Sync: Skylark and Charybdis

From my 2015 sync notes:

2015 Nov 1 (Sun) – Ate at a Korean restaurant in Taichung. On the way, passed signs for a restaurant called “Skylark,” and I explained to V what a skylark was. Went to Mollie [Used Books]. V got The Odyssey, retold by Robin Lister and illustrated by Alan Baker. I skimmed it and was struck by the unusual rendition of Scylla:

Later that night I was reading Dunne’s Intrusions? and found the following (p. 52):

Ward writes: ‘A whole swarm of meteors might have streaked the sky unheeded while Ulysses, life in hand, steered between Scylla and Charybdis.’

2015 Nov 2 (Mon) – Finished Intrusion?. Later, on pp 113-114, Scylla and Charybdis put in another appearance, this time in an extended metaphor:

On to turmoil and destruction! Forward to the Mindless Automaton! There is the Scylla and there is the Charybdis between which Man the Flaming Soul has to steer a course which Nature herself has not yet been able to discover.

Scylla is the nearest, now. We have to dodge those snapping jaws before we can give heed to anything else; and, fortunately, our ship’s crew is in complete accord on that point. Unfortunately, however, the majority of them are clamouring for a helm hard down and a course –– the shortest possible –– laid straight for the centre of Charybdis.

If we reached that, what would it matter whether we circled there for a thousand years or a million years before disappearing down the vortex? We should have bungled the whole voyage, and have missed making the open sea.

What lies in the open sea? All our hopes for the future of the Human Race.

I do not believe that Man has reached his zenith. I do not believe that a woman moaning ‘ye-ew’ down her nose to the accompaniment of a tom-tom is the acme of musical achievement (and this notwithstanding the bandmaster’s assurance that the nasal trouble in question is a ‘great voice’). I do not believe that the Painter has no choice save that which lies betwixt the Representational and the Disgusting. I do not imagine that the cigar-box indicates the apotheosis of Architectural Form. On the contrary, I hold that Music has barely unfolded its skylark wings, that Art has not yet wandered beyond the fringe of its powers, that Invention is in its infancy, and that the common man’s ability to appreciate beauty is only just awaking from its natal sleep. And I believe that in those aspects of the Open Sea, the Flaming Soul will find satisfaction for its needs. For Creation –– Creation untrammelled by tradition, unheeding the discouragement of the multitude, undaunted by the opposition of Nature –– is the greatest of all adventures.

Oh, God! allow us to reach the Open Sea!

From my 2016 sync notes:

2016 Aug 6-7 (Sat-Sun) – Finished rereading J. W. Dunne’s Intrusions? On Saturday. Finished The New Immortality a day or two before. On Sunday, reread the entirety of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (except the first page or two, which I’d read much earlier and then taken a long break).

From Dunne:

But God, thank God! Is not ‘just’. Justice is of Man. God is, to us, what the Seers have seen in Him. He is the Escape from Self. He is Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful. He is the Father Who does not will that one of these little ones shall perish. He is Love. But he is not a distributor of rewards for ‘virtues’ and of punishments for ‘iniquities’. (New Immortality, p. 106)

Ward writes: ‘A whole swarm of meteors might have streaked the sky unheeded while Ulysses, life in hand, steered between Scylla and Charybdis.’ (Intrusions?, p. 52)

I was extremely keen on singing, and had just discovered that a callous choir-master had ruined my voice (I had been the school soloist) by making me continue to sing alto long after that voice had begun to crack. I had waited for two years before trying my new, man’s register; but, when I did so, I heard to my dismay a horrible reedy thing with a range of barely twelve notes. (p. 76)

On to turmoil and destruction! Forward to the Mindless Automaton! There is the Scylla and there is the Charybdis between which Man the Flaming Soul has to steer a course which Nature herself has not yet been able to discover. Scylla is the nearest now. We have to dodge those snapping jaws before we can give heed to anything else; and, fortunately, our ship’s crew is in complete accord on that point. Unfortunately, however, the majority of them are clamouring for a helm hard down and a course -- the shortest possible -- laid straight for the centre of Charybdis. … I do not believe that Man has reached his zenith. I do not believe that a woman moaning ‘ye-ew’ down her nose to the accompaniment of a tom-tom is the acme of musical achievement (and this notwithstanding the bandmaster’s assurance that the nasal trouble in question is a ‘great voice’). … On the contrary, I hold that music has barely unfolded its skylark wings,...” (pp. 113-114)

From Shakespeare (page numbers from my edition of the Complete Works):

When we are both accouter’d like young men,

I’ll prove the prettier fellow of the two,

And wear my dagger with a braver grace;

And speak, between the change of man and boy,

With a reed voice; (p. 219)

Truly then I fear you are damned by both father and mother; thus when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother; well, you are gone both ways. (p. 220)

But mercy is above this scepter’d sway,––

It is enthroned in the heart of kings,

It is an attribute of God himself;...

Though justice be thy plea, consider this––

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; (p. 222)

Music! hark! …

The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark

When neither in attended… (p. 226)

I noticed the Scylla and Charybdis link first, then the reedy voice. The other two are less specific.

I've only read Intrusions? three times. Two out of those three times, it was accompanied by skylark and Scylla-and-Charybdis synchronicities.

What sent me back through my sync files to dig those up was "Sync: Don't be confused. Back up the heavy burds," in which I noted that Big Bird has sometimes claimed to be a lark, and that skylark is punningly equivalent to l'arc-en-ciel. (WanderingGondola left a comment mentioning a Japanese band called L'arc-en-Ciel which sometimes goes by D'ark-en-Ciel, which made me think of "Ark in the dark".) Remembering that I had noted that equivalence before, I searched for it and found that it was in a post that began with Bertie Wooster's unwitting allusion to Shelley's "Sensitive Plant." Recently, in the comments on "Weirdly specific sync: Meerkats and piranhas," I quoted the very same Wodehouse line, this time in connection with the Venus flytrap.

While I was browsing through the 2016 sync log, I found a reference to Doob2, a restaurant I used to frequent in those days, though it closed down years ago. I had completely forgotten about it. Their logo featured a white rabbit.

Nowadays, of course, I frequent an unrelated place called Cafe D&D, though I had originally thought its name was supposed to be D00D. B + 2 = D.

