Cormac

No. 32

I didn’t expect to write about Cormac McCarthy this week but I felt compelled to do so after learning of his death ten days ago. Almost certain from the start I would not do justice to his talent, I was inspired to try, while traveling at 540 mph, 37,000 feet above the ground. I wasn’t so much surprised by his death but saddened by the passing of yet another individual who had influenced my thinking despite having never met the man. McCarthy was 89.

I am confounded by how people, who I’ve never met, can have such significant influence on my life. Neil Peart’s death was like that too—who I wrote about in A Bridge To Something More—whose influence had begun when I was a teen. Rush’s music and performance magnetized my attention but even more was the affinity I had for Peart’s lyrics and writing. Their form and subject had a profound attraction to me. But like McCarthy, I never met the man.

Why had McCarthy’s work impacted me? I began to understand this when I watched his 2022 interview with David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, where McCarthy had been a research colleague since its inception. I would love to be in the environment McCarthy landed in at SFI but I’ll touch on that later. The interview covered many of McCarthy’s interests across the fields of mathematics, physics, and philosophy, but in no way was limited by them. He was a curious person. How did all this fit into the person who’d written the novels I’d read?

I first became interested in his work after seeing the Coen brothers’ movie No Country for Old Men that McCarthy had written the screenplay for. I then read his magnum opus Blood Meridian and became familiar with his James Joyce-like punctuation style of no quotation marks for dialogue and his minimal use of commas, semi-colons and colons for which his work is renown today, almost to the detriment of his very formidable storytelling ability. But it was All the Pretty Horses that swelled my heart, taking the romantic western novel, made popular by the likes of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey, to a new level of insightfulness while exposing the very souls of his characters.

My enthusiasm grew listening to the interview as McCarthy spoke about Moby Dick and the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the historic figures behind the physics, mathematics and philosophy in which he spoke. Oppenheimer, Bohr, Dirac, Rabi, Wittgenstein, Heisenberg, Einstein, Heidegger to name a few. He referred to a Murray a lot too, not in last name but first name only. McCarthy knew Murray Gell-Mann.

Gell-Mann was one of the founders of SFI. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 and is recognized as the one who coined the word quark in atomic physics that he took from James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake. Gell-Mann was a polymath and believed in 1984 that a new approach to mathematical science was necessary to take the complexity of the world seriously. He saw there were people who liked logic, reason and analysis in their work but also people who liked synthesis, qualitative assessment, and natural history. But he also saw there were a few who tried to combine both—Apollonian, Dionysian and Odyssean types. He believed finding a couple of these people would make an enormous difference in this new approach.

Gell-Mann went looking for his Odysseans at the annual meeting of the MacArthur Fellows, of which he was also a founding director. An avid reader, one of Gell-Man’s favorite authors was a relatively unknown author in 1981 named Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy was awarded the MacArthur Fellow prize in its first year of operation. Gell-Man then brought McCarthy to SFI where McCarthy has been ever since. What a world to fall into surrounded by eminent physicists, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, or in other words, very smart people and thinkers. I fell in love with the world that McCarthy described at SFI in New Mexico. I rarely feel envious but I am. I’d love to fall into such a world to continue my writing work. I meet with different people for coffee several times a week, maybe for the same reason—to foster thinking and new thoughts.

As the interview with Krakauer went on, McCarthy shared anecdotes and stories about the famous thinkers he’d met or read about. Some I’d heard of and some I hadn’t.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosopher who in his early twenties inherited a huge sum of money that he eventually gave away believing that philosophers should not be wealthy. Almost all of Wittgenstein’s writing was about morality. Martin Heidegger was then mentioned, an eminent philosopher of the same time period who wrote almost nothing of morality of which McCarthy said, if philosophy is not concerned about the way you should live, what the hell is it concerned with? Plain, strong words from a sophisticated mind. I have a hard time not agreeing.

He told a story of Robert Oppenheimer who Nobel Prize winning physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi said was the smartest person he’d ever met. Oppenheimer was known to tell his professors on occasion they were wrong and proceed to rub off the blackboard, in front of a class, what the professor had written and replace it with his own formulas. He’d be right but others didn’t like it. Students at one point signed a petition to have him kicked out of the class. Oppenheimer led the famous Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. He was also an early developer of the theory for black holes in the 1930s.

Krakauer and McCarthy’s discussion then turned to the unconscious and language, which was what The Kekule Problem—discussed in a couple of my past articles including … And Then There Were Three—was all about.

McCarthy explained that an idea exists in our heads but is not in a sentence yet almost immediately we form it into one. We try to put the idea into words but we don’t have them yet. You’re trying to put this into words, he said and then added, but what is the this you’re trying to put? The idea exists independent of language and that’s a problem. We don’t know how that works.

McCarthy spoke about how the unconscious does not seem to use numbers. I thought of, and have written about, how Sir Roger Penrose had talked about needing another medium, disciple or thing—that’s not science or mathematics—and the place we might find this other thing is in the unconscious.

McCarthy goes on that the unconscious is better at math than we are. It doesn’t have a ledger, said Krakauer. Nor an eraser, added McCarthy. We can’t do things that way. The unconscious is doing it completely differently. George Zweig, another of the minds at SFI, called the work done by the unconscious, the night shift.

It can’t be doing it the way we are, McCarthy said, and it’s better at it than we are. If it is better, why doesn’t it tell us. It thinks we’re too dumb to understand it. Baffling how it can do what it does. Here he adds that he doesn’t think the unconscious uses numbers. Some mathematicians and scientists have agreed. If it’s using numbers, it would be doing the same thing that we’re doing and obviously it’s not.

The unconscious is willing to work on any problem we give it.

Then McCarthy shared another story not unlike the Kekule problem.

Donald Newman, an MIT mathematician, whose name McCarthy couldn’t remember, was having difficulty with a problem. It was getting him down. His family and friends, even his wife, were worried about him. One night he went to bed and had a dream. In his dream, he sat down with John Nash, the late genius mathematician and subject of the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” He explained his problem to Nash who listened intently. Nash then wrote down a few equations on his napkin and handed it to Newman. Newman then woke up, turned on his bedside lamp and wrote down what he remembered Nash had written. Then went back to sleep. When he woke up the next morning, he looked to his bedside table. Elegantly written on the pad were the equations solving his problem. Newman later gave Nash co-authoring credit for the solution.

McCarthy then followed the story saying, the unconscious is a machine for operating an animal. The brain is as complicated as the liver. I’d never heard this before.

McCarthy made the unconscious sound like God. The unconscious works only for you twenty-four hours a day. The unconscious doesn’t have any problems other than the ones you give it. It is constantly monitoring your behaviour and guiding you so you won’t die. It seems to have a huge vat of stuff of which to take things out of to solve your problems.

All this from the man who wrote Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and No Country for Old Men. I cite these novels in particular as the ones that I’ve read and now after understanding a tidbit more of a man I’d never met, I wonder whether I’ve actually read them at all.

Rest In Peace, Cormac McCarthy, you’ve done your work and given us a piece of the unconscious that I doubt you were even aware of doing.