SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS
By Marco Bruna (Translated from the Italian by the author)
Corriere della Sera, La Lettura January 16, 2022

Thirty years have passed since the release of All the Pretty Horses, and the best way to pay homage to a giant like Cormac McCarthy is to drive from northwest Texas to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The desert is dotted with creosote bushes and mesquite, segmented by immense ranches where cattle graze free. Only the mesa interrupts an otherwise monotonous horizon for hundreds of kilometers. In these boundless lands McCarthy brought his cowboys. We readers, too, have been riding in the desert with John Grady Cole, the boy hero of All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of a poignant trilogy narrated with the prophetic tone that so much appeals to this shy writer, born in New England but adopted many years ago by the South.

The journey of “La Lettura” to Santa Fe is a sort of pilgrimage to the origins of McCarthy’s inspiration. The destination is the Santa Fe Institute, the temple of studies on complex systems presided by David Krakauer since 2015 and of which Cormac is a trustee, founded in 1984 by a group of brilliant minds including Murray Gell-Mann, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on elementary particles. Krakauer opened the doors of the institute to us for an exclusive tour (the structure was closed during the Christmas holidays), showing us the places where McCarthy and his friend Sam Shepard–the last two cowboys of American literature–composed their masterpieces. Sam, who passed away on July 27, 2017, at the age of 73, was using an Olympia SM9; Cormac, 88 last July 20, a legendary Olivetti Lettera 32, which was auctioned at Christie’s in 2009 for $254,500, all of which was donated to the Santa Fe Institute for research.

The day before entering the Institute, we had breakfast with David Krakauer at The Teahouse on Canyon Road. It is December 28 and the usually quiet Santa Fe, around 85,000 inhabitants, has awakened full of tourists crowding the streets around the Santa Fe Plaza, near the Basilica of St. Francis. “In addition to having revolutionized our lives, the pandemic has rekindled awareness around the issue of complexity. A tiny virus was enough to subvert the order of the world. DeLillo had already predicted the arrival of chaos in Underworld,” explains Krakauer, born in Hawaii but with a very strong British accent, the legacy of a youth spent between London and Lisbon.

“Robert Musil and Thomas Mann were great system thinkers, ante litteram. Today, it is unthinkable to separate epidemiology from economics or ecology. Or from literature. Everything is connected. Why should only Anthony Fauci talk about epidemiology? COVID spills over into every area of our lives,” said Krakauer. “On the one hand, it’s gratifying to us at the Santa Fe Institute, who have been studying complex systems for decades. We want to break down the barriers between the sciences, the boundaries between disciplines. I am not surprised that the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Giorgio Parisi, Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann. Their contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems are crucial.”

The Santa Fe Institute Press has just published a volume, edited by Krakauer himself and former president Geoffrey West, titled The Complex Alternative, which collects the texts of over 60 affiliates of the Institute–including scientists from Harvard, Columbia and London School of Economics–on the role of complex sciences in the 21st century, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Complex Alternative takes into consideration immunology, epidemiology, psychology, analysis of inequalities and on collapse.

“We use mathematics to explain the celestial orbits; we know how an atom works. Why can’t we use it to investigate social dynamics?” continues Krakauer. “Newton said that it was impossible to understand the madness of the masses, that we are able to analyze the celestial motions but not the masses on Earth. There was an element that escaped mathematical calculation. What was missing was the human aspect. There are things that are difficult to explain mathematically. For example, why do people decide not to get vaccinated during a pandemic, putting their own and others’ lives at risk?”

“History comes to our aid. In 1847, the Austro-Hungarian doctor Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis discovered that bacteria can be killed by washing hands. An immense discovery in its simplicity, if you think about how many lives it has saved. Well, Semmelweis was fiercely opposed, among others, by the French and the English. Why? Because neither a French nor an English scientist made that discovery. It is an ideological question, just as an aversion to anti-COVID vaccines is ideological. The mathematical study of complexity must also leverage these aspects. Certain parameters of social life must be integrated.”

Visitors and members of the Santa Fe Institute are greeted at the entrance to the Cowan campus by the same intimidating motto, written in Greek, that adorned the entrance to Plato’s Academy: “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.” The headquarters of the Institute is located on top of a hill, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range, which offers a wonderful view of Santa Fe and the desert under the snow. Before continuing on, we stop to look at the installation by artist Bob Davis, designed to entertain visitors: a space rocket mounted on a 1966 Ford pickup.

The rest of the staff are on vacation, the campus is empty. David Krakauer’s studio is on the right after the entrance. In the two adjoining rooms worked Cormac McCarthy and Sam Shepard. A large photograph of Shepard in a cowboy hat hangs outside David’s studio: with Sam, as with Cormac, David has been a sincere friend.

“In these places Sam wrote the last three books,” explains Krakauer as we walk through the halls of the institute. They embodied the spirit of the Santa Fe Institute, the collapse of the barriers between disciplines. Both Pulitzers surrounded themselves with scientific tomes, irreplaceable sources of inspiration. In 2017, McCarthy measured himself for the first time with non-fiction in the scientific journal Nautilus, delving into the mysteries of language and demonstrating rare interdisciplinary qualities for a literary author.

Today, in the room where Sam worked, there are only boxes; however, a small sculpture remains, a head of Medusa, which David Krakauer had placed in front of Shepard’s desk “to keep him from being distracted.” There is also one in the library where McCarthy worked, although the author of the Border Trilogy preferred to write with his back to the window.

Here at the Santa Fe Institute, on a bare wooden table, Cormac also typed the latest book, The Passenger. Fans and critics have been waiting for it for years, the internet is full of summary information on the plot. David read and reread the proofs and even staged it in 2015 “but the publisher was furious because it hadn’t been released yet, so we had to withdraw the show.” The protagonist is a brilliant mathematician who suffers from ‘a mental illness’ maybe bipolar. A book like this could only be born within the walls of the Santa Fe Institute: science and literature merged under McCarthy’s expert eyes. “The Passenger is divided into two volumes: the first is the novel, the second is the transcription of the mathematics session with the analyst,” continues Krakauer. “It will come out this year, hopefully. Cormac is a perfectionist, he re-reads to the last.”

As soon as the visit to the Institute is over, we set off towards Tesuque, a quarter of an hour’s drive from Santa Fe. Cormac McCarthy lives here, far from the outside world. We enter the Tesuque Village Market, perhaps the only attraction of this microscopic center, where you can eat and buy local products. We ask a waitress if she has ever seen the most illustrious inhabitant of the place, but she hardly recognizes the name. It’s no surprise: like John Grady Cole, Cormac has severed all ties with the world. But his journey on horseback in the desert is not over yet.