Divine Madness - The Quantum Mechanics of the Soul

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. --Mark Twain

Divine Madness - The Quantum Mechanics of the Soul is a true tragicomedy, blending a humorous satire of religion and philosophy with a tragic love story. The title is taken from Plato's Theia Mania, the divine madness of poets, prophets, and seers. Joseph Colocento lost his fianc嶪, 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 real 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."

Divine Madness is a mostly 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 Theia Mania-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.

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.

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.

Above all it is a philosophical novel of ideas--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.

I am stunned, but I want to be stunned, since I have sworn to you, my soul, to trust you even if you lead me through madness . . . It is unquestionable: if you enter into the world of the soul, you are like a madman, and a doctor would consider you to be sick. Carl Jung (The Red Book, pages 148 - 150)