Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

and finding himself writing like some latter-day Christian apologist, making casual, fashionable use of the scientific myth of the moment (the Big Bang, anyway, and evolution-theory), he’d been surprised and amused, though not put off. He’d understood well enough that the God he was talking about could not really be made to jibe with the Christian Jehovah; but it had pleased him, there in the mountains, with the trees full of birds, bears and wolves in their shadow, to talk with childhood’s confidence of God—any God. Later, back in Providence (ironic name!), he could not recapture that feeling and had occasionally ranted about the cowardice of Tillich.

All the same, it was a theory he should have mentioned to Alan Blassenheim, he thought now. It would have been a comfort to the boy’s religiously grounded idealism, nonsense or not. It might have guy-wired the touch of prudery, old-fashioned faithfulness, he was seeing his way past. And anyway, he was not certain that the theory was nonsense, though heaven knew there were arguments against its meaningfulness. It would have satisfied Blassenheim’s wish, even need—like Mickelsson’s and, worst of all, poor Nugent’s—that the universe make sense. It allowed for randomness, the seemingly undeniable fact of our physical experience—the Heisenberg principle, the implications of plasma compression, electrons spinning out in unpredictable directions, so that even if some all-embracing intelligence existed and could know the solutions of all the equations that govern events, no completely accurate prediction of the future would be possible (random electrons, random universe)—yet at the same time it offered not only hope but certainty: the very randomness that made prediction impossible was Nature’s tool for insuring the emergence of life in each expansion cycle, Nature’s guarantee of the approach to perfection and harmony as increasingly complex forms evolved: out of atoms, layering upward, God’s grandeur, answer to the flounder-heart’s need, soft cry to the lutists: “That was nice!”

He imagined Blassenheim asking him, glancing up at him, not quite meeting his eyes—petulant as a child, Adam in the garden, who’s been offered some gift and then seen it, apparently for no reason, withdrawn—“So what’s wrong with the theory?”

“Ah,” Mickelsson said, and feebly moved his arm on the covers, in his mind waving Blassenheim away, “the trouble is the psychics. Time theory.”

“Go on,” Blassenheim said.

“Nobody worries about it, here on the East Coast, but in California they’ve been studying it for years; also other places—England, Russia. … Psychics, the authentic ones, can tell you the future, often the past, sometimes even the distant past. Sharks have some prescience, apparently—in fact there’s some evidence that lower forms have an advantage in these matters. You’ll find proofs of psychic phenomena mountains high, if you care to look. Ask the police who use psychics to find missing children or solve crimes. Never mind that often they can’t do it; notice that occasionally—with great accuracy of detail—they do. A number of scientists are looking into such things these days; mostly physicists. The Stanford out-of-the-body experiments, dream labs, studies of dream predictions like the famous one last year, before the DC-10 crash. If it’s true that psychics can occasionally tell you in advance, in precise detail, what’s going to happen, and if it’s true that once the psychic has seen it there’s no preventing it, no more than one can prevent today the accident one witnessed yesterday, then in a random universe (unpredictable electrons, unpredictable universe) it would seem—tentatively, anyway—there’s only one clear avenue of explanation: the future has already taken place. Maybe part of it, maybe all of it; in any case, the moving bubble of ‘now’ is in some sense—no one knows quite in what sense—an allusion. It’s true, you can make up theories to explain it—hundreds of theories, whatever you’ve got the math for.” He waved again, dismissive. “But a hundred untestable theories are as good as no theory.”

“But that’s what science is for, isn’t it?” Blassenheim asked—or rather, Mickelsson (Mickelsson’s self-fiction) made him ask, forcing himself through a fool’s Socratic dialogue, stacking the deck, the shadowy teacher oonching cards into the shadowy student’s hand: “Make up hypotheses and test them, one after another, the way Edison tested materials for the lightbulb?”

Mickelsson closed his eyes, dropping the game, losing interest. The image he’d been fleeing rose up again, long-legged, beautiful Jessica Stark giving tit on the couch in Tillson’s office, Tillson snuffling like a humping wet rat. Venus and the deformed Vulcan. He clenched his teeth, but lightly, turning his thought away, mine-sweeping waters he knew to be more safe, trying to remember what he’d been thinking just a minute before. It came to him at last: typing, late at night, in his Adirondack camp. Silky-winged moths fluttered drunkenly around him, crawled like soul-weary “new philosophers” on the tabletop, nibbling at his papers and books. Sometimes he’d get up and go out on the porch to listen to the sounds of the night—animals brustling about in the fallen leaves not far away, wind moving softly through diseased beechtrees and pines. Far, far in the distance, on an island in the acidy lake below, he could sometimes make out warm yellow lights. Ah, community, he would sometimes muse. He’d written about that too. Why do we think what we think and not all the other things equally possible, once prejudice is defused? (Why, he thought now, do we choose not to believe in frog falls, blood falls, falls of bricks, cookies in plastic bags?)

He opened his eyes again. The sky outside his window was distinctly lighter. Why was it, he thought—putting the question in a way he had never thought to put it before—that people were increasingly interested, of late, in alternative (so to speak) reality options? Castaneda—Carlos, not Hector—UFO books, quack speculations like The Secret of the Pyramids or The Cosmic Egg. The Western way of thinking had held its own since the pre-Socratics. Could it be because lately the community had expanded—it was possible now to read good, thoughtful books about the Tibetan way