Bell encounter

Behind me was the ashen skeletal ghost of a dome. Facing me was the glass-captured remnants of the victims, their shadows traced their bodies like palimpsest of an unspeakable moment. To my right was a Japanese diplomat. He motioned for me to strike. I did. It resounded throughout the grounds.

I rang the Peace Bell at Hiroshima almost two decades ago. It is one of those experiences that never allowed themselves to fold up in my memory and leave. It stamped me with an echo moving inward in my mind. It audibly announced a passage where I, then barely twenty, stood on grounds that defined the spirit of the times that birthed the world I awoke into. My parents were born during the decade when science sharply reconfigured the idea of war and peace. The war that they survived ended because the Hydrogen Bomb was dropped by the Americans in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They survived the war and its immediate effects and at that point in hallowed ground, I, their oldest child, stood there in Hiroshima, drowning in an echo, holding what seemed to me then a muffled phosphorous rod, about to strike, they said, for peace. They said to strike the Hiroshima Bell is to remind yourself to make peace everywhere. I liked the idea. After all unlike human sight which is oriented forward, sound is omni-directional. On a bullet train back to Tokyo, I came across a koan (Japanese riddle) that spoke of the "sound of one hand clapping." Art has a way of catching you when you are most vulnerable because I was sure that meant something else figuratively but after having just seen the mangled traces from the fissionary outrage that was Hiroshima, I felt sick and sullen.

Recently, I have been re-reading J. Bronowski’s Science and Human Values which included a beautiful, mind-unraveling dialogue called The Abacus and the Rose, between a politician (Sir Edward), a member of the literati (Dr. Harping) and a scientist (Prof. Potts). They discussed, often debated, to what extent the sciences have rendered their powers to the service of life. Harping lamented the values that science seemed to have taken away from human life such as personal relations, their loves, anxieties and yearnings for meaning and offered nothing in their place but a materialist culture in its most superficial form, the television, to its darkest, the A-Bomb. But Potts rebutted him by saying in fact that the creative process of discovery that goes into the making of the Bomb is the same as the making of a great painting. In a great painting such as Rembrandt’s, Potts said, a profound representation of a reality is rendered, only one among many, even in a self-portrait. In science, the underlying principles in nature only theorized about previously are found out to be realizable. Science is not simply having the tools to unlock nature’s mysteries. It is having the imagination that there is a mystery at all, even if previous thinkers claimed to have passed that way already and comprehended all. To engage in science is to be in the same creative stream of thought as in the arts. Both deal with the nature of things – the things themselves and what these things become after humanity has immersed them in their own brewing lifetimes. Such divisions between the sciences and the arts, both contemplating the nature of life, did not exist in the time of Aristotle when life, living and meaning could all be embraced by natural philosophy. It is when we started to separate the "world" from what is meaningful or to some "holy," and characterize as necessarily "clashing" the sciences and the arts did we confuse some members of our own species. After all, it was the politicians, the likes of Sir Edward, who decided to drop the bomb even if the scientists made it and in fact objected to its use.

But I do not think that we should pine for those days where we could sneak a peek at Aristotle’s contemplative hours. There is a path I discovered you might want to try. I was told there are places and times where we can know the best that has been thought and expressed in the world. Who wouldn’t want that? After all, isn’t that the recreation of life itself, when you come to brush with ideas in the whole of human history by the march of your own thought? You need not be Einstein but to appreciate Einstein is to take part in the creative stream of life of which he too was a part. You need not be Shakespeare but to read him and experience the whole range of the human condition in the nuances of language, you pump life into a half-millennium old artifact and even make it dance! You need not be Van Gogh but see his work in the original or in postcard form and tell me if you will ever look at a starry night the same way again. To be fully alive is to engage the human mind.

Entering yourself, you enter this world and the other worlds,

You enter what the astronomer saw in his telescope, the mathematician in his equations:

disorder and symmetry, accidents and rhymes, duplications and mutations,

The St. Vitus dance of the atom and its particles, the cells reproducing, the stellar inscriptions.

– Octavio Paz, The House of Glances

And where are these times and places? It is a book that is read and read again. It is a book passed on or read to. It is a school meant to create knowledge, that shares the knowledge and builds on it, not the ones meant simply to place you in pigeon-hole jobs. I shirk in shame remembering even now when as a 16-year-old college freshman, I was told with others in the university I attended then that they received us because we were "la créme de la crème" (over and over again). A school should engage first the mind and leave the ego alone. The ego has a life of its own and it will grow or shrink and the school need not help inflate or deflate it. After many more stints in learning times and spaces after college, I still have trouble what the school authorities then meant by "la créme de la créme." I still fail in many things but I think as Rilke said, "progress is to fail in greater and greater things." I am not sure about that either. But I know that I did try and brush against thinkers with the march of my own thought and continue to do so.

There are more of these times and places. It is when the parent learns with the same zest for understanding, from the child, as the child from the parent, to this ongoing creative honing of human life. It is with a circle of friends who can discuss ideas and not just people and the things they do in the dark. And the reward? It varies. I can only tell you mine. It is being alone and young and asked to ring a bell and years later finding you are able to connect the physical sound of molten steel with the atom, with the minds that understood the structure of the atom, with a foreign land that received the energy of splitting atoms, with the science and the humanity that then encountered each other face to face.