A teacher once reminded me that we are "sense-making machines." The body experiences the weather--heat, cold, wet--or sound--loud, quiet--in ways that we have to interpret, make sense of, find words for. It is easier to "interpret" food than wine (or tea) because there are more shared ways to talk about cake or steak than Merlot. Comics make fun of wine talk by joking about the "nose." The nose is an interpretive mechanism, but each nose finds its own "nose" in the Merlot. People who talk about wine, or tea, have to agree to agree. Fascinating post, rewarding comments. Thanks.
Excellent insights here. Thanks for sharing, Allen. I love these sorts of thoughts. It'll will take a while for me to process this idea of the nose and wine in contrast to cake and steak. Something to mull over during my next hike through the forest.
The Robbins essay is mindbending and warrants multiple readings. It showed me a way of beginning to perceive intelligence in the universe, and introduced me to Henri Bergson's brilliant theory of mind.
Enjoy. Apparently Bergson the professor was a force of nature. In her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West relates a story told to her in 1938 by Serbian poet Stanislav Vinaver about his experience of studying under Bergson: "We students . . . were not the pupils of a great professor, we were the sorceror's apprentices. We did strange things that are not in most academic courses. On Sundays we would walk together in the forest of Fontainebleu, all day long sometimes, reconstituting his lectures by pooling our memories. For, you see, in his classroom it was not possible to take notes. If we bent our heads for one moment to take down a point, we missed an organic phrase, and the rest of the lecture appeared incomprehensible. That shows he was a magician. For what is the essential of a spell? That if one word is left out it is no longer a spell."
Thanks for catching the error and correcting it, I was in the process of doing so when my phone then died —everything‘s verklempt and falling apart over here, it’s been a hell of a morning :-)
Taking the whole elephant perspective fully to heart, perhaps “feelings” and “chemistry” are each valid, each limited, and each properly belongs as part of a larger elephant.
Perhaps to engage in analysis at all requires analytical categorization, and this categorization occurs unavoidably within the limits of our experience and ir/rational abilities.
Perhaps the way we find the whole elephant is by telling each other stories, across boundaries, to arrive at a shared Gestalt?
I think you're spot on, RDM. Thanks for this comment! Each perspective has value if it gets us somewhere. Too easily forgotten is that "objectivity" is essentially the application of a measure of common reference to a phenomenon or group of phenomena. And that common reference is arbitrary. This is more obviously the case with subjects like literature, in which one may apply any manner of approach to the text under analysis: formal & structural aesthetics; psychological; historical; political; and so forth. Texts provide a wonderful analogy with the great Logos of the world and cosmos. We can never capture the whole; we can only appreciate it from what appears to be an endless array of perspectives. And oddly, the more approaches we share, the less sure we are of what the phenomena are because they wind up being so many things. Analysis breaks it down, and then we have to build the picture back up through groupings of analogous qualities. And this method leaves us always short of the whole. Perception of the whole requires silence... an idea mystics have been proposing for a long time.
Mystical silence and the Logos. Yes! Thanks for bringing all that up. I find it magical that stories and myths from different cultures across space and time mysteriously share so many commonalities. I also wonder if meditating on that mystery could lead to perceiving the logos latent in each of us.
A teacher once reminded me that we are "sense-making machines." The body experiences the weather--heat, cold, wet--or sound--loud, quiet--in ways that we have to interpret, make sense of, find words for. It is easier to "interpret" food than wine (or tea) because there are more shared ways to talk about cake or steak than Merlot. Comics make fun of wine talk by joking about the "nose." The nose is an interpretive mechanism, but each nose finds its own "nose" in the Merlot. People who talk about wine, or tea, have to agree to agree. Fascinating post, rewarding comments. Thanks.
Excellent insights here. Thanks for sharing, Allen. I love these sorts of thoughts. It'll will take a while for me to process this idea of the nose and wine in contrast to cake and steak. Something to mull over during my next hike through the forest.
Everyone, please, I implore you: take Asa’s recommendation and read the Stephen Rollins article. Please.
You will not regret it.
The Robbins essay is mindbending and warrants multiple readings. It showed me a way of beginning to perceive intelligence in the universe, and introduced me to Henri Bergson's brilliant theory of mind.
Moi, have heard the name and second hand reports only; just today Asa pushed me over the edge into getting two of his books.
Enjoy. Apparently Bergson the professor was a force of nature. In her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West relates a story told to her in 1938 by Serbian poet Stanislav Vinaver about his experience of studying under Bergson: "We students . . . were not the pupils of a great professor, we were the sorceror's apprentices. We did strange things that are not in most academic courses. On Sundays we would walk together in the forest of Fontainebleu, all day long sometimes, reconstituting his lectures by pooling our memories. For, you see, in his classroom it was not possible to take notes. If we bent our heads for one moment to take down a point, we missed an organic phrase, and the rest of the lecture appeared incomprehensible. That shows he was a magician. For what is the essential of a spell? That if one word is left out it is no longer a spell."
This is brilliant! Thanks for the quotation and sources...
*Robbins
Thank you, RDM!
ROBBINS, aye!
Thanks for catching the error and correcting it, I was in the process of doing so when my phone then died —everything‘s verklempt and falling apart over here, it’s been a hell of a morning :-)
Taking the whole elephant perspective fully to heart, perhaps “feelings” and “chemistry” are each valid, each limited, and each properly belongs as part of a larger elephant.
Perhaps to engage in analysis at all requires analytical categorization, and this categorization occurs unavoidably within the limits of our experience and ir/rational abilities.
Perhaps the way we find the whole elephant is by telling each other stories, across boundaries, to arrive at a shared Gestalt?
I think you're spot on, RDM. Thanks for this comment! Each perspective has value if it gets us somewhere. Too easily forgotten is that "objectivity" is essentially the application of a measure of common reference to a phenomenon or group of phenomena. And that common reference is arbitrary. This is more obviously the case with subjects like literature, in which one may apply any manner of approach to the text under analysis: formal & structural aesthetics; psychological; historical; political; and so forth. Texts provide a wonderful analogy with the great Logos of the world and cosmos. We can never capture the whole; we can only appreciate it from what appears to be an endless array of perspectives. And oddly, the more approaches we share, the less sure we are of what the phenomena are because they wind up being so many things. Analysis breaks it down, and then we have to build the picture back up through groupings of analogous qualities. And this method leaves us always short of the whole. Perception of the whole requires silence... an idea mystics have been proposing for a long time.
Mystical silence and the Logos. Yes! Thanks for bringing all that up. I find it magical that stories and myths from different cultures across space and time mysteriously share so many commonalities. I also wonder if meditating on that mystery could lead to perceiving the logos latent in each of us.