An old song for a new apocalyptic age

This morning I found my thoughts turning to an old song by Sting, “Love Is the Seventh Wave,” along with Sting’s rather profound comments on it. Both his comments and the song’s lyrics strike me as resurgently relevant to our current state of global conflict and crisis, and I was rather moved when I looked up the lyrics and reread them after all these years.

Sting wrote the song during the culminating years of the Cold War, when a sense of doom hung over everything (as I well remember, because I was 15 when the song came out). In an interview for the NME, he explained the song’s central metaphor and shared his intent when writing it:

In popular myth, if you count the waves on a sea shore, the seventh wave is supposed to be the strongest, the most profound. And I felt that at present the world is undergoing a wave of evil, if you like. The world’s never been as polluted. We’ve never had as many missiles pointing across the borders, or as many armies in waiting. We seem to be in the grip of this growing sense of doom. And the song is uncharacteristically hopeful, saying that behind this wave there’s a much more profound one. It’s love, beyond selfishness. And I think if there isn’t this wave, then we are finished. So it’s singing about something and hoping that by singing about it you’ll create it. The alternative, thinking that in five years’ time the world will end, isn’t that helpful. It might sell records, but it doesn’t help the people listening.

Here are the lyrics, which, as I said, come off as at least as relevant to our current global cultural moment of crisis and collective sense of impending doom as they were to the original context in which Sting wrote them:

In the empire of the senses
You’re the queen of all you survey
All the cities, all the nations
Everything that falls your way, I say

There is a deeper world than this
That you don’t understand
There is a deeper world than this
Tugging at your hand

Every ripple on the ocean
Every leaf on every tree
Every sand dune in the desert
Every power we never see

There is a deeper wave than this
Smiling in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

Feel it rising in the cities
Feel it sweeping over land
Over borders, over frontiers
Nothing will its power withstand, I say

There is no deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is no deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

All the bloodshed, all the anger
All the weapons, all the greed
All the armies, all the missiles
All the symbols of our fear

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the world
There is a deeper wave than this
Listen to me, girl

At the still point of destruction
At the center of the fury
All the angels, all the devils
All around us, can’t you see?

There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the land
There is a deeper wave than this
Nothing will withstand

I say love is the seventh wave

Every breath you take with me
Every breath you take, every move you make
Every cake you bake, every leg you break

The monk, the apocalypse, and the demon muse

I’m currently tending an idea for a new book. It has arisen in connection with the following two thoughts, which in turn follow on from my reflections a couple of weeks ago on Ray Bradbury’s “book people” and Morris Berman’s “monastic option.”

First, for the past decade-plus I have felt/suspected that America’s collective adoration of apocalyptic fictions and fantasies is not unconnected to the now patent emergence of some truly catastrophic trends and scenarios in real life. This predates, by the way, Demon Lindelof and Brad Bird’s savvy exploration of the same idea in Disney’s Tomorrowland movie (which I heartily recommend even though it’s flawed).

Second, in The Twilight of American Culture—a book that I can hardly believe is now 23 years old—Berman mounted a devastating analysis, both academic and polemical, of America as a country and culture that is definitively past its peak and on the downhill slope of collapse.

In Twilight’s intro he said he had deliberately not included a “happy chapter.” Too many books, he said, mount a compelling, even an unanswerable, argument that some current situation is grave, dire, a clanging emergency—and then conclude with a single glib, fatuous chapter that lays out a five-point plan to “fix it.” Berman said his view was that 1) history clearly shows a cycle of maturation and decline playing out in every culture and civilization, 2) this never, ever varies or reverses itself, and 3) the U.S. is clearly living out its own decline stage right now. As Agent Smith said to Neo, “You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.”

I find this view quite persuasive. So I guess I’m saying that I think we currently have both things happening at the same time. On the one hand, our collective addiction to apocalyptic fantasies is both spawning and reflecting a proliferation of real catastrophes. On the other hand, this trend or tendency is wrapped within a real and irreversible trajectory of decline and collapse.

