Euclid's Illusion

I'm reading a fantastic book on art theory, scientific theory, and the strange, often untold union between these two called Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light . Overloaded with corollaries, probing insights, and thought-provoking speculation, the book is a wonderful tug at the imagination. For a master in neither physics or art, the author demonstrates a firm neophyte's understanding. The idea presented here in this book is that art and physics are more interrelated than the two know, something I've always thought myself. Both are ostensibly concerned with the nature of being, with our existence, and with trying to assist in the understanding of our existence. Their methodologies may differ, but their goals are the same. 

In an early passage, the author is discussing Aristotle and Euclid and how through them so much of what we now know of in terms of space and logic is stable, how we've managed to craft a linear understanding of our world and time; yet, the author writes, we mustn't overlook where they erred. "Everyone learns this system," he writes, "of thinking so early and it works so well that is is very difficult to see its deficiencies. But, if truth is the correspondence between appearance and reality, then there are some glaring inconsistencies in this system. Straight lines are strikingly absent in nature. If you take a walk in the woods, it is apparent that there is virtually nothing that is ruler-straight.  Instead, all naturally ocurring forms are curved and arabesque...Only tree trunks and the perpendicular alignment of the human form standing upright upon the earth offer a commonly seen vertical that approximates a plumb line. Despite this direct evidence of our senses, we continue to connect everything with straight lines." And here's my favorite line: "The nineteenth-century Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated, 'It would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains.'" 

And 

he

continues...

"The Western adherence to the illusion that the link between objects space and events in time is a straight line is similar to belief in a religious dogma. Just as all the major religions of the world begin with the assumption that beneath the flux of our sensations there lies a unifying principle, so science had discovered in Euclid's rectilinear system its corollary..." He then goes on to clarify a little bit: "To say, however, that nature does not contain any perfect obvious straight lines is not entirely correct. To most peoples' vision, there is one: the uncluttered meeting of sea and sky--the horizon as seen upon the water. The horizon is the central orienting line in our experience. Pilots and sailors who are lost in a fog and cannot see the horizon frequently report a strange disorientation regarding up, down, front, back, right, and left. This naturally occurring straight line is so important that I speculate its ready visibility had a powerful effect on seacoast civilizations. Perhaps the reason that linear alphabets, linear logic, and linear space have championed principally by the seafaring empires of classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Renaissance Venice, and Elizabethan England is that their inhabitants continually had nature's straightest line in plain sight. This sharp crease was missing from everyday experience in the land-based civilizations of ancient Egypt, Asia Minor, and China. Perhaps its absence is the reason these empires failed to develop a widely used alphabet, or to organize space and time in a linear fashion."

Okay. The point is: as an artist and a writer, time is a spectral interest to me, thus why I felt it apropos to cite such lengthy and verbose passages. But I find them excessively interesting. We consider time linear, but it simply is not. Not here and especially not outside of this planet. Leave Earth and time all of a sudden gets warped and twisted and beat the fuck down. Yet we demand our novels to be linear, chronological; we demand the time demonstrated within, if not linear, to make sense, whatever that means (when did time or anything about our lives "make sense"?). Do we want our works to "make sense" in pedestrian terms or do we want to demonstrate our characters' truth, per whatever is necessary to the story? If a story demands fragmentation and jump-cuts through time and it can be done with aplomb, well then why the hell not? If time is essentially not linear, what's the pressing urge to represent it as such, other than stubbornness and tradition and pandering? Our brains don't even work that way. If you think you think linearly, consider more deeply. Our brains, small time-machines on their own, transport us almost constantly from the past to the present to the future. We exist, if not in body then at least in brain, in all three of these realms. There is no singular space from which we sit for all of our adult lives. 

And I suppose this always comes down to what we want or what I want fiction to be? Is it a mindless escape rife with predictable melodrama that can be read while cooking dinner or is it an elegant, engrossing, and maybe sometimes complicated art that demands attention? These things need not be mutually exclusive; we've made them so. I don't know why they can't be the same thing, why things that are complicated, difficult, and perhaps even educational can't be considered a good time. Aren't our actual lives mindless and escapist enough? Cannot our art be simultaneously challenging and entertaining?