Mammon and the Black Goddess, page 4
Well, now that electronic computers have passed the limits of the brain's imaginative grasp, physicists should consult an anthropologist who still speaks their own scientific language, and let themselves be reassured that vast tracts of human thought remain to be explored, which the computer knows nothing of and which call for no complex apparatus.
Here, at the risk of seeming to bite the hand that has so generously fed and cosseted meI must say that I have never, repeat never, been so welcomed by any university on either side of the Atlanticlet me make a criticism. When the question came up in the Zacharias Committee, 'Should philosophy continue to be taught here as a special subject?' and I was invited to answer, I said: 'For me, philosophy is a peculiar disease of thought most readily limjerstandable by reference to the Athenian environment where it first hardened: in an atmosphere of more or less uninhibited thought, slave labour, the rich Laurion silver mines, a powerful fleet, the subjection of women, ideal pederasty. Philosophy is a subject for anthropologists. So also are, for example, such strange phenomena as the self-perpetuating Freudian priesthood disguised as a scientific college; the equally unscientific and self-perpetuating Communist priesthood; non-figurative art; and philately. With a simple anthropological background, students should be able to figure these phenomena out for themselves without spending much time in their detailed study.' To provide an anthropological department at M.I.T. would cost three million dollars, or so I was told. So what? Three million bucks are mere chicken feed.
A study of anthropology would remind the student that civilization has been developing at different speeds in different parts of the world for several thousand years. The more successful nations, judged in terms of military strength, communications, productivity and trade, do not govern all the less successful ones; yet they do force them to imitate the Western way of life. Although originally the avowed aim was to evangelize all benighted heathen the Spaniards and Portuguese began this; the English, Dutch and French followedno historian will challenge the Oriental saying: 'First Bible; then enamel basin; then bayonet.'
After the bayonet came roads, railways, factories, hospitals, famine relief, striped trousers and bowler hats, bureaucrats, automobiles, parliamentary voting, scientific institutions. . . . The few primitive areas left in Africa, New Guinea and Oceania, have shrunk to pocket-hand- kerchief size. Another twenty years, and they will have faded away altogether. Of course, the bayonet is now out-of-date, replaced by the submachine-gun; so is the enamel basin, replaced by a plastic bowl; and so, with all respect, is the Bible. Big business, which controls all modern states, has trodden in the missionary's footsteps and used the Judaeo-Christian ethic, based squarely on the Bible, in support of its policies. Yet no scientist, however specialized his field, can factually accept even the Book of Genesis; and what the scientist thinks today, everyone else will think the day after tomorrow.
I should like you to feel nostalgic about the picnic basket that got left behind; though I have described its contents in New England termswhich differ somewhat from Mark Twain's Missouri ones. He wrote in his Autobiography:
It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John's. The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous mealswell, it makes me cry to think of them! Fried chicken, roast pig; wild and tame turkeys, ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot 'wheat bread', hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, 'clabber'; watermelons, musk-melons, cantaloupesall fresh from the garden; apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobblerI can't remember the rest. The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendourparticularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread and the fried chicken. These things have never been properly cooked in the North. . . .
That really was food! In our Majorcan village, we still eat real food; and in the back streets of Palma de Mallorca, our provincial capital, the habit lingers obstinately. But the thousand or more tourist hotels, residences, pensions and restaurants that now dominate our economy, have switched to the modern cuisine insisted upon by their guests. Now, though I don't want to be personal or to denigrate American food, which is at least as good as what I get in England, can you imagine any modern Mark Twain, grown to manhood, celebrating the goodness of today's home cookingwhich for all but those in the top income brackets means battery broilers, battery eggs, the latest battery veal, vegetables grown in chemically-manured soil and consigned to cans or the deepfreeze, processed meat in cans, tasteless cottony white bread, processed cereals, sterilized milk, canned blueberry pie, caniled crapes suzette, even canned rice pudding? Well, if you can't imagine, here is a bit of science fiction to help. . . . Your children, in their old ageunless they have somehow controlled what are called 'the social consequences of science'will be living on protein steaks worked up from petroleum or plancton but synthetically flavoured and handsomely technicoloured, and on hydro- ponically raised vegetables, all sent thermo-sealed down the conveyor-belts of the Federal Foodstuff Factory. These will then be the good old days of home cooking!
A young farmer from the Channel Islands visited me not long ago; he raises early potatoes and tomatoes for the London market. I asked whether he still fertilized his crops with seaweed, as his father had done. He laughed unpleasantly. 'What? And put at least another penny a pound on the wholesale price? No, chum, I don't! If I did, I couldn't be here on holiday.'
'Surely,' I said, 'seaweed makes a lot of difference to the taste?'
'Maybe it does; but I'm not selling to choosey individuals like you. I'm selling to the big dealers. They care only for size and condition; don't give a damn for taste. I do use seaweed, though, for my early daffodils. Gives them a deeper colour, and I get a bob a hundred more. But whether they taste better, I wouldn't know.'
