In our culture at least, cats have been associated with magic. In European tradition cats were seen as being a typical ‘familiar’ of a witch or warlock. I would like to suggest that, on the contrary, it is cats who perform magic, and that it is we who are their familiars.
As in many ‘systems’ of magic, cats cast spells primarily by means of vocal utterances. They gaze at their familiar, that is their human, they utter their spell, and magically food appears, or water, or a nice bowl of milk. If the magic does not work the first time, recasting the spell will normally do it. Now you may argue that this is not magic at all, that this is only evidence that the cat has managed to domesticate its human. Consider another example: the cat spell for opening doors. The cat magician, merely gazes at the door that it wants opened, utters its spell, and, miraculously, the door opens. (Sometimes this kind of spell is accompanied by some sorcerous paw gestures.)
No doubt you’re thinking: that’s not magic! Perhaps it is not so from your point of view, but how does it appear to the cat? Imagine, if you will, one of our magician cat’s wilder relatives – a lion, say. What would a lion imagine was going on if, merely by roaring, a gazelle were to fall dead at his feet?
By domesticating us, cats have managed to acquire a means of controlling their world that their forebears (to avoid confusion: cats are not descended from bears!) could only dream of. Ah, but then dogs can perform magic too, I hear you say. That’s arguable, though I would say that a dog feels himself to be human (or considers us to be dogs too), and so is well aware that a door opening at a woof is not magic at all, but a favour done for him by one of his pack mates. A cat’s view of us is not contaminated by such delusion. It knows that it is a cat and that we are not, and it knows how to do magic.
The greatest danger facing the human race seems to me to be how our collective ‘idea’ of what the world is is progressively moving away from what the world actually is.
Without wanting to open up the whole can of worms that is the ‘mind-body problem‘, I think it is not too contentious to state: that the impression we have within each of us of the ‘world’ is only an approximation of that world. After all, beings perceive the world through their senses and it is from these perceptions that a model of the world is constructed within that being, a model that it uses to ‘understand’ the world in an attempt to survive. That model – even at its most sophisticated – is not ‘identical’ with the world, and is merely an approximation.
Further, the sensory inputs from which that model is constructed are themselves approximations of what is being perceived. Let us use an ‘eye’ as an example. An eye allows light to enter it. This light will be detected within the eye and send a signal to whatever sort of ‘brain’ it is attached to. Detection is by means of a finite number of discrete detectors, and so the brain will be presented with a ‘grid’ of frequency values. This grid is naturally ‘flat’ – so what is being looked at is projected onto it like a film on to a screen. Any depth present in what is being looked at thus has to be deduced. Having more than one eye will provide the brain visual information from different angles. Movement will produce a succession of images that can provide even more information. But none of this is going to actually provide a direct perception of what is being seen. Some kind of ‘software’ is required to deduce volume, to isolate objects in the field of view. We know that this system can be fooled – consider optical illusions, or the experiment of the ‘invisible gorilla’.
All in all, it seems to me obvious that what each being ‘sees’ is something that stands at the very apex of a pyramid of guesses and half truths, and if two people observing the same scene are seeing different things (because of the different angles they are seeing it from, and their different life experiences that affect ‘what they see’, etc), how much more is the difference between what a human sees as compared to a pigeon, say, who has 5 colour cones in its retinas to our 3 – with each of those 5 being considerably more discerning of frequencies than are our own. And who knows what kind of ‘software’ is operating in the pigeon’s brain. I feel it is safe to say that, whatever it is that it is seeing, this will be considerably different from what a human observing the same scene is seeing. If we then continue our process of aggregation to take in the other senses that a being might possess, then it becomes blindingly obvious that there are as many perceptual views of the world as there are beings – with a wildly varying variety among them.
