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joculumBr’er Joculum 'Splains It All Agin, Version 2.0
To quote one of my favorite sci-fi movies from my childhood, “Why haven’t I seen this before?”
(I had a marvelous time getting technical updates on the film in question for the sake of this self-satirizing clip.)
This has to do with my characteristic curiosity about how traditions get disseminated. It has just sunk in that it is entirely possible that it was realized much earlier in human history than we think that it is not necessary to introduce people to one another to form a network of individuals with shared purposes (as distinct from ones that share the same public values and symbols).
In other words, all that is really necessary to have an invisible brotherhood is, as was said of Rosicrucians' ludibrium, to spread false rumors that such a brotherhood exists and there are things one needs to do to be admitted to it.
Pretty soon a deconstructed network forms, consisting of people who are doing desirable things (or undesirable, as the case may be) in order to be counted worthy.
This is, of course, what some of the paradoxical figures who have engaged in purposeful razzle-dazzle have been telling us flat out. But nobody has been willing to take them at their word.
I have "seen this before," actually, numerous times in this journal, including in my discussion of another much-beloved novel of which the paperback is now scheduled for December 30 publication. But I haven’t seen that I’ve seen it, or have forgotten what I’ve seen, so bear with me as I tell it all to you again.
We are, as I have noted repeatedly, an incredibly diverse but repetitious species. Just because there are hundreds if not tens of thousands of possible combinations of personal reactions to social situations and sexual stimuli and the stresses of all types and conditions of living does not mean that they cannot be categorized.
And they are categorized, obsessively, in more resources on the internet than one ever suspects until someone’s use of a bizarre newly coined term leads one to do a web search.
And while technology is only now making possible that which was only dreamed or imagined in terms of invisible interconnections (or have types of them been there all along, poorly understood and usually piss-poor in their working?), the nature of human personalities and of deconstrtucted networks has been understood for many, many centuries…probably to one degree or another it was understood in the Paleolithic caves, even though we usually imagine that the people who drew those marvelously rendered animals and childish stick outlines of humans spent their days grunting and rutting and farting, like so many people we know. Once social groups ensured the survival of the least fit in terms of hunting and defending themselves, there were abstract thinkers who also grunted and farted while producing the first works of philosophy.
So by the time of the high civilizations, there were at least a few people who understood the possibilities of metafiction disguised as wisdom, or the other way round.
Frances Yates was ridiculed for her suggestion that Renaissance intellectuals realized that if they put out hints of a secret brotherhood, along with passwords and codes and suggestions for how Invisible Brothers ought to behave, people trying to find the Invisible Brotherhood would in fact behave more acceptably in hopes of showing what good candidates they were for membership.
And those would-be candidates would refine the lessons they extracted from the books, or embody them in their own ridiculous fantasies. Which meant that still other personality types would receive the teaching that it is better to see things from more than one perspective, that even occasional compassion is better than unalloyed self-interest…you know, all that stuff.
These writers would have had ample opportunity to see that pounding lessons into people’s heads at weekly or daily religious services did not seem to be producing the required behavioral modification.
But the hint that there are personal gains to be gotten from catching up with hidden Masters, or that life goes better if you do this and not that, even if you don’t quite understand the reasons why life goes better if you do that…why, that would be a stimulus to change that outdid the saws of preachers.
And it wouldn’t require the impossible conundrums of “You must love” when the hearer does not even understand the rudiments of love. It would begin on a much more basic psychological level of teaching, and would combine elementary lessons, advanced teachings disguised as razzle-dazzle, what have you, all tossed together to attract as many personality types as possible.
And because people for their own private reasons were all involved in parallel searches with a few key hints and guesses and place names, those who really, really most needed to meet would collide with one another as though by design.
And informal networks would form. Even if they were maintained only by correspondence or occasional meetings in a tavern, with each person wondering if the other one was the hidden master for whom they had been searching.
The hidden masters were indeed the books themselves, as the writers of those books said unambiguously.
