The Tune of Things, by Christian Wiman

A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Albert Einstein credited all his major discoveries to music. Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned. The term “species” is increasingly meaningless. Ninety-five percent of physicists who won the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century believed in a god. A group of hotel cleaning staff showed significant improvements in blood pressure, weight, and body mass index after being told their work counted as exercise, though their levels of activity were unchanged. Until the Eighties, it was common practice in the United States to operate on infants without anesthesia, as it was believed their brains were not formed enough to feel pain. The human brain is the most complicated thing we know of in the universe, and the development of AI will have no bearing on this. The writer Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. Form is prior to matter. The first place was a voice. There is no such thing as stillness.

Better to begin with a jolt. Lord knows we need it. But also I aim to call into question some of our most settled ideas, and lay a little depth charge under some of the dualisms that define and derange us: subjective/objective; mind/brain; belief/unbelief; reason/imagination; intellect/intuition. My goal is to solve the “hard problem”—What is consciousness?—and thereby save America from its death wish. Impossible, you say? But then your reaction to some of the statements above was the same. All but one of them are true, though the outlier will depend on who you are.

But first, a story. When one of our daughters was young, we sometimes referred to her as “our little mystic.” Her eye was uncanny. We’d be walking through dense woods, both kids chattering or complaining, when suddenly Eliza would freeze eye-level with the eye of a lizard completely camouflaged by the bark of a tree, or maybe it was only the bark of a tree. Or she’d stop and stare straight up as if in a kind of tractor beam of attention at something forty feet high in dense leaves. Sometimes she’d point it out—the red head of a woodpecker, the first turned leaf of fall—sometimes not. I’d swear she glowed in those moments, a nimbus of radiance around her, but that may have been nothing but love. We recently unearthed three drawings of a tree she’d made at six or seven. The first is one any child might draw. The second is a version of the first, but the bark is now covered with runic symbols. In the third, the bark has become language, mostly incoherent down the branches until it resolves in the trunk: splashing in a summer stream i’ve never felt so loved. Eventually that visionary gleam faded and, as Fanny Howe says, “the self replace[d] the soul as the fist of survival.” But I remember, and she does, too. For a few years that little golden girl was seeing “into the life of things,” as Wordsworth put it, and it was not rare.

Seeing or being seen? We’ve lived so long within a paradigm of subject (us) and object (everything else in the universe) that even people whose intuitions and direct experiences strongly counter this paradigm still grind away their lives within it. I’ve heard a well-known poet say he didn’t believe in the soul, which seems akin to an astrobiologist saying she doesn’t believe in space. (Howe: “Why write if it is not to align yourself with time and space?”) Ever since Descartes, who split mind from matter and linked thinking and being, we’ve drifted from the very thing that makes us human. We’ve separated ourselves from the natural world, physically and mentally. The mental separation enabled the physical one. We came to see ourselves inhabiting a world of things, ourselves the only conscious element within it. Why not vivisect dogs, as Descartes reputedly did, likening their howls to a broken machine? Why not slice open infants without anesthesia? (True.) That’s a strong dogma that can override the screams of a baby.

Even as the “things” grew smaller and smaller, until we could peer into a world where all laws of cause and effect broke down, we in the West went right on clicking our existential abacus. “Shut up and compute” is what young physicists hear if they suspect their equations might have nothing to do with reality. And biologists? It’s evolution all the way down, slicing up species all driven by the “selfish gene,” and even the care you lavish on your grandmother with dementia is somehow a survival instinct. Never mind that some top scientists believe that life is so tangled, organisms so interwoven, that, as the biologist Daniel Drell says, “we can no longer comfortably say what is a species anymore.” And the flatworm with its new noggin immediately solving the maze its old one worked so diligently to master? Or trees that learn to distinguish between threats, direct nutrients to an afflicted brother, and remember their own seedlings? Shut up and compute!

There have been periods of salutary resistance—Wordsworth remains a fortifying example—but in general the drift has been constant. And now it’s not a drift but manic acceleration. (What is AI but the culmination of the notion that the brain is a machine?) Yet even people committed to this subject/object distinction, people confident that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, mostly agree on one thing: we are hurtling toward our own destruction. It’s our brains that are the disease. It’s our minds that could save us.

