nothingness itself, as Aristotle and Aquinas could not realize, contains potential for power, for energy, for creation. As with snowflakes and rainbows, so with all of energy and matter, seen or unseen, it's not a miracle. Like it or not, this is the universe we're faced with. 

He presents more thoroughly why the hot and cold spots found in background radiation helped measure the age of the universe to 13.72 billion years, and why the lumps resulted in "quantum nothingness" (98) full of "virtual particles" (69) that thanks to inflation inherent in quantum physics--this verifiable to one part in a billion!--created all we see and are. No First Cause needed. Out of random fluctuations, we inhabit the visible universe. 

This universe, ironically, now exists in a perfect phase for analysis. It's expanded enough to measure, but not enough to lose sight of the other galaxies. Eventually, this will change, and they all will recede, leaving far-future astrophysicists unable to outrun light, and to conjecture that they live--as was thought a century ago by earthlings--in a stable galaxy that spontaneously appeared, surrounded by blackness. In the last forty pages, Krauss' emotion infuses the science movingly. 

He concludes with a nod to the decay into negative energy of this universe. It will collapse into itself again, he conjectures, inward to a point returning to the "quantum haze" (180) which birthed us. Understandably, Dawkins reiterates in a short afterword the "devastating" end to our existential tale.

But, Krauss as a popularizer now and then fumbles. A cameo by Steven Pinker with an analogy to a God bound or not by condoning rape and murder appears off-topic, and even there, why not cite Scripture when Yahweh called for such violence against His enemies? This would have tied together the idea Krauss considers of whether or not the laws of nature are bound by themselves. 

The concept Adam Riess found of a "cosmic jerk" that accounts for about five billion years ago the shift from matter accelerating to empty space for energy density to accelerate and not decelerate needed elaboration. Krauss slips off into Feynman sums without sufficient guidance for a lay reader, whereas Hawking + Leonard Mlodinow's "The Grand Design" explained this better. Similarly, Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos" delved far more deeply into string theory, understandably. (For a philosophical twist, see Jim Holt's new "Why Does the World Exist?" These titles reviewed by me July 2012.) Even if Krauss suspects some of M-theory, not even labeling it here appears odd indeed. 

I expected more than an aside to branes, but Brian Clegg's "Before the Big Bang" is excellent on this, and the Big Splat: a conjecture Krauss never mentions. He does discuss multiverses but lacks enthusiasm for this model; I get the impression he finds it a cop-out, lacking (inevitably, perhaps?) the proof of his Big Bang and open universe design. John Gribben's elegant study "In Search of the Multiverse" is recommended for those needing to know more.

The book's compact, far more than, say, Greene, and this may or may not prove as a recommendation depending on how much you want to learn. As a layman, I liked best its attention--and the addition of true feeling--to the end of the universe. Although I would have appreciated a reading list, and some charts or illustrations unevenly elucidated his sometimes recondite arguments, I did learn more about cosmic expansion and our universal fate. For, Krauss ends this short book sadly. If string theory holds, our universe being unstable by nature, it will fade away and blink out as suddenly as it sparked.

(Amazon US 8-19-12; P.S. I think this is the most complete of the versions of a 2009 video that convinced Krauss to put its gist into the first 2/3 of his book, before he peers into the future of the universe for his final stretch.)

Credo quia absurdum?

What do I believe? I was asked this after a slew of reviews. As a scholar I tend to analyze and cite, rather than expound on my personal credo.

Tertullian, an early Christian philosopher, is often wrongly cited; "Credo quia absurdum is, of course, a misquote. Tertullian's words are credibile est, quia ineptum est (De carne Christi 5.4)." Robert Sider argues this in "Credo Quia Absurdum?". But I promised no footnotes, so here I cannot get past my own blog entry's title's verification. My training runs deep.

And that's the point. It's hard for an academically trained type; Tertullian or me, we face the same challenge. It's credible because it's inept, that is, defying belief. The absurd becomes the basis for our faith, our attribution to a force beyond our reason or understanding that we then trust, that we accept as worthy of our confidence as the concrete evidence that surrounds us.

