Sam Kahn writes in New Atlantis about Delia Bacon, a forgotten figure who was at the center of the American creative burst in the 1840s. She was taught by Beecher and influenced Emerson and Hawthorne and Poe. She wasn’t related to Francis Bacon, but spent her life trying to establish that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s work as subversive opposition to the psychopathic royals like Elizabeth and Henry.
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Bacon has been, for many, either the great hero or the great villain of modernity, or both. He is Faust, he is the sorcerer’s apprentice, he gave up the soul of classical and medieval philosophy and the unifying vision that bound humans to nature, for the sake of gaining knowledge of nature’s secrets and, with that, the power to subject nature to our will. The whole modern trajectory of materialistic thought — science and technology not just as efforts to diminish human needs but as ends in themselves, with deeper human longings subordinated to the notion of “progress” — is, to a startling degree, an extension of his philosophy. To merge together Bacon’s scientific determinism and Shakespeare’s exuberant humanism would, as Delia’s ally Emerson wrote in his first letter to her, “take alchemy itself.” Delia’s totally lunatic, totally fascinating conception was to do exactly that, to make the case that those were two sides of the same coin.
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Two sides of the same coin. Emerson turned this theme into a masterpiece.
Bacon, like Newton, was simultaneously a masterful experimenter and an expert mystic and an expert courtier. Both knew how to play the games necessary to keep your head attached in a world ruled by lunatics like Liz and Hank. Both were willing to weaponize the same games against their own competitors. Both were expert cryptographers. Delia saw the “Shakespeare” plays as part of Bacon’s subversion, getting the word out in stage tableaus instead of Vigenere tableaus.
Author Kahn seems to miss the essential Godly connection between observation and experiment. The old scientists knew what they were doing.
Observational science is knowing God’s will. Solving problems is doing God’s will.
The old observers, Arabs and Persians and pre-Endarkenment Euros, were observing the stars and the physical world to determine what God wanted.
Life is solving problems. Every living thing functions by trial and error with an infinite number of feedback loops, adjusting its response to survive in changing conditions. Simpler life adjusts the genes and epigenes. Plants and invertebrates adjust by picking different forms of reproduction, sexual vs cloning, or by choosing several alternate forms (larva, swarmer, dormant). Complex life adjusts with intelligence. This is what God intended, this is God’s will in action.
Carver:
LOOK ABOUT YOU.
TAKE HOLD OF THE THINGS THAT ARE HERE.
TALK TO THEM.
LET THEM TALK TO YOU.
Kahn mentions that the Shakespeare investigators spawned the discipline of cryptography, now used against us by the modern inheritors of Liz and Hank. The mechanism of spawning, not mentioned in the piece, was just as wild and weird as the old investigators. George Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories was devoted to connecting Bacon and Shakespeare. Fabyan was a total psychopath, a destroyer of souls, and he trained the demons who went on to establish our cryptographic agencies like NSA. His students weren’t interested in Bacon, but they knew how to weaponize the skills they learned in the Bacon quest.
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