No Line's Infinity: the “cogency of all possibilities, potential and actual”

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No Line: the “cogency of all possibilities, potential and actual”

It’s no wonder the French motorcycle cop in the U2 song "No Line on the Horizon" ditches his Rue de Marrais beat for an unplanned, Spiritaneous trip down to Morocco to see that amazing “girl…with a hole in her heart.” There is just such an attraction to someone who knows the secret of the universe: “Infinity’s a great place to start.”

She’s not only an optimist, but a
good physicist: “Time is irrelevant; it’s not linear.”

We usually think of time as linear. Time travel is equivalent to this line closing up into a circle.” (John D. Barrow, “The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Infinite,” 271)

Ahh, No wonder there is no line on the horizon! It’s a circle, as this record’s trajectory is inevitably a plunge into nonlinear time travel..

The girl is no slouch. She follows God. She may even be (as often in the U2 lexicon) God. She sure feels like a version of the girl in “Mysterious Ways” (“She moves in mysterious ways…Spirit moves in mysterious ways”) Of course , for Bono, the ‘she’ can respresent (wife)Ali, for Christ’s sake…and/or Christ, for Ali’s sake.

Follow her, for she follows Christ.

She is such a draw for the unnamed cop that he seems to self-hijack his work motorbike

(“Siren’s wailing, but it’s me that wants to get away”).

for his determined drive to meet her/God…which he does a few songs later in “Fez/Being Born.”

You know, that tongue in the ear thing might have also partly motivated his pilgrimage…but it’s all good, it’s all elevation.

Why is infinity such a great place to start?

Infinity has haunted human minds for thousands of years. It challenges theologians…Is it part of the problem, or part of the solution?...It is also a live issue. Physicists’ accelerating quest for a Theory of Everything has been primarily guided by an attitude about infinities. Their appearance can be a warning that you have entered a blind alley on the road to the truth. The enthusiasm with which superstring theories were embraced was a consequence of their ingenious evasion of the problem of infinities that had plagued all their predecessors (preface)…

Aristotle thinks the infinite is incomplete… it is the unending character of the flow of time that makes it… infinite (30)...Augustine’s idea of the humanly infinite appearing finite to the mind of God is intriguing…the ‘threat to God from the infinite world’….Not all philosophers saw the infinite as a theological problem. Nicholas of Cusa embraced the infinite as a place where opposites could be reconciled [a quest Bono has been on, and on about, for years] ..

Pascal [whom Bono quotes fairly often , even paraphrases in the song at hand: “hole in her heart” ] confronted the problem of time and ‘double infinity: infinite largeness and infinite smallness in all things.(35) ..

Infinity is a player of great significance who appears on the stage only when the crucial questions of existence are raised...Infinity challenges us to contemplate the duplication of ourselves….and ponder the the cogency of all possibilities, potential and actual. (273)

-Barrow, “The Infinite Book"

The cover story of June 2009 Wired magazine dovetails here: “The NEW New Economy: More Startups. Fewer Giants. Infinite Opportunity.” I see that title as a word for the church..and the world..in this current economy and “weird moment in history.”

If we are bold and innocent enough to see correctly in this day and age, there is no line at all on the horizon….Bono has made clear this is not the disorientation of the pilot who has lost site of the line…. but the boundless, infinite optimism of a surprisingly “realized eschatology” where heaven invades earth, the future Kingdom travels “backwards” in time to meet us. The new and creative creation has creatively arrived. It used to be “High Street never looked so low”..but now, from our new vantage point, even streets like Rue de Marais already have no name .

Read NT Wright, and get to work while the horizon is lineless.

Borrow your motorcycle, and get to Fez; speed to Infinity.

Not a bad place to start... “cogency of all possibilites,” indeed.

May it shape our ethos, ethics, eschatology….and epistemology:

Once infinity seemed like an evil spirit that was determined to confuse our way, but we have come to see that it is a surer guide than we ever thought to the true path….the quest to understand the nature of matte and the universe of space and time may come to rely uniquely and completely upon the beckoning or the avoidance of the infinite. We will need to know it better than we know ourselves. (Barrow,274)