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limping towards Bethlehem
May. 15th, 2009 11:25 amI daresay my earlier post sounded not only grouchy but out of touch with reality—perhaps because it was, as this one may be also: how would I know? (And how would you know, for that matter?)
The stimulus (no package involved) was a re-perusal for the first time in many years of J. H. van den Berg's The Changing Nature of Man, that 1960 book that proposed, tentatively, that the changing nature of human perception and self-perception determined such things as whether individuals noticed the landscape or not, and whether miracles were possible or not—so that miracles were once possible but today are not. (The dialectical reasons for all of the foregoing being provocatively playful and serious in their metaphoricity.)
I am astounded to find that the good doctor is about to turn 95 on June 11 (four days after I turn my own elderly next age of the world) and has been writing books as recently as 2004. I don't feel any need to catch up on his career, but it is astonishing to find that each sentence of some of the essays in The Changing Nature of Man suggests entire bodies of research that have since made van den Berg's offhand speculation into hard, documented historical data. It is a reminder of how circa 1960 nobody was putting the tentative speculations of the Frankfurt School together with the tentative researches of the purportedly harder sciences, but borderline cases like van den Berg were writing strange yet not insupportable books proposing crazy ideas that were already being bruited about by art historians in a different key, and psychologists in a still different one, but today are more or less the starting point for entire genres of historical and sociological research.
Of course, some of these observations had already been made in poetry and fiction, and in mystical literature; as I've written frequently in this weblog, this stuff is not rocket science. You do not need an immense number of prior theorems and discoveries regarding the structure of matter in order to make discoveries about the farther reaches of human nature, much less the nearer reaches thereof. So it would be surprising if there had in fact not been discoveries that were encoded in systems that are alien to us for the simple reason that most of their other hypotheses are wrong; the difficulty being to discover whether something was made possible by behaving as though the wrong hypotheses were correct that would not be possible otherwise (because, say, one otherwise would have no reason to fast for thirty days and stay up for five nights running inducing borderline oxygen deprivation through breath control).
Which reminds me, Tahir Shah has recently been blogging about the tricks of the Indian magicians (based on his experiences in India recounted in his Sorcerer's Apprentice). I am surprised to see that none of them seem based on the usual tricks of misdirection recently discussed in stories of classic magic tricks—the illusions that work even after you've been told how they work, because your senses have particular lag times and retinal retentions. No, the tricks in India are all based on chemical reactions, apparently, if Tahir Shah is to be believed. (He has also been blogging about early forms of interdisciplinarity in past centuries...which reminds me of Doris Lessing's offhand remark that our present Age of Comparison is without precedent, and that at the time of writing she feared it might be as transient as earlier moments of cross-cultural communication. But that takes us off in the usual digression-laden directions.)
The stimulus (no package involved) was a re-perusal for the first time in many years of J. H. van den Berg's The Changing Nature of Man, that 1960 book that proposed, tentatively, that the changing nature of human perception and self-perception determined such things as whether individuals noticed the landscape or not, and whether miracles were possible or not—so that miracles were once possible but today are not. (The dialectical reasons for all of the foregoing being provocatively playful and serious in their metaphoricity.)
I am astounded to find that the good doctor is about to turn 95 on June 11 (four days after I turn my own elderly next age of the world) and has been writing books as recently as 2004. I don't feel any need to catch up on his career, but it is astonishing to find that each sentence of some of the essays in The Changing Nature of Man suggests entire bodies of research that have since made van den Berg's offhand speculation into hard, documented historical data. It is a reminder of how circa 1960 nobody was putting the tentative speculations of the Frankfurt School together with the tentative researches of the purportedly harder sciences, but borderline cases like van den Berg were writing strange yet not insupportable books proposing crazy ideas that were already being bruited about by art historians in a different key, and psychologists in a still different one, but today are more or less the starting point for entire genres of historical and sociological research.
Of course, some of these observations had already been made in poetry and fiction, and in mystical literature; as I've written frequently in this weblog, this stuff is not rocket science. You do not need an immense number of prior theorems and discoveries regarding the structure of matter in order to make discoveries about the farther reaches of human nature, much less the nearer reaches thereof. So it would be surprising if there had in fact not been discoveries that were encoded in systems that are alien to us for the simple reason that most of their other hypotheses are wrong; the difficulty being to discover whether something was made possible by behaving as though the wrong hypotheses were correct that would not be possible otherwise (because, say, one otherwise would have no reason to fast for thirty days and stay up for five nights running inducing borderline oxygen deprivation through breath control).
Which reminds me, Tahir Shah has recently been blogging about the tricks of the Indian magicians (based on his experiences in India recounted in his Sorcerer's Apprentice). I am surprised to see that none of them seem based on the usual tricks of misdirection recently discussed in stories of classic magic tricks—the illusions that work even after you've been told how they work, because your senses have particular lag times and retinal retentions. No, the tricks in India are all based on chemical reactions, apparently, if Tahir Shah is to be believed. (He has also been blogging about early forms of interdisciplinarity in past centuries...which reminds me of Doris Lessing's offhand remark that our present Age of Comparison is without precedent, and that at the time of writing she feared it might be as transient as earlier moments of cross-cultural communication. But that takes us off in the usual digression-laden directions.)
