The Elephant in the Inner Room
by Asa Boxer
Welcome to Barstool Bits, a weekly short column meant to supplement the long-form essays that appear only once or twice a month from analogy magazine proper. You can opt out of Barstool Bits by clicking on Unsubscribe at the bottom of your email and toggling off this series. If, on the other hand, you’d like to read past Bits, click here.
Most are familiar with the Indian folktale about the blind men and the elephant: each takes hold of the beast from a different area of its body and draws conclusions about the creature that in no way resemble those arrived at by any of the others. Each however is convinced that his own perspective is the true perspective and that his fellows are dead wrong. The moral of the story is that we may all be examining the same phenomenon, but owing to our biases we believe that we are in possession of the one true Truth. Each perspective of the elephant however is objectively true, it’s just that no one is seeing the whole elephant.
Some see the parable as sanctioning relativism: the idea that any personal proposition is as true as any other proposition, no matter how outlandish. But that’s not what I see in the tale. What I see is that there’s one elephant, and that this one elephant is the objective reality we are attempting to appreciate. We know it’s there because we can all capture something about it. We may have different ideas about what it is or how exactly it works, but at the end of the day, we’re all dealing with this elephant. This model is serviceable to my argument, but let’s keep in mind that the elephant analogy implies a pre-existing, pre-defined Truth, awaiting the mirror of science. . . a concept before which I hesitate.
So in my version the elephant represents a kind of uncertainty before which we are truly blind. Still, there’s something objectively there. We know the entity is real because some ideas stick and others don’t. Some readings work, while others don’t. Some workarounds help us move the elephant around and get things out of it, while some attempted workarounds wind up getting us kicked in the head. And some ideas that seem to hold for a time, wind up falling away in the face of manipulations that are more effective or fashionable.
The inner world is one such elephant. Indicators that the inner world is as real as the material world can be found in areas of agreement like archetypes. Those familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and Northrop Frye (1912-1991) will know that mythologies across the world share basic tropes, character types, and hero quests.
Attempts to historically trace these shared elements to common origins have been moderately successful, but must remain highly speculative. Often you can trace influences, storylines, and characters that seem clearly borrowed from previous texts. According to psychologist and philosopher Erich Neumann (1905-1960), for example, the tale of Psyche told by Lucius Apuleius (a Carthage-educated lawyer) in the mid 100s CE likely informed the Norwegian tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” first recorded (by a zoologist and his theologist compatriot) in the 1840s. Thing is. . . folklore, fairytales, and legends circulate long before they’re collected, how long before is hard to say.
I’m not sure it matters whether these stories sprang up spontaneously and independently, though any case where they did would surely indicate a collective unconscious. Perhaps what matters more is that the stories made sense when they were passed along, that they communicated enough to be retold in new cultural clothes. It is equally significant that all cultures tell stories, and share a set of customs (even if the specifics vary).
The field of psychoanalysis suggests that we share dream imagery; and that we also share elemental associations. With little variation, water for instance represents emotions; fire, vitality; air, intelligence; and earth, sensation. No doubt, the cardinal elements is a European imposition, but for some reason, these types of associations aren’t entirely alien, for example, in ancient China where they had a five-element, five-season, five-planet system that makes its own sense and shares striking similarities in the manner by which their schema is broken down. We understand these ancient ideas when we encounter them and foreign cultures understand ours. How?
The similarities between the Christ and Buddha stories are enough to give one pause, considering they both managed to lay the groundwork of civilisations. How do wee stories inspire leadership, develop social cohesion, stoke ambitions of empire, inform art and architecture, and provide guidance for both individual and social development? There’s an elephant there.
Here’s another observation: what is it that’s inherent to the minor key in music that generally elicits sadness or comforting melancholy? Why do we experience a similar feeling when observing autumn leaves? I don’t mean to suggest that these feelings necessarily assert themselves, only that they represent areas of near-universal agreement. . . a phenomenology.
Certainly the analytical mind can bury those feelings under rationalisations. And I have encountered many who dismiss their inner world as irrational and not worth their time. Autumn leaves fall every season. So what? The trees take up less water, then turn colours that rational folk experience purely aesthetically, if at all, in the realm of “feelings.” If we feel sad, it’s because of associations: either the fun of summer is coming to a close or simply the warmth, and the cold season is approaching, and maybe you don’t like school.
It’s generally more difficult to rationalise away the mystery of how music moves us, in part because we don’t subject music to the same analytical apparatus. Some musicians however do go that route. But they tend to produce work the general public finds uninteresting because un-engaging. In short the left brain may hide the operations of the right brain—another way of saying that we may ignore the workings of the inner world—but they’re still there and still real. How do we know? Because our experience is confirmed by many others.
A committed naive materialist might sour at this suggestion. At the end of the day we experience cloudy weather one way and sunny weather another due to quanta of happy chemicals released in our bodies when exposed to sunlight and quanta of unhappy chemicals when deprived of that sunlight. We all tell stories because we experience linear time. And we have similar reasoning structures due to the neural structures of our brains. And we share associative emotions because we share five senses. Surely the same will turn out to be true regarding the minor key and autumn leaves. No doubt there is some truth to that perspective. . . which essentially boils down to chemistry. But most of it is unconvincing because it doesn’t really account for the phenomena.
Let’s keep in mind that the hard problem—how we have an experience of the world—has not met with a satisfying explanation. (Though I do recommend Stephen Robbins’s article about it here.)
In any event. . . which comes first? The feeling or the chemistry? Which do we prioritise and why? Is the feeling a reflection of the chemistry or is the chemistry a symptom, as it were, of the feeling? In other words, would that feeling exist without the chemistry? For those who lean toward the notion that the chemistry must be prior because feelings cannot definitionally arise without them, here’s an observation from Henri Bergson (1859-1941):
The lower we descend in the animal series, the more the nervous centres are simplified, and the more, too, they separate from each other, till finally the nervous elements disappear, merged in the mass of a less differentiated organism. But it is the same with all the other apparatus, with all the other anatomical elements; and it would be as absurd to refuse consciousness to an animal because it has no brain as to declare it incapable of nourishing itself because it has no stomach. (Creative Evolution, 1907)
Similarly it would be absurd to reduce our inner lives to pure chemical mechanism. It is quite imaginable that the feelings come prior to their expressions in chemically activated, sensual form. Luckily I don’t have to resolve this conundrum. All I have to do is open the door of your analogical mind.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
Everyone, please, I implore you: take Asa’s recommendation and read the Stephen Rollins article. Please.
You will not regret it.
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?