Here, for whatever it's worth, is my sync note that mentioned Doob2. I notice it was on March 17, seven years ago today.

2016 Mar 17 (Thu) – I was checking . . . homework at Doob2. I was just correcting a line [a student] had written: “She looked like an angel,” when it should be “She was like an angel.” At the same time, the music playing in the restaurant had a repeating line that sounded like “She seems like an angel.” I looked it up later, and it turned out to be “She sings like an angel”; the song was “Unforgivable Sinner” by Lene Marlin.

Some days previous, the idea had come out of nowhere that if I ever quote my Mosquito Song (“O brother, shrink not from the kill / ‘Tis but your own suck’d blood you spill”) I should attribute it to “the West Alleghany Singing Devils.” This idea came back to me on 3/17 and I wrote it down in my planner. I can’t be sure if it was before or after hearing the Lene Marlin song, though.

This led me to search my blog for mosquito to see if I had ever quoted the Mosquito Song and if I had attributed it to the West Alleghany Singing Devils. (Yes, and no.) The other two hits for mosquito were both examples of the Byron-influenced comic tetrameters I used to write: "The mosquito question" and -- of all things! -- "Ark in the dark."

J. W. Dunne's dream of the shadow of God

As described in my last post, "God vs. King," the name Godzilla made me think of this dream of Dunne's, because the Hebrew name Zillah probably means "shadow." I've decided to quote the whole thing, from Dunne's posthumously published book Intrusions? This is a book almost nobody reads -- Dunne is known almost exclusively for An Experiment with Time -- and I think the dream is worth sharing with a wider audience.

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The intelligent part of me 'awoke', alert and curious from a duller, forgotten dream, to a vivid scene which appeared to be of a purely allegorical nature.

I was sitting in bright sunlight on a rock half-way up a gently sloping, sandy hillside. At the bottom of this declivity there ran a brook. I was dressed, somewhat to my annoyance, in the attire of one of Mr. H. G. Wells's 'Samurai' as these are pictured in his book, A New Utopia. Two lines of Longfellow's hymn, beloved in spiritualistic circles, were ringing in my head: the ones about great men leaving footprints in the sands of time. I saw that my own tracks were leading up from the brook's edge to the place where I sat. Obviously, I was dead, and the brook was the allegorical Jordan. I experienced a mild thrill, succeeded by a flame of anger, for I knew quite well that I was not a great man and suspected that I was being fooled. The other side of the brook represented evidently the world I had left, and I looked at it to see where my footmarks entered the water; for I had a horrifying idea that I might discern (vide the poem) a string of idiots following them. But the whole of that world lay in shadow, and, although I could perceive numbers of people moving about therein, none of them was clearly distinguishable, and any footprints there might be were quite invisible.

The deep shadow was contrasted so strongly with the brilliant sunshine in which I sat, and ended so abruptly at the water's edge, that I became puzzled as to what might be the cause thereof. Then it dawned on me that, about a hundred yards to my left and slightly behind me God was sitting working with bent head at something of which I was ignorant. I did not see Him because I could not turn my head: I merely knew that He was there. The whole scene was as silent as a picture. And the shadow which lay upon the world was the shadow of God.

I must emphasize that I was, from first to last, fully aware that the entire vision was purely allegorical, and that all the images therein were merely conventional symbols. Had there been the slightest attempt to suggest to me that any of the figures were veridical -- e.g. that God was a Male Worker -- I should, probably, have shied away from the whole.

I was deeply puzzled about one thing. God's shadow was lying over the whole world. Then why did not those blind fools see it? As I asked myself this, I became aware, abruptly, that two yards to my left and just behind the limit of my field of sight, there was standing -- an allegorical Angel. Do not ask me what he looked like; for that is quite unimportant. He symbolized something which could be questioned. And I fitted him with an allegorical make-up which would be in keeping with the rest of the vision. I made him a conventional Angel, tall, dark, beardless and attired in a long white garment. But I was not interested in him. Wild curiosity held me in its grip. I called to him and pointed. 'Look! look!; I cried, 'God's shadow! It's everywhere! It's all around them! Why, why don't they see it?'

I had expected that the reply would be something conventional about their being too much absorbed in their own, worldly affairs; and if that answer had come I should have discredited it; for my sympathies were with these people, and I knew that many of them were searching everywhere for evidence of God's existence. But the answer which came -- came immediately in five short decisive words -- was completely unexpected.

'Because it has no edges,' said the Angel.

And I found myself wide awake -- really awake -- and memorizing carefully every detail of the dream. Of course, I saw at once that what the 'Angel' had said was true. It is psychologically impossible to be aware of anything which 'has no edges'. To realize the existence of this or that there must be a 'not-this' or 'not-that' with which to make comparison. As for the dream, it meant obviously that there was no place in the whole world where God was absent. Consequently, it would be useless to search anywhere for evidence of God.

There is, however, something else about that allegory which is important. It did not preach Pantheism. God and the world were not one and the same thing. But His shadow covered the world; which means that His Spirit or Mind pervades the physical world which is neither Him nor that Spirit.

God vs. King

My last post, "When that gorilla beats his chest," featured this poster for the movie Godzilla vs. Kong, which was originally going to be released in 2020 but was delayed for the usual reason.

This synched with, among other things, these lyrics from The Script:

Yeah, you can be the greatest, you can be the best
You can be the King Kong bangin' on your chest
You can beat the world, you can beat the war
You can talk to God, go bangin' on his door

Besides the explicit mention of King Kong, it also says "You can talk to God," a link to the "God vs. King" tagline. Doing a little research online, I find that Godzilla vs. Kong features a deaf character played by a deaf half-Asian actress (Kaylee Hottle, Korean-Caucasian). The music video for the Script song, "Hall of Fame" (2012), also features a deaf character played by a half-Asian actress (Ariana Emnace, Filipino-Mexican).

Godzilla is a giant reptile from the sea, but (a commenter informs me), his name comes partly from the English word gorilla. The original Japanese name, Gojira, apparently created before the monster's reptilian nature had been decided on, is a portmanteau of gorira ("gorilla," from English) and kujira ("whale").

