Stella Maris

 

You committed yourself here.

At Stella Maris.

Yes.

If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you don’t. They figure you must be reasonably sane or you wouldnt have shown up. On your own. So you get a pass as far as the records are concerned. If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.

Presented as a “coda” to Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, Stella Maris contains the transcripts of seven therapy sessions between a psychiatrist and Alicia Western; the genius mathematician sister of the main character in The Passenger; a troubled young woman whose eventual fate is described in the previous novel’s first few pages. Whereas The Passenger only had generalised passages about math and physics, Stella Maris features a deeper dive into mathematical thinkers and their work — with a particular focus on Alicia’s speciality in topography — and as it is entirely presented in dialogue, this reads as a Socratic investigation into the nature of reality (and our inability to translate what we unconsciously intuit into communicable language, whether verbal or mathematical.) I did enjoy this as a followup to The Passenger — and if the math references were going over my head, they were going over Dr Cohen’s, too, and he asked for clarification where necessary — but even more so than with the previous novel, this feels a bit like a vanity/legacy project; as though McCarthy just wanted to put the summation of his life’s thinking into print without feeling particularly indebted to novelistic expectations. As a completionist, I am delighted to have read this, but this is going to be one of those rare occasions upon which I will not assign a rating; this feels outside the scope of such things. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The problem with the unknowable absolute is that if you could actually say something about it it wouldn’t be the unknowable absolute anymore. You can get from the noumenal to the phenomenal without stirring from your chair. In other words, nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual. Bearing in mind that to claim reality for what is unknowable is already to speak in tongues. The trouble with the perfect and objective world — Kant’s or anybody’s — is that it is unknowable by definition. I love physics but I don’t confuse it with absolute reality. It is our reality. Mathematical ideas have a considerable shelflife. Do they exist in the absolute? How is that possible? I said to myself. But then myself became another self. No more than right. It took the math with it. The idea. A long period of uncertainty. When I recohered I was someplace else. As if I had escaped my own lightcone. Into what used to be called the absolute elsewhere.

I dont understand.

I know. Me either. It’s just my view that you cant fetch something out of the absolute without fetching it out of the absolute. Without converting it into the phenomenological. By which it then becomes our property with our fingerprints all over it and the absolute is nowhere to be found. Now I’m not so sure.

As a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, Cormac McCarthy has long been incubating his ideas about the world in conversation with a cross-disciplinary assemblage of other deep thinkers. In 2017, he published his first nonfiction essay — The Kekulé Problem — in Nautilus magazine, and many of the facts and ideas from the essay pop up in Stella Maris. I appreciate McCarthy’s use of the Socratic format to present and debate these ideas — the psychiatrist/patient dialogue was perfectly suited as a fictional framework — and there’s just enough plot tie-in with The Passenger to warrant reading this to complement Alicia’s brother’s story. I don’t think I would call this a complete and satisfying novel on its own — “coda” does seem about right — but again, I did find considerable value in it.

I look unhappy? Tougher mettle is called for I suppose. I’m all right. For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection. I thought that it was something Plato might have considered but could in no way bring himself to express. I see by your look that you have at last beheld the very incubation of lunacy.

I am happy that this duology exists as a summation of McCarthy’s thought and craft — I know of no other living author who writes at this level — but I think it needs to be read in the context of his entire oeuvre; Stella Maris certainly needs to be read in concert with The Passenger, or if one wanted to mainline the ideas, The Kekulé Problem is complete unto itself. And again: If McCarthy’s main thesis entails the futility of expressing sensed truths in communicable language, I beg patience for my clumsy words.

The Passenger

 

He motored slowly down the point and along the south shore of the island. The gulf was calm in the last of the light and lights had begun to come up along the shore to the west. He swung the boat around and twisted the throttle slowly forward and headed north, taking his bearings by the lights along the causeway. It was cold out on the water with the sun down. The wind was cold. By the time he got to the marina he thought that the man who’d gone ashore on the island was almost certainly the passenger.

