Jody's Notes
Well, I don't know. There are these people, on the one hand, who believe in God (or in other things). They just do. And, near as I can tell, they don't stand out from the general population as far as their other character traits are concerned. Even though a lot of them talk about faith. Nevertheless, they aren't particularly more irrational than other people in the population. Or more conformist. Or whatever. (But of course studies that would establish this one way or the other are extremely hard to carry out successfully.)
Anyway, there are these other people who don't believe in God (or in other things like that). And they just don't get it. What's wrong with you people? Don't you have eyes? Can't you see? And what's all this about faith, anway? And they hypothesize all sorts of irrational mechanisms at work in these other people (or in the communities they grew up in).
Well, I don't know. Maybe there's this third group. (Is this possible? A third group? Of humans? Is this really possible?) Anyway, these people understand the second group; but they understand the first group too. They don't believe; they can't believe; "faith isn't an epistemic engine," some of them say enigmatically. But they understand people who do; they sympathize with people who do; they empathize with people who do; they get it.
Maybe people like that want to be different. Maybe they fantasize about being Mormons, or being Amish, or being anyway, someone who thinks the cosmos is the way these people think the cosmos is. Even though they know it's not. Knowledge. It doesn't always fit in with everything else about you.
We could describe these people as ones with "divided souls." But we'd have to be careful if we said that. Because It isn't that these kind of people are unsure of anything, or that they have doubts, or anything like that. Things are quite clear to these people. And that's the problem.
Have you noticed this? People of the first two kinds find people of the third kind annoying. They usually claim that these people are self-deluded, that they're people of the first kind or of the second kind, but don't realize it.
I kind of doubt that.
I republished this poem in The Lust for Blueprints.
What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if
he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning
sphere of methane or ammonia must be silent?
—R. Feynman
Nightfall, a friendly ash,
sticks to everything: makes
me think of heaven. The dumb
stars too are hopeless. Only Greeks,
flimsy with evidence, connected the dots;
sketched imaginary companions like children.
Nowadays mad gravity dominates
even the scattered heavens; the black
hole, where spacetime sleeps
crunched like a button, embraces light:
an eye gone stomach.
Do I have to say it? Some people
like this sort of thing. But they too
die, and find themselves nowhere.
© 1998, 2001 Jody Azzouni