Kong, of course, is a giant gorilla. Where did his name come from? According to Wikipedia:

[King Kong creator Merian C.] Cooper was fascinated by [his friend Douglas] Burden's adventures as chronicled in his book Dragon Lizards of Komodo where he referred to the animal as the "King of Komodo". It was this phrase . . . that gave him the idea to name the giant ape "Kong."

So Godzilla, the giant lizard, has a name partly inspired by gorilla; and Kong, the gorilla, has a name partly inspired by a giant lizard.

The land-monster Kong and the sea-monster Godzilla made me think of Behemoth and Leviathan. In my post "Mr. Owl ate my metal worm," I noted that the giant fish Bahamut, the Arabic equivalent of Leviathan, has a name that comes from Behemoth; while Behemoth-equivalent Kuyutha, the giant bull, has a name that is likely a corruption of Leviathan. There is an obvious parallel here to the way in which Godzilla and Kong got their respective names.

Bahamut is also the name, in D&D, of the king of all metallic dragons, so I connected the name with the Metal Worm in the palindrome. Bahamut -- the sea monster whose name comes from a land monster -- corresponds to Godzilla, so Godzilla is the Metal Worm. The Metal Worm's antagonist is Mr. Owl. As it happens, there is an extremely popular YouTube video (nearly 30 million views) that takes the Godzilla vs. Kong trailer and digitally replaces Kong with a cat -- a cat named, of all things, OwlKitty.

Cat vs. Godzilla also ties in with "Immediate confirmation that Michael is Mr. Owl," in which -- besides referencing the Metal Worm palindrome yet again -- I mention seeing a gecko and thinking "Hey, it's a dragon!" and then later having to rescue a different gecko from my cats. "When that gorilla beats his chest" also included a gecko anecdote, pairing the gecko not with a cat but with a moth -- Godzilla vs. Mothra?

To the Japanese, Gojira suggests "gorilla-whale." To my own ear, Godzilla is God + Zillah. Adah and Zillah are the two wives of Lamech in Genesis and were a source of deep fascination to me as a child. The contrast of A and Z, together with the fact that Zillah probably means "shadow" in Hebrew, led me to envision them as opposites -- Adah as a very pale white woman, and Zillah as a very dark-skinned Indian woman.

Much later, in college, I knew two women, roommates, who exactly resembled my childhood image of Adah and Zillah; I always thought of them by those names, and now I find I can only remember the real name of one of them! For some reason, the 2002 Steve Earle song "Ashes to Ashes" is also closely associated in my mind with these two women. (I think it's just that I started listening to the song about the same time I met them, and its overall vibe fit "Adah's" personality.) The lyrics do have a bit of Godzilla-vs.-Kong type imagery.

A long time ago
Before the ice and the snow
Giants walked this land
Each step they took
The mighty mountains shook
And the trees took a knee
And the seas rolled in

Searching my own blog for godzilla just now, I found a dream I had forgotten about, recounted in the post "On the threshold of lucidity," in which I watched a sea serpent (Leviathan) transform first into "a bipedal Godzilla-type creature" and then into a woman "who reminded me a bit of the actress Sarita Choudhury." As you may have gathered from the name, Sarita Choudhury is of Indian extraction, and she has dark skin. Looking her up, I find that, like the other two actresses mentioned in this post, she is only half-Asian -- though as far as I know, she has never played a deaf character. That dream ends with me being bitten by a poisonous snake, though, and adders are proverbially deaf.

Anyway, God-zillah means "God's shadow." In one of J. W. Dunne's books (I'll have to look it up later), he relates a dream in which he became aware that God's shadow was cast over the entire world, and he asked his angel guide how it was possible that people could not see something so obvious as that enormous shadow. "Because it has no edges" was the angel's reply.

(I am working on a theological post that keeps being delayed by these syncs. In it, I happen to quote Dunne: "Oh, God! Allow us to reach the open sea!")

The twilight of the brain

St. Denis of Paris, noted cephalophore

In a recent post (qv), Bruce Charlton discusses Rudolf Steiner's statement that "hearts must begin to think."

My understanding is that Steiner meant that the divine destiny of modern Man is to become a thinker with 'the heart' primarily: that is, an intuitive thinker; and with the feeling that our thoughts are located in the chest.

And the 'must' comes in, because Steiner also predicted that 'Head thinking', intellect, the thinking that we feel is located behind the eyes - would decline.

Therefore, if Men failed to to be heart-thinkers, failed to embrace our destiny; then we would after a while hardly be able to think at all.

I suspect that what follows bears very little relation to what Bruce had in mind when he wrote that, but it nevertheless seems proper to cite him as the source of this train of thought.

"Head thinking" is, obviously enough, that thinking which is performed by, or through the instrumentality of, the brain. Since thinking is not among the functions of the circulatory system, "heart thinking" can only be a metaphor; but it apparently refers to a sort of thinking that bypasses the brain, and which can go on even when the brain is switched-off or dead -- the sort of thinking manifested by the dreaming mind, or by the demented shades in Hades.

The prospect of men abandoning the brain and becoming a race of "heart-thinkers" is a chilling one, because as things stand, the "heart" can hardly think at all, at least not at a level that is recognizably human. (Steiner himself implies as much when he says "hearts must begin to think.") The only heart-thinkers of which we have any direct experience are the dreaming, the demented, and the dead -- which is what makes the idea so immediately repulsive. To embrace that as "the divine destiny of modern Man" would be the ultimate obscenity.

But we are not to embrace heart-thinking as it now stands. We are to develop it into something worthy of the name. Imagine some ancient sarcopterygian fish being informed that its race's destiny is to abandon swimming and rely instead on the vastly inferior means of locomotion known as walking. How could it see such a prospect as anything other than horrible? How could it imagine how its clumsy scrabbling from tidal pool to tidal pool would evolve into walking as we know it today, to say nothing of running or flying?

For astrologers, the present is a time of transition from Pisces to Aquarius -- that is, from fish swimming about in water to that water being unceremoniously dumped out. The fish can learn to walk, and to breathe air, or they can die. Men, likewise, can learn to think with the heart -- developing what rudimentary ability we already have -- or we can cease to think at all.

⁂

But why assume that the water is going to be dumped out? Why assume that the twilight of the brain is upon us?