And there was no secret order other than the deconstructed network of individuals whose lives had been modified by their reactions to the games and misleading cues of the books.
And real organizations would come into being because of the books. But the point of the books was not to found hierarchical structures, but to provide frameworks within which individual human lives would be altered for the better, even though the writers couldn’t predict which human lives would be impacted. History is unpredictable and largely unalterable. Isolated human biographies, on the other hand, can be messed with by making sure that the right texts exist (I typed “tests,” which has its own meaning), with sufficient ambiguities to make certain that as many different psychological types as possible will respond to them and at least put a few of their pieces of advice into practive.
Nobody will perfectly embody the prescriptions set forth in the books, because the writers themselves did not embody them. They made them up as an ideal matrix.
And this has happened repeatedly in human history.
And one book indeed begat another, and there were truly remarkable men and women who did meet together and ponder these things and extend the level of research and understanding, and then they wrote their own books.
And they could throw out bullshit-sounding phrases like “The secret protects itself” because the secret really does protect itself; it is a secret because it is too obvious to be stated.
I could, for example, rephrase most of this essay in standard literary terms (about which, more below), but my point is that the workings of deconstructed networks are made possible by the existence of obvious truths such as how literature works. It doesn’t mean that the writers in question had no more complex goals in mind than the most jejune writer of metafiction does.
The writers of whom I am thinking were aiming for, so to speak, a Poisson distribution of compassion. Given the sheer variety of personality types in any given population, it would be impossible to know what or who would react in which ways. But the general increase in compassionate action could be predicted, and more or less how it would make its way through the populations…as a small, unnoticed and ineffectual alteration of individual behaviors, as predictable as in any actuarial table.
But every so often one of the lives impacted would belong to an absolute monarch, or to an unusually gifted politician or entrepreneur, and then everyone would wonder where that came from. And along the way, there would be a few hundred or a few thousand lives made better because the books had altered other people’s behavior.
Does that sound fatuous? It is. But I am not, repeat not, talking Uncle Tom’s Cabin stuff; Harriet Beecher Stowe had no idea how to make people more compassionate towards their grocer or his delivery boy or the Jewish refugees just arrived from Russia. She had a social purpose in mind, but not a conscious psychology. And that is how most “books that change the world” operate…on pretty much a half-assed basis.
Whereas the writers I have in mind tell you that they are rogues and charlatans, because they are, on some level that they have come to see even while everyone else is thinking of them as wonderworkers or saints, or at least hoping that they are wonderworkers or saints. And their advice is usually paradoxical because engaging in flummery is the only way to keep the interest of the people they want to influence.
And this has gone on for generations, and there is no single secret teaching passed down orally from master to disciple, although there have been plenty of oral traditions that found their way into independent works of literature. There were doubtless master-disciple relationships going on in the Paleolithic caves in between grunting, feeding and farting.
But once research is out there in the world, it replicates itself virally. And if it was designed from the beginning to replicate virally, then the writers who created the original matrix might as well be considered one’s invisible teachers on a more exact metaphoric level. They knew exactly what they wanted to change about you, even if they didn’t know who you were or whether there was a chance in hell that you personally would find the book.
And they also knew that if they could reach across the centuries and meet you face to face, they wouldn’t like you.
I want to clarify this as much as I can.
Almost every writer has an ideal reader in mind, sometimes quite precisely. Everyone writes for an implicit audience, even if the intended audience is only the author.
But most of these guys (I call them guys though not all of them were male), knew not only their ideal readers, but the fact that they would not find any; they knew the range of their most likely readers, and they composed their books to elicit the behavioral reactions they wanted from each of the different types most likely to read the books.
Not just the aesthetic; the behavioral.
In fact, they frequently ridiculed the aesthetic and the structurally formal aspects of literature even as they made use of them. They did not believe that “poetry makes nothing happen.” They did not believe, however, that it could make everything happen, just certain definable and delimited behavioral modifications, especially if the fictions were presented as though they were encoded forms of unspoken truths to be sought for.