So our direct perception of the world is unique, but there is more to our awareness of underlying reality; for do we not produce further levels of aggregation collectively? Surely we influence each other’s perceptions, as does our culture, our upbringing, what we read, what we watch on TV etc. If an average person from the West wanders about in the Amazon rainforest, she will see ‘trees’ and creepy crawlies, whereas a native to the area will, presumably, see this kind of tree and that kind of insect, and will, further, have cultural associations with that tree and that insect – stories, understanding of possible uses. (Before I had a garden, I would walk into one and notice that it was colourful, and see the flowers and the foliage forming a ‘pretty picture’ – now I see the individual plants, and notice details I never noticed before, and I’m aware of what is on an ‘upswing’, what on a ‘downswing’. Friends who don’t have gardens, or little interest in them, look at my garden and they simply don’t ‘see’ it – they are ‘blind to it’ in the way I used to be. A little bit of knowledge and some experience have entirely changed what it is I ‘see’.)
So, let me suggest that people getting lost in ‘virtual worlds’ (our current anxiety is those virtual worlds produced by computers and by our technology) is nothing new. Human beings, like all other beings, have always lived in a ‘virtual world’, one that they have created within themselves as the best attempt they can make towards achieving a direct awareness of underlying reality. It is how close those virtualities are to the underlying reality that is always in play. When we began abandoning our old hunter-gathering lifestyle, we set in motion a new process. Life within a human settlement is substantially different from a life outwith it. In a human settlement, for example, geometry begins to dominate – the simple geometry of straight lines, corners and circles – a geometry that is a product of our brains’ desire to simplify the ungraspable fractal complexities of the world. As settlements began increasing in complexity, undulations in the ground were flattened out, slopes were turned into steps, water began running in channels, or off roofs and into gutters. Even in ancient times, it was becoming possible in some places to live one’s life entirely within this human-made space. This process has accelerated for thousands of years so that, gradually we have spent more and more time in environments that are externalizations of the software that evolved to make sense of our perceptions of the world. For many of us this feedback loop has grown tighter and tighter. Always having lived in a virtual reality of our own individual making, we have slowly replaced the inputs from those parts of the underlying reality that were not human-made, with those that are. And since all things human-made are an externalisation of our interior virtualities, we are now increasingly in danger of living within a locked system entirely of our own making: we live not in the world at all, but within a collective ‘human virtuality’.
So, all beings are peering at reality through their own version of a keyhole, however, we humans seem to be intent on blocking up these keyholes. Of course, the reason that beings developed senses at all was because everything that determined their chances of survival was outside them. That need has not changed, but we humans have become so intoxicated with our own power that, with ultimate hubris, our senses focus increasingly on the human virtuality. But, critically, that collective hallucination is increasingly diverging from reality, and so we motor on into the future driving ever more blindly.
Still haven’t managed to get round to restarting that – admittedly – rather erratic ‘machine’ that is my blogging. I have just written a new blog post, but it’s a tad hefty and needs a bit of editing, and so I hope to publish it tomorrow morning by 11am. In the meantime, may I wish you a very happy 2013.
proclaiming the People’s Republic of China in 1949
the unopened tomb of the First Emperor
I have a notion as to why the Chinese authorities are delaying the opening of the tomb of the First Emperor, and it’s not the official reason given. I think I can also make a reasonable guess as to when it will be opened…
In 221BC Qin Shi Huangdi became the first emperor of a unified China. Even though his dynasty collapsed shortly after his death, that unification has not been undone to this day. The First Emperor began work on his tomb when he ascended the throne of the petty state of Qin. The location of this tomb has been long known. The famous Terracotta Warriors are merely one set of guards buried in the ground around the tomb. The tomb itself is a massive artificial mound that is 76 metres high, and the interior of which is described in the account of the historian Sima Qian. Apparently, its floor is a model of his empire in which the sea and rivers are represented by flowing mercury. Tests carried out on the summit of the mound have detected mercury fumes saturating the earth in a pattern that seems to hint at a map of China. If this is true so, presumably, is Sima Qian’s claim that the tomb was filled with unimaginable treasures.
