The problem with science II

in reference to I'd read that as "(even) the nearest" dream of (even fleeting) happiness is elusive--thus what chance the hope for "steadfast" {lasting) happiness?Tonally, it's much richer than that, of course, the speaker's voice loaded with melancholy and loss, hinting that there may be some rare instances of realized happiness but leaving us to wonder at the particulars behind the melancholy. The child's disappointment mirrors the poet's disillusionment; this should resonate in anyone who has watched a child play and wondered what hard knocks the future held in store.Auntie Em could be dwelling on a lover or a god--seems that way often in good poems, and hers are exceptionally consistently good.

Hi, Brenna. I feel a lit crit rant coming on: you're the occasion, not the target I was aware of those general outlines about Auntie Em (my favorite poets are like family to me, so there's Auntie Em and Big Bill--you can probably guess who he is).I'm wary of reading the poet's work through the poet's life. The notion that to understand the work we must first understand the life is, in its purest form, a genetic fallacy. On the one hand, poems are made things, and they take on their own patina of meaning once they leave the poet's hand; on the other, what is known about a poet's life is often constructed on a scaffold of speculation and supposition. The relationship between the artist's life and art is, ultimately, unknowable.The poem, the thing made--that, to me, is primary, although some knowledge of the poet's life can be useful. Postmodern criticsm would sever any connection between the author and the text, often denying any authentic meaning to the text at all, since it is a social and cultural construct patched together around gender, class, race, power, and wealth, so that under close scrutiny it deconstructs into icons, symbols and enactments of those forces. (I've often wondered why people who feel that all texts deconstruct themselves bother to write anything at all, but that's another rant.)To know that Emily Dickinson pined for a clergyman ulitmately explains nothing about the things she made: I might learn (or learn more) about loss through the death of a pet, but every subsequent poem I write that invokes loss is not about dead puppies.I think JavaMan's literary analogy fits well with his larger theme of what is (or isn't) wrong with science.To categorize or describe a phenomenon or thing does not exhaust its meaning or significance, but the cataloging process can seem almost imperialistic, as though science seeks to encompass and subsume the object of study, and, necessarily in the way of cataloging, set it aside and move on. The human subjects of scientific investigation can be left feeling, like Prufrock, "pinned and wriggling on the wall," a sensation intensified by the "thin slice" approach of scientific investigation: the narrower the focus, the more likely the human subject (or group) is to feel a trivializing effect, as various disciplines tell them what is "really" happening in one behavior or another.Our view of a dead poet loses depth, the rounded figure flattened by telephoto perspective: a human being who changed ceaselessly becomes a fixed sum with which to parse all their work; or, worse, each poem must correspond to specific events.To throw a masterwork of ceramics, the potter does not have to achieve near-perfect focus and poise for a life-time, only for a few moments. The poet likewise seeks a particular creative cast unique to each poem, and that cast may bear little resemblance to what we find in biographies and critiques.You can conclude or even know that Auntie Em pined for a particular man, but that won't tell you what was on her mind when she wrote that poem. Science can tell me much about how being human works, but little about what it means. Scientists who forget that do themselves and science a disservice, but the tendency to do so is human, not scientific.P.S. Give it a decade or two and try Em's work again. You might be surprised at how much she will have learned.

