 |
version seven. http://demongin.org |
Six Go Through the Whole World
A sortilege post in which I work backwards from a title to an essay, starting with Culhwch and Olwen.
Thursday, 2009-08-06 | Language, Literature, Philosophy, Social Studies
| Arthur said, "Are there now any of the rare and difficult things that we do not have?"
|
| Culhwch and Olwen |
Of annoyingly frequent heart-breaking let-downs, one of the worst is the one in which a loved-one demonstrates both a shocking ignorance of basic semiotics and a gaping hole where there ought to be a sense of adventure.
I, for one, can recall a number of occurrences with great detail on which I watched my own crest fall in real-time as a valued friend or family member took a look at something from either a time-honored or experimental narrative and, rather than simply saying, "it's weird--I don't get it", said something like, "why couldn't he just have done XYZ and avoided the whole situation" or "it was alright, but suicide is never the answer. You know that, right?"
This is a more or less direct consequence of the sad fact that there is a super-abundance of story-tellers in any human population and a teensy, weensy minority of people with the horse sense to a.) apprehend a narrative that is set in front of them (remember those "reading comprehension" test you took on standardized tests as a youth? Most of your peers, including Yours Truly, were receiving embarassingly low scores on them) and b.) resist the impulse to relate to same.
As for why there are so few people capable of understanding a given fictional (or non-fictional, as there really is no difference to most readers) narrative on its own terms (i.e. not forcing the square peg of a given Canterbury Tale through the round hole of their tiresome late 20th century secularism), the best that your humble narrator can recommend is an abrupt 23 skidoo in the direction of the nearest "department of evolutionary biology" (formerly doing business as the "department of biology", and the "department of pitiful-if-it-weren't-so-pathetic autobiography" before that). Grab the first evolutionary biologist you see by his ruffle (or one of the handlebars of his moustache) and ask him why, after thousands of years of telling stories to one another, so few living humans have the ability to mute their internal cipher and listen with an honest ear.
He'll probably tell you that it has something to do with an increased capacity for empathy in the earliest female homo sapiens sapiens evolved to discourage the earliest male homo sapiens sapiens from accidentally buggering her.
Just go with it.
Regardless of what exactly it is or why it's there, there is something hardwired into the human consciousness (which, admittedly, has been improving rapidly since the advent of the Internet, but which still nevertheless tends more toward the reptilian than the mammalian at the time of this writing) that, to borrow a Shakespeare-ism, screws our courage to the sticking place most times our fellow man picks up the conch and causes us to process his words through the, "how can I relate to this?" filter and thus to miss the salient details.
Fortunately for the likes of you and me (i.e. the "oh yeah, I can totally relate to that") crowd), someone, at some point, invented the university and the idea of concentrating all of the honest listeners in one place and pooling their labor. When enough of these Smart Guys (with a capital S) finally got together, higher education became an social institution and, thank the Maker, a goodly number of us were taught to resist the impulse to empathize--no matter how strong--and to make an honest attempt at understanding what exactly our interlocutors were trying to convey.
Unfortunately, however, the creation of the university only really served to draw attention to the first problem I mentioned above, i.e. the super-abundance of story-tellers in any given human population.
One looks at this or that university and one sees a great many humans suffering from hyper-glossia and therefore appearing to have some kind of vocational need to write. At length. At stupefying length, in most cases. One sees this motley crew and, if he's over 30, thinks to himself, "thank the immortal gods on Olympus that these composting bow-ties are keeping to their holier-than-thou selves and not living down the street, trying to drink the beer out of my garage fridge and tell me about how DaVinci's codes unlock the Doors of perspicacity and Omar Sharif's Ruby on Rails is the path to the Tower of Babel, or whatever."
If he's under 30, however, one might still be innured enough (there are degrees of being branded, right?) of the Rat Race that he looks at writer's communities and thinks to himself, "sheesh--we took all of these story-teller types, maybe 100 or 200 thousand of them, stashed them in universities, and were left with what, 10 or 20 thousand working writers living outside of the academy? These people who feel compelled to spin their little yarns are a minority that makes the Jewish presence in 13th century England look like a superabundance."
And there's that word again. Wasn't I just going on about how there's a super-abundance of story-tellers and now am I not going on about how rare these people are?
Astute readers will have seen where this was going a while back, but my point is this: human communities, even vast, continent-spanning ones, reach their saturation point, as far as story-telling is concerned, very, very quickly. And this has, as we've seen, mostly to do with our capacity for empathy.
The fact of the matter is that if we weren't so busy attempting to "relate to" or "identify with" everyone who opened his mouth (or discharged his pen) in our presence, we could form social and economic networks capable of supporting much larger numbers of professional story-tellers.
Which brings me back to my first point, i.e. the one about how "failures of imagination" or the "absence of a sense of adventure" are encountered frequently in ourselves and in our loved ones. These things are heart-breaking because, when we understand them correctly--"failures of imagination" as "successful attempts to relate to" and "absences of a sense of adventure" as "successful attempts to identify with and thereby reduce to the level of utter mundanity"--we see them as the secondary evidence (i.e. the symptom) of some kind of weird evolutionary tick that, for reasons that will only ever been known to the washed-up Freudians peddling "evolutionary biology" on cable news channels and in social science seminars, prevents us from engaging others in a meaningful way and vice versa.
Which brings us to the tale of Culhwch, a lesser Welsh noble of late antiquity, and Olwen, daughter of this or that fearsome giant. Richard Loomis, in his preface to the version of the tale that lives in the sad remains of my once proud private library (in James J Wilhelm's totally fucking awesome The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation), writes thus of the story's premise:
Culhwch's response is not prudent anxiety but heroic sexual excitement, instantly recognized and appreciated by his father, who doesn't steer him away from danger, but tells him how to manage it: Get Arthur to trim your hair and ask him for Olwen as a gift. The hair-cutting is symbolic recognition of consanguinity; once the blood-tie is acknowledged, Culhwch can tap the generosity that flows in a kinsman's veins. ... Arthur proves to be not only a good relative but a noble prince who welcomes boon-seekers because they're a means of enhancing his honor.Loomis takes a few, hastily penned lines from the middle ages about Culhwch submitting to the shears of the Alpha Male and turns them into a political symbology where actions are signs and signs can be read and the space "between the lines" of an ancient text can speak volumes about the mores of vanished cultures.
Loomis is a story-teller. And a good one, too. He glosses, perhaps too quickly, over the whole idea of social manipulation between generations by institutionalized, ritualized or otherwise coercive grooming (e.g. pre-nuptial fasting, the famously shaven skulls of young marines, etc.), but hey, this is a 2000 word anthology preface and not an article in Speculum. The point is that he sees more to the hair-cutting scene than just one guy cutting another guy's hair because he doesn't try to relate to the text or fit it into his own experience.
Rather, he takes a look backward, makes a few educated guesses about his subject matter, and takes a flying leap. He has demonstrated, in other words, that he possesses something of a sense of adventure.
One can easily imagine sitting across the table from one's mother, relating the hair-cutting scene (sans exegesis, of course: just the facts, mum) to her only to have her stop the story and remind one that one would look much nicer if one had short hair.
And finding that reminder a little heart-breaking.