Well, IQs have been in free fall for several generations now, to the point where roughly 85% of us would have been below-average by Victorian standards -- and this is very likely an inevitable development, something that will happen to every species with a highly developed brain. High levels of biologically-based (brain-based) intelligence are inherently unstable. Basically, highly intelligent animals use their intelligence to create a more hospitable environment for themselves -- that is, one in which basic selection pressures are relaxed, deleterious mutations can accumulate, and intelligence (and every other form of fitness) will decline. The smart make it too easy for the stupid to survive, and once that happens the days of smartness are numbered.

In theory, brainy beings could escape this fate by taking an active role in designing and maintaining their own brains, bypassing biological evolution -- using such technologies as genetic engineering, the augmentation of brain power by means of neurological prosthetics, etc. In practice, the adequate development of such technologies requires a sustained period of high intelligence and high technology -- sustained for a longer period than evolution appears to allow. A mere six or seven generations after the Industrial Revolution, here we are.

One of the most memorable images from Whitley Strieber's book Transformation is that of "a university a million years old." Is such a thing possible? Can intelligence ever persist at that level for that long? Only, it would seem, by making the leap to something not dependent on the biological brain -- which, despite the corporeality of the metaphor, is what I take "heart-thinking" to mean.

Backing up this theoretical argument, there are reports (the accuracy of which is probably unknowable) of contact with intelligences much older than Man -- the gods, the fairies, the greys -- and a few common threads emerge: (1) they are "psychic"; (2) their relationship to their bodies is different from, and looser than, our own; and (3) their way of thinking is, from the human point of view, extremely strange. To me, all of this is consistent with the hypothesis that these beings have a developed a mode of intelligence that is not biologically based.

(Against this, what is to be made of the grotesquely enlarged crania of the greys, if their cognition is not brain-based? I suppose that non-brain intelligence, the development of which is necessitated by the decline of the brain, can then be used to reverse that decline, bring the brain back, and develop it even further -- but that brain-thinking would ever after be secondary to non-brain-thinking.)

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Even setting to one side these speculations about the future of Man as an intelligent species, it remains true that each one of us will eventually have to learn to think without a functioning brain. Many of us will develop dementia as we get older, and every one of us, without exception, will die and become -- at least in the interval between death and resurrection -- a demented shade.

(Bruce Charlton has an interesting theory that this is why Christianity emphasizes the need for a childlike and decidedly non-intellectual "faith" in Jesus: because it is as demented shades, without access to the brain, that we must make the crucial choice to follow him to resurrection.)

Is it possible to survive death with a fully human degree of intelligence? It certainly seems to be rare. One of the most universal features of ghost stories around the world is that ghosts behave as if they were severely retarded. Possible exceptions include such shades as those of Samuel and Tiresias -- men who were "psychic" in life and may have developed an unusual degree of non-biological cognitive ability.

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The idea that the the brain must teach the soul to think is touched upon by J. W. Dunne in An Experiment With Time (pp. 212-213).

So we are driven to the interesting conception of an ultimate thinker who is learning to interpret what is presented to his notice, the educative process involved being his following, during the waking hours, with unremitting, three-dimensional attention, the facile, automatic action of that marvellous piece of associative machinery, the brain.

This, admittedly, is a complete reversal of the old-time animist's conception of the 'higher' observer as an individual of superlative intelligence producing the best effect he can with the aid of a clumsy material equipment. But it seems to me there is not getting away from the plain evidence afforded by the character of our dream thinking. Whatever capacities for eventually superior intelligence may be latent in the observer at infinity, they are capacities which await development. At the outset brain is the teacher and mind the pupil. Mind begins its struggle towards structure and individuality by moulding itself upon the brain. [. . .] the brain serves as a machine for teaching the embryonic soul to think.

Dunne expands on this in Intrusions? (pp. 64-65).

Your [immortal soul] has plenty of intuitive knowledge: his ability to perceive what lies ahead in time-1 is an instance of that. Moreover, a study of dreams shows that he is thinking in a rudimentary fashion. [. . .] But the logic, usually, is little better than that of a very young child [. . .] He is not in the least surprised by any incongruity which he encounters: he accepts it without hesitation. [. . .] But there are times in dreaming when the more rational part of the mind rouses from its uncritical inspection of the fantasies presented to it by its half-witted partner, and you find definite though still rather feeble thinking going on. It has all the characteristics of brain thinking, incredulity, criticism, judgement, planning: and this is the thinking it has learned from brain during the earlier travels of the three-dimensional 'now'.

Later in the same book (p. 76), Dunne lists the capacities of the mind (as separate from the brain) as follows.

These are: (a) control of attention; (b) an ability to learn from experience; (c) foreknowledge of sense data lying ahead in time-1; (d) as a consequence of (c) and (b), purpose, expemplified in intervention to avoid, or ensure reaching, those foreseen sense data; and (e) a very limited amount of thinking (tutored by that mechanical thinker, the brain).

Dunne's perspective on this is of course inseparable from his unique theory regarding the nature of time. (The references to "time-1" in the passages I have quoted refer to the first of the infinite number of temporal dimensions postulated by Dunne's theory.) While I believe Dunne's theory of time to be essentially correct, I also believe -- as he does not -- that the spirit pre-existed the body, and persists after bodily death, in time-1. For Dunne, the immortality of the soul is strictly a time-2 phenomenon. Nevertheless, his thoughts provide a fruitful starting point for speculation.

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As should be fairly obvious, this post has been an exercise in thinking-aloud and throwing out possibilities, and it does not represent my final, considered opinion. One obvious problem with all that I have written is that it does not deal adequately with the fact that brainless minds must have predated brain-mediated ones and must have been able to develop a high degree of intelligence without the aid of a biological brain. This is something I need to think a lot more about and, while I do not expect this post to resonate with very many people, I do welcome comments from anyone sufficiently sympathetic to be able to engage with it.

The Christianity of J. W. Dunne

J. W. Dunne in 1909

Among those interested in the work of J. W. Dunne (1875-1949), aeronautical engineer and philosopher of time, there seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding Dunne's religious beliefs or lack thereof. I have seen him described as a devout Catholic, as a devout Anglican, and as an atheist.