Though the authorities have permitted the excavation of the terracotta warriors, they have forbidden any attempt to open the tomb itself – even though it is believed that it is still intact. The reasons given are along the lines of: the tomb and its contents may be of such quality and quantity, that China does not have enough archaeological resources to do it properly or: that current technology is not yet up to the job. These explanations are plausible, but I feel there is another underlying reason that has not been voiced: politics.
If the tomb is intact, then it must surely contain the choicest treasures. When we consider what incredible artefacts must have adorned the courts of the various states that the First Emperor conquered; treasures that were surely looted – the contents of Qin Shi Huangdi’s tomb could make that of Tutankhamun look like a garden shed. The opening of King Tut’s tomb opened the eyes of the world to the glory of ancient Egypt. The glow of excitement resulting from when that tomb was opened in 1922 has still not faded; and Tutankamun was a minor pharaoh: Qin Shi Huangdi was the man who brought to an end the Warring States Period. The China he unified was incomparably vaster and more wealthy than ancient Egypt.
Consider how carefully the Chinese government managed the Beijing Olympics so as to not only communicate to the watching world China’s increasing wealth and power, but also her long and glorious history. How much more carefully must they wish to manage the opening of the tomb of the First Emperor. This event might well display to a wide-eyed humanity the incomparable splendour that was China. How could the wonders of the First Emperor’s tomb not serve to underline the claim that the Middle Kingdom can rightfully make that, throughout history, she has been one of the primary centres of the world, if not indeed the centre.
So, it seems to me that the most likely date for this opening will coincide with China’s income per capita becoming the largest in the world, and according to at least one projection, this will occur in 2048… or perhaps the opening will be delayed until 2049 to celebrate the centenary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China…*
* barring of course the collapse of Party rule, global warming disasters etc
(In the Autumn of 2014, the people of Scotland are going to vote in a referendum to decide whether they wish to separate from the UK. There are all kinds of arguments that can be made for and against this separation, I would like to add one of my own.)
Humanity seems unable to focus on doing what would have to be done to head off global warming of 2ºC – and, the way things seem to be going, an increase of 3-4ºC (or more) is a distinct possibility. So the world is going to change, probably beyond recognition. In such circumstances, all the old certainties are likely to fail. Where people live, where our crops are grown, where in the oceans we will find fish – these are all likely to shift. The infrastructure that we have spent centuries constructing: of cities, roads and rail, of trade routes, may no longer be well located. Some places will get wetter than at present, others drier; some warmer, others colder.
Though no one knows the shape that this new world will take in detail, we can make some educated guesses about the broad trends. One of these looks likely to be that the current climactic zones are going to shift towards the poles. Mankind’s ‘centres of gravity’ are likely to follow this shift. In the Northern Hemisphere, this means a general movement northwards. The Arctic, increasingly free of ice, will expose new land for settlement, will contain what fish stocks are left, will carry ever greater tonnages of freight and will expose natural resources hitherto inaccessible.
The UK, with it’s centre of gravity in the south-east, may struggle against the inertia of centuries to turn its gaze away from the heart of ancient Europe, or from the Atlantic and America. As a part of the UK, and tethered to the government in London, Scotland naturally gazes south, and thus, as an island, we tend to turn our back on the north.
It seems to me that the only way the people on these islands are going to be part of this new Arctic world is if we free ourselves to look northwards. Scotland is a region of the British Isles that naturally belongs to the north. Both in numbers, in climate and in landscapes, Scotland could be part of the Scandanavian world, as parts of it were in the past. A fully fledged government in Scotland would give the British Isles a centre of gravity in the north that would naturally concern itself with the north. Scotland’s 5 million would make us a power comparable to Norway (4.5 million), Denmark (5.4 million), Finland (5.2 million) or even Sweden (9 million).