My melange of denominated tendencies begins with cradle Catholicism from an Irish-American upbringing still strict enough to have imprinted itself upon me deeply despite a post-Vatican II childhood, as the very first generation who came of age after the Latin Mass and Baltimore Catechism (although my parents duly bought me a copy whose illustrations I still recall vividly). By college, I had already begun drifting away, although difficulties during grad school brought me into an ambivalent dance of moving closer and then stepping back from the Church. By the time my wife and I established our relationship, I'd begun shifting first through Eastern Catholicism-- for its theological perception of God as emanations we could grasp but not His essence intrigued me-- and then, intersecting with our realization that a liberal form of Judaism might allow us a shared space within which to raise a family, into the faith that she was claimed by as a member even if she grew up with but a shaky grasp of its tenets.

For a while, this space supported us. Both parental pairs regarded by mixed bemusement or subtle hostility our decision. But, as my wife noted in a conversation with a friend that I half-overheard about a year ago, ultimately a more dogmatic approach "didn't take" with our kids and us. We tend, and I probably bear the most credit or blame, towards skepticism. If I was not around I reckon my wife and our sons would have grown up firmer in their Judaism, but who knows? My dissenting mindset mixes with theirs and it half-formed them, and half-differs from hers.

We live in an environment where hardly any of their classmates from the JCC had two Jewish parents, and while many of their classmates continue to be my sons' friends-- as had been predicted by their principal the first day we visited the Silverlake-Los Feliz JCC-- these diverse boys and girls reflect the reality of a diverse Los Angeles outside the enclaves in the Valley or Westside where one can surround one's family with camps, schools, shul, and friends who stick to a Jewish way of life.

Anyone thinking that "Yiddishkeit" or delis or comedy alone can keep a Jewish heart alive should note "Seinfeld" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as portents-- not only of their creators' wishes to "pass" in Hollywood, but of a doddering nod to trust in schtick and stand-up as reliable indicators of Jewish identity. Contrast this with assimilation, intermarriage and compromise that American Jews now accept, outside of the Orthodox, as inevitable. Watch a Judd Apatow film where the schlub desires the blonde; that director's wife mirrors what we see projected. Conversion and blended families, secularization and modification, will mark whatever Judaism marks my sons, with their surnames, as a different breed if from the same tribe within. This transformation will alter whomever chooses to identify with Judaism in a diasporic community far far different than any other in the three-thousand years of the people's history.

I never spoke more than a few sentences to a Jewish classmate until I entered my M.A. program. I knew nearly no Protestants, until then, also. Just as I was raised in a totally Catholic milieu, who can say if such an immersion will ensure continuity in a nation where 44% of us "switch" from our childhood or ancestral faith, or lack of, nowadays? Soon, you will, for the first time in a long time, likely not "tell" who's a Jew by their name, their appearance, or at least part of their genealogy. New sitcoms may be pitched on just such a premise; "Bridget Loves Bernie" no longer as instant joke?

Of course, Catholics have no worries about losing numbers, while Jews do. This places on us a low-level guilt, for we wonder if we're betraying a promise, an obligation laid on us by my choice to follow my wife into Judaism, and our commitment to guide our sons. Yet, and this sums up my own attitude, I argue that imposing rigidity will not lock them into a "Torah-true" path anyway. It may drive them towards a desperate flight from a faith or a practice. I'd rather sleep more soundly knowing they've been exposed to what they are within Judaism, that they have the basic orientation inside upon which they may test moral and spiritual guidance, and they have a confidence that they can continue to seek their fulfillment.

My wife blogs often about her own struggles with her soul's direction, within an attenuated ancestral allegiance that attracts her often but also daunts her. Writing the past year to three Jewish prisoners, all of whom grew up in a similar Californian setting where no ties to the ancient practices strongly bound their families to the life they'd left behind in moving here, she's had to confront her own questions. Meanwhile, she responds to theirs about a faith that it turns out they all clutch tiny fragments of, as they try to fit their pieces within the puzzle.

For me, I stand at more of a distance from any genetic bond. What's pulled me in, of course, has been my Irish identification. Catholicism by definition enters this, even if one is a Protestant (or in one case we know, a beloved, cranky, Belfast-bred Jew). Yet, so does the Celtic, and then pagan, foundation, if one so deep and so broken by 1500 years post-Patrick that (as I've written lately) one can dimly glimpse and not grab securely what remains after so long a Christian overshadow.