Now, I'm not saddling you technologists with all the shortcomings of the businessman whose pockets you have filled by showing how to process foodstuffs. These innovations have, I know, saved housewives an excessive deal of labour, and set them free, if they wish, to improve their minds by reading or watching television, or to go out and take jobs. But the result of our highly artificial urban life is that you forget how delicious old-fashioned cookery can be, or at least you resign yourselves to the new diet. Worse, no sound medical evidence has yet been adduced to show that this new rationalized cuisine does the eater any harm, so long as vitamin deficiencies are corrected and the diet balanced. Zest comes from the sauce bottle.
Science fights a little shy of taste as a phenomenon impossible to measure or describe, since different human subjects will react differently to experimental tests; nor can it be connected with the economy of digestion since, for example, the most poisonous of all mushrooms, the amanita phalloides, tastes most deliciousfamous last words!and insipid food nourishes no worse than the savoury. Scientists, however, find taste difficult to distinguish from smellthough gorse blossom smells as coconut tastes, whereas coconuts do not smell as gorse blossom tastesto which they willingly concede nutritive value since, in times of famine, children have been kept alive by being laid in the street above the vent of a baker's shop.. ..
However, I use taste here as a metaphor for taste in the wider sense, which is one way of establishing internal truth. And I don't mean 'good taste', as sold in bulk by fashion magazines to the middle income group: good taste, the commodity which falls a little below the daringly advanced or the authenticated antique, but which is carefully distinguished from the popular. I mean personal taste, intuitive certitude in the way one dresses, reads, furnishes a room, chooses friends, and treats music. A sudden/loss of internal truth, by the acceptance of a false situation, can always be noted in the loss of hitherto unerring personal taste.
I have been told that a finished product of M.I.T. can follow literary and historical and artistic discussions far better at least than the humanists of other universities can follow the scientific way of thought. No doubt; but you must understand that taste does not enter into these discussions. The teaching of the Humanities, however well taught, since supported by the same funds that support you, is based on at least semi-scientific principles: masterpieces of literature, art, and criticism being explained deterministically and classified in terms of technical accomplishment. Taste is excluded from the curriculum. A sensitive student must read numerous works as offensive to his taste as they are irrelevant to his education. The personally unique is necessarily neglected by the text-books, and so is everything that justifies its appearance.
Let me, -with apparent ingratitude, parenthetically venture a further criticism of M.I.T. by calling attention to the weakest link in the technologico-humanitarian symbiosis. The brain is here regarded as an electrical apparatus. Fair enough. Complex communication between brain and brain is first achieved by some obscure sort of telepathy, then by language, finally by written words. To achieve perfect communication the writer must take cognizance of the receptive system in the reader's brain and send it messages free from fading, atmospheric crackling, stridency and short circuits, so that the semantic flow is not interrupted at any point. The scientific study of English in this sense has never been attempted at M.I.T., and among the worst offenders against clarity of communication are the leading authorities on the functions of the brain. Myself I have for some years now written all my prose at least six times over, with the help of a secretary whom I have trained to catch faults that miss my own eye, reducing each message to its clearest and simplest form, and preventing the unintended and irrelevant mating of words which have a similarity in sound, or phrases which have a similarity of rhythm; such matings are as a rule not consciously noted by the eye, but they distract the brain. And the memory length of words used in a narrative passage is far greater than the writer is aware. This is a highly specialized study, but I guarantee to prove the use of this skill, without the least contradiction, to any specialist in semantics who is also a specialist in brain signals.
On every academic roll, dullards and phoneys necessarily outnumber the real writers, artists and thinkers. In science, of course, phoneys are soon detected; unless, as happens in a few unenlightened universities, department heads claim credit for original work done by their assistants. And even these cases fall short of complete phoni- ness, since the fabric of science is, in theory, anonymous;
and the department-head may himself have been robbed of credit for original work by his predecessor. Moreover, what does 'original' mean? Often a discovery of great moment results from random experiment, and its implications are grasped with no expense of mental effort. That is not original work; but more like being bequeathed money by a great-aunt whom you never met.
True originality implies a leap taken by the mind across a dark gulf of nothingness into new regions of scientific thought, and the establishing of a bridgehead on the far side to help routine scientists across. Eratosthenes, Newton, Einstein, Planck, Bohr: you know their names and achievements better than I do. But men of this calibre have always been hopelessly outnumbered by the routineers of science, from whom original work is not expected. Nor, during the long, flat period of the eighteenth century, was it required of the poetic routineer; he earned far greater ^respect for his servile imitations of the classics than for felicitous new verbal coinages. Nowadays, however, poetic originality is insisted upon, and the routineers must pretend to possess it, by embellishing their poems with rhetorical tropes borrowed from abstractionism, psycho-analysis, and undigested foreign literature.
