The Blues and
Abstract Truth is the title of a jazz album recorded in 1961. The title might also be a formula for all
great art, including the art of living.
Feeling and thought, substance and form, passion and
detachment, yin and yang, Bacchus and Apollo, the blues and abstract truth – each
a critical part of our experience; thus the integration of the two is required
to be present to or to represent the wholeness of experience.
Albert Einstein once stated that “science without religion
is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Personally, I find this quote rather lame, but perhaps what he really
means is that abstract truth without the blues is lame, the blues without
abstract truth is blind. Science needs
to be grounded in the concrete, felt, everyday experience of living; the
concrete, felt, everyday experience of living needs the guidance of timeless
truths.
Stephen Hawking wrote: "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" What I hear
Hawking asking is “Where is the blues behind all this abstract truth?”
The discoveries of science, as Hawking states, is “just…rules
and equations.” Or, we might say it is a
comprehensive, ever improving map of the world.
Maps are wonderful for getting you oriented, but the goal of a map is to
help you arrive. When you get to
Graceland, you can fold the map up put it in the glove compartment.
Or another analogy is that science is an attempt to uncover
the recipe of the world. But. when you’ve
cooked the gumbo, you can put aside the recipe and sit for a spell and
eat. That’s what the blues is about,
being there and eating it up.
The first tune on The
Blues and Abstract Truth is “Stolen Moments.” If you want to hear what the marriage of
blues and abstract truth is all about, take a listen. A version is available on the Internet at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps3ftZQ5O3w. (of course, just about anything by Duke
Ellington or John Coltrane will also do.)