Divine Madness - The Quantum Mechanics of the Soul

<p>Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot ... will be shot.<strong>                                                        --Mark Twain</strong></p><p></p><p><strong><em>Divine Madness</em></strong> - <strong>The Quantum Mechanics of the Soul</strong> is a true tragicomedy blending a humorous satire of religion and philosophy with a tragic love story. The title is taken from Plato's <em>Theia Mania</em> the divine madness of poets prophets and seers. Joseph Colocento lost his fiancée Mary Malin in a car accident just before college graduation. He no longer believed in God yet for years and years after the accident he couldn't stop blaming the God of his Catholic youth. Then finally the<em> real </em>God appeared to him a God too big for any one religion a God too big in fact for any one universe a God who is not at odds with our current understanding of the vastness of our universe as well as the infinity beyond it a God who tells Joseph Heaven is not the end of your journey it's the maternity ward.</p><p></p><p><strong><em>Divine Madness</em></strong> is a <em>mostly</em> humorous satire of religion and philosophy. It plays with two dichotomies: first the dichotomy between brilliance that borders on madness and madness that borders on brilliance and second the dichotomy between Plato's <em>Theia Mania</em>-the divine madness of poets oracles prophets and seers-and organic madness. A couple of the towns are fictional the narrator is unreliable and it's a colt writer's first whinny to boot. But it addresses important questions about the meaning of life (especially why bad things happen to good people) in a new way.</p><p> The novel's structure pays homage to one of its main themes chaos theory-the science of complexity which says that very complex systems appear on the surface to be in chaos but upon closer study are found to have deep structures feedback loops strange attractors recursive symmetries and other classic features of non-linear systems. They can appear most chaotic just before the bifurcation point when they suddenly reorganize themselves on a higher level.</p><p>In this case beginning around The Princeton Episode it morphs from an episodic novel to one that is narrative driven. And then beginning at A Few Words About Mary it becomes more of a love story in an college setting between a Jewish girl and a gentile boy and mostly dialogue driven.</p><p> Above all it is a novel of ideas-profound and somewhat iconoclastic ideas-about God and the soul hidden in a humorous satire like a teaspoon of castor oil hidden in a bowl of Lucky Charms.</p>