As I mentioned two posts ago, Berman’s suggested action during such a time is to adopt what he termed “the monastic option”: Follow the lead of the famous Irish monks who “saved civilization” by finding some worthwhile area of endeavor—a field of knowledge, a set of skills, a blueprint for a humane way of living, whatever calls deeply to you—and deliberately seek a way to preserve and transmit this to a new culture that will arise in the future, after the present one has burned itself to the ground. To illustrate and flesh out the point, Berman explicitly makes reference not just to the witness of history, and not just to what he takes to be “new monastic” efforts that are currently underway (such as the Clemente Course in the Humanities), but to various manifestations of this theme of cultural preservation through a post-collapse dark age in apocalyptic and dystopian fictions, including, as mentioned, Ray Bradbury’s “book people” in Fahrenheit 451, who memorize and effectively become books during an age when reading is banned, so that one day, when things have changed, their knowledge can be written down once again.

You might infer from my recent focus on these things that such ideas have been occupying my attention. You would be right. As I said at the top of this post, I’m currently, and speculatively, incubating an idea for a new book that will fuse these ideas with my A Course in Demonic Creativity. In other words, a book about the discipline of the demon muse, the discipline of divining and aligning with your inner creative genius, as a way of identifying and cultivating your own monastic option, your own unique “great work,” in the face of the apocalypse.

Emergent phenomena and sheer miracles

Today I was reading an absorbing interview with Alan Lightman, the theoretical physicist and author, about his new book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, when I came across this passage:

This brings up the concept of “emergent phenomena.” In your recent PBS documentary series, you ask biochemist and Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak, “Are we just atoms and molecules?” And he answers: “We aren’t just atoms and molecules; it’s the organization. We are layers and layers of emergent phenomena.”

That’s right. Emergent phenomena are behaviors of complex systems that cannot be understood or predicted from the understanding of the individual parts of systems. The human brain is one of the most fantastic emergent phenomena.

Are there attributes then that we study in biology that are not reducible to chemistry and physics?

Biology studies whole systems, and a living thing is a system. If you try to take away parts of it and reduce it, the way physicists do when they study things, you don’t have a living thing anymore. Let’s say you start with a cell. If you start taking a cell apart, and you study the cell wall, and then you study the mitochondria inside the cell, and then you study the DNA, at that point, you’re getting closer to physics and chemistry than biology. You’re thinking like a physicist or a chemist, which is a more reductionist way of thinking. When you have a complicated system that’s exhibiting emergent phenomena, the reductionist method doesn’t work.

From “Does a Final Theory Exist? A Conversation with Alan Lightman,” LARB, February 23, 2023

This came right after the interviewer pointed out that in his book Lightman says nearly all contemporary biologists are mechanists, meaning they believe “a living body is just so many biological pulleys and springs and chemical flows with no metaphysical spiritus needed,” as distinct from vitalists, who believe “the transformation of nonliving matter to living matter requires some nonmaterial essence or vital force outside the laws of chemistry, biology, and physics.”

As I read—and quite enjoyed—this conversation, I couldn’t help reflecting, as I often do when considering such things, that there’s really no difference between the scientific idea of emergent phenomena or properties and the old joke about scientific-sounding non-explanations for what unaccountably happens at some stage of an observed process: “And then a miracle happens.”

So much of what we commonly take for persuasive and authoritative statements of truth in a culture oriented around science and technology is really just a semantic camouflaging of the fact that literally everything is a mystery. One thinks of Nietzsche’s famous criticism of Kant on the grounds that the latter did not so much offer truths as restate questions, disguised as truths. Nietzsche compares this to Molière’s fatuous doctor:

How does opium induce sleep? “By means of a means (faculty),” namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere: Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura sensus assoupire [“Because it contains a dormative virtue, whose nature is to put the senses to sleep.”]. But such replies belong to the realm of comedy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 1: The Prejudices of Philosophers

Multiply that times infinity, and you have the situation that exists today in modern technological cultures where it’s implicitly assumed that, thanks to science, we pretty much know who and what we are, and what the world is, and how it all fits together.

I’m not saying that Lightman asserted such a thing, by the way. Though I’m only passingly familiar with his books, he has always struck me as an insightful and perceptive writer and thinker. I’m just pointing out that it’s all too easy, here in the glow of electric streetlamps and smartphone screens, and amid the digital cacophony of perpetual streaming entertainment, to forget that science is just another language for adumbrating the ultimate mystery of who we are and what all of this is.