This then is an argument based not on nationality, nor is it a rejection of the English, or of the British community of nations – Scotland has been too closely wed to England and the rest of the UK for political separation to mar our familyhood. Scotland would continue to benefit from England continuing to deal with – as it does now – the heart of Europe, and the greater world: England would benefit from having some part of these islands taking a full part in the Arctic adventure.
Eastern martial arts – and other ‘physical motion disciplines’, Kabuki for example – are taught through forms, or katas. These are ways to train the subconscious so that it assimilates a particular linked pattern of motion – a pattern that is a distillation of a ‘system’. If we consider T’ai Chi, a martial art I studied for years, there are a fixed number of these katas that appear to be a complex dance, performed solo and in slow motion. At first the practitioner cannot even ‘see’ the kata, however many times it is performed in front of him. Asked to simply copy the poses and movements, a beginner is often convinced he is making a reasonable approximation, but, to the eye of the more practiced, the beginner’s attempts are bizarrely contorted. With long practice, the kata comes closer and closer to that of the master’s and, by this means, the system that the kata codes becomes part of the practitioners subconscious. Theoretically, the practitioner should be able to now fight in the ‘style’ of the system that devised the kata.
But we do not need to study a martial art to learn any number of similar forms, or katas. A human being will not only learn, but invent all manner of katas as he goes about his normal life. When we move into a new house, we are like the T’ai Chi beginner. We see the rooms, the placement of doors, of windows, of electrical sockets; we will quickly work out how to go to the bathroom, the bedroom, how to cook in the kitchen. We decide into which cupboard to put our plates, into which to put our cups and mugs. We decide where to store our food, where to put our clothes. As we settle into our new place, we begin to create and learn the katas for ‘operating’ it. Earlier I said we ‘see’ this new home, but I meant ‘see’ in the way the T’ai Chi beginner sees his master performing a kata – imperfectly. Of course, that first arrangement of our belongings in the new house, is only a first attempt, and, over time, we will move things about until it feels right (each of us refining this to a degree that suits our temperament). However, it is the patterns of movement that interest me here: the way that we carry out the daily tasks of living in a house. Each such task – be it washing ourselves, eating, cooking, entertaining, reading a book – is a form, or kata, that we constantly refine. Our bodies learn how many steps it takes to cross from one door to another; where to place our feet so that we can reach a switch without stretching; a switch whose position we come to know so well that our hand can find it easily in the dark. Our body counts the steps of a staircase, so that we can climb them or descend them without noticing we are doing so. We learn how to lounge on a sofa so that the light perfectly catches the page of the book we are reading. Eventually, our body gets the ‘measure of the place’ until we can perform any task without a single conscious thought intervening. No wonder it comes to feel so comfortable; now wonder that we call it home: within it, we are as perfectly attuned to it as snail to its shell.
Being a tad OCD, I have developed a kata for drying myself after my morning shower. My finger finds the hem of my towel and thus determines which is the front, which the back. Roughly speaking, I dry the upper half of my body with the front, the bottom half with the back. (Am I the only one who, on some level, sees himself as a satyr? *grin*) It’s a complex dance and I can’t really describe to you how I manipulate that towel, but my body does it in such a way that every part of me is dried only once, and that by a dry area of the towel. I say that ‘my body does this’, because I sometimes perform an exercise during which I remove my conscious mind entirely from the operation. It is strange to ‘observe’ my body going through this complex kata without ‘me’ having to be involved at all.
The reason I have let you in on this less than glamorous business is, at least on one level, to encourage you to try something of the same (perhaps you already do this all the time…). This is a way of demonstrating the distinct separation between the conscious and subconscious mind. It is also a way of demonstrating what so many scientific studies have shown: that, for many aspects of our lives, our conscious mind is merely a rider on the shadowy horse of our subconscious – a horse that only pretends to be guided by the reins our ego holds in its grip.