They say the Celts did not believe so much in omnipotent gods but more powerful humans who, euhemerized (great word), were transformed into deities. The supernatural intervention beloved of a "deus ex machina" Greek's frequently lacking in the Ulster Cycle. Heaven's downplayed, but life's fleeting. I must have cottoned on to this early in my childhood reading, somehow. I'd enter the little of nature I could and there I'd sense a presence lacking in a man-made sanctuary-- especially after Vatican II denuded so many altars and snuffed out their candles. Stars still comfort and terrify me equally, or awe-fully. If you ask me I might prevaricate as a Ph.D., but inside, I can attest that I feel an energy latent, if not for rational me manifested fully due to my intellectual caution, within creation.

I looked up "panentheistic" to check my recall of this term the other day. A pantheist finds "God is nature." A panentheist holds that "God is in the Whole." A subtle distinction, but the point being that the latter concept allows a Whole beyond a deity (or deities) manifested within only the organic or visible realms.

A universe or multiverse that precedes or takes in a Creator, even. Brian Clegg's book "Before the Big Bang," which entered my thoughts up in Big Sur where I reviewed it last August, suggests that before the blast that inflated our horizons, there may be dim echoes and trace elements of a recurring pattern, branes colliding, background radiation persisting, that each Big Bang all but obliterates, worlds with end, amen. This end-runs around Anselm's Ontological Principle, and shows that we can have indeed posit a God greater than than we can conceive, if it's a Force that stands outside the universe and allows the First Cause creating "ex nihilo" to be itself inconsistent from what we perceive-- even if we can never prove this to convince a medieval theologian-- as a scientifically postulated space that can, after all and after all ends, never be created... since it has always existed.

This aligned neatly for me with a Buddhist concept. I noted in my blog-Amazon US review of Clegg how he elides over this connection. The recurring model, rather than chronologically Big Bang-> endless expansion theory or the Big Bang-Big Crunch start-stop alternative, fits for me better. It may defy Anselm's thousand-year-old logic, but he did not live in a world of satellites. Clegg predicts that we soon may know much more with the new telescopes we're sending up. Buddhism, as the Dalai Lama has reminded us, if it clashes with scientific proof, would cede a contested doctrine to reason. It does not fear progress. (I've written a lot about Buddhism as a blog keyword search shows, so I will be brief.) I like its lack of digging in and insisting that it alone holds the right way towards salvation. Instead of theistic reward, it leads to inner enlightenment-- a telling distinction. For a Buddhist, the impermanence that the Big Bang's recursive and brane theories suggest may not threaten a belief, but may confirm its ancient message that all things must pass.

Even if the Quiet Beatle was a Hindu; my other favorite term lately's "henotheist": one can believe in one deity while not denying the efficacy of others. Tolerance and its lack among many believers and deniers alike wearies me. Sin happens when we fail to better ourselves and others, not when a god or Santa marks a demerit. Salvation comes when we welcome a messiah to this world, even as atheists or gentiles, when we learn to get along. That's about it for my eschatology these post-purgatorial days.

If we move away from intolerant monotheism, for here my discomfort may lie with my formative mindset, what's next? I've often referred since taking the BeliefNet.com quiz about my religious affiliation vis-a-vis double 100% scores as Mahayana Buddhist & Neo-Pagan. These two don't really match, on the other hand, so they may register I suspect my past study with my ongoing research-- combined with personal reflection-- on Western adaptations of Buddhism. This overlaps Celtic sympathies that may have re-emerged, filtered through an inbred leaning that my childhood may have deeply embedded within me. Despite habitual Catholicism, which tied for last place at 13% in that quiz. Still, another quiz about my spiritual attitudes put me as a Straddler, smack between the observances of more conventional worship and the freer floating thinking and not-thinking akin to a restless seeker such as me.

Added to this, or showing my lack of grounding, another test I took pegged me as an Agnostic-Atheist. The conflation of these terms irritates me, and an exchange with the head of "Atheists United" ticked me off. For 2/3 of the article she presented herself as an atheist. Then this leader defined herself as really an agnostic, to me a related but fundamentally very different philosophy. (No more footnotes but it was Bobbie Kirkhart interviewed by Patt Morrison in the L.A. Times on 12 Dec. 2009.)