In point of fact, Dunne was (briefly) an atheist and at another time (also briefly) a devout Christian of unspecified denomination, but it appears that he spent most of his adult life, and ended that life, as a firm believer in God but not in Christianity. Most of the available information regarding Dunne's religious beliefs is to be found in the posthumously published Intrusions?, the most autobiographical of his works, from which I excerpt a few relevant passages below. I quote only those passages that have to do with Christianity as such, as the material dealing with God (in whom Dunne indubitably believed) is too voluminous to be summarized here. As the author sometimes uses periods of ellipsis in the original, I have enclosed my own ellipses in square brackets.

In Chapter IV of Intrusions?, Dunne recounts his first -- somewhat abortive -- conversion to Christianity.

At the age of seventeen I was a pupil on a South African farm, and I was, for several reasons, in an extremely disgruntled condition. To begin with, I had just lost all belief in the existence of God. This was from the usual cause. A foolish cleric had given me false reason for that belief. It had seemed to me sound; and, in accepting it eagerly, I had realized that my previous grounds had been utterly insufficient. Later on, I discovered the fallacy in the man's argument -- and found myself with nothing left. 

In the second place: I was extremely keen on singing, and had just discovered that a callous choir-master had ruined my voice (I had been the school soloist) by making me continue to sing alto long after that voice had begun to crack. I had waited for two years before trying my new, man's register; but, when I did so, I heard to my dismay a horrible reedy thing with a range of barely twelve notes. How I cursed that master, and how I longed to curse the God in whom I no longer believed. 

Finally: I had supposed that I could write. I had sent a short story to a Capetown periodical. After two months had elapsed without an answer, I had written again. Now, a fortnight had gone by without any reply. So that enterprise had failed. I was only seventeen, and these three major disappointments, one on top of the other, had shaken me to my rather shallow depths. 

At that moment I made a rather curious discovery. Normally, I was a fairly decent young fellow. But I had strange bouts of savagery in which I was no better than what we should call to-day, a young Nazi. I did things at which I was aghast in my more normal moments. Thinking this over, I came to the conclusion that I was in some strange way two diametrically different persons occupying the same body. [. . .] My angry disappointment about God bid fair to turn the scale. Goodness was nonsense: there was neither good nor evil: my so-called 'evil' personality was by far the freer of the two, and there were no limits to what it might achieve. Reason said: give it rein.

At this point, Dunne happened to find and read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which had been published some 7 years previously and about which he had previously known nothing, and it made him realize the folly of his thinking regarding his 'evil' self. He continues his narrative.

But (I thought) what a marvellous coincidence! At the very moment when I had decided to give my Hyde the mastery, I pick up the grimmest story ever written -- the story of a man who did that very thing. Coincidence be damned! The chances seemed millions to one against it! There was a God! and He had intervened in the promptest and the most effective way possible. 

Then I did an extraordinarily silly thing. I offered God a bargain. (I was very young, of course; but I had no business to make such a bumptious bloomer.) I promised that, if the despaired-of letter would arrive by the next post, I would believe 'the whole thing', by which words I meant 'Pauline Christianity'. And next morning that letter arrived! My story was accepted! And . . . I found, a little later, that I could not believe what I had promised to believe. 

[. . .] 

Now, I want you to understand why I had offered that absurd bargain. I wanted very much to believe the Christian story. Had my desire been in the other direction nothing would have made me let the decision rest on a chance which so easily might have gone against me. But I was tired to death of the whole business of religious doubt and speculation. And it seemed to me that, if God was so ready to intervene, He might be ready to intervene a little further -- in which case I should be saved the bother of having to make up my mind. And if the letter did not arrive, no harm would have been done. I was not, in that event, bound to disbelief. I saw an opportunity of saving myself trouble -- of throwing the onus of a difficult decision to God -- and that with the proviso, 'Heads! I win. Tails! We'll try another way.' 

[. . .] So I remained stuck in the curious pit I had digged for myself. I wanted to credit Christianity. Reason refused permission. But I must do so, because I had promised that to the God in whom I did believe! For ten uneasy years I had to shilly-shally in this fashion; and, during that period there developed within me what grew to be a veritable horror of the notion of urging upon anyone any belief which could not be securely based upon cold, unsupplemented reason. There was a great deal more than ordinary scientific reluctance in this. There was an absolute loathing of the idea: a temperamental terror that I might through carelessness do some such thing. Later on, that proved to be an attitude of mind almost essential for the work I had in hand. So, if it had been intended that I should tackle that task, those ten years were not so much punitive as educational. Hence I might have been even prompted to make my foolish promise.

Dunne picks up the story again in Chapter VIII.

You will remember that at the end of the Jekyll-Hyde episode, I dug for myself a trap in which I remained caught for 'ten uneasy years'. [. . .] I have pointed out that the ten years of shilly-shallying which followed were of high educational value [. . .]

Returning to my own, private difficulty: What happened was that I surrendered -- from sheer mental exhaustion. The word 'promise' seemed to me to be the key to the whole problem. I might have done wrong in promising; I might have promised on insufficient ground; but a promise I had given -- and given to God. Honour demanded its fulfilment. If reason rebelled, reason might hope for clearer light later; but meanwhile it must remain silent. So I became a Christian: as humble, unquestioning a Christian as any Catholic might desire. 

And, oddly enough, with that surrender came peace. It was not merely quietude after storm: it was a deep satisfaction: a sudden flooding up of the belief which I had never really lost. I wanted nothing better. And I was enabled, at last, to address my prayers to that Jesus of Nazareth I had never ceased to love. 

Now this occurred just after the conclusion of the Boer War; and it so happened that, perhaps two months later, I found myself riding through the rolling grass-lands of the Orange River Colony in the light of the intensely bright African full-moon.

I at first thought that this was the same surrender narrated in Chapter IV, in which Dunne, "tired to death of the whole business of religious doubt and speculation," gave up and let chance decide his religious beliefs for him. However, the Second Boer War concluded in May 1902, when Dunne was almost 27 years old, so this was apparently a second surrender, coming at the end of the "ten years of shilly-shallying." It appears that Dunne was only a proper Christian for approximately two months.

The story continues, with Dunne riding through the moonlit grasslands.

Perhaps you can imagine something of the unearthly beauty of that scene [. . .]. I rode enraptured, with loosened rein, looking now at the unutterable loveliness of the earth and now into the depths of that miracle sky. Then admiration changed into adoration; for Heaven and Earth seemed to be filling with the 'glory', and it was more glorious than I could have believed possible. I began a half-wordless paean of thanks, addressing this to that Christ whom, I realized -- and never before so fully as now -- was indeed One with God. The last vestige of doubt had gone. I was soaring up, unchecked, towards the zenith of that prayer when suddenly . . . 