And sometimes they included within the story itself every possible response to the reading of it, from offended outrage to credulous excitement to bewilderment to reflective puzzlement at something not quite stated but present nonetheless. And the stories were meant to bore the incorrigible, transform the transformable at least a little, and interest everybody enough to keep the stories in play over successive generations. This was no more than savvy understanding of individual and collective psychology and sociology, unless of course it was something more; which perhaps it really was.
All of this scales off into occultist nonsense in one direction and into fatuously obvious truisms in the other direction. Either way of phrasing it all, and all that follows from it, sounds dumb, because, well, it actually is as idiotic as it sounds. (“It is in fact idiotic, but as they say, it takes all types to make a world.”)
But in between are the phenomena about which I am writing: the forms of social relation that are currently causing so much difficulty in the world, as books and videos and websites that were designed to cause certain types of behavior are inspiring people who in fact go out and set up organizations that have no communication with one another, but who know who their master is even though they have never met the master (and in some cases, the master in question has been dead for decades).
So it isn’t like we don’t understand the nature of deconstructed networks. We just don’t think that they have existed throughout history, the way that love and hate and warfare and commerce have existed throughout history.
And because those who investigate the deconstructed networks of the past tend to be rather demented types themselves, they can announce their findings all they please, because they will announce them in a way that no one will take seriously, or else that no one will understand if they do take it seriously.
And because all searchers and researchers approaches the problem from their own perspective, their own personal history, and their own set of preferred issues and books they have already read, the secret, in spite of being an open secret, will continue to protect itself no matter how many people shout it from the rooftops or post it on the internet.
But just in case, the declarers usually find as obnoxious a means of putting the question as possible. And yet the curmudgeons who are telling us to shove it have also been among the world’s great lyric poets, and one of them is currently near the top of the best-seller lists in the poetry category in America, largely because he is filtered by men who make his sometimes harsh ecstatic messages mellifluous and more agreeable.
To quote one of my favorite sci-fi movies from my childhood, “Why haven’t I seen this before?”
(I had a marvelous time getting technical updates on the film in question for the sake of this self-satirizing clip.)
This has to do with my characteristic curiosity about how traditions get disseminated. It has just sunk in that it is entirely possible that it was realized much earlier in human history than we think that it is not necessary to introduce people to one another to form a network of individuals with shared purposes (as distinct from ones that share the same public values and symbols).
In other words, all that is really necessary to have an invisible brotherhood is, as was said of Rosicrucians' ludibrium, to spread false rumors that such a brotherhood exists and there are things one needs to do to be admitted to it.
Pretty soon a deconstructed network forms, consisting of people who are doing desirable things (or undesirable, as the case may be) in order to be counted worthy.
This is, of course, what some of the paradoxical figures who have engaged in purposeful razzle-dazzle have been telling us flat out. But nobody has been willing to take them at their word.
I have "seen this before," actually, numerous times in this journal, including in my discussion of another much-beloved novel of which the paperback is now scheduled for December 30 publication. But I haven’t seen that I’ve seen it, or have forgotten what I’ve seen, so bear with me as I tell it all to you again.
We are, as I have noted repeatedly, an incredibly diverse but repetitious species. Just because there are hundreds if not tens of thousands of possible combinations of personal reactions to social situations and sexual stimuli and the stresses of all types and conditions of living does not mean that they cannot be categorized.
And they are categorized, obsessively, in more resources on the internet than one ever suspects until someone’s use of a bizarre newly coined term leads one to do a web search.
And while technology is only now making possible that which was only dreamed or imagined in terms of invisible interconnections (or have types of them been there all along, poorly understood and usually piss-poor in their working?), the nature of human personalities and of deconstrtucted networks has been understood for many, many centuries…probably to one degree or another it was understood in the Paleolithic caves, even though we usually imagine that the people who drew those marvelously rendered animals and childish stick outlines of humans spent their days grunting and rutting and farting, like so many people we know. Once social groups ensured the survival of the least fit in terms of hunting and defending themselves, there were abstract thinkers who also grunted and farted while producing the first works of philosophy.
