Things are not what they seem

This morning I dropped my wife off for the parkrun in Pollok Park and spent the next forty minutes exploring the Park's quieter corners - which means most of them at 9.30 AM on a damp Saturday morning. I was reminded of the first time I ever visited Pollok Park. I was in the last year of my Bachelor's degree. Finals were a few months away and everything was beginning to feel a little bit tense. A few of us made plans to visit Pollok House and get away from everything for an hour or two. We took the train to Pollokshaws West station and walked along the road and into the Park. All of a sudden we were away from traffic and city noise. I felt like I was exhaling fully for the first time in months. I realised I'd been tense for weeks or months or maybe since coming to Glasgow; maybe the tension of a country boy living in the rush and noise of the city.

The Park was beautiful and relaxing but what really struck me, what stayed with me, was this sudden realisation of part of my day-to-day life, evidently ever-present but somewhere below conscious awareness.

Walking around the Park, on a pretty dreich morning, prompted by this memory, thoughts turned to how much else of the world might be lurking somewhere beyond conscious awareness; a very natural topic for a physicist, maybe, but there are many, various, baroque versions of this thought.

Here's the "sound shadow" passage in Gravity's Rainbow:

...Suppose They don't want us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether," which can carry sound to every part of Earth. The Soniferous Aether. For millions of years the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Unless it changed, how would anybody ever know?

Except that at night now and then, in some part of the dark hemisphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there will come to pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a few seconds, in a particular place, nearly every night somewhere in the world, sound-energy from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the Sun stops...

Are there good consequences from the resulting moment of revelation? Doesn't seem very likely. Anyway it's Gravity's Rainbow so the focus moves on.

Towards the end of Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress the main character sees a world of luxury dissolve to something very grim and grimy. A world on its way out is made bearable for most of its inhabitants only via mass administration of hallucinogenic drugs. How could we know if this were the case? And which is worse, the miserable state of full knowledge, or the happily deluded state?

After a few Philip K Dick books, for instance, we're no longer surprised when the rug of reality is pulled from under the main characters. This is a recurring theme in philosophically inclined science fiction, in movies just as much as books. The Matrix is an obvious example. They Live is a personal favourite, darkly satirical, pulpy to the core (underlined by the casting of an ex-pro wrestler in the title role). The main character comes across a pair of sunglasses that reveal the world as it truly is, a totalitarian state run for the benefit of hideous aliens, bedecked in subliminal messages: "Obey Authority" "Have Children" etc.

Could any of these entertainments be hinting accidentally at a true, hidden state of affairs? It would be fun (of a sort) but doesn't seem too likely. Nonetheless we are led, possibly willingly, possibly kicking and screaming, but inevitably nonetheless, to some very strange understandings or theories via a road that starts not at the feet of some 60s guru, nor in the glare of the psychedelic light show with the reek of pot in our nostrils, but with hard-nosed laboratory experiments. In this fundamental case what we can't know can't be fixed, however; there are no scales that can fall from our eyes.

I thought about related questions not so very long ago, in conversation with a fellow redundancy pool member. She reminded me of the frog in the pot of boiling water. Throw it in and it jumps straight back out. But sit it in a pot of cool water and heat it up gradually and it will just sit there, possibly not even remembering a time without pain.