The Well Tempered Pynchon

[jporter]

Somewhere between the subatomic quarks and leptons (and perhaps even more
minute- a solar system smaller- the planck length superstrings) and their
attendant bosons, fields and forces, and, the orbs modeled by the orrey,
flung across the heavens by the primal fist, but knowledgeable, at least of
the grand field through which they course, are we. And we are left to make
sense of all that comes filtering into our expanding ken, and why it might
be that we have been given this particular visto.

While neither musicologist nor physicist, still, to my eye and ear, this
seems a matter of scales.

And it has always been a matter of tuning, hasn't it? The old tension
between anatomy and culture, and how resolved. Those dissonances which are
allowed, and those outlawed- like the wolf, ears pointed up, on the fringe-
E flat or D sharp, resisting domestication. Wild or well tempered,
something hidden from our eyes and ears before the separation, missing from
our lives, that which lies beneath the surface, joining somehow the
discordant realities of life.

Here's Captain Ahab, as quoted by Leon Lederman in: THE GOD PARTICLE, his
story of the hunt for the Higgs Boson, the putative agent of that symmetry
breaking that shimmers all around us:

        "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in
        each event...some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth
        the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.
        If man will strike, strike through the mask!"

Lederman, the particle physicist, goes on:

        "One of the finist novels of American literature is Herman Melville's
        MOBY DICK. It is also one of the most disappointing-- at least for
        the captain...Ahab is pissed. The whale has bitten of his leg, and
        he wants revenge. Some critics suggest that the whale the has bit
        off a lot more than leg, which would explain more adequately the
        good captain's pique. Ahab explains to his mate, Starbuck, that
Moby
        Dick is more than a whale. He is a pasteboard mask; he represents a
        deeper force in nature that Ahab must confront."

That Ahab must confront if he is to understand himself and the differences
between himself and Moby Dick, between us all. For Lederman, concerned with
the esoterica of subatomic physics, Moby Dick is the Higgs boson, and the
very manifestation of the mysterious force responsible for how and why the
pristine symmetry of existence came to be broken into the complexity we see
today...Why I am me and not you, and why we are forced to deal, as best we
can, with the loose ends of our world, as unfair as either of us might feel
it to be. But in that unfairness, that hiding or breaking of symmetry, lies
our greatest gift, our freedom.

If "History is the Dance of our Hunt for Christ...", the piper thus paid,
note now the music- a tune for all scales.

jody