the routes of wonder, take one

“Inquietum est cor nostrum...nescimusque cur,” Augustine did not write.

Why are we lovers of wonders?

Lovers of unheard-of luxuries, yes. The imaginations of the powerful in all ages have led to the creation of objects that fulfill the most extravagant fantasies, all of which fantasies are no more than refined versions of the Land of Cockaigne where food and drink and comfort arrive effortlessly (the Big Rock Candy Mountain being a more recent American version of this). The sufficiently well-to-do in more imaginative times have created earthly paradises far beyond ordinary wish-fulfillment and paid scholars to make them immortal within their alternative worlds. (Today, luxury objects and luxury environments are merely fancier versions of the common folk’s geegaws and getaway pleasures, and the quest for immortality involves flatfooted genetic manipulation, but all that is another story.)

We need not agree with Augustine or C. S. Lewis about the God-shaped blank or the notion that there must be a fulfillment for the wish for an absent Paradise just as there is a fulfillment for the wish for sex or for food. (Strange that a man who composed about allegorical fantasies and wrote them himself did not think as he composed the argument-from-Sehnsucht, that his argument was identical to “we have a desire to see unicorns, and....” But for him, Aslan and Narnia were symbolic parallels to the shape of the real world that was there but that could not be seen or spoken of openly.)

Evolutionary psychologists seem curiously oblivious to this dysfunctionality of the human condition. (Harrell’s new book Phantasmal Media confronts, happily, the computational model of consciousness with the imaginal model—although his focus is the potential for social manipulation and social liberation through such images. But the larger point is that the human mind is doing more than operating probability-calculating wetware.)

For survival, we must visualize more or less adequately as well as compute probabilities, but even so, it seems highly unlikely that ancestors inclined to sit down and fantasize about all the wonderful things that could or ought to be on the other side of that grove of trees, rather than finding out one way or another and/or figuring out how to make the desired result happen, would have passed along their genes in sufficient quantity to make fantasy and the lust for wonders into such a major human capacity.

We may be a storytelling species, but why aren’t our stories more consistently humdrum? There certainly are enough people for whom the humdrum is sufficient to make us curious as to why it isn’t a universal trait.

Is it just that once the capacity for imaginative solutions has been inherited as a genetic trait, there is no stopping it at functional limits? Imagining the impossible, and enjoying imagining the impossible, would have their own desirable outcomes.

But why should we enjoy imagining the completely impossible in the first place? As distinct from imagining the not-yet-possible, or the world that might very well exist out there beyond our immediate perception...but here we are getting into the problem of whether all fantastic stories begin as tales of belief, or alternately, as conscious lies. Our capacity to state the counterfactual even as we know that it is counterfactual obviously comes into play in the initial creation of fantasies...adults’ fantasies and children’s fantasies both. But why the capacity for the counterfactual hypothesis should stretch from childhood to adult tale-telling...this takes us into realms of psychology that presumably have been researched to the point of boredom, but who has written the definitive study of how narrative is birthed from childhood’s early imagination? The famous studies of children from sixty years ago were grounded in local cultures and social classes so much as to make their conclusions hopelessly suspect, though we have a good many collections of stories from around the world that offer evidence with which to supplement them.

Obviously there is something evolutionarily desirable in the extension of the childhood fluidity between the real and the unreal...but if the ability to fantasize leads to ritual and social order, it also leads in more or less equal measure to pointless pathology and to productive (even when functionless...) art. I presume that this dual outcome is a structural constant of the capacity to imagine and the influence exerted upon it by early childhood experience. (This allows guardians of social order to equate functionless art with personal pathology, as we know very well from the past hundred years or so of history.)

I am plodding painfully through what is very familiar territory for various academic disciplines, because I now have trouble making the academic disciplines line up satisfactorily. Every one of them picks up at a different point in the human story, and I cannot quite discover how some imaginative faculties can remain dormant for so long until refined by circumstance (this is nothing mystical...I mean such things as the ability to see, to understand preverbally, what is going on in a painting, for example, something of which I was incapable even after years of graduate study in verbal disciplines...something of which some would accuse me of still being incapable, but my life as an art critic depended on having developed a certain amount of capability in this department).

the routes of wonder, take two

“our hearts are restless...and we don’t know why,” part two


I am afraid that, based on my earlier musings on why we should ever have become lovers of impossible wonders, I am going to inflict some reflections of the imaginal and the imaginary on my readers without benefit of citations of most of the theoretical volumes that have probably influenced my ideas.

Lonnie Holley’s performance “Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants” is an excellent test case, because a good many people will react to it with dismissive irritation simply because for them, the whole premise of six space shuttles and 144,000 elephants celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s birthday is arrant nonsense. Those of us who delight in it may find pleasure in its incongruity plus its intuitive formalism: after all, space shuttles and elephants are logical opposites when it comes to soaring versus being difficult to get off the ground, but both possess the quality of being large and attention-getting, hence obscurely appropriate for a celebration of royal power (think ancient Roman processions and contemporary Air Force flyovers). The off-the-wall numerology borrowed from the Book of Revelation signifying the population of redeemed souls further reinforces the notion that something very important and dignified is being symbolized by a juxtaposition that, nevertheless, is incongruous enough to be hugely amusing. Whether this leads to serious reflections on what constitutes incongruity and why we find it funny—that depends on who we are.

The amusement or disgust at violations of the rules of “things that go together” and “how things ought to be done” is functional enough in terms of maintaining social order, but it does raise the question of why “we find him, as far back as we can trace, making this thing other” (misquotation of David Jones somewhere in The Anathemata, I think, and in Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body). We can understand why our remotest ancestors buried objects with their dead (whether they did it because they expected the dead to use them in the afterlife or because objects once used by the newly dead made them feel nervous). The motive for metaphor is a little more obscure; the part for the whole, or the abstract image that apparently conveyed as much meaning as the exquisitely rendered animal or cartoon shaman(?) in the cave painting.

It’s curious that Aby Warburg should have intuited the relevance of the question when he used his researches among the Hopi to ponder the implications of Renaissance iconography and image-making in general—a career choice that horrified both his relatives who still practiced Judaism and his assimilationist family who had found a language-centered Protestantism an easy enough leap from a militantly aniconic Jewish tradition. (I started out with the Warburg Institute folks when I was twenty-two, but this latest meditation is based on Michael P. Steinberg’s “Aby Warburg and the Secularization of the Image” in the 2013 survey volume Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, eds. Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick.)

I can see how the capacity to pursue multiple lines of thought that turn out to be useless dead ends would actually be evolutionarily useful—the solution that no one had yet thought of comes out of all that maundering and idea-mongering, more so than from simple trial and error. But how we as a species got so fundamentally wedded to dysfunctional pursuits, behaviors that make individuals and sometimes whole societies less likely to survive—well, that was a question being discussed in anthropology half a century ago, as belief in the dogmas of functionalism waned. The notion that a dwindling number of economists and far too many evolutionary psychologists still operate as though functionalism were the default position is nothing short of dismaying. There is a large enough number of human beings who actually do operate according to what seems to them the most immediately advantageous course of action, and who have no use for any aspects of their own culture that doesn’t offer immediate sensory rather than intellectual gratification, to make us wonder why the more functionless imaginative options have survived, plus why the excessive social rules that such folks treat with cynical disdain ever became so excessively codified in the first place. As in the once-contemporary idiom that comes to mind at the notion of six space shuttles and 144,000 elephants celebrating the Queen’s birthday: “that’s just wrong.”