The Limits of Experimental Science

There are two main obstacles to considering one's own life from a rational or scientific point of view: it is nearly impossible to isolate the variables and there is no control group.

For example, right now, at 3:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve Eve, I may have woken up after falling asleep at 10:00 last night because I am still jet-lagged after returning from Paris 3 days ago; because I ate a whole acorn squash for dinner; because my stomach is upset (see reason #2); because I drank coffee after dinner; because I have been seeing old friends who live far away all week at an average rate of 1 friend per day, and by now their faces have collected like coins at the bottom of my dreams enriching me, as a fountain in the plaza of a foreign city, with currency I cannot use; or because my partner is moving away next fall to go back to school, and his absence fans out like a light from that future point disrupting any present, momentary darkness with images of what I might do and where I might go. Or is it some combination of these factors -- jet-lag plus nostalgia, say, or squash mixed with anxiety?

Cause and effect also seem to be unstable. Was my sleep interrupted because I'm burping (see reason #3) or am I burping because my sleep was interrupted? In other words, are we alive in order to work and eat and grieve and give or do we give and grieve and eat and work because we're alive, after all, and there isn't much else to do, especially when the weather's bad?

It's hard to say; the alternative would be to not live in the first place and then work or possibly to not live and not work at all, but no one who has taken either of these paths has anything to say about the matter, at least not to us.

There is a simple, if not easy, way of testing some of these hypotheses: I must take two weeks off from work each winter for a total of at least 6 years and each year when I arrive at my parents' house in western Massachusetts, after spending the afternoon walking near Mansfield Lake with Rachel in a scatter of raindrops that thickens to a downpour as we drive from Great Barrington to Housatonic and she points out between the swipe of her windshield wipers the vacant factories that will soon be converted to dance studios and art colonies, I must either eat squash, or drink coffee, or have a partner who is leaving in the fall, etc.

It would take another few years to test each combination of factors, but after a finite, albeit extended, amount of time I would know why exactly I am awake right now, which may or may not help me fall asleep the next night, but still wouldn't answer the question of whether it's worth it, whether a short essay is better or worse than an hour of sleep, whether anyone, including myself, will care for what I have written enough to outweigh the very good chance that I will get much less done tomorrow and in a much worse mood than I might have otherwise.

Le Couple

Des arbres froids portent des vestes de feuilles

et le couple dans la voiture discute

ce que tous les couples partout discutent :

c'est quelle route il faut prendre 

pour arriver, enfin, au but. 

A Moment's Notes

Eternity is not an experience of endless duration, it is the absence of duration and should take no endurance to bear.

Many people believe they brush up against it while altered by those special chemicals that inflame the senses until even the most mundane (fog beading on a windowpane, steam curling off a pot of water) swell and soak you up instead of the other way around. So a phrase like "the moment filled an eternity," meaning a momentary sensation absorbed me for longer than a moment, has come to seem cliché.

Although hyperexperience is pleasurable at times, pop-philosophy exhortations to "live in the moment" and "seize the day" exasperate me. These generally lazy statements don't acknowledge the debt our emotional vocabulary owes to time. Feelings may seem to be creatures of the moment, but words like nostalgia, worry, dread, anticipation, wistfulness, and hope show us the extent to which what we feel now is refracted through if and then.

I have glimpsed eternity of late while making tea at work. Every morning I pluck a light purple pocket of earl gray from the metal rack attached to the wall, drop it in my mug, open the fridge to my right, reach for a cool container of milk. As I flip the red hot water spigot and release a thin stream of steaming water, I feel the great turning disk of my day come to a halt. I imagine I hear the muffled clicking, like a lock's heartbeat, of this morning's actions falling exactly into the action of every other morning. And then I know that I am always, always here, at this counter, making one cup of tea forever that I will never drink and all the rest is a dream.

And I have been thinking of eternity in chorus where we sing music that is old -- or "early" as music written in Europe during the Renaissance and baroque periods is called -- comprising many parts that coil around each other in swift counterpoint. It is cooling, meant to be sung like a current slipping beneath a frozen stream, fine and clear. Because the multiple melodies move in different directions at once they sometimes undo each others' work, filling in the gaps that might otherwise catch a listener short. Single voices silver to the surface and then disappear back into the dense mesh of parts. Because the earlier music is more static harmonically, its expansion is spatial, opening onto wide fields of ice. And because the intervals and chords permitted are limited by what was considered consonant at that time (thirds were just becoming acceptable), because these pieces don't express emotion by varying dynamics or tempo but instead, like the mechanism of a clock, by perfectly and precisely integrating parts into a functioning whole, these songs may seem to lack the directional spine that shapes the classical and romantic music we are more familiar with. 

If a Mozart aria presents a sonic narrative that evolves, modulates, and resolves like the phases of a moon or a love affair, a Palestrina mass stretches out like the sea at night, and notes shimmer across its face, tiny quivering panels of light suggesting the immensity of the water all around.

Singing this music in the context of its creation -- the Catholic Church -- I have come to think of the qualities of early music as not merely stylistic but also symbolic choices. The world of the Church is an eternity machine, created and completed in beauty to run until it runs out. The world of the enlightenment is a work in progress; we who inhabit it burst forward at times only to be slung back again by forces beyond our control. 

The wonder is that these two worlds exist not only side by side but also within each other, that from the arcing shoreline we can look out onto a sea whose waves are always cresting and never break, and then turn around and walk back up the beach, towards the parking lot.