Reality is a tricky thing.
What each of us perceives as the "real" world may vary wildly. A Buddhist, a Baptist, and a Baháʼí will look at the same event, and see it quite differently. Our faiths, our biases, our fallibilities all inform how we view and think about our existence.
The philosophical divide between "facts" and "truth" is just one example. When Professor Jones, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, tells his students, "Archaeology is the search for fact. Not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Doctor Tyree's Philosophy class is right down the hall."
Oddly, that is the same defense Peter Morgan, the screenwriter of The Crown, made when the British Culture Minister suggested the series should include a disclaimer on each episode that it is fiction, not a documentary. Morgan admitted that the very nature of the series requires a good deal of speculation and fiction. After all, no one is taking notes when Queen Betty and Prince Phil are discussing their romantic desires behind closed doors.
So far, so good. But he then went one step further by concluding he believed what he was portraying was essentially true.
Facts always suffer in the arts. The artist is trying to convey something deeper than a mere recitation of facts. Even photographers manipulate their framing to convey a purpose beyond what can be seen with the eye.
That is true for all of society. Ministers. Spouses. Children. Politicians. We all try to marshal and manipulate facts for our own purposes.
But there is a tiny portion of life that theoretically relies on facts. The scientific method is designed to make some sense of the material world by making an observation; formulating a question; forming a hypothesis, or testable explanation; making a prediction based on the hypothesis; testing the prediction, and then iterating the result by using the results to make new hypotheses or predictions.
The fundamental assumption in science is that no question is finally answered. The greatest limitation is that the method's scope is limited to matters material. It will tell us a lot of facts, but it can never explain a daughter's love or a Shakespearean sonnet. In other words, science, by its very nature is a stranger to philosophical truth.
I thought about that on Saturday. Saturday is one of the two days Dora stops by to help me clean the house with no name. (Wednesday is the other. If you are like me, whenever I hear a comparative, I fixate on what the other half of the comparison might be, and I lose focus on what I am reading.) She brought her 10-year old son Leo with her. My friend Ozzie had stopped by to help me trim my palm fronds.
I was sitting at the table in the patio finishing up my Saturday communique to you when I looked up at the eave of one of the pavilions on the upper terrace. Something darker than the ivory paint was hanging there.
For most of the summer, Jan Golik, a reader of the Facebook version of Mexpatriate, has been regaling us with the tales of Baggy the Bagworm. If you do not know what a bagworm is (or even if you do), it is the caterpillar form of a moth. Most butterflies and moths are most interesting in their adult form as they flit through our lives. But the bagworm moth is at its best in its caterpillar stage.
Caterpillars are nearly at the bottom of the food chain as they wander around munching on our landscaping. Some have developed rather nasty stings that make scorpions look domesticated. The bagworm goes one step further.
It disguises itself as a bit of natural detritus by first spinning silk and then attaching dried plant parts, sand, or lichen to the silk. The intended result is to look about as appetizing as an Oxxo sandwich.
Because I had spent so much time this summer being regaled by Jan's stories, I thought I had my own personal bagworm. Now, that theory was a bit implausible. Bagworms usually attach themselves to a plant for easy access to food. And any bagworm attaching itself to the eaves of my house would be far from food and on its way to an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
Applying the scientific method, I had made an observation, asked my question, formed a hypothesis, and made a prediction. What I needed to do now was to test my theory. So, I climbed the stairs to the upper terrace and stood below staring at it.
I was a little disappointed. It was obviously not a bagworm. It was too thin.
So, I iterated my conclusion. If it was not a bagworm, what was it? And why was it so still. Dora and Ozzie saw me looking up and came over to see what I was looking at. They offered their own hypothesis. "Es una hoja." It's a leaf.
That was plausible. It looked like one of the dried leaves from my cup-of-gold vines. They blow everywhere when they drop.
Leo then joined us. He looked puzzled when Ozzie told him it was a leaf. Leo then asked a question that reiterates the reason a child was chosen by "The Emperor's New Clothes" to point out the emperor was naked.
"What is a leaf doing up there?" Indeed, why. And how could it possibly be stuck on the eave.
Leo's question caused me to look at whatever it was with a new perspective -- without the expectation that I was looking at a leaf. The solution was then simple.
"It's a butterfly," I announced with a little too much smugness that I hope was disguised in my terrible Spanish. All three looked at me sceptically. Having announced my hypothesis, I used Dora's broom to create a small breeze.
The leaf morphed into a butterfly, spread its wings, and floated to another eave that would offer some solitude from these three pesky and officious beings who were intent on disturbing its siesta.
That the butterfly was not a leaf is a scientific fact, and its ability to disguise itself as a withered leaf no tastier than a well-disguised bagworm is also a scientific fact.
What science cannot tell us are the deeper truths of butterflies. Why they play different roles in different cultures -- the minions of Satan in some, the protectors of lovers in others Or why the very sight of them can change a mundane morning into a moment of magic that can then morph into an essay. Poetry can never answer the questions posed by poetry.
But poetry may help science in that quest.That may be what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote in "Four Quartets":
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
For me, that passage has always echoed the Shaker hymn with its reminder and promise:
'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
The scientific method, just like poetry and art, often leads us back to where we started and allows us to know that place for the first time.
And somet
imes we find ourselves exactly where we ought to be -- having peace at the center.
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