It was like a blow in the face. The whole marvellous scene -- sky and rolling down -- had gone empty. There was nothing there to answer me. I was addressing a blank. 

The shock was quite real. It was so utterly unexpected, and it had happened so instantaneously. I stared at that uncaring exhibition of Nature, and tried again. But it was hopeless -- and the words faded away. The void remained. Jesus of Nazareth had died nearly two thousand years ago. He was not present in this lovely 'now'. 

For perhaps half a minute I rode on in perturbed silence; and then, more than a little doubtfully, I tried offering my prayer to God. I had got no further than, 'Oh God! Thank you for' . . . when instantly -- as instantaneously as it had emptied -- the scene had filled to overflowing, and I had the most tremendous awareness of a Great Being, who was not only listening to me, but pleased with my delight in all this beauty, and sending out response. 

I realized then that God Himself had released me from my ridiculous, unfulfillable promise to Him. And, as I rode on in deep gratitude, I felt myself enveloped within and without by that friendliness of God which is so much greater than any emotion like 'love'. [. . .] Obviously, I had been going from bad to worse; for to make truth subordinate to a vow is to fall very low indeed. And it is clear that I had got myself into such a state that I would have accepted release from none save Him to whom I had vowed.

Intrusions? includes accounts of three vivid dreams in which he appeared to receive messages from an angel. There was a fourth such dream, which he related to his wife and son, but he died before he could put it into writing. An account of this last visitation, written by Dunne's son, is included as an appendix to Intrusions? Dunne is referred to here in the third person.

In the third appearance he described the scenery as having grown dark and stormy so that he could barely see the 'Angel'. In the fourth and final appearance it was pitch black with a raging tempest. All that he could see of the 'Angel' was a white something which he took to be his robe and which he caught hold of, for (here I quote his own words) 'I knew that it was the last time I should see him.' 

This Appearance was very brief and I think it took him by surprise. He said that he thought rapidly for some question to ask the 'Angel'. The question which had always worried him came out -- 'Christianity, is it true?' and the 'Angel' replied: 'God lets it be true for those who want it to be true.' 

He said that he had no interpretation of the 'Angel's' reply to his final question.

⁂

To summarize, then:

1. I have not been able to find out in which denomination of Christianity Dunne was raised. His father was Irish, and his mother was English, making both Catholicism and Anglicanism reasonable possibilities. In describing his brief period of orthodox belief, Dunne says "I became a Christian: as humble, unquestioning a Christian as any Catholic might desire." To me this description of himself as being as unquestioning as a Catholic would be unusual for someone who actually was a Catholic, so I lean toward the assumption that he was an Anglican.

2. He was very briefly an atheist around the age of 17. In giving the background to the experience that convinced him there was a God, he writes, "I had just lost all belief in the existence of God" -- implying that his conversion came close on the heels of his loss of faith, and that his atheist period was likely a matter of months rather than years.

3. At the age of 17, he had his Jekyll and Hyde experience, which convinced him of the reality of God. There is no indication that he ever again doubted God's existence. At this time he also made a promise to God that he would believe "Pauline Christianity" (i.e., Christianity as presented by the Apostle Paul in the Bible; no mention of any denomination) but found that he was not in fact able to believe it.

4. There followed "ten years of shilly-shallying," during which Dunne disbelieved in Christianity but felt guilty about that disbelief because of the promise he had made at 17. No mention is made of church affiliation or activity during this period, but one assumes he would have participated in public worship at least sporadically out of a sense of duty. Looking back on this period later, he said that at some level he "had never really lost" his Christian beliefs and "had never ceased to love" Jesus.

5. Around the age of 27, he finally found that he was able to believe by an act of will, and he "became a Christian" (implying that he had not been a Christian, not even a doubt-ridden one, before).

6. Some two months later, he had a spiritual experience of which the import seemed to be that Jesus was dead but that God was real, and he understood that God had released him from his promise to believe in Christianity. From then on he was a firm theist but not a Christian. All his books were written well after this experience, when he was no longer a Christian.

7. However, it appears that he was never entirely sure that Christianity might not be true after all. Given the opportunity, near the end of his life, of putting a question to an angel, the question he chose was, "Christianity, is it true?" -- characterized by his son as "the question which had always worried him." The angel's reply was ambiguous and confusing, and it appears not to have precipitated anything like a deathbed conversion.

Changing the future and changing the past

In a recent post, Bruce Charlton asks "Can the past be changed?" -- and answers, "Obviously not," going on to pronounce the contrary opinion "demonic." Since I have been guilty of entertaining a version of this doctrine from the pit of hell (see this post), I thought I would revisit the idea.

*

The first matter of business is to establish exactly what is meant by change. As a simple example of a change, consider my marital status, which changed in the latter part of 2010. Prior to that date, I was not married; after that date, I was and am. That's what change means: that a given proposition ("William James Tychonievich is married") is/was/will be true at some points in time and false at others.

We can represent this change graphically by means of a colored line. The dimension represented by the line is "time," with the past to the left and the future to the right, and the color of any given point on the line represents my marital status at that point in time (blue for single, gold for married). Below is a portion of such a timeline, covering the years from 2009 to 2020.

Fig. 1

We want to consider the idea of changing the future and the past, so this timeline is inadequate, giving no indication of which points on the line are past and which are future. We need to add something to indicate that the present moment is -- well, of course it's a moving target, changing even as I type this sentence, but this is a pretty low-resolution timeline, so "about a third of the way through 2019" will be good enough for our purposes. (If you should happen to be reading this post at a significantly later date, please be so good as to proceed on the counterfactual-to-you assumption that the present moment is indeed in that general vicinity.) Let us modify our timeline by reserving the bright colors used in Fig. 1 for past points in time and representing future points by paler versions of the same colors, like so:

Fig. 2

There are now two points on the timeline where the color changes. The point where it changes from blue to gold represents the event of my marriage. To the left of that point, I was single; to the right, I was, am, and will be married. The point where the line changes from bright to pale represents the present moment. Everything to the left of that point is past, and everything to the right of it is future.