Another story, another jolt. There once lived an Italian friar named Joseph, an almost exact contemporary of Descartes. Joe was an unprepossessing fellow. His nickname was Bocca Aperta—literally, “mouth open.” Despite his limitations, Joe displayed an impressive degree of ascetic discipline and a ravenous desire for God. He fasted so intensely it was a struggle to keep him alive. He not only wore a hair shirt but wrapped his body with a chain so tightly that it embedded into his skin—all to make himself completely attentive to, and an acceptable receptacle for, God.

And it worked. While taking part in a procession in town, on the Feast Day for St. Francis, Joe suddenly rose up into the air, terrifying himself and the other clergymen. This was merely a prelude. He began to levitate more often, at times leaping with a loud shriek to the top of a tree. He flew through the air. He bilocated. Unlike most other levitating saints, whose feats were witnessed by only a few, St. Joseph of Cupertino became a spectacle. People came from great distances to witness his flights, many bent on proving them a sham. There are extensive testimonies of St. Joseph levitating, from a wide variety of people. And because this was during the Inquisition, when a miracle deemed demonic was fatal, St. Joseph eventually found himself hauled to Rome. Bocca Aperta jacked up into the air right in the pope’s quarters—as testified to, again, by multiple eyewitnesses.

I learned about St. Joseph from Carlos Eire’s weird and wonderful They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Eire’s book raises the question of a culture’s epistemic reality and whether that affects the kinds of events that can occur. His scholarship is rigorous, concluding only that “the act of levitation is inseparable from belief in levitation, personally and communally.” What happens in a culture is partly dependent on what the collective consciousness of the culture allows. This has nothing to do with the truth of the events; it involves the specific form the miracles took. St. Joseph levitated because this was an act expected of the holiest friars and nuns—the physical expression of metaphysical experience, the raptured body suspended between gravity and grace. By most accounts, this was a trauma.

Let’s put aside whether St. Joseph actually flew or if everyone was caught up in a collective delusion. Either way, the phenomenon suggests some primary connection between our minds and physical reality, because thousands of people were convinced they witnessed something. This connection makes sense, as our minds are composed of the same atoms that make up the reality around us. Levitating saints, though, or housekeepers shedding pounds semantically, at least raise the possibility that we might live in a circumscribed version of reality, and that it’s circumscribed because we insist on it.

I like books about quantum physics—minus the math. You can spend an hour in one of these and feel as though Harry Potter is rigorous history. Atoms that become “entangled” are bound to one another, no matter how great the distance; what happens to one happens to the others, more or less instantaneously. Some 70 percent of the energy in the universe is “dark”: we have no idea what it is. This is also true of 25 percent of matter.¹ We are literally ghosted by what we don’t know.

A fascinating experiment occurred in the Canary Islands in 2008. Most people are acquainted with the double-slit experiment, which is over a hundred years old at this point. Scientists pass a photon through two slits to see what pattern it makes on the other side. If no one is watching—that is, measuring—the photon as it passes through the slits, it acts as a wave: it goes through both slits and spreads out on the screen beyond them. If someone is observing the passage, then the photon acts as a particle and passes through one distinct place (leaving one spot on the screen). This is bizarre enough, suggesting that merely the fact of our attention affects physical reality, or that there is some immense reality occurring that our brains are too limited to observe. Or both.

In the Canary Islands, researchers used the double-slit experiment to test the theory of quantum erasure. They began with two entangled particles. The first they shot through slits without observing it. It passed through as a wave. Then they moved to another island and shot the entangled twin through slits while observing it. It passed through as a particle. Given the theory of quantum entanglement, this might sound impossible: what happens to one particle must happen to the other. Maybe there was a chink in the theory: time. But when the researchers went back to the first island and checked the screen behind the slits again, the results of the first experiment had altered: the original particle had now passed through only one spot. The past had seemingly altered. Or maybe at some level of reality there’s no such thing as the past?² In any event, the relation between particles transcends time. And we are these particles.

This seems to me as offensive to rationality as a saint shrieking into the air. What if this were part of our “epistemic reality”? If reality is this fluid, and if the mind communes with matter in ways we don’t understand, maybe miracles aren’t miracles. Intellect simply hasn’t caught up with—or recovered—intuition.

