The Importance Of Being Gothic (And Remaining Scientific)

An Old Master said, towards the middle of the last century, that even after science has answered all possible questions, the most fundamental ones remain even unasked. I start with this statement in order to higlight my view that it is possible to agree with this Master without at the same time giving up this core belief that we cannot repudiate the knowledge that we have gained from the basic sciences such as physics and evolutionary biology. That is, whereas I believe on the one hand, for reasons I shall not discuss in this post, that the nature of reality is close to what quantum mechanicists and neo-Darwinists tell us it is, I also believe, on the other hand, that the oft-made claim that 'science is the only road to reality' is at best a tautological statement that redefines 'reality' in terms of 'what science tells us today in the year 2005'.

Thus I affirm both that (a) science is a valuable practice that is in the process of telling us with greater and greater cumulative accuracy what the world is like, and (b) that because of the methodological limits that the scientific enterprise is based on, some elemental questions concerning human existence necessarily have to be left outside the scientific domain. The essential difference between me and some scientists will therefore lie over the range of questions that I have placed under category (b). They might like to claim that these questions (such as 'Who am I?', 'Why should we go on living?', 'What is my life about?','What is suffering?', and 'What should we hope for?') can be redefined, rephrased or reformulated in such a manner that they now come under category (a), such that these questions become 'Which collection of atoms/genes am I?, 'Why should these genes/atoms go on surviving?', 'What are these atoms/genes about?','What is the mutation of a gene/oscillation of a wave-pattern?', and 'Where are these atoms/genes headed towards?'. I shall not go into this matter in greater detail here, except for noting that while I do not rule out the possibility that I am mistaken, I am not yet convinced that this redefinition will make the former questions disappear into nothingness.

While we physicists, biologists, and philosophers of science continue to debate over whether or not questions in (b) can be 'reduced' to questions in (a), here is one of my gothic stories to illuminate the point that I am trying to make. (The point, to recall, is that one can have both (a) and (b)). I shall define a gothic story as an example of a style of fiction that tries to bring out what is fundamentally mysterious about our existence. And by 'mysterious' I mean not the lack of adequate information or of access to an appropriate data-base system, nor simply a weekend indulgence in story-telling or a nostalgic yearning for happier days, but our inability to express in and through human speech those questions that lie at the limit of understanding. Therefore, when I talk about The Importance of Being Gothic in this sense, I am thinking not just of Buffy the Vampire-Slayer, of Dracula's Daughter, of the weird girl next-door, of a nutty professor, or of Urban Gothic rock bands, but of all human beings, and especially of them who are seeking to express that reality from which our fragile words turn back.

It was on a December morning that I took that fateful turn at the fork when coming back from the market-square. It had been many years of my life in the university town of Cambridge, but I had never gone along that brown road before. That was the great road untaken, and I had been warned by many people against going that way. Some had said that nothing lay at the end of it, some had said it would take me to a place with horrible secrets, and others had said I would never really come back from it. When I think about them today, I realise that only those in the third group were correct : I have never quite come back from what I saw, heard, discovered and felt that evening at the end of that road.

As I walked along, I suddenly realised that I was walking along the banks of the river Cam. The sun was setting in the distance, setting the sky on fire with its brilliant orange rays. Some of them came shooting through the damp air, made their way through the leafless branches and fell on the cold shimmering waters. After a while, I realised that I was completely alone on that desolate bank, and that there was not a soul anywhere near me for miles around. I looked towards my left, and through the lifting mists I saw a graveyard on the other bank of the river. I was perplexed for despite being an avid frequenter of graveyards I had never known of the existence of one in that part of the countryside. And then I suddenly saw her. She was sitting at the other end of a small brown boat that was moored to the bank, and was looking towards the sky dripping with red. I was standing speechless, staring at her long white flowing dress when she turned towards me with a faint smile on her famished lips. I looked at her eyes, and I felt that someone had distilled the entire suffering of the world and poured it into a pair of human eyes. She threw out her left hand, and beckoned to me to come into her boat.

I slowly walked down the slippery bank and crawled into her boat. She uttered not a word, but gently picked up the oars and began to row into the middle of the river. I was now able to see her from a closer distance, but I could not say whether she was young or old. There was something very young about her face, and yet I felt that her eyes were the most ancient that I had ever seen on any human face. Soon we reached the other bank of the river; she gracefully slid out of the boat, her long dress trailing behind her, and I followed her like a puppet, mesmerised by the sights and the sounds of this brave new world that had suddenly been revealed to me.

