Tyger Tyger burning bright
Noël Staples muses on some universal questions
Derek Guiton’s thought-provoking ‘Thought for the Week’ on William Blake’s poem ‘The Tyger’ (10 August), big bang theory, and beauty and transcendence reminded me of Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s 2013 James Backhouse lecture A Quaker Astronomer reflects. Derek Guiton wonders whether: ‘…through us and through the rest of the evolved animal world, the universe itself is moving towards new forms of transcendence that may ultimately reconcile the “fearful symmetry” of the tiger with the “graceful symmetry” of the gazelle.’
Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s conclusion about the future of the material universe, after the Earth has been gobbled up by our dying sun, is bleak: ‘Galaxies will go black and all life in the Universe will die, will be exterminated; no life will be possible.’ I would add that: ‘No life as we know it will be possible.’
When we speak of evil we refer only to what tends to harm humans. Outside the human contex,t the idea of evil has no meaning. In the absence of any possibility of affecting humans, what would an evil act be in our nearest galaxy, Andromeda, with which our Milky Way galaxy will eventually collide? Tygers are supreme predators and will, if hungry and the chance offers, eat humans like any other animal they may catch. Yet we hardly judge them as evil!
William Blake wonders how whatever created the predatory Tyger also created the Lamb. Humans are much more predatory than Tygers! There are not many Tygers left because of humans killing them. The entire material universe, including humans, is in a continuous process of creation and destruction. Jocelyn Bell Burnell says, one day, life as we know it will cease. And yet… what about the numinous, the transcendent mysterium tremendum et fascinans described by Rudolf Otto that Quakers (and so many others) sense, often in Meetings for Worship?
Iain McGilchrist in The Master and his Emissary tells how our bicameral brain’s left hemisphere sees the material universe in terms of its ever-diminishing component parts. Yet the principle of nonsummativity acknowledges that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’.
If we have to have a creator to assemble all these parts into a creation, then what creates the creator? It is as though we are stood between two parallel mirrors and looking at our reflection disappearing through multiple images into infinity!
The right hemisphere, Iain McGilchrist tells us, first takes an overall, holistic view of what it perceives. The left hemisphere receives its perceptions through the corpus callosum, a large white matter-bundle of fibres connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, enabling communication between them, but whose exact function is still not known.
It is also not yet known by what process thoughts become conscious (or even what consciousness is), or what determines the extent to which the left or right hemisphere affects conscious thoughts.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell twice mentions her experience of the numinous in her lecture: ‘I have long had a sense of the numinous, and suspect that in other societies I might be labelled a mystic. Encounter with God, communion, has always been very important to me, and it mostly, but not always, happens in Meeting for Worship.’
Jocelyn Bell Burnell can also be labelled a mystic within our Society of Friends! Like her I, too, do not know what this ‘numinous’ I sense is. It might even be the right hemisphere of our brains sensing the ‘dark energy’ that comprises nearly seventy-two per cent of the known universe, and perhaps transcends it.
So, we have a universe that Jocelyn Bell Burnell describes as slowly burning itself to a cold, black stillness. We have a bicameral brain with two different ways of perceiving that dying universe. Within that world we can see, as Derek Guuiton puts it, ‘how wonderful [is] the symmetry, beauty and energy of [a house martin’s] flight’ even though it, like William Blake’s Tyger, ‘is a terrifying, natural born killer, snapping up with speed and efficiency the exquisitely organised life-forms we call insects’!
Although we know much about the material universe and how we perceive it, we see something else, something somehow ‘other’ than that universe. It remains rather as Winston Churchill described Russian action in 1939: ‘…a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’
