Snatching Stuff from the Universe

My old friend Alvaro Mutis, who is perhaps the best writer in Latin America, said in a number of interviews that all poets go to heaven.  Then he always chuckled, adding “At least I hope so.”  I wondered what he meant by that until, in an interview I was doing with him, he stated that all true poetry exists ready-made in heaven, and the poet’s task is to go there and retrieve it.  The trick is to express it adequately in human language, he added.

Concurrently, I had been telling people that in listening to some of Mozart’s more sublime passages (try Ave Verum Corpus), I had a distinct impression that he had gone to heaven and brought them back.  Then I read Walter Isaacson’s Einstein, in which the great physicist is quoted as saying, “Beethoven created his music, but Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe” (p.38).  On another occasion, Einstein remarked that while Beethoven had to compose his music, Mozart snatched his from the universe, “the way I snatch my ideas from the universe.”

Tricks of the mind?  Humility?  Silly metaphors?  Or is Jung’s “collective unconscious” at play again, informed by the very crypto-structures of reality itself?  I’m sometimes bemused in watching programs on savants on the more serious television channels.  The narrator will suddenly blurt out, “Savants have knowledge they have never learned,” and then quickly change the subject, knowing what has been stated is is taboo in the context of reductionist science.

My stepdaughter Marla was born deaf, and deafness is a condition that tends to cause certain neural connections to be made differently than they are in “normal” people.  She has now had cochlear implants in both ears and has 96% hearing.  (That loud applause you hear in the background is for Dr. Thomas J. Balkany and the Audiology Clinic at the University of Miami.)  The first inkling I had of her possessing stunningly different abilities came when, as a seven-year-old with only a couple of piano lessons under her belt, she began pounding away at the piano as children do.  Suddenly she came up with about four measures of perfect, professional-sounding jazz.  I dropped the pot I was washing and looked over at her in a state of shock as the name of Oscar Peterson flashed through my mind.  She looked at me, smiled and asked, “You like it?”

On another occasion she jumped up on my lap at the computer and took control of the mouse.  (People born deaf are nothing if not aggressive, but she was so charming that I didn’t mind postponing what I was doing.)  She found a word game consisting of a string of letters out of which one was to make quite a number of words of different lengths.  Between us we managed to get all but one seven-letter word.  I couldn’t come up with one and suggested that we give up.  She said, “No, I have it!”  She typed in what looked like gibberish to me, and I remarked that it didn’t mean anything.  Then she hit “Enter” and the game took the word.

I asked her where she had got it, and she said, “I heard it once on TV.”  Well, words that a person who has probably done a million pages of reading in multiple languages has never encountered tend not to be used on Spongebob.  I looked it up in Webster’s Unabridged, and it was there.  And no, I was too stunned to write it down, so I don’t know what it was.  Maybe she does.

The name Marla means “high tower” in Greek.  Maybe there’s an antenna on there somewhere.

Science is hard-pressed, to say the least, to come up with a plausible—and I stress the word “plausible”—explanation of such phenomena.  She was not surprised at her ability to play jazz at that level, at least on that one occasion.  Furthermore, she was completely confident that she knew an appropriate word to finish the game.

Is there, indeed, a ghost in the machine?  Is science being hypocritical in proclaiming that it operates objectively, examining all the facts and coming to reasonable conclusions, when it also sweeps anything not matching its preconceived notions under the carpet?  I am referring, of course, to anything that smacks of a reality beyond the purely reductionistic.