That quiz asked me and I confirmed that "God can neither be proven or disproven." For me, a truly agnostic admission. My wife disagrees. She sees God's presence all around her. I have wandered far from this comfort although I grew up with this view. But perhaps I sense it in the fleeting moments of a bird that alights on a branch, or a desert sunrise-- if more than in the maggot that crawls in dog crap or the cancer that kills a third of us. My romantic soul battles here with my pessimistic mind. I find it difficult to attribute a unicorn-and-rainbow goodness to our world when within it, disease and decay also linger, on a planet where we labor in vain to eradicate killers in cells. Remove man, take away incarnation, get rid of revelation, tear up inspired scripture, and still you'd have predators, germs, microbes, and slaughter, far as I can tell. We place over this a storyline of salvation and transcendence, but I suspect it for its wish-fulfillment. We need happy endings; that's why we call them fiction, to paraphrase somehow Oscar Wilde.

Still, I wrote a Master's paper on Tolkien's "eucastrophe," his idea that the Gospel was the first myth that came true. I admire this argument, and once I agreed with it. My sympathies persist, and my medievalist preparation imbued me with an appreciation and respect for this ideal even as my own life's trajectory moved me past it, for as I wrote my dissertation, I found my own beliefs changing.

So, I cannot-- as those quiz results prove-- stay in one checked denominational box. I lack confidence that a loving god or pantheon guides us. After we die all I can say is that we will return to whatever unknowable, unfathomable, and/or non-existent mystery preceded our conception. I aver that it's impossible to one way or the other confirm anything more. My decade working on a dissertation on "the idea of purgatory in Middle English Literature" attests to my interest in the topic, even if the medievals failed to convert me to their pieties. The condition of the soul before it came into a body, as some Neo-Platonic concoction, has for as long as I can remember intrigued me: it was the first philosophical or theological question I formulated as a precocious lad already troubled by mortality and my soul's fate.

In my family tree, around 350 CE, there's a clan ancestor that my great-grandmother as a Connellan from Roscommon may trace her line to. Typically arcane genealogical explorations led me to this fellow, "Ono," who was a Druid. Combine that with the East Mayo "tinker" that then birthed the woman who was my maternal grandmother and you get suggestive, if again romanticized naturally, DNA traces that for a guy like me, stuck in the city, still spark faint but delightful imaginings. I've always loved "origin myths." The ways we explain how we got from way back to now intrigue me. I suppose my own search for faith combines with my own turn back to Ireland.

My teacher, soon to become an ex-nun, freshman year at my distantly-Jesuit-run university, told me I was a Pelagian. My lack of confidence in original sin as staining us, and my trust that the soul unaided by an infusion of grace could attain salvation, set me at odds with orthodoxy. Yet, I learned that this was a decidedly Celtic heresy, and similar misgivings that such as Anselm would have brought from his Italy to Canterbury about such as John Scotus Eriugena's avowal of a primitive creation spirituality, a sort of panentheism, may betray my own genetic theology.

"Magic" may be denigrated or cheapened now, but I suggest in its expression of the inexplicable delight and the uncanny omen it's but too-loose a term for what we cannot account for. A nagging, sense-defying sixth sense that beyond our intellect another level of action, and perhaps meaning, persists: I can live with this. I've always felt that energies move around us. We may tap into them for good or evil purposes. I betray my own naivete or my core creed. Where they come from and where they go I may lack an ability to tell, for I may accede to them without witnessing them myself. But, today at least, absurd as it may be, that's what I might believe.

Image: "Godless Columbia: Terminology FAQ"

"Beckett, Buddhism, and the Void"

Neatly inscribed, as if in a handwriting-imitative font in its precision, at the back of a secondhand copy of Richard Seaver’s  I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader, I found this meditation:

In each moment there is a question, made up of smaller questions, made up of smaller sub-questions, divided by both the senses and by experience, held together by emotion, logic, reason...Herein lies the playground of the mind, to seek understanding, weighing each answer according to its source, and only by the receipt of information are these moments connected. If by chance the answers aren't enough, or the questions not right, there is no space between then and now, and certainly no time to tell the difference. There is only repetition. Question everything. Experience the best of everything. Forget the questions and remember how you asked them.

