REVISTA DE GASTROENTEROLOGÍA
Chaos
and the arts...s ,magic and medicine*
"The artist should be a
'shaman', uniting the viewer
ith the sacredness and mystery of nature..."
Margaret
Grimes, landscape painter, from
Fractals:
Discovering a New Aesthetic of Science and
Nature,
by John Briggs.
The mysteries of the universe take us on a journey
into the unknown. All cultures have extolled the
beauty, majesty and ingenuity of the universe, and man has stared in awe and bewilderment at nature.
We seek explanations and create stories to explain nature.
We create myths, magic and metaphors of the
universe, embellish them with time and enshrine them with enough credibility to comfort
us. We create
comfortable and necessary belief systems to sustain us.
Our beliefs have changed over time but we are
still left with the relics of them all.
Spyros Marketos and
C. Papaeconomou describe
magic as belonging to all times and to all people.
Magicians were the first to explain the world. They surmised that supernatural forces were more
threatening than natural phenomena to primitive man, and that the caregiver was first a priest and secondarily
a physician. Spells, charms, talismans, amulets, etc., some still practised
today, to them, illustrate the
power of magic. Shamans -the word deriving from the Tungus people of Siberia -became the experts in
exploring the world of spirit. They journeyed to the spirit
world, met and conversed with the spirit beings,
returning with their discoveries for the benefit of their
fellows. Shamans travel the cosmos along a pillar
or axis from the underworld to the sky. They were the first time travellers and the first space
travellers, free of
the limitations af space, time and identity. In primitive
societies the shaman was the priest, the witchdoctor
and doctor. Orpheus, the first Greek shaman
wandered the cosmos with his harp prophesying and protecting man from disease.
Philosophers disagree on what is philosophy but
agree that Greek civilization around 6th century BC
was the focus of a world wide stirring from 800 BC - 200 BC.The Greek definition,
"the love of wisdom"
made Thales of Miletus probably the first wise man, a practical thinker seeking knowledge of the world
and the stars, and eschewing myth. Greek philosophy sought to disentangle science and
magic, and out of the
physician philosophers emerged Democritus, seeking the uncuttable atomos of
matter, and Hippocrates, whose new medicine, based on observation and
natural
causes, became the source of Western Science
and Western Medicine.
Science seeks a rational explanation of the universe.
P. Davies describes this in
The Mind of God,saying,
"The Greek philosopher sought a means to formalize
human reasoning by providing unassailable rules of
logical deduction. By adhering to agreed procedures of rational
argument, these philosophers hoped to
remove the muddle, misunderstanding and dispute that so characterize human
affairs. The ultimate goal
of this scheme was to arrive at a set of assumptions, or axioms,
which all reasonable men and women would accept,
and from which the resolution of all conflicts would flow".
They fell quite short.
Science seeks its understanding of life's mysteries by
systematically studying nature objectively, through the
scientific method -experiment, observation, deduction,
hypothesis,a nd verification. Modern science has put
man on the moon, and men and women to walk in space,
and seeks the absolute uncuttable atomos of
Democritus, a Higgs boson smaller than a quark. It however gives us the new physics with a blurring of
reality,and virtual particles taking science close to metaphysics.Physics answers
how, metaphysics-why.
Gerhard Staguhn describes this relationship in his book
God's
Laughter. Man and his Cosmos,
with
these comments,
"Not since Greek antiquity have science and philosophy
been as close as in our century of quantum physics
and relativity. But whether an ailing philosophy can be revived by science's artificial respiration remains
to be seen. At times it seems that modern physics
is the last serious advocate of the mythical and the metaphysical.
Like religion,i t is governed by dreams
of the absolute".
Religion explains
mysteries. The supernatural
governs the world and has no limitations.Science has
limitations,and cannot explain everything. Everything starts with some assumptions,science with the laws of
nature.Paul Davies explains, "Sooner or later we all have to accept something as
given, whether it is God,
or logic, or a set of laws, or some other foundation of
existence. Thus 'ultimate' questions will always lie
beyond the scope of empirical science as it is usually defined...
Through my scientific work I have come
to believe more and more strongly that the physical
universe is put together with an ingenuity so
astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There
must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation.
Whether one wishes to call that deeper
level `God'is a matter of taste and definition".