I came across that experiment in Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying. Junger had what is commonly known as an NDE, and I’d just come out of my own near-death experience (lowercase, but quite real). Junger’s book tripped me into the massive body of literature on NDEs. Some of this requires a bath afterward, but that’s true of a lot of contemporary literature. Anyone who pursues NDEs eventually finds Bruce Greyson’s After. As a young psychiatric resident, Greyson witnessed a veridical NDE that shocked his scientific brain so profoundly that he told no one about it lest it risk his career.³ But he spent the next fifty years researching the phenomenon in an effort to explain that incident.

NDEs, much like a flourishing young man with a skull full of cerebrospinal fluid, offer a powerful suggestion that consciousness may be more than a projection of the brain. We’ve known for some time that consciousness is not limited to humans, though some scientists continue to protest. “Anthropodenial” is what the late Frans de Waal called this: Descartes’s dog certainly looks like she’s in pain, but is she actually aware that she’s in pain? In fact, that capacity for something to “look like” it has human consciousness extends beyond dogs and trees. And why should human consciousness be the defining type? Even a single-cell organism has the capacity for volition and acquired aversion, the latter of which it can pass on to its daughter cell. And pain? Some researchers of simple organisms like snails (and beheaded flatworms?) believe that such creatures might actually feel more pain than humans, or at least suffer that pain more precisely, and thus more cumulatively. The idea is that there are no mitigating factors like knowledge of pain and awareness that it always ends (even if only in death). The pain a severed snail feels is cosmic, its complete being. I would have thought I’d experienced that in my life, but reading this speculation (and of course it’s only that) still made me shudder.

Many people believe that humans represent nature becoming conscious of itself, but what if nature is conscious of itself without our aid, and always has been? What if we are conscious of ourselves without our “selves,” at least if we think of the self as ineluctably bound to the body? What if consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetic energy? “Mind is common to all things.” “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.” “I don’t know who God is, godding inside of me.”⁴ What if all these statements reach toward one truth?

This is essentially the argument of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, a candidate for the best book I’ve ever read. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and polymath who has focused for decades on the asymmetry of the hemispheres of the brain and what that means for how we perceive ourselves and the world. There are four long chapters with extensive footnotes on the subject in this immense book, but here’s the gist. The right brain sees in wholes (the gestalt), whereas the left brain loves systems. The right brain knows what it doesn’t know. It’s the source of intuition and transformative leaps in all disciplines, including math and science. For the left brain, anything outside its purview is irrelevant, wrong, or invisible. The right brain imagines; the left brain analyzes. The right brain produces (and understands) metaphor; the left brain is more rigidly literal. Poetry comes from the right brain but, interestingly, language comes largely from the left. And that right there is a key to understanding our divided brains: though we can speak of their different capacities, in fact the left and right are indissolubly linked and can’t function healthily without each other. But this health—individual and cultural—depends upon the right brain, which is larger, being the master, and the left brain being the emissary.⁵ We have reversed that order.

Does this even need to be illustrated? Speech codes, identity politics, cancel culture: left-brain bullshit. DOGE, killing every grant that has the word “diversity” in it, even if the word refers to insects, cancel culture: same. But this goes far beyond politics and culture war.⁶ Militant atheism, scientism, religious dogmatism, tribalism: all this occurs in cages its inhabitants have ceased to see. The first quarter of the twenty-first century seems like some massive insult to the right side of the world’s brain: billions of us staring catatonically at screens, unable to form durable attachments, slicing time into ever-smaller increments for the sake of efficiency (and control), even as we feel its ever-faster passage crushing us.

What is AI but the apotheosis of left-brain lunacy? A Babel of “intelligence” towering toward . . . what, exactly? The next stage of evolution? Let the right brain atrophy and you’ll get exactly the reverse, a diminution of true knowledge, an end to the leaps of imagination that make flourishing progress possible. The “hallucinations” that plague current AI are suspiciously similar to the confabulations that occur when the left brain reaches the limits of its vision. McGilchrist provides fascinating examples of this in schizophrenics and people with damaged brains, but examples also abound in apparently thriving minds. Can’t figure out what consciousness is? That’s because it doesn’t exist! (Daniel Dennett called it a “benign ‘user illusion.’ ”)

I once overheard an AI developer enthuse that AI will soon compose music a hundred times better than Bach. It can be existentially bracing to come across something so truly and irreducibly stupid, akin to the slam-down dark of a total eclipse. It takes a good deal of intelligence to make a real work of art, but it’s a very specific form of intelligence that not even the artist understands, and artists are rarely the “smartest” people among us. I have known truly great ones who, emerging from the blaze of creation, grow sudden pelts and boxy jaws and fling their excremental opinions at their enemies.

