Ten - THE OPEN DOOR

Ten

THE OPEN DOOR

WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR THE MYSTERIES OF LOVE

In that abyss I saw how love held bound

Into one volume all the lives whose flight

Is scattered through the universe around;

How substance, accident, and mode unite,

Fused, so to speak, together in such wise

That this I tell is one simple light.

—Dante, from The Divine Comedy

The natural phenomena that first evoked mankind’s passion for elucidation, definition, prediction—the passion for science—were the regular tracks of heavenly bodies against the night sky. Logical deduction led early astronomers to propose a scheme with Earth as the motionless hub of a wheeling universe. They imagined the stars and planets embedded in rotating crystal shells, thus accounting for the jeweled processions they witnessed above.

The demands of pragmatism soon impinged on the model’s lovely simplicity. Increasingly careful measurements of planetary and celestial motion necessitated adding more hollow spheres to keep the system aligned with observation. Eudoxus postulated twenty-seven separate glass bowls. By the time Aristotle published his version, he needed fifty-five. Claudius Ptolemy tacked on some further awkward correctives for accuracy’s sake, and that star-tracking contraption limped along for another seventeen hundred years.

The telescope’s invention finally opened humanity’s door to the stars and proved Earth a spinning, speeding top, caroming around the sun. Much of the motion the old astronomers had charted was the hurtling of the ground beneath their feet. The Ptolemaic machine, which had served and deceived astronomers for centuries, wheezed and collapsed.

Our age is ready to retire another host of unwieldy and outmoded contrivances: the models of the emotional mind that pre-dated empiricism. Science is busily disassembling the brain that engenders intelligence, reason, passion, and love—the delicate structure that creates each of our selves, each of our hearts. The spectral inhabitants that we were taught to expect there—id, ego, Oedipus—are fading like summer stars before the coming dawn. The discoveries effacing these former luminaries have come from a science that explored—much as any poet must—a fantastic world to seek its principles without first assuming their continuity with the rational.

Ptolemy’s geocentric map of the universe, while extravagantly incorrect, did inform sky watchers for centuries about the apparent movements of stars and planets, sun and moon. The model predicted and explained, often quite accurately. It could not explain enough. At the limits of its applicability, no amount of tinkering and tacking on could save it. So it is with twentieth-century models of the emotional mind. They have served and deceived faithfully, but now they creak and fray under the steady pressure of inconsistencies they cannot redress. We are not obliged to discard all observations made under old auspices—a core crew of findings will sail on into the future, like sailors rescued from a sinking ship, who, from their new perch on the top decks, watch an outdated vessel disappear under the waves.

Emotions reach back 100 million years, while cognition is a few hundred thousand years old at best. Despite their youth, the prominent capacities of the neocortical brain dazzled the Western world and eclipsed the mind’s quieter limbic inhabitant. Because logic and deduction accomplish so plainly, they have been presumed the master keys that open all doors. The mind’s early surveyors drew their plans by the light of this guiding disposition, including as weight-bearing beams their faith in a veridical reality, the supremacy of analytic thought, and the ultimate rule of rationality.

The mind’s early pioneers imagined a castle in the sky that flew Reason’s banner, and for too long, our society tried to live within their fanciful construction. Their efforts were commendable, even visionary, but the structure they raised proved inhospitable to the glorious illogic of human lives.

Limbic resonance, regulation, and revision define our emotional existence; they are the walls and towers of the neural edifice evolution has built for mammals to live in. Our intellect is largely blind to them. Within the heart’s true edifice, those who allow themselves to be guided by Reason blunder into walls and stumble over sills. They are savants who can see too little of love to escape painful collisions with its unforgiving architecture.

Our culture teems with experts who propose to tell us how to think our way to a better future, as if that could be done. They capitalize on the ease of credibly presuming, without a pause or backward glance, that intellect is running the show. Not so. Reason’s last step, wrote Blaise Pascal, is recognizing that an infinity of things surpass it. As a new millennium commences, science is beginning to approach that pinnacle of perspicacity.

Although our culture may oppose them at every turn, people can still manage to lead successful lives, if they cultivate the connections their limbic brains demand. No matter what humanity’s future holds, we will never shed our heritage as neural organisms, mammals, primates. Because we are emotional beings, pain is inevitable and grief will come; because the world is neither equitable nor fair, the suffering will not be distributed evenly. A person who intuits the ways of the heart stands a better chance of living well. A society of those who do so holds a promise we can only guess at.

The adventure of seeking a theory of love is far from over. While science can afford us a closer glimpse of this tower or that soaring wall, the heart’s castle still hangs high in the heavens, shrouded in scudding clouds and obscured by mist. Will science ever announce the complete revelation of all of love’s secrets? Will empiricism ever trace an unbroken path from the highest stones of the heart’s castle down to the bedrock of certitude?

Of course not. We demand too much if we expect single-handed empiricism to define and lay bare the human soul. Only in concert with art does science become so precise. Both are metaphors through which we strive to know the world and ourselves; both can illuminate inner and outer landscapes with a flash that inspires but whose impermanence necessitates unending rediscovery. Carl Sand-burg once wrote that poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment. The most we can reasonably ask is that science open a door of its own from time to time, and allow us to spy for a fraction of a second the bounteous secrets inside.

Humanity awaits the revelations that may glint through that open portal. In the end, all such discovery has one purpose: to help people reach their potential for fulfillment and joy. While we cannot alter the nature of love, we can choose to defy its dictates or thrive within its walls. Those with the wisdom to do so will heed their hearts and draw strength from their relatedness, and they will raise their children to do likewise.