algol30

The second way of coming to grips with any nervousness
about Algol is to ask what story you're telling yourself which is
making you nervous. In a way this is simply asking yourself
what effect you're having on the experience. Your answer may
be the myth, or the story, itself. Or it may be a slightly different
version of the story in which the observable scientific facts of a
shade traversing a star bind with the personae, settings and
events of the story as you're telling it.
Some force or power seems to overshadow just the bare facts
and darken even the most dry and dusty scientific material.
The ancients saw simply starlight in the direction of Algol, but
felt dread from it; they related that sense of dread in the story
of Perseus and Medusa. Every science invents its own lexicon,
and no science escapes using metaphors, which might be
defined as the art of relating apparently unrelated things.
Modern astronomy relates a word like "envelope" to "a
gaseous region surrounding one or more stars," or a phrase like
"dirty snowball" to a theory of the composition of comets. In
the modern mind, Algol is related to other stars with similar
spectra, called B stars. In the ancient mind, Algol is related to a
demon, and therefore feared. The force is in the demon, not
the spectrum.

* * *

In Plato's dialogue the Phaedrus, Socrates and his young
friend Phaedrus stroll down along the stream Ilissus, looking
for a pleasant spot to read a speech by a poet they both know.
They notice a nice, shady plane tree in the distance, and
Phaedrus points out that legend says Boreas, the North Wind,
ravished Orithyia at about that spot. Socrates, the inventor of
logical analysis, matter-of-factly replies, "No, it was about a
quarter of a mile lower down."
Phaedrus asks Socrates if he believes the story is true. Socrates
makes an interesting reply, which I'll give here. He says:

I should be quite in the fashion if I disbelieved it [the story], as the men
of science do. I might proceed to give a scientific account of how the
maiden, while at play with Pharmacia, was blown by a gust of Boreas
down from the rocks hard by, and having thus met her death was said to
have been seized by Boreas, though it may have happened on the
Areopagus, according to another version of the occurrence. For my part
Phaedrus, I regard such theories as no doubt attractive, but as the
invention of clever, industrious people who are not exactly to be envied,
for the simple reason that they must then go on and tell us the real truth

about the appearance of centaurs and the Chimera, not to mention a
whole host of other creatures, Gorgons and Pegasuses and countless other
remarkable monsters of legend flocking in on them. If our skeptic, with
his somewhat crude science, means to reduce every one of them to the
standard of probability, he'll need a deal of time for it. I myself have
certainly no time for the business, and I'll tell you why, my friend. I can't
as yet 'know myself,' as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as
that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into
extraneous matters. Consequently I don't bother about such things, but
accept the current beliefs about them, and direct my inquiries, as I have
just said, rather to myself, to discover whether I really am a more
complex creature and more puffed up with pride than Typhon, or a
simpler, gentler being whom heaven has blessed with a quiet,
un-Typhonic nature.(Phaedrus, 229c-230a;Benjamin Jowett translation)

In this translation, Socrates' answer to Phaedrus' question is
that he 'accepts the current beliefs about such things' because
the trouble with trying to explain scientifically the events and
characters and settings of myth is that the amount of time,
energy and cleverness needed would distract him from his real
task, which is (following Apollo's dictum at Delphi) to know
himself. This phrase in Socrates' lexicon is equivalent to: to
discover the truth. Objectively disproving every myth would
not help him discover the truth at all.
Socrates seems neither to believe nor to disbelieve the myth,
which was in his time the accepted belief. In our time, the
scientific fact is the accepted belief. Socrates, for example,
would be satisfied with the story that Helios the Sun harnessed
his horses and drove his chariot across the sky every day. We,
on the other hand, are satisfied with the idea that once every
24 hours or so the Earth rotates on its axis, exposing our side
of the world to the Sun, which is a luminous ball of gas near
enough to blind us, and for all intents and purposes stationary
in the sky. But the fact of either one of these explanations does
little for us in the way of truth. If "the truth" is simply that
while rotating we revolve around the Sun, how does that help
us? The answer is, it doesn't, by itself. More is to be made of it.
A sentence which recurs in grant-applications and popular
apologies for scientific projects is: "It helps us learn more
about ourselves." This phrase is applied, for example, to the
study of planetary geology, which seems utterly unrelated to
Earth-problems, but whose data is used (so we're led to
believe) to learn more about Earth geology; the more we know
about Earth's geology, the better we can, for example, predict
earthquakes and volcanoes.
Now this all seems far off the point. Some very clever people
have spent a great deal of time and energy figuring out practical
rationalizations for exploring outer space, when really all that's
happening is they are trying to satisfy a compelling curiosity
about the universe. They are, obeying a completely human
compulsion, trying to find out the truth about the cosmos. This
brings us back to Socrates' offhandedness about scientific
explanations. Without some human context, they are very dry.
The human context appears when an intuition or an emotion
or even a compulsion suddenly completes the picture, like a
bright star emerging from behind a cloud to complete a
constellation. The truth of a star or a girl's death is in neither
the objective facts nor the fiction built up around them. It is at
a different nexus, where the observer with his or her perceptive
and intellectual faculties meets the objective situation, where
they all touch and are magnified or filtered into explanations
for what is happening. To know, it is necessary to know not
only the facts, but yourself, since you are the one who is, in the
end, acting, observing the experiment, telling the story,
whatever story it is.
This expression of the unity of observer, object and equipment
is now grossly oversimplified. And here is what I mean: in the
Phaedrus Socrates goes on to point out that good rhetoric
depends not only on a capacity to arrange words effectively,
but on, moreover, the knowledge of the truth of what