Seaver, Beckett's editor, provided a reminiscence. It concludes:

For in his dimming landscape, peopled with clowns and misfits, has-beens and ne'er-do-wells, the malformed and the deformed, those on the threshold of death or already on the other side (‘I don't remember when I died’), he has created a stark world far different from our own, hardly recognizable, a nether world, a purgatory, or perhaps Antepurgatory, having nothing whatsoever to do with us.

Our world. (xlv)

Wherever it originated, that (for me) anonymous statement alongside these editorial comments reminded me of Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. This former Zen and Tibetan monk clears clutter around Buddha, karma, rebirth, gurus, and temples. He favors a therapeutic approach akin to a psychologist in his non-denominational, non-theistic guidance. He admits we-- as with the Buddha-- do not know what happened or will happen regarding our place in the universe.

He leaves it at that. He pushes us past sterility, ritual, and codified belief into a mature, democratic, and communally responsible morality that renews what has frozen into mantra, temple, and guru. He proposes agnostic confrontation rather than consolation, derived not from salvation or reward but existential honesty. How do we go on when we feel we can't go on? How long, O Lord, how long, as the Psalmist cried out —long before Godot?

Batchelor's brief but rich treatise can inform anyone. I think secular and atheist readers might benefit most. (I note his newest book — out last month — titled Confession of a Buddhist Atheist trumpets a blurb by Christopher Hitchens; this may indicate Batchelor’s desire to leap on a neo-atheist bandwagon waving a non-theist prayer flag.) In a section on ‘emptiness’, that fundamental dharma teaching, he tells us how:

much of the time we fail to register what is happening here and now. We are reliving an edited version of the past, planning an uncertain future, or indulging in being elsewhere. Or running on automatic pilot, without being conscious at all.

And instead of a coherent personality that stretches back into an unbroken line to a first memory and looks forward to an indefinite future, we discover a self ridden with gaps and ambiguities. Who ‘I am’ appears coherent only because of the monologue we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads. (24)

He explains that we are less the hero of a B-movie starring ourselves but as ‘more akin to the complex and ambiguous characters who emerge, develop, and suffer across the pages of a novel. There is nothing thing like about me at all. I am more like an unfolding narrative’. (82) Becoming aware of this impels us towards an ‘ethics of empathy’, refusing to cling to habits and routines. We cannot hold on to our ego to sustain our fragile and evanescent self; rather, Batchelor urges: ‘Instead of taking ourselves so seriously, we discover the playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before’. (83)

‘The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego. We can put into words only the question it poses. And then let go, listen, and wait’. (99) This reminds me of moments in Shakespeare or Beckett, this bold staring down of ‘shunyata’, ‘emptiness’ that we cannot define satisfactorily for its own notion ‘falls prey to the very habit of mind it was intended to undermine.’ (81)

Whether in an article I wrote earlier in this decade on Beckett’s purgatories and liminality, a happenstance scrawl in a secondhand book, or my ‘nightstand Buddhist’ study, I try to make sense out of my own monologues, waking and dreaming. They vanish. But scripts remain, as Seaver, Batchelor, Beckett, and even the Buddha know, ‘dramaticules’ enacted by others after we die and head towards whatever ‘unnameable’ emptiness will embrace us again.

While studying Batchelor, I wondered about Beckett’s affinity, if any, with Buddhism. John Calder, Beckett’s publisher and friend, considers the influence upon Beckett’s early work by a Belgian follower of Descartes, Arnold Geulincx. Cited in Murphy, the source of the first words spoken in Waiting for Godot, ‘rien a faire’ or ‘nothing to be done’, Geulincx proposed a proto-meditative reaction. (4) Calder stresses Beckett’s youthful quest for truth within meditative philosophy rather than dogmatic theology. Christian mystics such as Geulincx, Calder suggests, edge near Buddhism ‘particularly in the denigration or merging of the individual self into the whole nature of the cosmos’. (5) Calder posits Murphy seeking nirvana as ‘Beckett’s most Buddhist creation’, yet he does not elaborate. Nor does Beckett himself on the influence of dharma.

