This note is under construction…
Haecity has to do with the distinct and specific identity of a particular time-place. I encountered the term in Stan Robinson’s Mars triology, and was intrigued by the way it was used to fuse a sort of mystical view of the world as a deeply interconnected whole with the quest for rigorous and systematic understanding that drives scientific inquiry.
In the Mars trilogy, one of the central protagonists, Sax Russell, is the primary exponent of haecity (with Hiroko Ai adding a mystical counterpoint). In what follows, at least for the moment, I lay out a series of quotes that resonate with my own views.
In the first quote, we have Nirgal coming to understand the unity of two seemingly different perspectives on the world.
With the wave machine turned off, the lake soon settled down to a round flat plate. The surface of the water became the same white color as the dome, but the lake bottom, covered by green algae, was still visible through the white sheen. So the lake was simultaneously pure white and dark green. On the far shore the dunes and scrub pines were reflected upside down in this two-toned water, as perfectly as in any mirror. Nirgal stared at the sight, entranced, everything falling away, nothing there but this pulsing green/white vision. He saw: there were two worlds, not one – two worlds in the same space, both visible, separate and different but collapsed together, so that they were visible as two only at certain angles. Push at vision’s envelope, push like one pushed against the envelope of cold: push! Such colors!
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, p 7
Next, we have Hiroko’s mystical view of the world, the green world, as evolving towards increasingly intricate and entwined patterns:
“Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That’s the shape of the universe itself. There’s a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It’s a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see. Like these sand fleas and limpets and krill — although these krill in particular are dead, and helping the fleas. Like all of us,” waving a hand like a
– KSR, Green Mars, p8
dancer. “And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe – its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. It’s a holy feeling, and our task in this world is to do everything we can to foster it. And one way to do that is to spread life everywhere. To aid it into existence where it was not before, as here on Mars.”
And next we have Sax’s view, illustrated via a classroom interaction:
Then one of them would see an opening and begin the game. He was helpless before it. He would say something like, “In nonshivering thermogenesis the body produces heat using futile
– KSR, Green Mars, p 11-12
cycles,” and one of them would raise a hand and say, “But why, Sax?” and everyone would stare hard at their lectern and not look at each other, while Sax would frown as if this had never happened before, and say, “Well, it creates heat without using as much energy as shivering does. The muscle proteins contract, but instead of grabbing they just slide over each other, and that creates the heat.”
Jackie, so sincerely the whole class nearly lost it: “But how?”
He was blinking now, so fast they almost exploded watching him. “Well, the amino acids in the proteins have broken covalent bonds, and the breaks release what is called bond dissociation energy.
“But why?”
Blinking ever harder: “Well, that’s just a matter of physics.” He diagrammed vigorously on the blackboard: “Covalent bonds are formed when two atomic orbitals merge to form a single bond orbital, occupied by electrons from both atoms. Breaking the bond releases thirty to a hundred kcals of stored energy.
Several of them asked, in chorus, “But why?”
This got him into subatomic physics, where the chain of whys and becauses could go on for a half hour without him ever once saying something they could understand. Finally they would sense they were near the end game. “But why?”‘
“Well,” going cross-eyed as he tried to backtrack, “atoms want to get back to their stable number of electrons, and they’ll share electrons when they have to.”
“But why?”
Now he was looking trapped. “That’s just the way atoms bond. One of the ways.”
“But WHY?”
A shrug. “That’s how the atomic force works. That’s how things came out –
And they all would shout, “in the Big Bang.” They would howl with glee, and Sax’s forehead would knot up as he realized that they had done it to him again. He would sigh, and go back
to where he had been when the game began. But every time they started it again, he never seemed to remember, as long as the initial why was plausible enough. And even when he did recognize what was happening, he seemed helpless to stop it. His only defense was to say, with a little frown, “Why what?” That slowed the game for a while; but then Nirgal and Jackie got clever at guessing what in any statement most deserved a
why, and as long as they could do that, Sax seemed to feel it was his job to continue answering, right on up the chains of because to the Big Bang, or, every once in a while, to a muttered “We don’t know.”
“We don’t know!” the class would exclaim in mock dismay. “Why not?”‘
“It’s not explained,” he would say, frowning. “Not yet.”
One morning, thinking about Sax’s frown, Nirgal stayed behind in the school until he and Sax were the only ones left, and then he said, “Why don’t you like it when you can’t say why?”
– KSR, Green Mars, p 12-13
The frown returned. After a long silence Sax said slowly, “I try to understand. I pay attention to things, you see, very closely. As closely as I can. Concentrating on the specificity of every moment. And I want to understand why it happens the way it does. I’m curious. And I think that everything happens for a reason. Everything. So, we should be able to tease these reasons out. When we can’t … well. I don’t like it. It vexes me. Sometimes I call it” – he glanced at Nirgal shyly, and Nirgal saw that he
had never told this to anyone before – “I call it the great unexplainable.”
It was the white world, Nirgal saw suddenly. The white world inside the green, the opposite of Hiroko’s green world inside the white. And they had opposite feelings about them. Looking from the green side, when Hiroko confronted something mysterious, she loved it and it made her happy – it was viriditas, a holy power. Looking from the white side, when Sax confronted something mysterious, it was the Great Unexplainable, dangerous and awful. He was interested in the true, while Hiroko was interested in the real. Or perhaps it was the other way around — those words were tricky. Better to say she loved the green world, he the white.