Beauty and the Beast: Vanquishing Shadows At A Time Of Change |
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Kyle Altis
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…
The first human beings emerged on Earth approximately 2 million years
ago. In this vast stretch of time, approximately 100,000 human generations
have lived and died, and yet ours are among the first to live in a world
where much of daily experience is shaped by widely shared, instantaneous
mass communication. |
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-
Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi1
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…
you, who are the father of writing, have … attributed to it quite
to opposite of its real function. … What you have discovered is
a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils
will have the reputation for it without the reality; they will receive
a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence
be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.
And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real
wisdom they will be a burden to society. |
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-
Plato2
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| I begin with a letter.3 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Twentieth from the alpha of the familiar structure of the English language, in | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
the latter
half of the alphabet, divorced from the much higher greater attention
and consequently rankings of power given surnames which happen to begin
with earlier letters (but not as unhappily isolated as those which follow
it, among whom is numbered Yeats himself),4
the tau and tao and tetragrammaton and three-in-one. Twentieth in a symbolic,
melodic line, within a structure and meaning entirely of human creation.
What meaning, what différance, what inherent value hierarchy we
assign to a human-created structure must ultimately resonate what it means
to be human. |
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| Like letter, word itself turns and turns in a widening gyre between symbol | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
and meaning.
The letter is the beginning of written word, the written word the beginning
of symbolic language divorced from its originator. Language is an extension
of self, a tool devised in our own image to foster communication –
but Foucault and Derrida have shattered the dictionary’s “last
word”. Meaning has been isolated from symbol, symbol from meaning:
both circling each other in the endless co-dependency embraced within
Yeats’ complementary gyres of objectivity and subjectivity, rationality
and emotion.5 |
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| Language itself builds the structures of the gyres within which that | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
co-dependency
operates. The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that specific
elements of any given language influence perception and can affect attitudes
and behaviour; a stronger version of the same hypothesis, perhaps ultimately
unprovable, suggests that structure of a specific medium of expression
not only shapes thought but directs it.6,7
In this dynamic calcification of symbology, language becomes a tool with
which to objectify perceptions into a consensual value hierarchy of symbols.8
In this interpretive analysis, this plastic tool of language shapes equally
the one analysing: by simultaneously identifying, interpreting, and inventing
those values in the process of analysis. Like advertising, another interpretive
medium of communication, the influence of the structure of language is
most effective when least noticed.9
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| With the construction of any value hierarchy, centre is pulled upwards, at | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
the same
time as the inertial force created by the gyre’s continual acceleration
increases in strength as it approaches its extremes. In Yeats’ overlapping
gyres, as the solar (primary) values of objectivity and rationality approach
their maximum strengths, the complementary lunar (antithesis) values of
subjectivity and emotion approach their minimum at a point simultaneously
internal and external, a singularity simultaneously of balance and of
imbalance: in an eternal series of cycles reminiscent of the great cyclic
dreams of Brahma. The great cycles constitute 26,000 years, the lesser
cycles 2,000 years, each soul and each civilisation a wheel arising from
irrationality, spiralling through all the symbolic phases of the moon
within the complementary waxing and waning of spiritual time and physical
space, and eventually destroyed in an agonised drawn-out decadence of
rationalism. The nature of the gyres themselves pulls toward continuation
of spin, inertia combines with entropy to pull that spin into ever widening
circles. |
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Now, at the
ending of our own 2000 year cycle, falcon is beginning to |
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separate
from falconer. More: the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. The last
unassisted sensory falconer-created ties binding the falcon have been
severed, and the purpose and centre of the falconer’s reason for
existence escapes the falconer’s control. The focus of the mutual
orbit distends, separating into elliptical and then into a parabolic infinite:
for within this paradigm, the falcon will not return in this cycle of
the gyres. |
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| What is falconer, without falcon? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The falcon may seem the subordinate in this relationship, its utility defined | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
by its relationship
with the falconer: but it may be more accurate to say that the falconer
is the reflection (Nietzsche might say the creation) of the falcon. We
evolve through language to cognition, and language defines the limits
of our cognition: “Every word is a prejudice.”10
But the overlapping gyres approaching the point of maximal rationality
begin to trigger re-evaluation of the innate Anglo-centric causal linearity
of the English language as they approach the point of reversal. It is
a falconer conceit to define falcon solely in terms of its quantifiable
function as it exists relative to the falconer. The languages of colonised
peoples often reflect this inversion of value: a Comanche tepee (“nïmïkahni”)
is literally an “Indian” house (“kahni”); a Karok
bow (“arara xuská-mhar”) has become literally an “Indian”
gun (“xuská-mhar”);11
some colonised cultures perhaps the more vulnerable to such value inversion
