Earth, We Have a Narrative, Part Four.

Scientific presentations already follow a narrative format: the introduction sets up the problem, the methods and results sections work through it, and the discussion (or conclusions) resolves the problem. Two consequences of the narrative structure in scientific papers are:

• Everyone knows the materials and methods section is the boring part of the story. In many journals, it either appears in smaller print, or as an online supplement.
• Null results—that is, when the hypothesis is not confirmed—seldom get published. Narratives they may be, but not very good ones. But, as Stuart Firestein explains in Failure: Why Science is So Successful, this is very unfortunate, because the null results of one investigator or team can, when read by another team, save them a lot of wasted time and expense. The second team can, by studying the null results, either give up while they have time, or devise a better method. Failures, null results, are as much a part of the narrative as the protagonist’s setbacks are part of the hero’s tale.

This happens a lot in literature. People like stories that have happy endings, or are at least resolved at the end. A story is supposed to make sense, even if the world does not. In this way, a story can help us understand the world, or at least accept it, a little better. Only in rare instances is a happy ending actually required: the four damsels and three swains agreed on the happy-ending rule in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but this is unusual. Even in tragedies, things get resolved: at the end of Hamlet, we find that things really were rotten in the state of Denmark.

(Joke intermission. In a Russian tragedy, everybody dies; in a Russian comedy, everybody dies happy.)

Music also follows a narrative structure. Music definitely follows a narrative arc. In fact, it can be arcs within arcs. Most musical pieces follow the “ABA form” or “sonata form,” as I learned it in music theory class in 1975. Introduction of one or more themes; Development of interacting themes; then Recapitulation (recap) of the triumphant, modified theme or themes. You find this in nearly all classical music that people like to listen to. The theme-and-variations form, and the verses-and-refrains form, are variations of this structure. Frequently, the development is in the relative minor (if the introduction is in major), as in A minor following C major; or the other way round.

In symphonies, each movement usually has an ABA form. The first movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony has dramatic themes in the introduction, then a development that builds up tension. That is an understatement. At the end of the development, there is an extremely strident chord repeated thirty-six times. Just before you scream, the recap begins. This symphony has such a powerful narrative structure that a Tulsa audience of hundreds listened to the conductor give an hour-long lecture about it before performing the symphony. The first movement is so exhausting that Mahler wrote in a three-minute relaxation period before the second movement. The conductor duly sat down on his podium as if he had just wrestled a Viking. Now that’s a story.

Many classical symphonies follow a narrative structure in their (usually four) movements, with an ABA form within each movement. The first movement is an introduction. The second movement is often slow and thoughtful. The third movement is often lively and everybody looks forward to it. The fourth movement is a resolution and frequently features the return of the original theme. The fourth movement, or any other movement, can also have a coda, which is a big bang ending that extends past the resolution of the theme. One of the most famous codas is at the end of the famous first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Just when you think you have heard the final notes, along comes this surprising coda. This symphonic movement has such an obvious narrative structure that musical humorist Peter Schickele applied a football-game-style commentary to it.

Mozart was a master of musical narrative structure. Mozart was unrivalled in the way he made the horizontal (tune) and vertical (chord) structures work together perfectly, with seeming effortlessness, as in the Gran Partita.

Sometimes the narrative form in music is completely overt. Each of Antonín Dvořák’s symphonic poems (such as The Water Sprite, The Golden Loom, and The Wild Dove) tells an intricate folk tale, usually grisly. I love them!

The first chapter of Genesis is a song. It has six stanzas for the six days of creation. Each stanza ends with a refrain, “and there was evening, and there was morning, another day.” Creationists, by forcing it into a literal meaning, have killed its beauty. I even rewrote Genesis 1 into a form that fit the tune of Oh What a Beautiful Mornin.’ (“The creation of Earth is like music, the creation of Earth is like music...” and “It’s such a beautiful cosmos, you’d better keep it that way.”)

The middle of the twentieth century was a time of embarrassment for classical music. Composers, usually working on university faculties (hence this music is sometimes called “academic”, suitable only for study and not for enjoyment) and having very few listeners, wrote music that was deliberately formless and void with darkness over the face of the deep, as in Genesis 1:2. In most cases they didn’t even have tunes. Students, including me, were made to pretend to like them. I could list some of the pieces and composers, but you almost certainly have never heard of them. They have become extinct, except when some musicians drag out the fossils and play them for audiences that endure them. Nobody goes around humming them. Today much of that pretense has been abandoned in schools of music. These pieces of “academic” music just leave the listener feeling confused. Music does not have to end with a bang, but it should end at some sensible spot. This is why most people, in thinking about the early twentieth century, can name only composers like Hindemith, Gershwin, and Joplin, who wrote tunes. What’s there not to like about the March at the end of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses? But “academic” composers looked down on Hindemith, especially since he insisted on sending every movement on a nice chord.

Science is stories. Literature is stories. Music is stories. We cannot not think in stories. We cannot not feel in stories.

