In defence of Wormholes, Rabbitholes and other Cavties and Appertures

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Wormholes are great things. These tunnels that connect two points that are either very far, or are in different universes - you get the picture. Not like anyone one of us has actually seen one, but I'm sure them physicists know what they're talking about. In any case I'm not planning to argue with them, I just think the concept is really cool - if you stumble down one, you could emerge in a completely new universe (or an old one). This has of course inspired a slew of science fiction and speculative fiction set in alternate universes. My favorite in this line of thought is of course Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. I've talked about the lyrical quality of the prose earlier. 

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Coming back from our little detour, Wormholes are great things. So are Rabbit holes, like the one Alice fell down. Because half a century before Einstein got around to writing about the General Theory of Relativity, which laid the conceptual foundation for wormholes, the nerdiest writer of all time, Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgso, if you will) needed something to escape the banality of human existence. And so we had a curious Alice tumble down a Rabbit hole and emerge in a Wonderland. We also have a beautiful, enigmatic song by Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit, which poked holes in Censors' efforts to curtain freedom of expression. It is widely touted as one of the first songs to sneak drug references past censors on the radio. Here is a kickass cover by the absolutely badass Amanda Palmer. 

'Down the Rabbit hole' is now fairly common expression to describe what we do on the internet. You're reading something and you follow a link to something else and before you know it, you're reading about something completely different. Going down the Rabbit hole in Wikipedia is a genre in itself and gets it's own word - a wikihole. There are those who have explored the depths of these wikiholes and claim that if you keep going down one, you'll eventually end up on the page for philosophy.

I went down a Rabbit hole recently with some very curious results. I was reading one of my favorite bloggers, Jai Arjun Singh (whose blog is incidentally called Jabberwock - a Lewis Carroll character)

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interview author Jerry Pinto. I stumbled on this hilarious poem about an algebra text book written by Messrs Hall and Knight. It talks about how they conspire to torment little hapless little children.

'How hard it is', said Mr Knight, 'to hide the fact from youth

That x and y are equal: it is such an obvious truth!'

We'd put the problem well beyond our little victims' reach.

'It is', said Mr Hall, 'but if we gave a b to each,

- Dr E V. Rieu

I've been there and suffered through it, as have an entire generation of engineering aspirants (if not more). So I was pleasantly surprised to find a poet who shared my woes. I went on a trip of my own, down the memory lane (or hole, if you will). Speaking of memory, I'd like to sign off with a quote from someone who has mined the depths of memory like no other:

People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

On word blizzards, uncertainty and versions of reality

I read this really sweet article the other day in the New York Review where the author, Tim Parks bemoans the mountain of books being published today - both as physical printed-on-paper books and ebooks. He posed the question: how does one make sense of it all and navigate through the blizzard of words. He takes you through a short history of writing and publishing and the rise of the Critic and Literary Prize, which have also proliferated to the point of pointlessness. He leaves us with the following options suggesting that it is a battle you have to fight on your own everyday:

"How to respond, then, to this now permanent condition of overproduction? With cheerful skepticism. With gratitude for those rare occasions when we come across a book that speaks to us personally. With forgiveness for those critics and publishers who induce us to waste our time with some literary flavor of the day. Absolutely without indignation, since none of this is anyone’s particular “fault.” Above all with a sense of wonder and curiosity at the general and implacable human determination (mine included) to fill endless space with dubious mental material when life is short and there are so many other things to be done."

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This reminded me of a character from Murakami's Kafka On The Shore who had a very interesting filter - he would only read books by an author who had been dead for at least 25 years. Clearly its a jape at the reader who isn't applying any such filters (otherwise I'd have to give up reading Murakami himself who is very much alive and writing wonderfully strange, delightful and insightful works).

A friend of mine once described him as The rock star among contemporary writers. What I appreciate about his work is that no matter how strange his worlds get, they are always lyrical. He uses a lot of songs and music references to express a certain mood or to underline a point. One of my favorite examples is how he repeated these lines from the song Its Only A Paper Moon:

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" It's a Barnum and Bailey world,

Just as phony as it can be,

But it wouldn't be make believe

If you believed in me."

in his novel 1Q84 to underline how displaced the protagonists felt in the world with two moons. You'd be forgiven for thinking the song was written for the novel.

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Marquez had explored the theme of two people separated by life and circumstances reuniting decades later in life in Love In Times Of Cholera but unlike the stubborn hope and certitude that Marquez gave his characters, Murakami's characters in 1Q84 know the pain of real danger to their existence and the very real possibility of dying without ever meeting one another. But then again, one shouldn't compare one's right eye to the left. In very much the same way the absolute, impossible, foolishly romantic and final 'forever' that ends Love In Times Of Cholera cannot be compared to the courage and hope with which Aomame tries to alter her reality in 1Q84 - knowing fully that her new reality may differ from her older reality and that one cannot really go back to what was.

Going back to Tim Parks' dilemma - how does one deal with this reality? I tend to stick to recommendations from trusted friends. It is a Barnum and Bailey world, but I get by with a little help from my friends.