Now, we have already established that my marriage in 2010 constitutes an example of a change, and our timeline above locates that change to the left of the present moment -- that is, in the past. Is this, then, what we mean by "changing the past? Obviously not -- but why not, and what do we mean?

Well, the natural answer is something like this: The change in question occurred in 2010 -- which means that at that time, 2010 was not in the past but was the present year. If what happened in 2010 were to change now, that would be what we mean by "changing the past." But this introduces a distinction between 2010-in-2010 and 2010-now which cannot be represented on a one-dimensional timeline. Such time designations require two coordinates -- (2010, 2010), (2010, 2019) -- which means our simple timeline must be expanded into a two-dimensional "timeplane" of the type pioneered by J. W. Dunne and discussed in my post "The present now will later be past."

The title of that post, taken from the Bob Dylan Song "The Times They Are a-Changin'," was chosen because, while it seems very obviously true, it implicitly assumes a two-dimensional model of time. A simple timeline, like Fig. 2 above, can represent past, present, and future, but not the idea that "the present now will later be past." The very phrase "will later be past" describes the same state of affairs as being future in one sense and past in another -- which requires a rectangular coordinate system comprising two perpendicular timelines.

Fig. 3

Now I know from experience -- my own included -- that this is point at which readers' eyes start to glaze over, but I'm afraid there's just no avoiding these diagrams. I can only ask for the reader's patience and do my best to explain. The color of each point on the timeplane in Fig. 3 represents a proposition regarding my marital status: The hue represents the content of the proposition (blue for single, gold for married), and the tint represents its tense (pure colors for past, light colors for future). Each point is located in two different temporal dimensions: The x-axis ("object time") represents the time the proposition refers to, and the y-axis ("meta-time") represent the time at which the proposition is true.

I've marked two (arbitrarily selected) regions on the plane "A" and "B," respectively, in order to use them as examples. They represent the following meta-propositions:

A: In 2010, the proposition "WJT will be married in 2012" was true.

B: In 2014, the proposition "WJT was married in 2012" was true. 

For completeness, we really ought to indicate the tense of the meta-proposition as well. Fig. 4, below, is so modified as to express this. Solid colors (such as were used in Fig. 3) represent meta-past, and stippling represents meta-future.

Fig. 4

The region marked "C" in Fig. 4 represents the following meta-proposition:

In 2020, the proposition "WJT was married in 2011" will be true.

The "was" in the object proposition is indicated by the use of a pure color as opposed to a tint, and the "will be" of the meta-proposition is indicated by stippling.

The red dot in Fig. 4 marks the place where the true present may be found. (Or at least, this was true when I wrote it, about a third of the way through the year 2019.) When we say, "2019 is the present year," the word "present" corresponds to the diagonal line separating pure colors from tints, and the present-tense verb "is" corresponds to the horizontal line separating solid colors from stippling. The intersection of those two lines, marked with the red dot, is "the present now." Dylan's statement that "the present now will later be past" means that if we start at the red dot ("the present now") and move vertically down into the stippled region ("will later be"), we find a pure color ("past") rather than a tint.

Take a minute to digest that. I want to be sure the meaning of these timeplane diagrams is clear before proceeding.

Now look back at the region marked "A" in Fig. 3 and the meta-proposition to which it corresponds: "In 2010, the proposition 'WJT will be married in 2012' was [already] true." And consider this: If I were to extend my timeplane diagram to cover a wider range of past times, there would be a region on that diagram corresponding to the meta-proposition "In 4000 BC, the proposition 'WJT will be married in 2012' was already true." This is fatalism, of the unassailable variety spelled out by Richard Taylor (whose argument I discuss here) -- unassailable because it does not depend on the doctrine of causal determinism. From the mere assumption that all possible statements about the future are (already) either true or false, and that their truth-value cannot change, it follows that all is fated, that whatever happens is inevitable.

 To escape Taylorian fatalism, it is necessary to believe that we can change the future -- an idea which is common enough in naive discourse, and which our two-dimensional timeplane allows us to model. Let us modify our diagram, then. Instead of assuming (as Fig. 4 does) that my getting married in late 2010 is something that was always going to happen, something that was already written in the book of fate hundreds of years before my birth, or as far back as you care to imagine -- instead of assuming that, let's assume instead that I wasn't going to get married on that date, not until I actually made the decision to do so. Let's assume that my decision, rather than being just another step in the inevitable unfolding of fate, actually decided something, literally changed the future. And let's further assume (as seems reasonable) that this future-altering decision was made some months before the actual event of the marriage.

Fig. 5

The black dot on the timeplane in Fig. 5 represents the moment I exercised my agency and made the fateful decision (which, I need hardly mention, is entirely different from a fated decision, the latter being a contradiction in terms and no decision at all).

The diagonal line that passes through the black and red dots, and divides the pure colors on the left from the tints on the right, represents the timeline of my life as I experience it, as a succession of object-time "presents." The horizontal line that passes through the red dot, and divides the solid colors from the stippling, represents the meta-time present. (The object-time present is a point; the meta-time present is a line.) The intersection of these two lines divides the plane into four quadrants, representing (clockwise from the upper left), what had happened (solid pure colors), what was going to happen (solid tints), what will be going to happen (stippled tints), and what will have happened (stippled pure colors).

*

The diagonal line -- my life as I experience it -- is exactly the same in Fig. 4 (where the future is fated) and in Fig. 5 (where it can change). It would appear, then, that there can be no empirical evidence for the one model or the other, no possible experience that would be more consistent with the one than with the other. Choosing one over the other would be a metaphysical assumption, not a conclusion from evidence.

However, that may not be entirely true. There is considerable evidence (see J. W. Dunne's Experiment with Time for starters) that, while the attention is generally confined to the point-present represented by the red dot, it can sometimes extend to other regions of the linear meta-time present, especially during dreams or similar states of relaxed or diffuse attention. In such states, we have access to the object-time future (precognition) and past (retrocognition) -- at least as they exist at the meta-time present. Under Taylorian fatalism (as diagrammed in Fig. 4), the content of object time does not vary across meta-time; the only meta-time change is that of tense (as the future becomes the past), so whatever future events are perceived through genuine Dunnean precognition will infallibly come to pass when the future times in question become present. There would be no possibility of seeing the future and then changing your behavior as a result of what you see, with the result that the foreseen event is averted. This is precisely what fatalism -- of the sort seen in the Greek myths, for example -- means. Cassandra's prophetic warnings are ignored and have no power to prevent the events they foretell. The prophecies regarding Oedipus are not ignored, but the very attempt to thwart them leads to their fulfillment. Either way, fate ineluctably plays out.