The original scientist may find some analogy between his experiences and a poet's. Let me present the case in technological terms. Poetry proper is written mainly by men between fifteen and twenty-seven years old though cases are known of people writing poems at an advanced age. . . . (Women's poetry belongs to a different study altogether, no less rewarding.) The poet is, on the whole, anti-authoritarian, agoraphobic and intuitive rather than intellectual; but his judgments are coherent. Symptoms of the trance in which poetic composition occurs differ greatly from those of an induced mediumistic trance; though both seem directed by an external power.
In a poetic trance, which happens no more predictably than a migraine or an epileptic fit, this power is traditionally identified with the ancient Muse-goddess. All poems, it seems, grow from a small verbal nucleus gradually assuming an individual rhythm and verse form. The writing is not 'automatic', as in a mediumistic trance when the pen travels without pause over the paper, but is broken by frequent critical amendments and excisions. And though the result of subsequently reading a poem through may be surprise at the unifying of elements drawn from so many different levels of consciousness, this surprise will be qualified by dissatisfaction with some lines. Objective recognition of the poem as an entity should then induce a lighter trance, during which the poet realizes more fully the implications of his lines, and sharpens them. The final version (granted the truthfulness of its original draft, and the integrity of any secondary elaboration) will hypnotize readers who are faced by similar problems into sharing the poet's emotional experience.
I left out an element from my proposition about scientists and poets standing at opposite extremes of contemporary thought: namely, that mankind is composed of men and women; and that woman's thought now oscillates between two extremesquasi-male and authentic female. Authentic female thought, though a matter of indifference to scientists, is of supreme importance to poets. ... In 1960, when I was flying from London to (ioneva on a twin-engined plane, my eight-year-old son stood up, looked out of the windows, and asked: 'Father, why is there only one propeller going round?' The Swiss nir-hostess stood aghast and dropped her tray. The pilot, nlso noticing the anomaly, flew us back to London. Let ino ask the same question about science: 'Why is there only one propeller going round?'
Almost every poet has a personal Muse, a relationship first introduced into Europe from Sufi sources in Persia and Arabia during the early Middle Ages. She embodies for him the concept of primitive magic; and even if an occasional poet divines the Muse's existence from other poetic work and from natural surroundings traditionally associated with her immanencesuch as mountains, woods and seashis sense of possession by her is real enough. Once the Muse takes individual form, she remains absolutely free and in control of the situation. The poet-Muse relationship can never be a domestic one, nor need it be sexually consummated; since, despite all the symptoms of romantic love, it belongs to another order of experiencewhich, for want of a better term, we must call 'spiritual' and which is usually characterized by remarkable telescopings of space and time and by cosmic coincidences. These coincidences are not wondered at because, though rationally inexplicable, they have clearly been ciafeated by the power of thought. To enlarge on such phenomena would lead me into tedious anecdote of the sort I recorded some eight years ago in a true story, called The Whittaker Negroes, and again in my account of how I wrote The White Goddess.
I have discussed this way of thought, which ties time into knots, with Dr Martin Deutsch, one of the scientists here whom I most wanted to meet; and he accepts it as what he calls 'structural thought', which cannot be criticized or negatived by rationalists since each occurrence is by definition unique. He told me frankly, nevertheless, that if any of his students thought in that style he would have to shake the poor fellow's hand sincerely and send him away. But this is the way poets work.
Professor Whitehead warned you when he gave his famous Harvard address of 1925:
We are now so used to the materialistic way of looking at things, which has been rooted in our literature by the genius of the seventeenth century, that it is with some difficulty that wo understand the possibility of another mode of approach to tho problem of Nature. In the eighteenth century, the mechanical explanation of all the processes of Naturewhich, lo these men of science, was a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourlessfinally hardened in a dogma of science.
Dr J. P. Hodin points out that Goethe had anticipated Whitehead by over one hundred years. Goethe wrote:
Both microscopes and telescopes shift man's real standpoint. The increase in mechanization frightens me. Nobody knows himself now, nobody understands the element in which he lives and moves. Railways, express-mails, steam-ships, and every possible facility for communication are what the civilized world is after. . . . Man is not born to solve the riddles of the universe, but to keep within the limits of the comprehensible.
Goethe advised a return to God and Nature's Iron 1 itiws, which he argued, were always right. But are they? Surely the scientist is also one of God's creatures? My old nurse used to say: 'If God had meant us to fly, He would have given us wings.' God had already done worse, or hotter, by letting us develop the internal combustion ongine and furnish it with a glider and a joy-stick. And Nature, as Tennyson noted, is 'red in tooth and claw'. Ilesides, at this stage one can't turn Luddite and smash the machines; nor has the average British and American cit izen any passionate complaint against our modern way of life. When he tries a holiday in some underdeveloped country, boldly renting a house in what seem ideal surroundings, he finds himself overwhelmed by the primitive problems of light, fuel, plumbing, transport, communication, entertainment. And the food has too emphatic a taste. . . .
