Stella Maris (The Passenger #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

intelligence is numbers. It’s not words. Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not. The math and logic questions on the IQ tests are a joke.

What Chesterton doesnt comment on are the peculiarly material interests of God. If you were a wholly spiritual being why would you dabble in the material at all? At judgment day the bodies rise? What is that about? Spirits are disembodied, not unembodied? Christ ascends into heaven as presumably a corporeal being. Encumbering the godhead with a thing it had not previously to endure. It’s hard to know what to make of such lunacy. You can see why Chesterton would steer clear of it.

If space contained but a single entity the entity would not be there. There would be nothing there for it to be there to.

I love physics but I dont confuse it with absolute reality.

I dont like nations. I believe in running away. Much as you’d step out of the path of an oncoming bus.

intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonder why the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good mathematicians. How does the unconscious do math?

If you dont know what life is—and you dont—then I’m not sure how you would characterize the absence of it. I

you have to understand what the advent of language was like. The brain had done pretty well without it for quite a few million years. The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation.

the unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only is it comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else.

And the unconscious doesnt like to speak to us because of its million year history devoid of language? Yes. It solves problems and is perfectly capable of telling us the answers. But million year old habits die hard. It could easily say: Kekulé, it’s a fucking ring. But it feels more comfortable cobbling up a hoop snake and rolling it around inside Kekulé’s skull while he’s dozing in front of the fire. It’s why your dreams are filled with drama and metaphor.

Creative destruction. All sorts of talents and skills must have been lost. Mostly communicative. But also things like navigation and probably even the richness of dreams. In the end this strange new code must have replaced at least

part of the world with what can be said about it. Reality with opinion. Narrative with commentary.

It’s easier to remember two things than one. It’s why it’s easier to remember the words of a song than the words of a poem. For instance. The music is an armature upon which you assemble the words.

Creating a language for nonexistent categories is not a particularly good strategy for those wishing to leave some sort of intellectual legacy. There has to be a metaphor for such enterprises. Some image of theoretical bones whitening in the waste.

My railings against the platonists are a thing of the past. Assuming at last that one could, what would be the advantage of ignoring the transcendent nature of mathematical truths. There is nothing else that all men are compelled to agree upon, and when the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything.

Platonists seem more or less silent as to the origin of mathematics and remarkably unconcerned as to what might be the purpose of computation in an uninhabited universe. I think spookthink is a lot more common among mathematicians than is generally supposed. In the end Gödel became something akin to a Deist. Not that he pursued any sort of spiritual practice. It’s a tradition that runs from Pythagoras to Newton to Cantor. Who after all attributed a supernatural origin to the transfinites. Aleph Zero. Aleph One. It couldnt have helped his cause. His notions of relative infinities had to await the death of an entire generation of German mathematicians before these notions could even get a hearing. Is the Universe intelligent? Isnt that what’s at stake? My brother used to say not very. Perhaps sufficient unto the day. Gödel never says outright that there is a covenant to which all of mathematics subscribes but you get a clear sense that the hope is there. I know the allure.

to claim that numbers somehow exist in the Universe with no intelligence to enable them does not require a different sort of mathematics. It requires a different sort of universe.

I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy. I think our time is up. I know. Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.