She walked on, and I followed her, as a moth that approaches its sure annihilation in the waiting fire. Old branches crackled under my feet which I felt had become as heavy as lead, so painful were my attempts to keep on moving on that rocky earth. Finally, she stopped at a gravestone, knelt down before it, and began to remove the thick layers of dust on it. Then she stopped midway, and began to sob vehemently. I felt the ground beneath me shake with the violence of her misery, and when I looked at the sky I felt that its redness had turned a shade deeper. I went up to her and sat down beside her. Just for a moment, she glanced at me, and I was filled with horror: she was weeping tears and tears of blood, pure, sparkling, thick, and red blood. They streamed down her white cheeks in two great streams, down her throat and her white dress and onto the brown soil.

At that moment, I heard thunder, and all of a sudden torrents of icy-cold rain began to fall on me. I instinctively jumped up and ran towards the green trees, where I remained sheltered for a long time, I don't know how long, perhaps an hour, perhaps two. When the rain finally stopped, I came out and started walking towards the gravestone. I now began to wipe away the thick mud on the gravestone frantically. And then a shiver ran through my entire body. On the gravestone was my name, followed by the words : 'Who died on February 11, 1776'. But that could not be possible! That was the date of my birth! Did I die on the very day that I was born into this world?

I looked all around me, but there was nobody in that solitary moment, not even the lady who had brought this unexpected misery upon me. At that moment, something made me look at the ground near my feet, and I saw a most amazing sight. At the spot where the lady's tears of blood had fallen earlier there were now three beautiful red lilies. I plucked them up from the ground, and as I did so a sudden agony ran through my body as if someone had thrust a thousand arrows of fire through my heart. The agony subsided as soon as it had attacked me, and I hurriedly made my way towards the boat with the lilies. Soon I was back on the other bank of the river, and I began to walk down the road that I had come along.

Very soon, however, I realised that something was amiss. The trees looked different, yes, they looked much older. After a long time, I finally managed to make my way into what I thought was the market-square, and even that had changed dramatically in the period that I had been away. Nothing looked familiar to me, and the ways in which the womenfolk were dressed struck me as definitely odd. I went into one of the shops and asked the owner what year it was. The lady at the counter curled up her nose and said : '1997. Why would you ask such a question?'

And that is how my new life in Cambridge started. I had to brush up a lot on my English, get used to wearing new types of clothes, start shopping at supermarkets, and learn how to handle cellphones, cars and computers. Yes, I do miss my old friends at times, I miss having a laugh with them, those lost friends with whom I used to talk about conquering the world, and exploring distant continents.

People who live around me now think that I am an artifact from some cultural museum, they invite newspaper journalists to interview me and bring TV camera crews so that I can smile onto their blank screens. They send in their psychoanalysts to find out precisely what category my madness should be placed under, their rationalists to expose my deceit to the public, and their temple-goers to tell them what message from the divine I bear for them. And they gather around me and ask me, 'So who are you?They say you are that many years old. Isn't that awesome?'. And when I reply that I do not know who I am, that I died on the same day that I was born into this world many centuries ago, and that they should ask themselves this very question before putting it to me, they turn away from me, and castigate me as a bad influence on the young students of Cambridge. How ironic that is, how could I be of any influence to anyone when I cannot even answer the question, 'Who am I?'

What used to intrigue me for a long time, however, were the three lilies that I brought back with me : they are still fresh today in the vase near my window. I was thinking about them one evening when I was walking along the Backs of the river Cam just behind Trinity College when I saw a young woman sitting at one of the benches. I went up to her and struck up a conversation with her in the course of which I happened to mention to her the three lilies.

'Ah', she said, 'A man could never understand such a mystery. So intricate and yet so simple it is that it would break his heart under its weight. You know what those three lilies stand for? For the three forms of human suffering, one that is real, one that is unreal, and one that lies sleeping in the heart of the darkness. And you know why those red lilies never die? Because in this world only those three forms of suffering are eternal, just as the desire to escape from them is eternal'.

Then she got up from the bench, walked towards the river where a small boat was moored to the bank. She effortlessly slid into it, and began to row away from me into the mists. I just sat there at my brown bench, mesmerised as I had been one day, long, long, long ago.

So, then, what have we got out of this random excursion into Gothiana? Have I answered any of 'life's great questions' for you through my story? Obviously not, but then it is not the purpose of a Gothic story to answer such questions, its purpose is rather to express the author's conviction that these questions are as real, as fundamental, and as live as any other 'scientific' question, and that these Gothic questions have a notorious reputation of coming in through the back door even after some of contents of the living room have been dusted, polished and emptied through the front door.