So by the time of the high civilizations, there were at least a few people who understood the possibilities of metafiction disguised as wisdom, or the other way round.
Frances Yates was ridiculed for her suggestion that Renaissance intellectuals realized that if they put out hints of a secret brotherhood, along with passwords and codes and suggestions for how Invisible Brothers ought to behave, people trying to find the Invisible Brotherhood would in fact behave more acceptably in hopes of showing what good candidates they were for membership.
And those would-be candidates would refine the lessons they extracted from the books, or embody them in their own ridiculous fantasies. Which meant that still other personality types would receive the teaching that it is better to see things from more than one perspective, that even occasional compassion is better than unalloyed self-interest…you know, all that stuff.
These writers would have had ample opportunity to see that pounding lessons into people’s heads at weekly or daily religious services did not seem to be producing the required behavioral modification.
But the hint that there are personal gains to be gotten from catching up with hidden Masters, or that life goes better if you do this and not that, even if you don’t quite understand the reasons why life goes better if you do that…why, that would be a stimulus to change that outdid the saws of preachers.
And it wouldn’t require the impossible conundrums of “You must love” when the hearer does not even understand the rudiments of love. It would begin on a much more basic psychological level of teaching, and would combine elementary lessons, advanced teachings disguised as razzle-dazzle, what have you, all tossed together to attract as many personality types as possible.
And because people for their own private reasons were all involved in parallel searches with a few key hints and guesses and place names, those who really, really most needed to meet would collide with one another as though by design.
And informal networks would form. Even if they were maintained only by correspondence or occasional meetings in a tavern, with each person wondering if the other one was the hidden master for whom they had been searching.
The hidden masters were indeed the books themselves, as the writers of those books said unambiguously.
And there was no secret order other than the deconstructed network of individuals whose lives had been modified by their reactions to the games and misleading cues of the books.
And real organizations would come into being because of the books. But the point of the books was not to found hierarchical structures, but to provide frameworks within which individual human lives would be altered for the better, even though the writers couldn’t predict which human lives would be impacted. History is unpredictable and largely unalterable. Isolated human biographies, on the other hand, can be messed with by making sure that the right texts exist (I typed “tests,” which has its own meaning), with sufficient ambiguities to make certain that as many different psychological types as possible will respond to them and at least put a few of their pieces of advice into practive.
Nobody will perfectly embody the prescriptions set forth in the books, because the writers themselves did not embody them. They made them up as an ideal matrix.
And this has happened repeatedly in human history.
And one book indeed begat another, and there were truly remarkable men and women who did meet together and ponder these things and extend the level of research and understanding, and then they wrote their own books.
And they could throw out bullshit-sounding phrases like “The secret protects itself” because the secret really does protect itself; it is a secret because it is too obvious to be stated.
I could, for example, rephrase most of this essay in standard literary terms (about which, more below), but my point is that the workings of deconstructed networks are made possible by the existence of obvious truths such as how literature works. It doesn’t mean that the writers in question had no more complex goals in mind than the most jejune writer of metafiction does.
The writers of whom I am thinking were aiming for, so to speak, a Poisson distribution of compassion. Given the sheer variety of personality types in any given population, it would be impossible to know what or who would react in which ways. But the general increase in compassionate action could be predicted, and more or less how it would make its way through the populations…as a small, unnoticed and ineffectual alteration of individual behaviors, as predictable as in any actuarial table.
But every so often one of the lives impacted would belong to an absolute monarch, or to an unusually gifted politician or entrepreneur, and then everyone would wonder where that came from. And along the way, there would be a few hundred or a few thousand lives made better because the books had altered other people’s behavior.
Does that sound fatuous? It is. But I am not, repeat not, talking Uncle Tom’s Cabin stuff; Harriet Beecher Stowe had no idea how to make people more compassionate towards their grocer or his delivery boy or the Jewish refugees just arrived from Russia. She had a social purpose in mind, but not a conscious psychology. And that is how most “books that change the world” operate…on pretty much a half-assed basis.