Three massive biographies, by Deirdre Bair, Anthony Cronin, and James Knowlson, make no mention of Buddhism within Beckett’s life; his works do not mention the teachings directly. Yet, Calder finds a connection, however tenuous. He claims that Beckett feared returning to life, and how ‘intellectual superiority of Buddhism over monotheistic religion, and the logic of reincarnation with the concept of even ethical justice, was not lost on him’. (43) Stoically, without religious belief yet never declaring himself an atheist, Beckett appears to Calder a dualist, between hope and despair, the material and immaterial. They might both have benefited from reading Batchelor.

Can philosophy align with Buddhist inquiry? Ben Howard cautions: ‘Zen questioning is not the same as rigorous philosophical inquiry. To be sure, Zen teachings engage metaphysical issues, most prominently the ‘Great Matter of life and death’. And insofar as they emphasize personal responsibility and freedom of choice, Zen teachings share common ground with existentialist thought. But unlike professional philosophy, Zen eschews definitions, abstract categories, and other components of systematic inquiry. Its way is more immediate, intuitive, personal, and concrete’.

I found one book-length study on the topic. Beckett and Zen by Paul Foster presents a challenging monograph on two difficult conceptions, one from that fearlessly inquisitive but honestly unbelieving writer, one from two millennia of authors known and unknown-- also distinguished for their refusal to speak but of the ultimately Unnam[e]able, of our fragile place in this enigmatically silent universe.

This aim nears an elusive target. Foster aligns Beckett's dilemma-- there is no God vs. we must seek God-- with the goal for Buddhism to veer away from a ‘monorail’ linear quest that traps Beckett’s characters to see only before or behind themselves in their existential exiles. Foster argues that their author, like his subjects, lacked the ability to exit this doomed road. There Beckett's dilemma's solved by leaving it and a/theism and existence as we know it and cannot know it otherwise all behind. Yet a true adept rejects mental constructs of a panicked ego. Zen searches for immersion into what’s beyond anguished thought, careless diversion, or misleading faith: into One Mind, the ultimate Unnameable.

In fact, Foster could have called it a ‘trilemma’, for not two but three horns rise. We face a senseless world without God, we lament our impotence, and we endure without solace. Foster, a longtime practitioner of Zen, employs Beckett's examinations of the mind in his major prose texts as a spiritual tool for exposing the ontological strengths, and ultimately weaknesses, of what happens when, as Beckett dared, you sit and contemplate your fate. Without bowing to a god, without killing yourself, without total despair or total comfort. A grim scenario for many of his characters and we his readers, but Foster delves into formidable narratives to apply his Zen-mind to Beckett's men and women who hesitate to make the ‘great leap’ demanded in Buddhism of those who would gain power over their impotent selves.

In Murphy, hints of Buddhism surface, but I agree with Foster that these are passing and rather inconsequential.  Still, there's a poetic sense of life's fragility amidst the sharpened exchanges of cruelty and cant. Three of my favorite passages: ‘He thought of the four caged owls in Battersea Park, whose joys and sorrows did not begin until dusk’. (106) ‘Is it its back that the moon can never turn to the earth, or its face?’ (131) ‘Each leaf as it fell had an access of new life, a sudden frenzy of freedom at contact with the earth, before it lay down with the others’. (150)

As with Scripture, one can read back into Beckett a myriad of critical intentions that the author may not have intended at all. For Watt, sophistry parodied wearyingly may veer near a Buddhist solution, however unintentional, when it comes to nothingness. ‘The difference is between the two is that where the one ends in brilliant but brick-wall theory, the other finds a way over the wall in practice. Where the one, like Watt, screams in an impasse of despair, the other initiates a revolution of mind that transcends both self and impasse’. (Foster, 150)

The prose trilogy that Foster takes on presents problems. With Molloy and Malone Dies, Foster ends his chapters on its first two installments at what to me appears a brick wall. Both novels break down, and while Foster excels at extracting fragments to shore up against ruin of the agonized narrators, I sense that he cannot solve the dilemmas that Beckett through his prose confronts without being able to resolve. The honesty of Beckett prevents him from doing so.

Foster, as with his subject, does not back down from what Beckett sneered or sighed at as ‘always the big questions’, and ‘the big answers’ that we all seek in our own exodus from meanings that comforted our ancestors, and may soothe our neighbors. For those among us who cannot be eased by such resolutions, the prose trilogy stands as an articulation of our refusal to submit, and of the pain this defiance by its honesty causes within the psyche. Can one say soul?