 

I am compelled to start by noting: Cormac McCarthy is probably my favourite author (in the top five anyway; the dog curled against me as I type this is named Cormac), and as I read all of McCarthy’s oeuvre before joining Goodreads, The Passenger is the first of his novels that I have attempted to review; and the task feels daunting. Of course I loved this, I expected to, and while I had the familiar visceral reaction to his sentences, and while I had an intense mental engagement with his overarching philosophy, I also recognise that this novel serves as a synthesis of all of McCarthy’s previous work; this has the feeling of a legacy project and I don’t know that it can be fully read or reviewed on its own (by which I suppose I mean that the plot of The Passenger isn’t its most important or straightforward element and it might be dissatisfying to someone who isn’t soul-stuffed with the previous works to which it hearkens). However, it would take a thesis-length essay to write down everything I’m thinking and feeling, and nobody wants that, so, suffice to say: I did love this, and I could objectively give The Passenger five stars, but I am going to give it four only as a measure against those of McCarthy’s own previous novels that stuffed my soul and taught me what the novel could do. Spoilerish from here.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

The titular “passenger” (as referenced in the first quote) seems a MacGuffin to engine the plot: Bobby Western is a salvage diver who is afraid of the murky deep, and in the opening scene, he is working with a partner to search for survivors on a submerged plane off the Mississippi coast. Western notes that the pilot’s flight bag and the plane’s black box had been removed, and when he is later visited by some government agents, he learns that one of the plane’s passengers had also disappeared before his search began. The mystery of this missing passenger hangs over the plot, and eventually, Western learns how powerless a citizen is in the face of government displeasure. And while there seems to be a direct link between Western having his assets and passport seized and the frequent visits from the mysterious men in black, we also learn that a burglary at his grandmother’s house had seen all of his family’s papers and photographs stolen; is there a bigger conspiracy at play involving the entire Western family? That’s pretty much the story arc, but there’s so much more to the novel.

Western’s father had been a genius — one of the architects of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan — and the following recounts his fact-finding trip at the end of the war (presaging the opening salvage dive, with the father discovering “passengers” of his own):

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

The only other meaningful use of the word “passengers” that I happened upon also concerned birds, which seems to tie into this passage: One spring, Western discovers migratory birds laying on the beach, exhausted from their flight across the Gulf of Mexico, “You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.” The son protecting these “weary passerines” as penance for his father’s sins perhaps?

Like the father, Bobby Western and his much younger sister, Alicia, are also certified geniuses: Bobby had an interest in maths until he got to Caltech, whereupon he changed his major to physics and then dropped out altogether; becoming a salvage diver, he’s an eidetic polymath who can mentally calculate the weight of water in a submerged barge or remember a badge number after a brief flash. (This rejection of one’s inheritance — intellectual and material — in order to live rough at blue collar work, obviously, puts one in mind of the title character from Suttree.) But the real genius of the family is Alicia: a mathematical savant of the highest order, her brand of intellect is accompanied by schizophrenia and bizarre phantasmagoria headlined by a flipper-handed, scabby-skulled dwarf (known alternately as an electromelic hallucination, a spectral operator, a pathogen, but most often as the Thalidomide Kid or “The Kid”; “The Kid” being, elsewhere, the name of one of McCarthy’s best-loved characters [at least, best-loved by me]). Alicia is cursed with the genius to understand the futility of existence; the impossibility of understanding or describing this pointless world (whether by physics or mathematics or the written word), and when she is visited by The Kid (in long scenes that open every chapter), he’s inclined to share something like the following:

Listen, Ducklescence, he whispered. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. And now, good night.

* A pause for a note on the language: This passage is copied as found, with McCarthy refusing the apostrophe for contractions like “cant” and “dont”, but allowing them in “that’s” and “you’re”. And I don’t pretend to understand his rules. As ever, McCarthy eschews quote marks for dialogue, and I was often struck by his eye-jarring (but brain-satisfying) portmanteaus like: spraddlelegged, parchmentcolored, or “the cold clay of her childsbody”. He’s Cormac McCarthy, he can write how he pleases and it will please me.

The other thing to know about Alicia: she’s a striking, ethereal beauty, and when Bobby returned from college one year and saw his (thirteen-year-old) sister performing a solo Greek tragedy in a natural amphitheatre on their grandmother’s property, he realised that he was in love with her and, eventually, that that love was mutual; the forbidden fruit that would ruin each of them for any other (echoing, faintly, Outer Dark). Sent for electroshock therapy and committed with her willing consent, her grasp of the unreality of reality challenges Alicia’s will to live, and therefore challenges Bobby’s:

In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw halfsentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?