Whereas the writers I have in mind tell you that they are rogues and charlatans, because they are, on some level that they have come to see even while everyone else is thinking of them as wonderworkers or saints, or at least hoping that they are wonderworkers or saints. And their advice is usually paradoxical because engaging in flummery is the only way to keep the interest of the people they want to influence.
And this has gone on for generations, and there is no single secret teaching passed down orally from master to disciple, although there have been plenty of oral traditions that found their way into independent works of literature. There were doubtless master-disciple relationships going on in the Paleolithic caves in between grunting, feeding and farting.
But once research is out there in the world, it replicates itself virally. And if it was designed from the beginning to replicate virally, then the writers who created the original matrix might as well be considered one’s invisible teachers on a more exact metaphoric level. They knew exactly what they wanted to change about you, even if they didn’t know who you were or whether there was a chance in hell that you personally would find the book.
And they also knew that if they could reach across the centuries and meet you face to face, they wouldn’t like you.
I want to clarify this as much as I can.
Almost every writer has an ideal reader in mind, sometimes quite precisely. Everyone writes for an implicit audience, even if the intended audience is only the author.
But most of these guys (I call them guys though not all of them were male), knew not only their ideal readers, but the fact that they would not find any; they knew the range of their most likely readers, and they composed their books to elicit the behavioral reactions they wanted from each of the different types most likely to read the books.
Not just the aesthetic; the behavioral.
In fact, they frequently ridiculed the aesthetic and the structurally formal aspects of literature even as they made use of them. They did not believe that “poetry makes nothing happen.” They did not believe, however, that it could make everything happen, just certain definable and delimited behavioral modifications, especially if the fictions were presented as though they were encoded forms of unspoken truths to be sought for.
And sometimes they included within the story itself every possible response to the reading of it, from offended outrage to credulous excitement to bewilderment to reflective puzzlement at something not quite stated but present nonetheless. And the stories were meant to bore the incorrigible, transform the transformable at least a little, and interest everybody enough to keep the stories in play over successive generations. This was no more than savvy understanding of individual and collective psychology and sociology, unless of course it was something more; which perhaps it really was.
All of this scales off into occultist nonsense in one direction and into fatuously obvious truisms in the other direction. Either way of phrasing it all, and all that follows from it, sounds dumb, because, well, it actually is as idiotic as it sounds. (“It is in fact idiotic, but as they say, it takes all types to make a world.”)
But in between are the phenomena about which I am writing: the forms of social relation that are currently causing so much difficulty in the world, as books and videos and websites that were designed to cause certain types of behavior are inspiring people who in fact go out and set up organizations that have no communication with one another, but who know who their master is even though they have never met the master (and in some cases, the master in question has been dead for decades).
So it isn’t like we don’t understand the nature of deconstructed networks. We just don’t think that they have existed throughout history, the way that love and hate and warfare and commerce have existed throughout history.
And because those who investigate the deconstructed networks of the past tend to be rather demented types themselves, they can announce their findings all they please, because they will announce them in a way that no one will take seriously, or else that no one will understand if they do take it seriously.
And because all searchers and researchers approaches the problem from their own perspective, their own personal history, and their own set of preferred issues and books they have already read, the secret, in spite of being an open secret, will continue to protect itself no matter how many people shout it from the rooftops or post it on the internet.
But just in case, the declarers usually find as obnoxious a means of putting the question as possible. And yet the curmudgeons who are telling us to shove it have also been among the world’s great lyric poets, and one of them is currently near the top of the best-seller lists in the poetry category in America, largely because he is filtered by men who make his sometimes harsh ecstatic messages mellifluous and more agreeable.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 10:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 11:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 11:14 am (UTC)The second factor is the ability of ideas to evolve in directions not dreamed of, much the less intended, by their original thinkers. There is a path that leads from the linguistic studies of the eighteenth century to the horrors of the holocaust, but you can't really blame the guys who set out to learn how their languages had come to be and where they came from in the first place.
Regards.
Edited: the spelling of Freemasons.