Why I write (so much)
Jul. 18th, 2015 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteI’ve been blessed (if you’re me) or cursed (if you’ve been forced to listen to me) with insatiable curiosity and a profound sense of wonder at the universe. Pretty much anywhere I look, I can find something in the natural world to fascinate me. And sometimes my brain flits around from notion to notion like a butterfly with ADHD. Over the years, I’ve accumulated an enormously wide, though often shallow, appreciation for a great many things.
As the years go by, I’ve tended to oscillate between my scientific training (wanting to name and pigeonhole everything) and simply appreciating things for their own sake, without having to apply a label that fixes them in intellectual formaldehyde. Labels are tremendously useful things; they help us define how things fit together, and knowing how the many parts of the world fit together provides a much more profound understanding of its wonders. But labels also strongly predetermine how we think of things, which can prevent us from seeing beyond the narrow walls of the mental pigeonholes we’ve built to contain them. More importantly, sometimes it’s nice to just enjoy something without having to think of its larger implications.
I also love reading, witness the overflowing bookshelves in our house.* I’m of the opinion that pretty much anything I read will teach me something new or inspire thoughts completely unrelated to what I’m reading (see above re. ADHD) but that are nonetheless interesting. For example, today, for no reason I can discern, I found myself wondering why police require guns and clubs to subdue potentially violent but not necessarily dangerous citizens. The Romans had a simple and elegant solution: use nets, like those used by the type of gladiator known as a retiarius. For the most part, a skillfully used net should be completely harmless to the citizen, and would be inexpensive enough that every patrol car could have one in the trunk. Heck, officers on foot could probably carry a couple on their belt. Hmmm...
* Were Shoshanna not equally voracious in her reading habits, this would be a serious problem. Fortunately, we’re highly compatible in this way. Even so, we both made the supreme sacrifice a few years back of weeding out some of our duplicate books and donating them to the staff of a convention.
During the Iceland trip that I described in the past couple weeks of blog entries, I was talking to our guide, retired geologist Richard Little of Earth View tours about geology and legends. (Richard is an excellent tour guide and organizer, by the way. If you love geology and visiting exotic places, Richard’s a great choice.) Our discussion prompted a memory of a book I’d read more than 30 years ago, Ragnarok: the Age of Fire and Gravel, by the 19th century U.S. congressman, early litcrit guy, and amateur scientist–author (many now say pseudoscientist) Ignatius Donnelly. (This dabbling across multiple disciplines was a common Victorian thing, and it produced both interesting insights and arrant nonsense. So does modern intellectual endeavor, though usually less often.)
Donnelly wrote this book in an effort to scientifically explain the curious coincidence of how certain geological evidence strongly suggested a large cometary impact that strewed similar types of rock and gravel around the globe. Unfortunately, Donnelly was writing well before glaciation was fully understood and before plate tectonics was being seriously considered by geologists (i.e., before Wegener began musing about continental drift in the early 20th century). Plate tectonics does a far better job of explaining the evidence. But what Donnelly got right (as subsequently confirmed by substantial geological evidence) is the fact that all kinds of large rocks and possibly even comets periodically strike the Earth, and that people who were alive at the time would have seen the larger impacts and tried to incorporate them in their body of myth.
It's been 30+ years since I read Donnelly’s book, but my memory is that it's a fascinating example of 19th century amateur scientific sleuthing and did a plausible job of explaining the available geological data. I remember the writing as charmingly antique (i.e., that Victorian style thing) and I remember devouring the book in only a few days. Donnelly turned out to be wrong because, of course, his knowledge was incomplete and, like many amateur scientists, he perhaps was unaware of how much data real scientists amass in their efforts to understand. But apart from the lesson in the history of science, what fascinated me about Donnelly’s book was that he took the second part of this idea and ran with it: the idea of how scientific phenomena can be incorporated in a culture’s myths. Thus, Ragnarök represents one of the early efforts to subject myth and legend to a scientific test to see whether there was a plausible scientific explanation for the myth. Here, Donnelly was specifically investigating the Icelandic/Norse Ragnarök myth): a large comet striking Earth would almost certainly carve a fiery trail through the atmosphere (the fire part of Ragnarok), leave a trail of debris and signs of an immense impact (the geological evidence Donnelly mustered), and create a mini-ice age if it threw up enough dust (the ice part of Ragnarok). Donnelly provides examples from several other cultures to support his hypothesis.
This notion blew my young mind: the mere idea that disciplines as different as science and history could be combined in highly productive ways that took advantage of the different strengths of these different ways of thinking was taken as a given by the Victorians, but this kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination has subsequently fallen out of favor. As a result, and a sad one at that, it isn’t being done nearly as often as it could be: professionals in various disciplines tend to work in their own isolated silos rather than working together to share their expertise. Whatever else one might say about Donnelly, he provides an example of several things: that amateurs can enrich our way of seeing the world, even when they’re wrong; that none of us can master all subjects, and that the amateur’s desire to understand multiple disciplines is best achieved by collaborations between professionals in these disciplines; and that (for me) understanding why an author’s thesis was right, wrong, or somewhere in between is itself a source of inspiration.
