Logos is the Word that invoked the universe’s creation. Not literally the word, but like a wizard incanting magic words, God spoke, and Chaos assembled into Cosmos. It’s the original story, the first one. It’s a story that we can now apply as a metaphor for the Big Bang, and that utterance began a long tradition of storytelling in which any and all of us can participate, listening or reading, writing or telling. Out of a jumbled heap of words and thoughts come stories which contain knowledge and emotion, the exploits of wizards, poets, and wanderers—or anyone growing grim about the mouth in need of an adventure. They have sung their songs and passed along a mythology upon which I can stand and see what they saw and created. Here I am now, telling what joy I have seen, and adding a little creation of my own to the Cosmos.
“Do you realize that all great literature—Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlett Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’—are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?” Lol. Kurt Vonnegut was brilliant at blending the sordid with the hilarious, and it’s a relief to me. He has shown me that life is such a grave matter that it must be approached with humor, or else you’re just not taking it seriously. I’ll probably mention death in each blog I write, but it’s only to make the jokes funnier.
Another thing about Vonnegut: he was classified as a science-fiction writer by the critics of literature. Products of English Departments, he called them. I am a product of one of the finest English departments in the world, yet I side with Vonnegut in his irritation of being classified as a science-fiction writer. He certainly didn’t want to be. But he had a technical education, majored in chemistry at Cornell, associated with engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. He brought his quite interesting knowledge of the technical to the analytical, emotional, and philosophical realm of storytelling. Being quite interested in learning for its own sake, with this blog I plan to marry my background in literature with my interests in physics and astronomy. Carl Sagan revealed how well that can be done, and I have ideas that are truly fascinating to anyone interested in what a bummer it is to be a human being. Vonnegut said, “I think novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” Well, I’m not a gadget writer, but I will bring up quantum physics, relativity, and the Large Hardon Colluder (that should be Large Hadron Collider, but I wanted to show you what a sense of humor my spellcheck has) in my discussions of literature. Take the idea of Logos above. I have blended a creation story with cosmological theory. I don’t limit my thinking to science on one hand or philosophy on the other. I want to see both simultaneously, as they are a unified multitude. My entire project hinges on unifying the physical world we observe together and my individual experience within it.
I have high aspirations for this blog. Like Milton’s unattainable project to justify the ways of God to men, I reclaim his overblown sense of purpose, along with a few of his ideas, and set out to re-paradise the world. I’ll make up lies called stories in order to make sense of nonsense and meaning out of meaninglessness so they all may fit nice and make out of this sad world a paradise.
For this is a damp, drizzly February in my soul. Writing about the world is all I can do to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off. Now, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
