Thursday, July 26, 2012

to peruse it



[continued from the last post]


It's a nightmare of dying for the small thing, everybody stands there, nobody reacts, the player character runs on unconcerned, the non-player characters go on shifting their feet or bouncing on their toes, and yet the scenery the little creatures run through while they're living (call that living) is sweetly fresh, O the green slopes, O the high silent trees on their beautiful roots, and the little morsel collapses with a squeak, gone, gone, gone -- I once shot a moth and it flew on with the arrow emitted upwards for at least three seconds, distressing even now.

The wild joy depends on the presence of the second rock, and then an implied third rock, a fourth rock, and unnumbered other rocks, infinite rocks, untold wildness, limitless joy, freedom promised to Saul, who feels glum and impermeable, a brick wall sitting there, depressed in spite of David's singing and his lyre: depressed when the younger man came into the tent to cheer him up, his chest heaves, he folds his arms, he pushes David by the hair and and stares at him.

Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' my hair
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind power --
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower.


But my point, which I was going to reach sooner or later, is that ideas might come from corporeal instances, we hear a description of death and so we think of death, or we see something else and think of death, as in Proust, or we see death and think of something else, eg, spoons, letter-openers (one string of our internal web has been touched), we see a stork chase a bat away from its nest and conclude that the bat must be damaging the eggs (though why the Ancient Greeks and Romans thought it made them sterile I don't know -- there's an unanswered mystery) -- and so we have to wonder where this love of pairs comes from, we think, we consider, we look around, and the conclusion comes with massive logic:because we have feet, and how many feet?

Two feet -- which require maintenance, and which reward us by carrying us here and there, the brain understanding its situation and developing an innate respect for pairs as it feels those two feet moving parataxically, ie, constantly near one another yet not intimately connected anywhere along their length. The hip bone bridges the gap between the legs but it doesn't remove that gap. So we love pairs, it's very natural. Which leads me of course to think of the mysterious recurrence of threes and trios in fairy tales, and my brain is conducted to a further conclusion -- which is? -- that in the past we must have had three legs, and developed a love of threes, and either jolted across the earth like mobile tripods on three staffs or else rolled like the triskelion in the story that one character tells the others in Christina Stead's Salzburg Tales. Possibly a fossil record of this somewhere, quint-limbed in the lava.


11 comments:

  1. I'm convinced that we'd have a very different philosophy and literature if we had more than one moon. As it is, we see these two principal orbs in our sky, and forget often enough to count ourselves as a third (to say nothing of the "little" orbs...).

    Flaubert's Madame Bovary, as I recall, has a striking amount of imagery of pairs, or more precisely, of things squeezed between pairs.

    I suspect that one's relation to one's feet is one of the least studied and potentially most rewarding areas of psychology.

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    1. ... and forget often enough to count ourselves as a third -- I was sitting at the hairdressers on Wednesday looking at a woman's foot when it occurred to me that the foot was moving at a huge speed through space and yet anyone who described it would not have used any kind of speed-word -- "going fast," "moving slowly," "at an ambling pace" -- because to a person in that room it didn't seem to be shifting at all; the foot was just there in mid-air, on the end of her leg, which she had left in a cocked-up position over her other knee.

      One article recently (I've linked it under "Noted" in the sidebar) talks about Hannah Arendt's Human Condition, and says that we're typically blind to the conditions around us, the conditions that condition us -- we forget that we could have had more than one moon, or that the sun could have been otherwise. (The writer doesn't make that point, it's yours.)

      I've just searched for "psychology relationship feet" and the first two sentences of the first article that popped up were, "Our feet and legs, often neglected in the study of body language, transmit a lot of valuable information about what we are sensing, thinking, and feeling. We pay so much attention to the face and other parts of the body, that we forget the importance of these vital appendages." So there you go. "They reflect our true emotions and intentions, in real time, unlike our face and other parts of the body, and they can be instrumental in the detection of deception. Over millions of years, our limbic system made sure that our feet and legs reacted instantly to any threat or concern; their reliability has assured, in part, our survival."

      http://tinyurl.com/cwfdnnr

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  2. You lost me until you got to Rilke.

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    1. Then I'm more comprehensible than I thought. I was reckoning I'd lose everybody until I got back to the storks again.

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    2. (I hadn't read Rilke for a long time, then I came across Alison Croggan's version of the Elegies online and wanted to find him again. There was a translation recently by Edward Snow -- do you know what it's like?)

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  3. Oh, I don't forget my feet ... They are my bête noir and control how I experience the world.

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  4. But I had never thought about them culturally or in terms of literature. I'm not sure I totally go with the logic of your deduction from pairs to trios by number of feet or legs, but I'll reserve judgement.

    I have always thought of threes in terms of things like religion (the trinity) but there is the chicken and the egg question I'm now thinking.

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    1. Religious threes, where do they come from? That's an interesting question. Three heads as well as three legs we had, once upon a time, like some subset of a Hindu god, and therefore threes ...

      I don't know. Threes are physically more stable than twos -- tripods stand where ladders fall, etc -- I don't know if that has anything to do with it: who does? Get the gadgets out and chase electrical impulses round the brain while the subject stares at three berries. Ah, see, the subconscious three is rooted in the hippocampocortex. But a ménage à trois is unstable. (I can't imagine the trinity without picturing Jesus and the Holy Ghost being jealous of one another, or bickering in the back seat of the car when god's not looking -- be quiet you two, he says, or I'll turn this thing around and take us all back to Jerusalem -- but he punched me! says the ghost, who is dressed for this holiday occasional in a Hallowe'en sheet -- I don't care, says god: stop pinching his arm. You don't think I can hear you but I can. Now stop.)

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  5. I have THREE words for you ... Omne trium perfectum! But don't ask me where that idea comes from. Perhaps your idea of three legs - politically bothersome though it is - has legs!

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    1. Three legs is the only sensible answer. I'm surprised those fossils haven't turned up yet. Matter of time, matter of time.

      Why isn't symmetry "perfectum", why do we wait until we get to our first bit of in-context evidence that asymmetry exists in the universe, the third sibling in the fairy tale, or the third bear's bed -- when we've just left the stability of a pair and we're edging out into the wilderness of too-much -- why do we call that perfect? Is it because we've been (I am madly speculating here) -- because we've been saved, we've been rescued from uncontrollable fives and nines and other masses that we'd rather not grapple? "It's all right," says the universe, "we were about to go on a long journey but I've changed my mind. You can relax." As with tickling. First comes the appearance of danger, then danger is averted, the assault is friendly after all, you laugh, you're relieved, the alert anxiety drains out of you, you're satisfied.

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    2. Or say that consciousness itself could be represented by a three: stability on one side -- the pair, the two, private, balanced, and hermetic -- and the unhermetic world flooding out on the other side -- and the person wants to acknowledge both while keeping balance between them, not committing themselves to either side.

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