This is only one reason that the vast story of evolution resonates less with the human spirit than does creationism. Evolution does not have a narrative arc. I tried to give it one in my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, but it just didn’t match up to Genesis 1 or to Adam and Eve (Genesis 2). Ursula Goodenough tried it too, with even less success than I.

Science needs as much interesting narrative as it can get, but not at the expense of reality. I am particularly annoyed by the sound bite at the beginning of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, in which a woman says, “We have to believe in impossible things.” No, we don’t, not even (as Lewis Carroll wrote) five impossible things before breakfast. If we let the narrative dominate, then science is as useless to us as religion. This is not, however, likely to happen.

Green Peace

I like to keep a layer of trees between me and the rushing madness of humanity.

Trees do not merely hide the frantic activity of business and politics, but actually absorb the pollution and noise. Psychological studies have shown that patients recover from surgery more rapidly when they can see a landscape of trees, and that children have reduced symptoms of hyperactivity if they play not just outdoors but in a setting of green plants.

But the peace that plants create is not merely a quiet absence of noise. Many people walk through parks and forests without noticing the plants, and while making their own loud noises. If there are no human structures in the forest, they may say “There’s nothing out here!” (Guess how many times I have heard this from my students.) But if you listen quietly and notice the details, you will become aware not just of the absence of noise but the presence of a powerful beauty. Gustav Mahler tapped into this power as he wrote his Third Symphony in a cabin by a forest and a meadow in the 1890s. It is a power that becomes stronger when you learn more about plants, ecology, and the evolutionary history of the Earth.

The world of plants is the real world, unlike the world of corporate boardrooms, paneled by dead trees. The powerful knowledge that you take back with you from the forest into your work and into human society will enable you to live joyously and to make the right decisions.

Originally published on http://www.stanleyrice.com in January, 2008.

Resurrection

Last night (March 12, 2016) I went to the Tulsa Symphony production of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection Symphony. The Tulsa Symphony, together with the Tulsa Oratorio Chorus, performed magnificently. The conductor was Benjamin Zander, who is also the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. I have carefully listened to this symphony for thirty years, but I still learned many new things when I actually saw the performance and listened to the conductor explain it.

Most people react to death by not thinking about it: by just going to the funeral and getting it over with. Mahler was not like this. The first movement of his symphony was not a funeral march; the inchoate march was always interrupted when Mahler stopped to agonize, or to appreciate the surprising beauty of life. With excruciating beauty, Mahler wrung out every last insight he could get from the fabric of life, death, and resurrection. Here was neither a facile atheism nor a shallow Christianity.

Mahler's music is not for everybody. I will admit that my writing, too, is not for everybody. I cannot write anything, not even a four-line poem, which does not somehow plumb the meaning of life, revealing both its agony and its beauty, sometimes simultaneously. I am trying to do for the written word what Mahler did for music.

This being a science blog, I am not going to go into any musical details. I just wish to say that, as a scientist, I see resurrection all the time. You have to look for it and think about it, as Mahler did. Here is what I see.

On the cover of a vinyl edition of Bruno Walter's recording of this symphony, there is one simple image: a deep space nebula. A nebula is a resurrection. The old superstar explodes as a supernova and is dead, leaving behind a pregnant cloud of gas and dust. From this cloud, new stars and planets condense, and the second generation of stars ignite. This is where our solar system came from. Our sun is a resurrected sun. And there would be no planets were it not for the engine of creation inside the supernova, the only place in which there is enough temperature and pressure to create the larger kinds of atoms such as iron, phosphorus, and magnesium from which planets and soils are made, and uranium, a radioactive element the decay of which keeps the interior of our planet hot. Our planet is solid and warm-blooded because of the supernova, the death and resurrection, of an earlier generation of star. This is why our sun is only five billion years old, while the universe is over twice that age. Astrophysicists believe in resurrection. It is not the same star, resurrected back to life; it is a different star; but the star-life continues.

I am a botanist and I see resurrection all the time. I don't just mean the opening of tree buds each spring, a process that is in full swing right at this moment. Budburst is not really resurrection; the trees and flowers were just asleep for the winter, and are awakening. But every forest that I walk through is a resurrection. Every forest is one that grew in a place in which an earlier forest was destroyed. Longfellow wrote about "the forest primeval" in Evangeline; but there is no such thing as a primeval forest! Longfellow's "primeval" Acadian forest had not even been there a few thousand years earlier, when the land was covered with glaciers. The forest had grown back after the glaciers melted. A fire or mudslide destroys a forest, and then it goes through a slow process of what ecologists call succession: first weeds, then shrubs, then fast-growing trees such as cottonwood, and finally, after about a century, the slow-growing and long-lived trees such as oaks. This is a resurrection. The original trees are gone; perhaps the new forest is different from the previous forest; but a forest has grown back. It is not a miracle, any more than a nebula is a miracle; it is simply the natural laws of plant growth. To realize this, you have to look closely at the forest, and look at it in four dimensions.

These are the kinds of resurrection that, I think, Mahler believed in. He had a hard time accepting the death of the old, but his faith in the growth of the new was irrepressible.