Einstein did claim that all his best ideas came from music. The whole concept of space-time emerging from Bach’s B-minor Mass. I’m guessing at the specific connection, but Einstein adored Bach. So does McGilchrist, who may have used the same source to, in a sense, split space-time in two. McGilchrist believes that time and space are absolutes, along with motion, or “flow”:

Our education teaches us not just to think of space and time as abstractions, but, because of our tendency to privilege abstractions, to see them as primary—and movement as secondary. I suggest that movement is as foundational as space and time. Each requires the other. Space is the potential for something to change within it. Both become actualised in flow. To attempt to negate motion, then, threatens to undermine any means we might have of approaching reality.

That mountain that seems so solid and perdurable in the distance? As McGilchrist points out, a billion-year time-lapse video would show it accreting or diminishing at every second. Not that there is such a thing as a “second.” Time may be an absolute, but our measurements of it are illusory. The notion of rest or stasis (or stillness) is also illusory, inimical to what Henri Bergson called the “mobility of the real.”

These ideas resonate with something called quantum field theory, an attempt to reconcile the Standard Model of physics, which works very well in practical terms, with all the quantum discoveries, which suggest that the world is a hell of a lot more complicated than we thought. Einstein was familiar with field theory and spent much of his later life futilely trying to “unify” the existing theory with the Standard Model, neither of which can account for gravity.⁷ Still, I find this (perhaps misattributed) quote by him helpful:

It needed great scientific imagination to realize that it is not the charges nor the particles but the field in the space between the charges and the particles that is essential for the description of physical phenomena.

(“Betweenness” becomes a crucial word for McGilchrist, the key to his whole philosophy.) Einstein was right, but he didn’t go far enough. The quantum field isn’t simply essential for the description of physical phenomena. It determines their very existence. And it isn’t limited to the space between particles, but is everywhere in the universe—is the universe, in essence.

Like McGilchrist, I find field theory intuitively appealing. Physics is inseparable from metaphysics, as he suggests, and field theory is broadly consistent with the Christian belief that creation is ongoing, that there is some constant energy animating and sustaining existence. It’s the time idea that nags. “Our consciousness depends on time,” McGilchrist says, “and we humans have no meaning, and can find no meaning, outside time.” This seems wrong to me, or at least limited.

The Western mind fails to understand time, McGilchrist argues, because it can conceive of it only spatially: a straight line steadily moving us and all reality into the future. It’s no good pointing to a point, because, as McGilchrist says, a point is already a line. The most infinitesimal bit of matter has a span. And though Wordsworth is McGilchrist’s favorite English poet, the phrase “spots of time” is misleading and refers to something that is physically impossible.⁸ Time is a flow. (All reality is a flow.) There’s no way to slice a piece out for observation or even memory. (All those vacation pictures? Studies show that they reduce your memory of events.) Some neuroscientists believe we retain every memory we’ve ever had but “lose” access over time; I put the word in quotes because, if true, this is probably a protective mechanism of the brain.⁹ But many people who experience NDEs report viewing their entire lives flashing in front of them, or through them.¹⁰ This process is at once instantaneous and so slow that they “see” details they haven’t remembered for years. Most mystics describe being free from time. St. Joseph of Cupertino, after levitating for a while, would drop back into his place at the altar and pick up the liturgy exactly where he’d left off. “To be conscious,” wrote T. S. Eliot, another poet McGilchrist quotes regularly, “is not to be in time.”

One remaining problem is that the word “flow” is still inescapably spatial: that river goes only one way, whereas time seems to me more swirled and layered. McGilchrist at one point likens time to a circle and finally lands on a spiral, but that doesn’t fix the problem. There are occasions when time seems to move backward: the way, as people grow older, their early lives reemerge with great clarity. Or consider “terminal lucidity,” when a person who has had Alzheimer’s for years and may be in a complete vegetative state will suddenly sit up in bed and not only recognize everyone around them but speak lucidly of events deep in the past. Then they die. That quantum entanglement extends through different times seems itself a strong argument against time as an absolute.