Thus, when at home, or in any other familiar place or activity, our mind is free to wander – our conscious mind, that is – our subconscious is always free – at least in the way a fox is. This is a freedom that increases as we grow from children – so that they, still being beginners in their katas, have to bend their minds to it far more than adults do. I believe this explains why time appears to move more slowly for children, than it does for adults. When we as adults are displaced to a strange location – a foreign holiday, for example – unfamiliarity causes us to revert to a more childlike state, and thus a week on holiday appears to last far longer, than one at home.
So, I would suggest that these katas are at the very root of being human, and are the means by which we are capable of the near miraculous acts of learning that allow us to master everything from driving cars to producing flowing calligraphy. Katas empower us and free us to live our lives with grace and ease. However, by freeing our conscious mind, our ego, from attending to the day-to-day, we are made prey to its endless judging, anxiety and confusion. Worse, it is this ‘freedom’ that enables most of us, most of the time, to not be ‘present’. We are often trapped in a past that no longer exists, or lost in a future that is nothing more than a mirage. We lose our connection with the pulse of life. Perhaps most dangerous of all, it allows us to disconnect from reality, and to live in, and help to create, the human virtuality, that is the make-believe world that most of us believe to actually be the world.
It seems that those of us who live in the West may need to get used to the fact that our economies are not going to return to constant growth. The belief that things are going to always continue to get better – at least in the sense of a constantly growing GDP – has always been a fantasy: constant growth of the kind we’ve experienced, that consists of consuming the Earth’s resources, presupposes that these are limitless. Since they are not, then it is hard to see how traditional economic growth could continue for ever.
Of course it’s difficult to give something up when you’ve had it there all your life. Nevertheless, I’m not going to cry over the difficulties that are overtaking us because things as they were depended quite a bit on selfishness. While our standards of (material) life have been constantly improving for decades, not everyone else on the planet was so fortunate. Not only were their lives not improving, but often that lack of improvement had something to do with our improving lives – I could make various arguments to support this stance, if such are needed. There are many direct links between us being up, and others being down. How much, for example, has our recent prosperity depended on people working in sweatshops for a pittance? Make as many arguments as you like about how we helped raise these poor people up from poverty – I will maintain that they have done this for themselves, and that we have been content to profit from these people being prepared (or forced) to live and work in conditions that we wouldn’t even contemplate for ourselves. What I don’t imagine can be argued is that we now have any justification in complaining that they’ve ‘taken all our jobs’; or that we have any right to feel aggrieved at what the consequences may be for us now that they are beginning to demand a standard of living closer to our own – whether this will come at the cost of dangerous carbon emissions, of a loss of power on our part, or of a permanent ending of a constant increase in our GDP.
So, I feel that we should accept this change in our prospects with good grace. We are at the end of a half-millennium during which we in the West have greatly enriched ourselves at the cost of just about everyone else on this planet. Western Europeans went to the Far East in search of things the people there had that we wanted some of. When we reached India and China, we found them fabulously sophisticated and wealthy. Through accidents of history too numerous for me to go into here, we had the whip hand on these civilizations more prosperous than we were. Now they are finally recovering, and rising back to somewhere nearer where they were – and had been for centuries – relative to us. Economic projections suggest that this will be achieved in a vastly wealthier world. Personally, I doubt this scenario – for all kinds of reasons; not least that, when it comes to natural resources, we have already picked all the low hanging fruit. What remains is unlikely to be enough to bring everyone up to the standard of living we currently enjoy in the West. More pressing would seem to be the threat of global warming that is likely to change the rules of the game entirely. Still, whatever comes, I for one am going to watch with some satisfaction as the rest of humanity achieves something like the life I have been privileged to live this far.