These are all the big things that are happening in The Passenger, but McCarthy fills the gaps with smaller (but no less interesting) content. Bobby Western is based in New Orleans (the year is 1980), and when he’s not working (or hiding from the feds), he meets friends (from an intellectual counterfeiter who can speak Western’s language, to drunken bums, to a bombshell trans woman) at various bars and restaurants, and the conversations range from experiences in the Vietnam War, to discussions about quantum mechanics and the personalities behind the theories, and a deep dive into who really assassinated JFK. Western travels to his grandmother’s property in Tennessee, to an offshore oil rig, to a California highway hemmed in by forest fires (and the sooty wasteland resultant is straight out of The Road; straight out of Bobby’s father’s wartime work), and, perhaps purposefully quixotic, to a windmill in Spain. And why not quixotic? Who’s to say that Don Quixote’s version of reality is any less real than Alicia’s reality, than Einstein’s, than anyone who believes that a government is in place to serve, rather than to surveil, its citizens? Many, many times throughout The Passenger, Western watches lightning flashing through the sky; several times he feels the pulse of massive manmade objects — a piledriver, an offshore oil rig’s prime mover, a millstone — throbbing beneath his feet, and as we watch him balanced thusly between the celestial and the mundane, isn’t he the passenger — aren’t we all? — with little control over the plane, the trolleycar, the life he’s trapped in? (When Bobby first left college, he became a racecar driver, and even though it would seem that he had control then, he was forced to realise that racing is at the whim of the car itself; and anyway, a crash eventually ended that career. Lesson learned.)

I have noted before a common theme in McCarthy’s novels (where there is no higher authority to appeal to — whether in the Appalachian backcountry, the Wild West, or the Mexican borderlands a hundred years ago, through to some bleak dystopian future — men will default to self-interested savagery), and he makes that point once again here:

When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.

This is long, longer than I intended — and I have so many more thoughts; so many more quotes and hearkenings! — but if it is impossible to describe physical reality with mathematical equations, it is equally unlikely that I can capture the essence of this reading experience with my clumsy and imprecise words; McCarthy reaches me on a soul level, and much is necessarily lost in the translation to English.

How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

 

I am not a pessimist or an optimist, I am a scientist. There is no agenda in understanding how the world really works.

How the World Really Works could be considered the capstone to Vaclav Smil’s impressive career in interdisciplinary research and analysis: having written over 40 books and 500 papers, he is considered “the” world-leading expert on energy (amongst other topics), and this current book attempts to synthesise and present what he knows to be fact in a world of increasing polarisation and misinformation. There was much that I found interesting here — so much about the functioning of our material world (from energy, container shipping, and food production, to the noninevitability of globalisation and the curiously out-of-touch human perception of risk) that I have accepted without examining — but I couldn’t help but be turned off by Smil’s frequently smug and superior tone (accented with snide asides and exclamation marks!) I liked that Smil positioned himself between the eco-doomsayers and the techno-optimists — calling that the rational middleground as we humans have never been good at predicting the future — but while I enjoyed the factoids, I’m still annoyed by the tone; my three stars are a refusal to take a stand on this book.

Inevitably, this book — the product of my life’s work, and written for the layperson — is a continuation of my long-lasting quest to understand the basic realities of the biosphere, history, and the world we have created. And it also does, yet again, what I have been steadfastly doing for decades: it strongly advocates for moving away from extreme views. Recent (and increasingly strident or increasingly giddy) advocates of such positions will be disappointed: this is not the place to find either laments about the world ending in 2030 or an infatuation with astonishingly transformative powers of artificial intelligence arriving sooner than we think. Instead, this book tries to provide a foundation for a more measured and necessarily agnostic perspective. I hope that my rational, matter-of-fact approach will help readers to understand how the world really works, and what our chances are of seeing it offer better prospects to the coming generations.

Right from the start, Smil stresses that decarbonising the economy (giving up fossil fuels) is a near-term impossibility because of the way our world is built (not to mention the staggering amounts of fossil fuels that go into, for instance, the manufacture and transport of a single wind turbine; not to mention the fact that he doesn’t believe there is an alternative to jet fuel for long distance flight; not to mention that Germany decommissioned their nuclear power plants and spent billions on solar technology that has eased their fossil fuel consumption by a percentage point or two.) A major thrust of the book concerns what Smill refers to as the four pillars of the modern world and he records that in 2019, we collectively consumed 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastics, and 150 million tons of ammonia. He makes the case that each of these essential consumables could not easily (if ever) be replaced by a more eco-friendly alternative, and as each of them requires massive amounts of fossil fuels for their production, he explains:

Global production of these four indispensable materials claims about 17 percent of the world’s primary energy supply, and 25 percent of all CO₂ emissions originating in the combustion of fossil fuels — and currently there are no commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives to displace these established processes.