Still, I take McGilchrist’s point about the flow of reality. In the onward rush of time, the instant doesn’t exist.¹¹ Things exist, but only if we can stop thinking of them as things—that is, as independent objects. “Nothing is atomistic,” he says, “not even atoms.” At the same time, McGilchrist is quick to affirm the “thisness” (“haecceity” is Duns Scotus’ term) of things, their individual integrity, singularity, and necessity. But what holds them together, what gives them their thisness, is not some property inherent to them. It is, just like that unifying field within the atom, their relation to other things; ultimately, to every other thing in existence. The multiplicity of existence is so astonishing because every single thing is utterly itself, utterly unique. The miraculous singularity of things is possible only because everything is in relation.

And motion or energy (or consciousness?) is the key. Concepts, systems, symbols—you can extract these from reality, and they can be useful for social existence, but ultimately they have nothing to do with the “mobility of the real.”¹² Reality is, in essence, all verb. Quantum entanglement precedes the “things” entangled. Many people who have been in lifelong relationships say of their first meeting: “It was as if our souls already knew each other.” Love—an abstraction, note, nonexistent outside specific relation—is a powerful surge of primal energy, of consciousness. So is death. I remember, five years ago, walking through the streets of Amsterdam when I felt someone from my past move through me. I don’t mean I thought of her. I mean that for a moment she inhabited me, and then she vanished into a “thought.” She and her husband were very important to me when I was young, but we hadn’t seen each other in years. I resolved to write when I got home but before I could do so discovered she’d died—and very near the moment I had felt her. Quantum entanglement? A fluctuation in a quantum field? Two consciousnesses linked by love as one goes to God? Coincidence? Damned if I know, but it’s only the last answer that seems preposterous to me.

You could read all but the last chapter of The Matter with Things and think McGilchrist is going to land at some sort of contemporary mysticism buttressed with quantum physics, brain science, and a boatload of quotes from brilliant scientists and philosophers.¹³ Which is much in the air, mysticism. “The Christian of the future will either be a mystic,” Karl Rahner famously said, “or will not exist at all.” This is the future. Simon Critchley, a declared atheist, recently published a candid and compelling book that, to this reader, practically leaks pain from its pages from an unfulfilled religious longing. The book’s title? Mysticism. Critchley focuses on medieval mystics,¹⁴ though his chief aim is to connect medieval mystical experience with contemporary aesthetic experience. This effort has a noble literary pedigree, incipient in Percy Shelley, gaining full steam with Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and continuing on through much of modernism (especially Wallace Stevens, about whom Critchley has written a book, Things Merely Are). It’s a line of thinking to which I’ve been sympathetic.

But one runs into a wall at some point. The wall is called suffering. It can be internal or external but in any case renders those little whiffs of aesthetic bliss impotent. Even repulsive. Here’s the reason Critchley gives for writing his book:

I begin from the feeling . . . that we’re all lost, we’re all lonely, we all find it difficult to believe in anything, to commit to anything, to live in a way that feels truly alive. In short, we inhabit a world of woe.

Doubt tears away at us like rats gnawing away under the floorboards in the house of being. It is like an existential eczema that we scratch at under our clothes . . . and leads us ultimately to the question of whether to be or not to be.

That’s an ambitious “we.” I wonder if it refers mainly to people who read too many books, those with chemical imbalances, and the destitute. I fit into the first two categories and have written a book “against despair,” so I’m part of this drear choir. But I know a lot of people for whom Critchley’s words would seem, at the very least, myopic. And even if this is the way our minds relate to our world, is art really an adequate antidote? For some, I expect it only exacerbates the disease. (Louis Sass’s brilliant book The Paradoxes of Delusion shows how similar much modern art is to the hallucinations of schizophrenics.) Critchley believes that music—any music, so long as one really loves it—can lead to mystical experience, and the end of his book is an encomium to punk rock. I was a metalhead in my youth and went into ecstasies at many vomitous concerts. Was that you, God?