In the model where the future can be changed (as diagrammed in Fig. 5), even true precognitions need not necessarily come true. For example, look back at Fig. 5 and imagine that in 2009 (in both object time and meta-time -- that is, at a point on the diagonal line) I had a precognitive vision of 2011. Since such a vision would be of object-time 2011 at meta-time 2009, I would see myself as still single at that date. However, by the time object-time 2011 becomes the meta-time present, it will already have changed, so that the 2011 I experience will be different from the 2011 I foresaw. Nonetheless, what I foresaw was true. (If that seems like a contradiction, consider this analogy. I turn on the TV to the weather channel and discover that it is sunny in Taipei. I then get in my car, drive to Taipei, and upon my arrival find that it is raining. But what I saw on TV was true.) Instances of true precognition that do not come true would be evidence that the future can be changed.

The problem, of course, is that, if a vision or premonition does not come true, there would seem to be no grounds for considering it genuinely precognitive. For example, once in my late teens, at a time when I had no plans to go overseas, I had a very vivid and detailed dream in which I was about 30 and living in Vietnam. I'm 40 now and have never set foot in that particular country. It's possible that my Vietnam dream was genuinely precognitive, revealing what was (at that time) going to happen in the future, but that the future it foretold has since changed because of choices I or others have made. It could also be considered a garbled precognition of what in fact came to pass. (I do live in Asia and have for most of my adult life.) But there's no good reason to believe that, and the simplest explanation is that it was just a dream and not precognitive at all. Certainly such a dream cannot constitute evidence that the future can be changed. Is such evidence possible?

Consider the premise of the Final Destination series of horror movies. The protagonist has a sudden vision of a series of events leading up to all his friends dying horribly in a freak accident. When the foreseen events begin to play out in real life, he panics and manages to prevent his friends from getting on the doomed plane or roller coaster or whatever. Then the freak accident occurs as foreseen, except that his friends are not among those killed by it. Later they all go on to die horribly anyway, in different freak accidents, because "you can't cheat death," but that's not germane to my point here, which is that the originally premonition is clearly a true one even though it does not come to pass exactly as foreseen. When people act on a precognitive warning so that the foreseen event does not happen, but subsequent events make it abundantly clear that it would have happened had they not taken action, that is evidence that the future can be changed.

Such evidence in fact exists. The literature on precognition is full of Final Destination type stories (minus the post-accident bit where everyone dies horribly anyway). Someone has a premonition of being in a plane crash, they cancel their tickets, and then the flight they would have been on crashes. That kind of thing.

*

What about changing the past? Well, it's a bizarre idea, so our illustrative example will be a little bizarre as well. I must ask the reader to suspend disbelief, ignoring for the moment the question of whether or not such things can really happen. Our question is what it would mean for the past to change, and, supposing it did change, whether there could be any empirical evidence of that change.

Suppose that "originally" I chose not to get married in 2010. Years later, in 2015, I looked back on that choice with regret and said to myself, "I wish I'd married that girl when I had the chance!" A passing genie happened to hear my remark and granted the wish. From that moment, it suddenly became true that I had gotten married in 2010. We can represent this hypothetical story graphically as below, in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6

The black dot on the plane in Fig. 6 indicates the moment at which my wish was granted. Notice that, when the past changes, the present and future change as well, since chains of cause-and-effect run horizontally from left to right across the diagram (i.e., causation is an object-time phenomenon).

Remember that the diagonal line dividing the pure colors from the tints represents my life as I actually experience it, as a succession of presents -- and notice that in the world depicted by Fig. 6, I never actually experience my own wedding or the first several years of my married life. I go directly from being a bachelor to having been married for nearly five years! Surely such an obvious discontinuity in my experience could not possibly go unnoticed, and surely the fact that people's lives don't include such discontinuities is evidence that the past cannot change -- right?

Well, not exactly. Remember that causation is an object-time phenomenon. When object-time 2010 changed in meta-time 2015, all subsequent points in object time also changed as a result of the causal effects of that 2010 wedding. For example, if photos were taken at the wedding, those photos will (after the granting of my wish) still be there in 2015 and after. But if the creation of photos is one of the effects of the wedding, the creation of memories in the minds of the participants is another. If my memories of the past are understood to be effects of those past events in the ordinary sense of that word (i.e., one of the effects of a given past event is an alteration in the state of my brain, which alteration persists through time and constitutes my memory of that event), then my memories at any given point in my life will be of what preceded that point horizontally (i.e., in object time), not diagonally along the line of my actual experience. If the past cannot be changed, the difference is immaterial, since the content of the horizontal and diagonal pasts will be identical. If it can be changed, then as soon as the change has happened, the content of my "original" past is inaccessible to me. When, at the moment marked with the black dot, I suddenly transform from a bachelor into someone who has been married for five years, my memories change as well. I would have no memory of ever having chosen not to get married in 2010, nor of regretting my choice and having my wish granted by a genie. My memory would tell me that I had "always" gotten married in 2010, and all observable effects in the present would also be consistent with that. No evidence that the past had changed would be possible.

What about retrocognition -- "paranormal" direct access to the past, corresponding to precognition and different from ordinary memory? Would that give us access to the "original" past, before it had changed? No, because like precognition, it represents an expansion of attention from the point-present to the linear present of meta-time (represented in the figures by the horizontal line passing through the red dot).

*

I had originally planned to discuss the so-called "Mandela Effect" -- the phenomenon of memories that don't match documented history (such as many people's memories of Nelson Mandela having died in prison, or of the Berenstain bears being called the Berenstein Bears) -- as possibly representing memories of the past before it was changed, but our two-dimensional time model has no way of accounting for such "memories" (except to say that they are simply errors). That will require us to venture into the even-more-confusing domain of meta-meta-time -- and, this post already being quite long enough, I think I will reserve that discussion (and a discussion of the moral significance of changeable vs. unchangeable pasts, as raised by Bruce Charlton) for the sequel.