for lacking any words even to express the concept of coercion. From the
falconer’s perspective, even the subjective value of time becomes
a measurable quantity, a commodity whose major value lies in its inherent
limitation: “time is money”. Without the return of falcon
to falconer there is no external, objective measure of time (the cycles
of the falcon’s return): and the principles of scientific management
which have defined our modern world tell us that nothing which is not
measurable has value.12 |
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| But where is past, here? where is future? We know only that the current gyre | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
of rationalism
is widening, that the falcon cannot hear the falconer: an isolated instant
of present which has never been past and will never be future –
a presence which cannot even be specified, for in the moment of presenting
it becomes something other than the presence, a simulcrum of a presence
which dislocates itself. Present becomes infinitely and irreducibly nonsimple,
forever constituting itself, forever dividing itself dynamically in an
infinitely deferred presence, an eternal becoming-space, becoming-time
which “exceeds the alternative of presence and absence”:13
but circling nonetheless around the moment which is now. |
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Yet “now”
is a concept which is fundamentally useless in the English |
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| language. Use exists only in what already exists and in the potentials. “Now” is not a measurable concept. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Where does this place Yeats as “Demon Est Deus Inversus”? |
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| The falcon, flying away from the falconer, will tend to fly upward, but “up” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
and “down”
are themselves specific value constructs in the English language (and
for that matter in many other languages) which echo through our reconstruction
of our world: God and heaven and good up, hell and evil down. Monotheistic
God is seen in the Anglo-centric as Highest, the older chthonic cults
reinterpreted accordingly. (Taoism may be unique as an organised religion
in the modern world in seeking wu wei, the active inaction of balance,
at the lowest point of stability.) The East Indian castes are ranked according
to where they spring from the original body, from the highest on down.
The seven chakras of kundalini and tantric practice are counted from the
fundament upward, each represented by a lotus with an increasing number
of petals, to culminate in the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown of
the head. We place the head above the heart (or the liver) and vilify
the “nether regions”, valuing intellect above emotion –
as Yeats’ Vision suggests is indeed inevitable, being very near
maximal primary expansion at the symbolic dark of the moon where Will
and Mask are not only dominant but very nearly unipolar against the near
singularity of Creative Mind and Body of Fate (Vacillation VII).14
Western geographical bias places the northern hemisphere at the top. We
build upward toward our highest external values, reaching for God: in
many villages and towns within the Christian hegemony, the steeples of
the church still occupy the highest point. Values challenged are values
“taken down”, often literally. The value is most strongly
challenged when taken down from above: lightning, rain (flood), missiles,
high altitude bombing, satellites. Those who challenge in the name of
the people organise at the “grassroots” level and strike at
or below ground level. Those operating in the name of “higher”
values strike from the heavens, until the attacked symbol “collapses”.
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| Always, though, the surviving symbols of the previous regime, be they | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
architectural or linguistic or governmental, must be “pulled down” before the new order can “supplant” them. Yet rationality, taken to its extreme, must ultimately be empty. It destroys core, fundamentally irrational beliefs in a grand nihilism which allows Nietzsche to proclaim God’s death15 and Camus to ponder the only serious philosophical question in the face of having assimilated the meaninglessness of existence: whether or not to commit suicide.16 When symbols of previous structures crumple in ever tighter temporal succession as the gyres approach the reversal – which might well be seen as utter collapse – of the drive toward the rational, dysteleological perceptions of history and humankind increase exponentially: ironically predicted and safely embraced within the cyclic flexing of the gyres. |
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Here lies a
mighty god His fall was not a small one We did but build his pedestal A narrow and a tall one.17 |
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As “mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wine and blood mingle in the
streets. Statues are destroyed. Tea is dumped into harbours. Borders are
obliterated. Pan is remade into a horned symbol of evil and exiled to
the ninth circle of hell. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Innocence, like
technological progress and infinite possibility of expansion, has become
an American staple.18
Its very existence founded upon rationality and its entire existence falling
within Yeats’ waning crescent, the United States and its protegés
may well be the last of the determinedly innocent countries19
in the Blakean sense: literally unable of themselves to shatter the chains
of innocence. Yet, though symbols be torn down or inverted or actively
rejected, so long as the symbols remain those of the previous regime,
the supplanting regime continues to define itself by them – and
thus in effect becomes what it has attempted to supplant. Nietzsche tells
us that “Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the
heart; but now it has first to burden the heart so as afterwards to be
able to lighten it … convictions are more dangerous truths than
lies:”20
the same could apply to any uprising in the name of freedom and justice.
Having supplanted what is redefined as injustice, it becomes unthinkable
that the new values could be anything other than justice: this is “the
logic of every nation that is in power and has a good conscience about
it.”21
And so the old colony becomes the new colonizing power, rejecting the
anguish of accepting true freedom and thus without escape. |
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© 2003 Kyle Altis |
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