Smil reports that the global annual demand for fossil carbon is around 10 billion tons, and while affluent economies (including China) give lip service to reducing consumption, it is reasonable to expect emerging economies (especially those in India and Africa) to ramp up their consumption in order to provide their citizens with the benefits of modern materials (as in the hygienic benefits of cement floors or the use of nitrogen-rich fertilisers to improve crop yields). Smil does make it clear that he’s not denying the ill effects of our carbonised economy, but he stresses that catastrophists calling for “net zero by whatever year” can’t will it into being without addressing how the world really works; this doesn’t come down to individuals giving up gas-fuelled cars and abandoning the suburbs (which are the kind of decisions that are ours to make, but which have an incredibly negligible effect on the big picture.)

An example of Smil snarking on the eco-catastrophists:

Some prophecies claim that we might only have about a decade left to avert a global catastrophe, and in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years. Just a few months later, the president of the UN’s General Assembly gave us 11 years to avert a complete social collapse whereupon the planet will be simultaneously burning (suffering unquenchable summer-long fires) and inundated with water (via a rapid sea-level rise). But, nihil novi sub sole: in 1989, another high UN official said that “government have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control,” which means that by now we must be quite beyond the beyond, and that our very existence might be only a matter of Borgesian imagination. I am convinced that we could do without this continuing flood of never-less-than-worrisome and too-often-quite-frightening predictions. How helpful is it to be told every day that the world is coming to an end in 2050 or even 2030?

And snarking on the techno-utopians

Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection. The response of the affluent world to COVID-19 deserves a single ironic comment: Homo deus indeed!

And, after making some good points about how, even forty years ago (despite having microchips and container ships, understanding the greenhouse effect) no one could have predicted the world we are living in today (and especially the offshoring of jobs that led to both rust belt America and the economic surge of China) Smil snarks on the futility of making predictions at all:

In the past, this tendency toward dichotomy was often described as the clash of catastrophists and cornucopians, but these labels appear to be too timid to reflect the recent extreme polarization of sentiments. And this polarization has been accompanied by a greater propensity for dated quantitative forecasts. You see them everywhere, from cars (worldwide sales of electric passenger vehicles will reach 65 million by 2040) and carbon (the EU will have net-zero carbon emissions by 2037). Or so we’re told. In reality, most of these forecasts are no better than simple guesses: any number for 2050 obtained by a computer model primed with dubious assumptions — or, even worse, by a politically expedient decision — has a very brief shelf life. My advice: if you would like a better understanding of what the future may look like, avoid these new-age dated prophecies entirely, or use them primarily as evidence of prevailing expectations and biases.

Again: Smil does write, “There is something new as we look ahead, that unmistakably increasing (albeit not unanimous) conviction that, of all the risks we face, global climate change is the one that needs to be tackled most urgently and effectively.” And it would seem that this entire book exists to make the point that decarbonising the economy would take a global accord to fundamentally change the way that our world actually works — at great cost to people alive today who probably won’t live to reap the benefits — and that both the eco-doomsayers and the techno-optimists are a distraction from actual reality. And, admittedly, this was worth wading through the snark to arrive at. I would read Smil again.

Being agnostic about the distant future means being honest: we have to admit the limits of our understanding, approach all planetary challenges with humility, and recognize that advances, setbacks, and failures will all continue to be a part of our evolution and that there can be no assurance of (however defined) ultimate success, no arrival at any singularity — but, as long as we use our accumulated understanding with determination and perseverance, there will also not be an early end of days. The future will emerge from our accomplishments and failures, and while we might be clever (and lucky) enough to foresee some of its forms and features, the whole remains elusive even when looking just a generation ahead.

 

For my own reference, this was an interesting response to The Revolt Against Humanity (which I read in August and which explores the debate between the Antihumanists [who believe that humanity will soon be wiped out and good riddance] and the Transhumanists [who believe that the singularity is nigh and that it will represent the perfected evolutionary endpoint for humanity]). How interesting that I've often tried to pin my own beliefs on that spectrum from cornucopian to catastrophist (with a proclivity for the techno-as-saviour end) without considering that that whole debate is just a distraction from reality. Interesting.