Another example of this hybrid scientific/historical approach to exploring deep history is the notion that the great flood of the Judeo-Christian Bible represents an oral history of the prehistoric flooding of the Mediterranean basin that occurred when the land between Gibraltar and Africa was eroded away, allowing the Atlantic to flood into the basin. Unfortunately, the flood timing doesn't seem to support this possibility; that flooding is estimated to have occurred more than 5 million years ago, well before modern humans evolved (ca. 300 kaBP for Neandertals). The flooding of the Black and Caspian seas, between 16 kaBP and 7 kaBP, is a more likely candidate for the source of this myth. Of course, the fossil evidence is also incomplete and fragmentary, so its possible that the Neandertals originated much earlier than 300 kaBP and that even older branches of the human lineage were much smarter than we currently believe and could have been around and verbal by the time of the flood. I’m not convinced, but it’s fun to play with such notions. Julian May’s Pliocene Exile series has a ton of implausible fun with these notions. So even if the science and history are suspect, it can still lead to some fun ideas.
The point I’m trying to make in this essay relates to the excitement provided by new sights, new ideas, and new connections among previously unconnected facts. In a sense, it’s less important whether the idea is correct than that it’s exciting. There’s always time to explore the idea using whatever tools you prefer (science, psychology, culture, whatever) and find out whether it’s plausible; it’s the exploration that’s important. The world’s a fascinating place, and sometimes idle speculation leads to even more fascinating insights, as in the case of Wegener following the chain of inspiration provided by suspiciously similar continental boundaries and inspiring a whole new field of geology (plate tectonics). Sometimes the exploration seems futile, as in the case of the Mediterranean floods, but can still result in good stuff (fiction in this case). The journey is as important as the destination, as is true in so many areas of life.
When I come across something that strikes me as cool, I want to share it with everyone I can trap into listening so they can share some of my sense of wonder and excitement. That’s a major reason why I write so much nonfiction, particularly related to writing and editing. I want other editors and writers to benefit from what I've learned. It's also why I blog about my vacations and take hundreds of photos: when I get home, I share the collection with anyone who expresses sincere interest so they can share some of my sense of wonder. (Shoshanna usually boils them down into a much shorter collection so as not to bore those who express only polite interest.) It’s my way of making the world a more wonderful place, one thought at a time.
As the years go by, I’ve tended to oscillate between my scientific training (wanting to name and pigeonhole everything) and simply appreciating things for their own sake, without having to apply a label that fixes them in intellectual formaldehyde. Labels are tremendously useful things; they help us define how things fit together, and knowing how the many parts of the world fit together provides a much more profound understanding of its wonders. But labels also strongly predetermine how we think of things, which can prevent us from seeing beyond the narrow walls of the mental pigeonholes we’ve built to contain them. More importantly, sometimes it’s nice to just enjoy something without having to think of its larger implications.
I also love reading, witness the overflowing bookshelves in our house.* I’m of the opinion that pretty much anything I read will teach me something new or inspire thoughts completely unrelated to what I’m reading (see above re. ADHD) but that are nonetheless interesting. For example, today, for no reason I can discern, I found myself wondering why police require guns and clubs to subdue potentially violent but not necessarily dangerous citizens. The Romans had a simple and elegant solution: use nets, like those used by the type of gladiator known as a retiarius. For the most part, a skillfully used net should be completely harmless to the citizen, and would be inexpensive enough that every patrol car could have one in the trunk. Heck, officers on foot could probably carry a couple on their belt. Hmmm...
* Were Shoshanna not equally voracious in her reading habits, this would be a serious problem. Fortunately, we’re highly compatible in this way. Even so, we both made the supreme sacrifice a few years back of weeding out some of our duplicate books and donating them to the staff of a convention.
During the Iceland trip that I described in the past couple weeks of blog entries, I was talking to our guide, retired geologist Richard Little of Earth View tours about geology and legends. (Richard is an excellent tour guide and organizer, by the way. If you love geology and visiting exotic places, Richard’s a great choice.) Our discussion prompted a memory of a book I’d read more than 30 years ago, Ragnarok: the Age of Fire and Gravel, by the 19th century U.S. congressman, early litcrit guy, and amateur scientist–author (many now say pseudoscientist) Ignatius Donnelly. (This dabbling across multiple disciplines was a common Victorian thing, and it produced both interesting insights and arrant nonsense. So does modern intellectual endeavor, though usually less often.)