Thank you Darwin for liberating us from the absurd notion that Man is God’s ultimate and most beautiful creation. When this notion was generally believed – at least in the West with its obsession with Ancient Greece’s perfect white marble nudes (that we now know were painted as gaudily as the carvings that smother Hindu temples) – did no one actually bother to look at other living things? Did no one see butterflies, birds, mammals, fish, cephalopods, jellyfish, the exquisite miniatures that are insects and the myriad other beasts with which we share our planet? In what did our purported supreme beauty consist? Surely it was not colour, nor pattern, nor iridescent plumage. Other species challenge us for beauty of eye, of limb, of skin. Or is it in another Ancient Greek conceit that our divinity lies: the supposed sublime beauty of Man in motion? At least Usain Bolt is doing something we were ‘designed’ to do – but are we also going to claim this triumph for Man in water; as if we somehow outdo the fish, the dolphins, with our splashing.
This attitude that Man is the very centre and the purpose, the crowning glory of Creation can surely only be held by people who live in fear and terror of their own insignificance. I have no doubt that early Man, close as he was – necessarily close – to Nature, did not dare these absurdities. For him animals were his brothers, sometimes even his gods. But then we started to move away from Nature, to get ‘above ourselves’… and, scaling the pinnacle of Creation, we attempted to enthrone ourselves upon its utmost summit. And from there, with imperious gaze, we fancied ourselves the Rulers of Creation, and who can doubt that we still do?
This mania started in fear, and with the thrusting out of our chests to impress each other, but it ends altogether more messily. We put this lie in the mouth of our gods. We use it to justify the way we wish to treat other living creatures as things, as resources. We insist on making Man the measure of Creation. Darwin confronted us with the truth, and it was devastating, and can we doubt the part that trauma played in the darker dramas of the 20th Century?
Still, if you ask anyone who has heard of Darwin, what it is his theory proves about us? many people will point to processions of apes and early humans slowly straightening, eventually becoming the paragon that is Man. We still persist in imagining some gulf between us and other animals. This belief, this thing we seem to need to believe, has become ingrained. No amount of evidence is going to change our minds. Why should it? Even before Darwin we surely saw that we bore the same basic shape as many other animals. We must have noticed how when we copulated it was not some grand act elevated beyond what we saw other animals doing. We must have noticed that this most perfect of God’s creation still needed to go to the toilet… and that if such wasn’t present, we squat to defecate as so many other animals do. No, I don’t believe that Victorians were really shocked to find out that they were descended from apes – I think it was just that it threatened to force them to admit what they must have already suspected, and that whatever trauma we suffered was merely our hysteria at no longer being able to peddle the delusion of our near-angelic status.
Why does this matter? Well, it certainly matters to the creatures who we harm all the time, often deliberately. It matters in that it allows us to decide that increasing the size of our economy is more important than preserving this species or that; each every bit as valuable a leaf on the tree of life as are we. And ultimately it matters – let’s get back to business as usual – because our need to believe that we are ‘special’ makes us blind to the reality that underpins our existence, and we are approaching a time when that reality is threatening to do to us what we have done to so many other species.
Ebooks are the latest stage of a process that began with the invention of writing. The ability to write thoughts and stories down allowed their distribution across space and time: a storyteller no longer needed to be present for his message to be communicated. These advantages are obvious, but there is also a profound disadvantage: that a text is a fossil of the author’s message, and that, disconnected from its living source, it can no longer adapt.
The printing press made it possible to clone texts that were free from the errors of manual copying, and allowed vastly more examples of a text to exist, thus facilitating wider distribution. The digital text has made it easy to clone a text, and the internet has facilitated the speed and extent of their distribution. Living as we do in a period of transition from paper to digital texts, many of us have qualms about what we may be losing. There is the issue of aesthetics that I address in this post, and there is also an anxiety that comes from the loss of there being a definitive version of a given text.
A digital text compared to that text printed on paper is like a vessel of clay before and after it has been fired; an essential quality of a digital text (of any digital object) is that it remains for ever malleable. This malleability robs us of an important benefit that is conferred by a printing press: that it produces identical and ‘fixed’ versions of a text. It is this aspect of a printed text that has compelled the author to strive for a perfect version of his text; for once it is printed it will have whatever failings he has given it. Apart from the changes that he can make in a new edition – nothing can be added, nothing taken away. That a text cannot be modified once it has been printed has also drawn to the process an entire machinery of publishing: editing to make sure the structure of the text is sound; copyediting to remove any errors. The capital outlay invested in printing a text (at least until recently) further increased the need for a publisher. A natural partnership existed between an author and his publisher because they had a common interest: that the text be as complete as possible.