And where does art fit finto all of this?Landscape
painter Margaret Grimes says she believes the artist
should be a "shaman"uniting the viewer with the sacredness and mystery of
nature, helping viewers
rediscover a deep immersion in the natural world. She uses fractal imagery in her work and sees philosophical
implications in fractal composition with "a sense of each thing in it being of equal
importance,... one life
form isn't necessarily more valuable than another".
Art relies on
reflectaphors, like metaphors, to
create a tension, a nuance and subtlety providing
similarity and differences, enough to jar the brain into wonder,
awe, perplexity and a sense of unexpected
truth and beauty. It resists habituation and is always fresh with something new seen everytime we
experience a truly great work of art. J. Briggs summarizes this in
Fractals, The Pattern of
Chaos, thus, "Each
great work of art is a kind of microcosm or mirror
of the universe.This means that each great artist's
personal vision must also retlect the
whole, which
means reflecting the mysteries, chaos and order of life itself."The technical art of fractals we all have
seen.These computer generated or "created" images are hauntingly beautiful,and thus art -but not true
art.However,
art reflects the mysterious chaos and order of life
itself, taking us back according to Carlos Ginsberg,
"to connect the unique spirit of a time
with a primordial mysterious insight that lies deeper than chaos".
Art is primordial, with primitive man
etching images on cave walls, and even some science as medicine etched on these ancient walls.
Medicine can not be true art
however. The "almost
art"of chaos is the art of medicine. Medicine
is a strange attractor with scientific principles, -
Hippocrates-and a tradition of healing, providing
guidelines, a framework, patterns and rules that must
be
observed. We are allowed some creativity and
some unpredictability within this determined range. If medicine were true art we would have no limits.
Chaos as the art of medicine allows this strange
attractor to exhibit some variability, with creativity
and openness in a necessarily conservative field,
constrained by experience, scientific principles, and
the teaching of others.
Art,
philosophy, science, myth, magic and religion
are all related, as someone's attempt to solve life's
mysteries and explain the world, representing their shadows of reality.
lt all reflects at the fundamental level however,
chaos,a more fundamental aesthetic of life.
Roy Willis in World Mythology describes the shaman,
exploring other worlds bringing back knowledge,
with these words, "The shaman's work resembles in
some ways that of the modem
scientist, in that it
is based on the accumulation of experience gained at first hand by
experiment, it is also, like that of
the priest, concerned with the domain of spirit. Yet the shaman also possesses a kind of creative freedom
which is characteristic of neither scientist nor priest in our
society, but rather belongs to the artist".
In our quest for knowledge we may be barred from
ultimate explanation by the very rules of reasoning.
An Austrian mathematician in 1931 proved that mathematical statements exist for which no systematic
procedure could determine whether they are true or false,
undermining logic itself. There will always be
true statements that cannot be proved to be true. Paul Davies elaborates on this in
The
Mind of God,
saying, "We encounter once
again, the Gödelian limits to rational thought -the mystery at the end of the
universe. We cannot know Cantor's Absolute, or
any other Absolute, by rational means". Unless we "believe".Or maybe sometimes things just happen
and rather than trying to explain the unexplainable we enjoy the
mystery. Goethe says,"The scientist
should leave the primary phenomena in their external serenity and glory untouched...joyful admiration is
not incited by the obsession to explain.''
Maybe we take answers and our science too
seriously.
Maybe if we lighten up and use chaos to
put some art back into science, we may be better off.
Gerhard Staguhn reminds to us of this, saying,
"The crisis of modern science may be connected to its failure to introduce humour as a universal constant
of nature.Research is done too obsessively and with too little
humour, governed as it is by the false
belief that human existence per se can be reduced
to a formula. I have a dark feeling, though, that a humorous quantum of action is hidden in nature that
refuses to be mathematically defined. It guarantees that behind every secret that man regards as the
ultimate one,another 'ultimate' secret will appear, each time accompanied by an engaging,not at all
scornful, laughter. But it will only be audible for, those who are endowed with truly
'spiritual'ears".
Gerhard Staguhn reminds us also in God's
Laughter. Man and His Cosmos,
of a Jewish proverb that
says "Man thinks and God Laughs."For good reason.