Donnelly wrote this book in an effort to scientifically explain the curious coincidence of how certain geological evidence strongly suggested a large cometary impact that strewed similar types of rock and gravel around the globe. Unfortunately, Donnelly was writing well before glaciation was fully understood and before plate tectonics was being seriously considered by geologists (i.e., before Wegener began musing about continental drift in the early 20th century). Plate tectonics does a far better job of explaining the evidence. But what Donnelly got right (as subsequently confirmed by substantial geological evidence) is the fact that all kinds of large rocks and possibly even comets periodically strike the Earth, and that people who were alive at the time would have seen the larger impacts and tried to incorporate them in their body of myth.
It's been 30+ years since I read Donnelly’s book, but my memory is that it's a fascinating example of 19th century amateur scientific sleuthing and did a plausible job of explaining the available geological data. I remember the writing as charmingly antique (i.e., that Victorian style thing) and I remember devouring the book in only a few days. Donnelly turned out to be wrong because, of course, his knowledge was incomplete and, like many amateur scientists, he perhaps was unaware of how much data real scientists amass in their efforts to understand. But apart from the lesson in the history of science, what fascinated me about Donnelly’s book was that he took the second part of this idea and ran with it: the idea of how scientific phenomena can be incorporated in a culture’s myths. Thus, Ragnarök represents one of the early efforts to subject myth and legend to a scientific test to see whether there was a plausible scientific explanation for the myth. Here, Donnelly was specifically investigating the Icelandic/Norse Ragnarök myth): a large comet striking Earth would almost certainly carve a fiery trail through the atmosphere (the fire part of Ragnarok), leave a trail of debris and signs of an immense impact (the geological evidence Donnelly mustered), and create a mini-ice age if it threw up enough dust (the ice part of Ragnarok). Donnelly provides examples from several other cultures to support his hypothesis.
This notion blew my young mind: the mere idea that disciplines as different as science and history could be combined in highly productive ways that took advantage of the different strengths of these different ways of thinking was taken as a given by the Victorians, but this kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination has subsequently fallen out of favor. As a result, and a sad one at that, it isn’t being done nearly as often as it could be: professionals in various disciplines tend to work in their own isolated silos rather than working together to share their expertise. Whatever else one might say about Donnelly, he provides an example of several things: that amateurs can enrich our way of seeing the world, even when they’re wrong; that none of us can master all subjects, and that the amateur’s desire to understand multiple disciplines is best achieved by collaborations between professionals in these disciplines; and that (for me) understanding why an author’s thesis was right, wrong, or somewhere in between is itself a source of inspiration.
Another example of this hybrid scientific/historical approach to exploring deep history is the notion that the great flood of the Judeo-Christian Bible represents an oral history of the prehistoric flooding of the Mediterranean basin that occurred when the land between Gibraltar and Africa was eroded away, allowing the Atlantic to flood into the basin. Unfortunately, the flood timing doesn't seem to support this possibility; that flooding is estimated to have occurred more than 5 million years ago, well before modern humans evolved (ca. 300 kaBP for Neandertals). The flooding of the Black and Caspian seas, between 16 kaBP and 7 kaBP, is a more likely candidate for the source of this myth. Of course, the fossil evidence is also incomplete and fragmentary, so its possible that the Neandertals originated much earlier than 300 kaBP and that even older branches of the human lineage were much smarter than we currently believe and could have been around and verbal by the time of the flood. I’m not convinced, but it’s fun to play with such notions. Julian May’s Pliocene Exile series has a ton of implausible fun with these notions. So even if the science and history are suspect, it can still lead to some fun ideas.
The point I’m trying to make in this essay relates to the excitement provided by new sights, new ideas, and new connections among previously unconnected facts. In a sense, it’s less important whether the idea is correct than that it’s exciting. There’s always time to explore the idea using whatever tools you prefer (science, psychology, culture, whatever) and find out whether it’s plausible; it’s the exploration that’s important. The world’s a fascinating place, and sometimes idle speculation leads to even more fascinating insights, as in the case of Wegener following the chain of inspiration provided by suspiciously similar continental boundaries and inspiring a whole new field of geology (plate tectonics). Sometimes the exploration seems futile, as in the case of the Mediterranean floods, but can still result in good stuff (fiction in this case). The journey is as important as the destination, as is true in so many areas of life.
When I come across something that strikes me as cool, I want to share it with everyone I can trap into listening so they can share some of my sense of wonder and excitement. That’s a major reason why I write so much nonfiction, particularly related to writing and editing. I want other editors and writers to benefit from what I've learned. It's also why I blog about my vacations and take hundreds of photos: when I get home, I share the collection with anyone who expresses sincere interest so they can share some of my sense of wonder. (Shoshanna usually boils them down into a much shorter collection so as not to bore those who express only polite interest.) It’s my way of making the world a more wonderful place, one thought at a time.