Thinking Scientifically is John Fraser's latest wildly original, experimental work of fiction: three stories ('The Opera', 'Round the World', 'The Shaft') centred on one theme: while we can think scientifically, can we be scientifically?
We can train as scientists - but that's a job, and when we stop doing it - we're the same chimpanzee types as everybody else. When we think
scientifically, what happens to all the other layers, the modalities, systems, of thought and being: the magical, the religious, the hunting and the gathering, the philosophical, the artistic...? The characters in the three long tales that make up Thinking Scientifically are involved in science, certainly - science as setting records, sport, endurance ... science as the psychology ... of art: of desire, the desire to be a libertine, the search for the unknown and unattainable - our Kurdistans: of what we know is there, somewhere, and leaves us flattened and exhausted by the search. Science - has no end: if it has a scope, it is not ours, not our happiness, certainly. Is it the discovery, rather, that what we know, or would like to know, and what we are,
are not at all the same?
In the end, after the exploration and the hypotheses - there's kids, maybe not ours, crowds and causes, bureaucrats. Not at all scientific ... what then? Enough of thought? Of experiment? In the end ... company? A welcome? An opera, exotic clubs: the world: and a hole in the ground. The protagonists use their best analyses to draw conclusions and wisdom from these familiar settings.
