Creon and Oedipus, an historian's murders (Book) - 12/14/2007 2:02:24 AM
Dear David
I am reading your ‘Creon and Oedipus’, but I am having a hard time.
I know Oedipus (“Swell Foot” – I have the same ailment) was the king of Thebes and that murder and suicide seemed to follow him wherever he went. After blinding himself, he went into exile and his brother-in-law Creon took over as regent from him.
I also know that in a certain sense, alchemy represents attempts to discover the relationship of man to the cosmos and to exploit that relationship to his benefit. It will therefore yield the key to the Creator’s intentions and will hopefully make man happy.
I share your idea of problems with ‘language though, e.g. the language of the history profession. Science is so compartmentalised into different disciplines within science itself that it has become impossible, for example, for a geologist to have an intelligent conversation with a geneticist on biology or physics. A cardiologist might even have trouble in understanding, for example, an orthopaedic surgeon. They speak ‘different’ languages. Today one get Physics for medical students, for different kinds of engineers, for mathematicians, etc.
The problem with science is the language barrier between various sub-specialists. They never can understand one another and will not even sit together to talk. This reminds me of the story in Genesis 11:1-9, where the people of Babel wanted to build a tower to reach heaven.
God, in His wisdom, stopped this project by giving different people different languages. Since they could not communicate, the tower could not be built! In science this is the reason why they are not able to get things right.
Specialisation and reductionism has killed the real progress there. David Ewing Duncan of the San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday, 19 December 2004) calls this the ‘bio-Babel’. There is a law that says that ‘anything that divides eventually disappears’. Today science has divided so much that in medical science we have ‘right ear specialists’ and the ‘left ear ones’ that do not seem to see eye to eye on any ear!
Your simile of the train, or railway, crops up all over your writing. I wonder if this is somehow a means to the past, a way to freedom?
Then there is WW11 and its concomitant value system, which was as far as I know very Victorian still.
What distinguishes the pattern of values called Victorian from the culture of today? Is it that the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patters of society? In fact, what held the Victorian pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual code. The one dominating question of ‘the post World War I period’ by contrast is, are the social patterns of our world going to run our intellectual life or is our intellectual life going to run the social patterns? Cultures are unique historical patterns that contain their own values; they could hardly be judged in terms of values of other cultures. This is a very serious complicating factor in our struggle to survive!
I will have to read the book to have any hope to see how you brought all this together in a coherent whole. It all sounds very intriguing though.
Best wishes
Willie
Jelly Everywhere! (Short Story) - 12/9/2007 4:03:37 AM
What a wonderful world - full of nice and soft jelly monsters. Willie
Intelligent Design (Short Story) - 11/16/2007 5:01:22 AM
Hi David. I think me might have much more in common than both of us might a priori have thought. Best wishes. Willie