What is mysticism? There have been many classic attempts to describe this unnameable experience of unity with God and/or all reality. (Critchley himself has a beautiful early paragraph that adds to these.) But I often find myself helped most by the most helpless attempts. Pascal kept sewn into his coat a piece of paper memorializing the one mystical experience he had, which he recorded in touchingly blunt lines:

FIRE.
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
. . .
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

This from the man who wrote the Pensées. And sometimes a single incisive perception will do. “There is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you,” said Marilynne Robinson. The “you” here is not plural. A mystical experience can make all reality seem, for a moment, addressed to you alone—as it is, I believe, to every single one of us. There are mystical experiences recorded in all religions, many of which suggest some sort of consciousness beyond all religions. One thing mystical experience is never entirely beyond, though, is the physical world. This is a crucial point. Critchley, glossing Julian of Norwich, draws a distinction between seeing and seeing through creation, but this is a false dichotomy. One sees creation more clearly, more truly, by seeing the excess existence within it. One sees creation more truly by seeing it for itself alone. “It is an elegant paradox,” writes Kay Ryan, “that close application to the physical somehow does release the mind from the physical.”

tune

Imagine a sea
of ultramarine
suspending a
million jellyfish
as soft as moons.
Imagine the
interlocking uninsistent
tunes of drifting things.
This is the deep machine
that powers the lamps
of dreams and accounts
for their bluish tint.
How can something
so grand and serene
vanish again and again
without a hint?

“Form is prior to matter” could be an epigraph to this poem by Ryan. This is a poem written by the ear. This is the mind playing with language playing with reality, a kind of trinity. (Howe: “the Trinity in Greek and Latin has a feminine root.”) The first word is “imagine” (attention matters), the creative energy is a “machine” (the laws of cause and effect we can’t escape), and the vision is of something “grand and serene” (reality as it really is, beyond imagining and beyond machine). And the form is first, not last. There’s a “tune” in the world the poet needs to sing, a reciprocal attention in which she must “play” her part. You might say the form is in the unconscious before the mind becomes conscious of it, but this is another false dualism. (Howe: “I don’t believe in the unconscious, because whatever it is, it is not un-anything.”) For all the good psychology has done, we took a wrong turn when we let it lock into a paradigm. It’s almost impossible to think yourself out of it, even though it’s so recent, and even though it’s highly ironic that we all know what the unconscious is when no one can define consciousness. Think of that little nimbused girl ankle-deep in a stream, picking up rocks, seeing sunlight filter through the leaves. Now think of her the next day, concentrating hard on her last tree, trying to give form to the attention she was giving and getting the day before. Where is the conscious mind and where is the unconscious mind in each of these scenes? “Betweenness” is maybe the best one can do.

Poetry enables me to understand that “form is prior to matter,” which to some will seem irritatingly paradoxical. How can the form of a tree precede the actual tree? But the statement is based in quantum physics and is quite literal. “The habit of everyday language,” said Erwin Schrödinger,

deceives us and seems to require whenever we hear the word “shape” or “form” pronounced, that it must be the shape or form of something . . . but when you come to the ultimate particles constituting matter . . . they are, as it were, pure shape, nothing but shape.

This is not to posit some Platonic form. Quite the opposite. It’s the process of coming into being that’s real, the resolution and dissolution of a form (that mountain, that tree, that little girl) that has never existed before and never will again. Ryan’s poem participates in this ongoing creation not only because of the elements I’ve noted. It actually produces the experience it describes. This is exactly the point that Critchley makes about mystical writings. Ryan is modest, just riffing a little “tune,” but the existential stakes are high. Something in the sound of poetry sounds creation itself. All of Christianity is predicated on the Word. Yahweh speaks the world into being in the first chapter of the Hebrew Bible. The first place was a voice.

That’s a metaphor, of course. So is the “Word” and Yahweh “speaking.” “Flow” is a metaphor. “Field,” “entanglement,” “particle,” and “wave”: metaphors. “If poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality,” writes Samuel Matlack,

this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude . . . poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality. Far from making poetic speech a mere means of translating a scientific message, talking about the constitution of the physical world must be poetic in some way.

