Silly wrong but vivid right*

Today marks two weeks of the newborn daze. Perhaps it’s the oxytocin, perhaps the three blessed hours of sleep last night—whatever it is, we’ve caught the morning sun, bathed, nursed, swaddled and put the baby down for his first nap, and had breakfast—all before 9AM.

During the long nights of the first week, these have been my waking companions (aside of course from Josh in various stages of nappy change bewilderment): Gong Yoo marathons of Coffee Prince, Train to Busan, and Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (a.k.a. Goblin) (kudos, Netflix, for trouncing sleep, your number one competitor); and musing on random articles on Twitter: Georges Lemaître’s model of an expanding universe and a long-unsolved math problem cracked during quarantine, among others.

I had been meaning to write about Lemaître’s hidden God of the cosmos and the geometry riddle for a while, but sleep deprivation and near-constant nursing doesn’t exactly lend itself to writing. Today I thought I’d try. This was the problem:

“It starts with a closed loop—any kind of curvy path that ends where it starts. The problem Greene and Lobb worked on predicts, basically, that every such path contains sets of four points that form the vertices of rectangles of any desired proportion.”

I won’t pretend that I understand the intricacies of the proof, but what jumped out to me was that Greene and Lobb used a four-dimensional space to model and analyze the two-dimensional problem. I remarked to my mathematician/poet friend Iris that it was like unveiling the mechanics of a higher dimension “miracle” to a 2D creature (such as in Planiverse or Flatland) or Meg Murry finally grasping how a tesseract works in A Wrinkle In Time.

*Ah, the headache-inducing epiphanies of higher dimensional math. (Source: xkcd.com)*

Iris and I used to talk endlessly about these aha! moments: fleeting, clear glimpses of the Divine and his patterns as we peer “through a glass, darkly”. In Lemaître’s case, his model of the universe implied an origin—a (0,0,0,0)—albeit flawed, because he theorized a cold starting state rather than what we know now to be a hot “Big Bang”. While I understand the initial suspicion of scientists of a possible religious agenda (he was a priest), what puzzles me is their passionate distaste for the idea of a beginning, even with the discovery of the cosmic wave background, the signature of the Big Bang.

(Bear with me, I’m getting to the kdrama!)

If impersonal math and science mysteries are already this difficult, what of those that involve the human heart? In the Goblin universe, the Almighty is portrayed as frivolous, meddlesome, even cruel, condemning protagonists Eun Tak, Kim Shin, Kim Sun, and Wang Yeo to love and yet suffer exile, again and again, from one another—first, in the bitter politics of Goryeo, then in the loss of memory, then again in sacrificial death (sorry, this is the best I can do to avoid spoiling the plot) and lonely immortality. He offers no answers to their suffering, but instead throws them a riddle: “Fate is the question I ask. The answer is for you to find.”

It eerily echoes the final words of Orual, another god-doomed character in C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces:

“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”

And yet we learn that while their fates appear on the surface to have been neatly sealed up, they are not fixed: they still wield “free” will, if within a certain order, a set of parameters—to hold a grudge or to love, to mourn or to be content, to give or to hold back, and all these choices’ attendant consequences. Fate and free will coexist, as do cosmic laws and a Creator who chooses to operate within the laws he created.

There seems to be no way of lifting the veil completely—depending on who you ask, this is cruelty or mercy. I wonder if our limited, puny 4D understanding will be able to contain the full, holy, great and terrible revelation. There are peeks, yes, given to prophets, geniuses (or madmen, take your pick), and at times lowly fishermen: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.” Sometimes the visions comfort us, sometimes they enrage us, sometimes they make no sense at all.

Till then, well, we have this life to try to make out the answers, even if they are mere shadows of the real thing. “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”