For Foster, no. As a Zen adept, he knows that Beckett's confrontation prevents the author from curing the dilemma that pierces him and his creations. The Unnamable tackles this in what superficially at times nears a Buddhist stance, but Foster knows that, given the cryptic and unstable narrative stance through which we hear the story, we cannot ascribe so reductively or summarily any pat solution to the momentous portents and baffling situations the protagonist-- if he indeed acts at all in the final judgment-- expresses so forlornly. It seems that Beckett steps back from the abyss, from what Zen would offer as obliteration within the One Mind.

I add here my problem with Foster's presentation. Beckett has been said to gain whatever knowledge of Buddhism he revealed via Arthur Schopenhauer, but that philosopher may have confused the One Mind direction of Buddhism with a Hindu ‘atman’-into-Oversoul version that distorts Zen teaching. In turn, as Foster does not elaborate upon Schopenhauer's interpretations of Buddhism, one's left to puzzle over what echoed philosophies of Mind and Nothingness Beckett inculcated. Here's a point where more elucidation would have helped ease what, given the textual and intellectual challenges, remain tough questions to address let alone resolve.

In the last text treated, the despairing (even by previous standards) How It Is, we're faced with faceless terrain that Foster compares to a prehistoric creature clawing through primordial mud. Meditation approaches the ‘monster silences vast tracts of time perfect nothingness’ (cited 238) of How; Foster finds the abandonment of the narrator approaching that required by the contemplative. Yet, Beckett draws again away and thus this text as with his work's a ‘tragedy’.

It's all ‘doomed to failure’, for the monorail perspective locks his narrators into infinite space and time without change, undeviating from ‘mental tedium’ of memories. The failure's not artistic, but cerebral. Foster compares our self to an onion, peeled down to its own essence but leaving us with emptiness at its core.

This impasse, Foster argues, presents us with a poignant encounter with how far Beckett comes, yet also how far he still had to go. Beckett failed to overcome the predicament that ties him and his narrators to the demands of the questioning ego, the relentless inquirer, the despairing pawn. No practitioners, they may be by Zen reckoning indeed doomed if they cannot escape ‘samsara’ and the ties to the flesh, ego, and stubborn soul that keep us tethered, dragging, or bound to this plain, pained existence.

Foster borrows an image employed by Alan Watts. We’re two faces on opposite sides of a coin, subject-object attempting to figure each other out. Stuck in this binary opposition, the ‘coin's faces’ spin about, failing to realize the thickness, the whatness, the ‘quidditas’ of the coin's hidden dimension.

This third, unseen dimension for Watts (if not Beckett's searcher, dim-bulb as we more resemble Watt) equally runs in both — and permeates all — directions inside the coin to unite its two sides. The two sides do not know of another way out; locked side-by-side but on opposite ends, they lack understanding of unseen unity. A new perspective extends the coin's definition beyond obverse-reverse dichotomies. This awakening may then truly join us to what we live within but we mistake as without.

Foster tackles the definition of the Void. He corrects Beckett critics who misunderstood this notionless notion as if synonymous with nihilism. A Zen practitioner, Foster argues that the Void nears more Nirvana or better yet, what's beyond that extinguishment of categories or oppositions that we can conjure up from our Cartesian dilemma. We strive to escape this subject-object divide that traps us in ‘samsara’ and prevents us from attaining awakening into ‘samadhi’ that will eventually pull the disciplined and undeluded seeker into realization of release from our body-mind problem. Liberation that allows neither God nor universe, self nor soul. Perhaps an indescribable realm, but we are scared because we stay ignorant, small, and frail. Beckett's terrain crawls with stammering, cowed figures.

I wonder, then, how the Void that Foster finds Beckett and his characters wrestling with — Jacob in an endless night battle with his assailant angel, dawn breaking not with deliverance but death — fits into not only Batchelor’s ‘playful irony of a story that has never been told in quite this way before’ or Seaver’s Antepurgatory but a cyclical universe? The place that we may ‘know’ or posit that we cannot grasp. It's in this search where a Buddhist tries to release the breakthrough beyond time and space, mind or body.