Fascinating article, JavaMan. I've always felt that Freud's theories of mind were applicable as descriptions of an obvious dynamic, though he lacked, as the article points out, the technology to delineate biological mechanisms. His descriptions were also flawed by the blinders of his age (and gender), most apparently (to me) in his conclusion that the patients who reported incestuous abuse were not accurately reporting their experiences. Indeed: I'd go further and say a good deal of our mental activity itself is unconscious.My own mind has always been an enigma to me. As a fourth grader, I was selected on the basis of achievement and IQ tests to participate in a program for gifted children that was provoked by Sputnik, funded in a defense act, and clearly aimed at producing scientists with which to combat the Evil Empire (the USSR).We soon realized we were being groomed as weapons and reacted strongly against it--otherwise, I suspect, I would have gravitated to science rather than the humanities. The program ignored class and essentially selected the highest scoring student from each of our city's grade schools; apparently only white kids were eligible.Quite a few of us were from lower income homes. A number of us left behind schools that had decided that our boredom, withdrawal, and behavioral issues indicated retardation: as a fourth grader I was reading at a high school level but labeled a slow learner.We marveled at and puzzled over our new status, trying to find some experiential component to our supposed superiority. We agreed there was no sensation of effort or merit. While we apparently learned more quickly and remembered what we had learned more readily and thoroughly than other kids, there was no conscious participation. Questions elicited answers, but our conscious experience was that of a bystander--the question is put, the answer appears: no sweat, no effort, no conscious identification or involvement with the process.We discussed whether we would surrender enough of our intelligence to rescue another from retardation and leave us average; we talked about how, when we daydreamed (I might call it meditation today, for we all sought thought-less moments as relief from the constant focus on our intellectual gifts), our fixed sense of identity slipped away. What the world most valued about us seemed not to be part of our conscious selves, and for their purposes we could be anyone at all as long as our brains performed; we found that being anyone at all was a sanctuary.The most insightful discussions of consciousness and being I have ever known were with a group of fellow 10-year-olds.We pondered Hell, and how extreme physical pain seemed to overwhelm and erase identity in the same way that stopping thought did; we all struggled with the idea that a punishing God would have to take special care to prevent a conscious identity from crumbling under the weight of torment: either Hell destroyed your identity, in which case God was eternally tormenting an empty shell, or God supernaturally preserved your identity in order to torment you eternally. Neither possibility brought us to a closer walk with Jesus.We did, of course, discover Freud. I recall with some embarrassment finding a passage that described some of the impulses and drives Freud felt were normal for all females--we would ask the girls if they were normal, then howl in delight when they cautiously supposed they were.But Freud's focus on the unconscious intrigued us all because it described our dilemma. Our experiences conformed to his theories: urges--sexual, aggressive--that came from who knew where, and cognitive processes that whirred along like little motors without requiring our participation. Our minds chattered along incessantly about both, but when we floated out into our "daydreams" we found a spacious sense of being that was free of them, and we spent long hours talking about what this could mean.We were also sent once a week to Bible school in an office trailer parked nearby but off school grounds (I gather this was a recent separation meant to satisfy the law). We learned a great deal there about the godless evil of communism. I discovered Buddhist texts and brought them along with great excitement at finding experiences and considerations of consciousness that so paralleled our own; I was suspended briefly for refusing to leave those books at home. Eventually we refused to attend the Bible trailer, and those classes were abandoned.We are, I think, natural explorers of our own consciousness. It takes considerable effort to stop or control this exploration, at considerable expense to the children who are stopped from wondering about and inspecting their own minds. Of our original class of 10, two became high school suicides, two experienced high school "nervous breakdowns," and most of us became cultural and religious rebels later.We had considerable interest in science but turned away from it in reaction to our assigned path as rocket scientists or nuke designers. The program had taken a group of bright children and shocked them awake to the big questions of consciousness and identity, and in so doing largely defeated its own purpose of producing weapon-minds.To return to topic(!), militarization of science and the regimentation of philosophical/religous thought estranged us from science and traditional religious belief alike. I'm sure a Freudian could do a delightful precis of this process in terms of Id, Ego and Superego, and it would be descriptively accurate as far as it went, but it would deal less well with that daydream of universal being, that refuge of stopped thought we discovered.Science and art are sisters in wonder. Any cultural divide between science and the humanities (loosely termed) is, I think, not so much the fault of science as the political and social agenda of empire, appropriating science for physical power on the one hand, and the humanities for political/propaganda utility on the other. Much turning away from traditional religious belief has more to do with the tendency of religious institutions to hear only voices of power than any corrosive effect from science: Christianity and militarized science got along quite well in those days.

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When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.Wilfred Owen Save lives! Click here!
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Gee, Schraf, last time I saw you the subject was breasts! I've heard the above theory, and it makes some sense in terms of sexual display. But if that were the case, then why would Africans generally regard breasts as "mommy parts"?--bipedalism long predates any African diaspora, so any cleavage-as-butt-crack response would have evolved there first.I think it's more likely--or at least partly--cultural. Ancient cultures by and large were more nonchalant about bare breasted women. I suspect the repressive mores and fashions of pre-modern centuries helped to sexualize the breast.Besides, in my manly heart, I know that boobies are not booties, and a shapely bootie is more important to female attractiveness than an ample bosom.

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You lost me there, Schraf.

And rightly so.