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obvious corollary to foregoing posts
Jan. 17th, 2007 09:55 amForgive me for expressing the fatuously obvious, but a corollary to my previous just-so stories about different ages' explanations for unaccountable phenomena is that not only is the world not as it has since become, but we never see the world as it actually is.
This is self-evident, since not even the creators of entirely fictional worlds see them as they actually are, as an omniscient creator would who was keeping the rules consistent; otherwise, authors would not unintentionally give the same minor character two different names, or place the same character in two different locations at the same time.
It isn't just that each age knows things that earlier ages did not know; it's that each age denies actually existing phenomena that prevous ages had perceived, even though they put now-refuted interpretations on what they perceived. We, in turn, put wrong interpretations on our selective perceptions, and this too is self-evident. Anyone forced to write about such things sooner or later offers the piety that future generations will regard us as deluded and benighted. Then we proceed as though we were the ultimate pinnacle of wisdom.
We are, as a corollary to this, in thrall to our changing metaphors, which we take for reliable models of reality. No matter how much we agree on this, we only notice the metaphors we don't particularly like; it's interesting to me to observe the urban legends and reality TV shows based on the model of humanity as a mammalian predatory species; this oversimplifies even our status as omnivorous creatures who spent far more millennia as prey than as predator, but it fits well with socioeconomic models that assert not only that homo homini lupus est, but that being the big bad wolf to your same-species sheep is a good thing.
I bring up all these self-evident truths because my copy of Eric Wilson's The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination has finally arrived. Not a new book at all, 2003 in fact, but like Scott Trafton's Egypt Land, it sheds light on forgotten imaginative models of reality that were based on then-current scientific investigations and erroneous extrapolations from perceived phenomena. Potent metaphors flowed from these mistakes.
And of course while the science may have been superseded, the spiritual metaphors might still shed light on our present condition, since they are in fact metaphors, and the function of a metaphor is to use one phenomenon to talk about another phenomenon. The parallel may still illuminate the latter phenomenon even if the hypotheses turn out to be wrong through which the former phenomenon was interpreted. To use an obvious, banal example, metaphors of the rising and setting of empires communicate the sense of growing political and cultural clarity and gradual descent into various failures of vision, even though the sun does not actually travel across the sky, and even though empires do not have the inevitable predictability of cosmic cycles.
Wilson's book looks like it may illuminate for me some of the more obscure passages in René Daumal's metaphorical novel about mountain climbing...analogies grow obscure when they are based on everybody knowing certain works of imaginative literature that have dropped out of general circulation, and I suspect Daumal was basing some of his fantasies on other fantasies that were more familiar to his intended readership than to us.
Imagine (and I know you have) the reception of certain works of fantasy fiction by readers who know the Mahabarata and the tales of the Peach-Blossom Spring but not the Arthurian legends or Alice in Wonderland.
This is self-evident, since not even the creators of entirely fictional worlds see them as they actually are, as an omniscient creator would who was keeping the rules consistent; otherwise, authors would not unintentionally give the same minor character two different names, or place the same character in two different locations at the same time.
It isn't just that each age knows things that earlier ages did not know; it's that each age denies actually existing phenomena that prevous ages had perceived, even though they put now-refuted interpretations on what they perceived. We, in turn, put wrong interpretations on our selective perceptions, and this too is self-evident. Anyone forced to write about such things sooner or later offers the piety that future generations will regard us as deluded and benighted. Then we proceed as though we were the ultimate pinnacle of wisdom.
We are, as a corollary to this, in thrall to our changing metaphors, which we take for reliable models of reality. No matter how much we agree on this, we only notice the metaphors we don't particularly like; it's interesting to me to observe the urban legends and reality TV shows based on the model of humanity as a mammalian predatory species; this oversimplifies even our status as omnivorous creatures who spent far more millennia as prey than as predator, but it fits well with socioeconomic models that assert not only that homo homini lupus est, but that being the big bad wolf to your same-species sheep is a good thing.
I bring up all these self-evident truths because my copy of Eric Wilson's The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination has finally arrived. Not a new book at all, 2003 in fact, but like Scott Trafton's Egypt Land, it sheds light on forgotten imaginative models of reality that were based on then-current scientific investigations and erroneous extrapolations from perceived phenomena. Potent metaphors flowed from these mistakes.
And of course while the science may have been superseded, the spiritual metaphors might still shed light on our present condition, since they are in fact metaphors, and the function of a metaphor is to use one phenomenon to talk about another phenomenon. The parallel may still illuminate the latter phenomenon even if the hypotheses turn out to be wrong through which the former phenomenon was interpreted. To use an obvious, banal example, metaphors of the rising and setting of empires communicate the sense of growing political and cultural clarity and gradual descent into various failures of vision, even though the sun does not actually travel across the sky, and even though empires do not have the inevitable predictability of cosmic cycles.
Wilson's book looks like it may illuminate for me some of the more obscure passages in René Daumal's metaphorical novel about mountain climbing...analogies grow obscure when they are based on everybody knowing certain works of imaginative literature that have dropped out of general circulation, and I suspect Daumal was basing some of his fantasies on other fantasies that were more familiar to his intended readership than to us.
Imagine (and I know you have) the reception of certain works of fantasy fiction by readers who know the Mahabarata and the tales of the Peach-Blossom Spring but not the Arthurian legends or Alice in Wonderland.