That a digital text remains malleable after publication, weakens the necessity for this partnership (as instant distribution of digital texts, and the lack of need of capital to print large numbers of texts that then require warehousing, weakens it further). Many authors will still wish that their texts be professionally edited and copyedited – however there is a new option: that this can now occur after the text is published. It is even possible that the readers of the text could be brought in to correct any errors. (I deal with the notion of direct reader correction of digital texts in this post.) On balance, I feel it is likely that an author would wish to retain control of his text. However, he could elect to use some kind of ‘crowd sourcing’ not only to have his text corrected, but perhaps even edited (I discuss my reservations about this latter notion in this post). The limited iterations of a printed text that new editions provide to an author, become limitless with a digital text. An author could choose to change and evolve his text in much the same way that software is now being constantly updated on our computers. Further, whereas some authors have had printed texts supplied with different covers for different markets (and types of readers), the author of a digital text could target any number of different markets with different versions of his text: abridged, simplified, with different endings etc. So, though we may lose the ‘definitive text’ we gain all kinds of other compensations.
There is, it seems to me, a profound consequence to all this. For all the advantages conferred by the invention of writing on the creations of an author, one thing was lost: the ability that the author had to keep his work ‘alive’. When all stories, all arguments, all knowledge had to be conveyed through speech, the only permanence of these lay in the memory of those who had heard them spoken. An oral storyteller could respond to his audience as he was telling them his stories. The next time he told those stories, he could improve them from his experience of how they were received at the previous telling. I am left wondering if, with the advent of digital texts, we have, in a way, come full circle. While still benefitting from most of the advantages conferred by several thousand years of development, every author can also have back something of what was lost from the oral past. Indeed, it may come to be seen that the period during which fixed texts held sway was merely a temporary aberration.
When I was 10 I found, in a corner of my schoolroom, a pile of magazines that happened to contain a comic strip entitled The Trigan Empire – I couldn’t get enough of them. A few years ago I obtained these same strips in book form. As I reread them, I began recognizing elements that were present in my stone dance books – elements so completely transformed that I doubt anyone else would be able to see the connections, but they are there nonetheless.
Thus it comes as no surprise to me that ‘pulp’ and ‘psyche’ should be so strongly linked. Pulp, because this is what is most likely to appeal to a child: few children are lucky enough to be exposed to high art – and even if they are, it seems to me likely that it would be aspects peripheral to that art that would impress themselves on the childish mind: the costumes, the monsters, the magic. That such pulp influences can penetrate the psyche so deeply is unsurprising: when a child finds a created work in which he/she sees mirrored something of their inner world, of their self, then this work will be absorbed with the voracious passion of youth. As passions cool with age, the adult will recall as most important to him/her that which excited that great passion; that has indeed become foundational for the development of their sense of self. If such a person is moved to create some art of their own, how could it not be influenced by this early passion? And, in seeking to relive something of that passion, what could be more natural than to attempt to re-create it?
However, the artist is no longer a child and it is not enough merely to re-create the pulpy work – I’m sure that, like me, when you return to the original pulp you are mostly disappointed; certainly, it no longer produces in you the reaction it once did. To excite the same level of passion in an adult, the themes and aspects that wowed and moved the child must be ‘upgraded’ into a new form that is capable of wowing and moving the adult. This is not only true for the artist, but also for his natural audience: those who were similarly wowed by the pulp when they were children, and who now are seeking to relive that experience.
Thus it seems to me that there is a cultural cycle in which the pulp stories, themes and heroes of a generation back are elevated and drawn into the heart of our culture by the shared childhood passions of creators and audiences alike.