Ryan’s poem is about exactly that: “the physical world must be poetic in some way.” And it’s a metaphor. If the poem were merely a wish that the world is like this, a pretty imagining, then to hell with it. Shut up and compute. How does the world cohere and decohere at the same time? How can the sense of an absolute union of all matter be reconciled with the endless multiplicity and distinctness of it? I dislike the phrase “finding the extraordinary in the ordinary” because it flattens and tames a volatile process. If the world is as fluid as physics says it is, if “things” (and people) precipitate out of energy and exist only in relation, then a metaphor’s chief power isn’t simply a sharp perception. It isn’t even, as R. P. Blackmur said, that it “adds to the stock of available reality.” No, a metaphor’s chief power in this endlessly dissolving and resolving universe is that, at the deepest level, it’s literal.

But also, alas, evanescent. The half-created, half-perceived cohesion does vanish, and “without a hint” of its having been. The revelations artists are shown in their work often mean nothing to their lives. No doubt this is the case for many philosophers and physicists as well. McGilchrist’s universal connectedness might sound like a kumbaya cohesion of our minds with reality, until you stop to ponder just how many terrifying things there are in reality, how many dangerous relations. In the time it took you to relish the “interlocking uninsistent / tunes of drifting things,” there occurred enough suffering in the natural world to shock God right out of any thinking brain. One reason medieval mystics resorted to apophatic language was to suggest the ineffable majesty of God, the God beyond God. Another reason, though, is that on this side of death an experience of God’s presence is terrible, in the biblical sense, and followed by an excruciating sense of absence. St. Teresa of Ávila was sometimes so ravaged she couldn’t lift her quill. The great majority of people who have NDEs describe the experience as blissful, more real than reality itself, and altogether outside of time. But they are dead.¹⁵ For the mystic, suspended between gravity and grace, every now is a not.

Religions can’t survive on that. They need to be cataphatic. They need to tell people how to live and what to live for and give them left-brain symbols and rituals that bind solitary experiences of God—Mind, if you prefer—together. They need to provide at least a shape to the nameless, without allowing that shape to replace the nameless. McGilchrist knows this and makes a wise and sane case for religion, even though he himself, as I read him, can’t quite commit to one. In his memoir What Is God?, the philosopher Jacob Needleman draws a dichotomy I finally like: “Modernity: the realization of freedom from. The necessary new era: the call of what freedom is for.”

For what? I think McGilchrist would say: Freedom to be in the process of being without irritably swimming against (transhumanism, the mania to prevent aging) or seeking to dam (ceding imagination to AI or to a petrified politics or religion) the current. Freedom to imagine the world imagining us (and to sustain the world sustaining us). Freedom to face death long before it threatens, and when it does, to die into Mind, the whole flowing field of it, which has no end (though humanity might) and is its own self-sustaining source. Freedom to praise and even to pray, even if you can’t quite land on a traditional god. Perhaps the very nature of the reality, both physical and metaphysical, that McGilchrist depicts precludes “landing” anywhere. Our time’s great spiritual affliction is longing without an object. Our salvation may lie in learning to love without one.

Which brings me, inevitably, to one last story. I’ve quoted a lot from the work of Fanny Howe in this essay. I can’t overstate how important a presence she’s been in my life, though we’ve probably spent a total of fifty hours together. A number of those hours were recent, as my near-death experience (an experimental form of T-cell therapy) took place in Boston in 2023, and when I wasn’t hospitalized, I’d make my way to Fanny’s dark basement apartment in Cambridge. (“I love this place,” she said brightly the first time I was there.) She always had questions for me, and they were always about God. I suspected they weren’t really questions (me instructing her?) and that we both knew the answers could never really be that. What was the point? Betweenness.

Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025. And that, for me, is the lie. If consciousness precedes matter, it’s a pretty good bet that it survives it. If consciousness seems at least partially independent of the brain, seems to move through the universe as its animating energy, one could almost have faith—and this is exactly how Fanny once defined what faith meant for her—that “we are safe.” I had no visitation when Fanny died, didn’t even learn about it until a day later in a Manhattan bar, where I stared for a long time into the distance and couldn’t speak. I didn’t feel grief. I didn’t feel anything. But writing this now, this very sentence, I feel grief and gift fused, presence and absence in one impossible, suspended instant. I suppose most artists become artists precisely because of this sad lag. Near the end of Indivisible, Fanny’s masterpiece, the novel’s main character—named, slyly, Henny—says, while grieving the death of her closest friend, “Jesus is the only one we ever hear about who really died. . . . You don’t know that the others died because they never came back.” Not true, dear Fanny, not true.