Recently I found in Brian Clegg’s Before the Big Bang the notion of a brane, a multifold, crumpled, floating dimension a hair’s breadth from ours that may, every ten or twenty billion years, brush against our realm and annihilate it all, to start again, nearly ‘ex nihilo’ as it obliterates any ‘anxiety of influence’, any progenitor prior to a recurring Big Bang all over again out of background radiation that has never not been. This may be a Big Splat, this spiralling and colliding dance of not spheres but these ethereal planes, these branes. I recall an ancient phrase: ‘the Mystic Law, uncreated and eternal, of the Buddha of beginningless time’.

Our sister universe drifts forever out of our reach. Clegg explores how ‘Groundhog Universes’ may exist along the Big Crumple, the dodahecadron-shaped possibility of a universe that eludes our whole perception due to our inability to ‘see’ some of its directions. The Big Bang may be replaced with a Steinhardt-Turok ‘bouncing branes’ model. This may show another universe a millimeter away from ours with enough ripples in the space-time fabric to allow for gravitational anamolies and a sort of mirror-pattern that shows perhaps a universe previous to the creation of our own.

A cyclically reoccurring, ekpyotic brane may float, like a flipped coin’s edge, near our own universe that by ‘quidditas’ or whatness hovers nearly at our own point of entry.  Our perception escapes us by our own incomprehension or inarticulation to utter it and to frame in words what cannot be perceived-- let alone conceived-- within language. Out of this encounter we cannot bear witness-- for in it lies our cosmic formation and termination.

Yet, we can't help but wonder where we came from. The Buddha mused about this life-essence out of the Void as form from emptiness: nirvana ‘Uncreated, Unformed, Unborn’. This search for our meaning, our purpose, our existence fits neatly with Beckett's own bold if quixotic quest. We must explore what we cannot explain, but what we're compelled to attain.

Works Cited:

Batchelor, Stephen. Buddhism without Beliefs. New York: Riverhead, 1997.
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. 1938. New York: Grove, 1970.
Calder, John. The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. Edison NJ: Riverrun and London: Calder, 2001.
Foster, Paul. Beckett and Zen. Boston and London: Wisdom Publications, 1989.
Howard, Ben. ‘A Fundamental Perplexity’. One Time, One Meeting. Blog. 18 Feb. 2010. http://practiceofzen.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/53-a-fundamental-perplexity.
Seaver, Richard, ed. I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader.  New York: Grove, 1976.
Portions of this essay appeared on my ‘Blogtrotter’, http://fionnchu.blogspot.com
A postscript: on Buddha.net, out of five pages of poetically apropos observations uploaded by various hands (Emily Dickinson's three poems shine terribly pure), Beckett is he who dies with the most quotes wins. None explicitly about dharma or Buddha, but all the more apposite.

P.S. This 3000-word essay had existed until March 2012 at Horizon Magazine, where it appeared 2010 in issue number 4. Edited by Mark A. Williams. As that site is defunct, I retrieved it via the Wayback Machine, embedding links to titles reviewed.  It's inspired by--but does not duplicate-- material from my earlier article on Beckett's purgatorial ideas in relation to medieval concepts, which was published as "Beckett's Purgatories" in Beckett, Joyce, and the Art of the Negative. ed. Colleen Jaurretche. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005) 109-124. European Joyce Studies 16. My thinking evolves, and a related review article on Donald S. Lopez. Jr.'s The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life (Yale UP, 2012) has transformed via The Non-Buddhist, "The Buddha as counter-evolutionary."

Apropos, I append this link and in a future revision/ expansion of this, it will shift my essay, as Paul Foster apparently was unaware of this crucial conversation, or his 1989 book had already been in press when this account appeared: Lawrence Shainberg, "Exorcising Beckett." The Paris Review 104 (1987).  See also Shainberg's 1997 Ambivalent Zen memoir. Thanks to Glenn Wallis for excavating Shainberg's essay via Wallis' "Samuel Beckett Stares at a Wall" at Speculative Non-Buddhism.

P.P.S. Image: Tate Gallery. "Nirvana" Augustus John. 1908. "In Buddhist theology Nirvana is the state of perfect beatitude. It is the state where all passions are dissolved, the extinction of individual existence and absorption into the Supreme Being."