'Moby Dick' was no fish story: Mark Wagner imagines the impossible

One day, we will live in communities — great or small — with sustainable, carbon-neutral infrastructure. Endless energy generated by the sun will allow us to reestablish forests and eliminate particulate discharges in the air from fossil fuels.

At the moment, due to competing economic and political factions, this reality may be hard to see. But it will happen, Just as Jules Verne, in 1865, imagined a trip to the moon, an idea that would become "Offenbach’s Opera," written in 1875, about the same concept.

If you had come out of those woods in 1865 and declared to your mates that one day humans would sail a great ship to the moon and walk on its surface, they might question your sanity.

You’d be like the character of Pip, the tambourine boy on the ill-fated Pequot. In Melville’s "Moby Dick," Pip falls into the depths, and there he saw — among many other wonders and vastness — "God’s foot on the treadle of the universe’s loom."

He saw God — or at least the foot of God — stitching and spinning the world into being. When he got back to the ship and after he related his vision of the divine, his shipmates thought he’d gone mad.

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But the Verne novel and Offenbach opera from the 19th century remind us of this: seemingly impossible events are made possible in time. Think the Jetsons' video phone or the sub two-hour marathon.

Those of us who’ve been through basic training, you learn the training slogan of the Ordnance Department of the Army before tossing a grenade: The possible we do right away, the impossible will take some time. The slogan is in no shape or form original, the slogan is drawn from a long history that appears to have begun in French literature in the 18th century and is as fine an expression of hope as human fancy gets: The impossible is something that can and shall be done.

Our knowledge of possible worlds is often based on notions of safety or sensitivities, the appearance of reasonableness. Most of us have been schooled on the phrases such as "Not gonna happen" and "It’ll never fly, Gulliver."

In the possible world, a colony on Mars will never happen. We stay in the safety of possibilities and avoid the logical complexities of imagining the impossible. The problem with this is that dwelling in these notions of the possible means we are living within limitations.

On the other hand, impossible worlds is a concept that suggests this instinct for limitations is temporary, a kind of conceptual blindness to the future. Imagining Impossible Worlds is a useful tool of hope and future discovery. Think: a surgeon in New York City operating remotely on a child for life saving surgery 7,000 miles away.

In sport and technology and television shows, maybe even in our longing for peace and prosperity in a warring world, the impossible is only a matter of time, and our imaginations are — in Einstein’s most famous quote — more important than knowledge.

Knowledge — factual knowledge — is the illusion of certainty, but as Einstein’s friend Max Planck has written,

"In no case can we rest assured that what is absolute in science today will remain absolute for all time ... The aim of science … is an incessant struggle towards a goal which can never be reached. Because the goal is of its very nature unattainable. It is something that is essentially metaphysical and as such is always again and again beyond each achievement."

Knowledge of what is possible is limited and limiting. Imagination — scientific and other — engenders new worlds. To live there is to live in an enchanted world, freed from the limiting stories we tell ourselves about what is possible. Carbon neutral economies are coming ... And raise the question: what comes after that? 

Imagine.

Mark Wagner is former director of the Binienda Center for Civic Engagement at Worcester State University. He has published two poetry books and is working on a project on Native American contributions to the game of golf. He welcomes visits to markgwagner.wordpress.com and markgwagner@charter.net.