'A Song of Enchantment'
by Walter De la Mare (1873 - 1956)
A Song of Enchantment I sang me there,
In a green-green wood, by waters fair,
Just as the words came up to me
I sang it under the wild wood tree.
Widdershins turned I, singing it low,
Watching the wild birds come and go;
No cloud in the deep dark blue to be seen
Under the thick-thatched branches green.
Twilight came; silence came;
The planet of Evening's silver flame;
By darkening paths I wandered through
Thickets trembling with drops of dew.
But the music is lost and the words are gone
Of the song I sang as I sat alone,
Ages and ages have fallen on me -
On the wood and the pool and the elder tree.
====
Libera: 'A Song of Enchantment':
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 - 1831). 'The Science of Logic'.
By way of an intermission:
Re-enchanting the World - Hegel’s Idea of Nature and J.G. Ballard’s 'The Drowned World' and 'The Drought'.
I am copying here almost verbatim from an article I wrote some years ago when I knew less about Hegel so I have updated some of it. Well, copying from yourself isn't plagiarism is it? This was the first time I interpreted works of literature through an Hegelian lens, a very glorious lens to be looking through. I am at present interpreting James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' seen through an Hegelian lens.
J.G. Ballard, (1930 – 2009), conceded in an interview that 'The Drowned World' and The Drought have been criticized for having 'a sort of vacuum at their centre – the character's behaviour superficially, seems to be either passive or meaningless in the context of the events'. Brian Aldiss, (1925 – 2017), has complained that 'the central problem of writing a novel without having the characters pursue any purposeful course of action… is not resolved'. But, Ballard explains, 'they're transformation stories rather than disaster stories', and 'in a novel like The Drowned World…the hero is pursuing a meaningful course of action… the hero, Kerans… decision to stay, to come to terms with the changes taking place within himself, to understand the logic of his relationship with the shifting biological kingdom… is a totally meaningful course of action'. Or, as David Pringle, (1950 - ), puts it, 'the disasters in these novels… are not to be taken too seriously as tales of man against nature; rather, they are about man conspiring with nature for his own ends… the protagonist collaborates with the geophysical changes that are going on, finding in them an analogue to the contents of his own mind'.
If such a relationship between the protagonist's mind and the natural world is to be intelligible, however, a theoretical framework is required. Ballard has argued, in defence of science fiction, that 'however crudely or naively, [it] at least attempts to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness. Such a theoretical framework can be the philosophical approach to nature of the kind that we find in Hegel. An approach that would be inapplicable to other kinds of landscapes. Ballard said of Max Ernst‟s, (1891 – 1976), paintings, 'The Eye of Silence' and 'Europe After the Rain', that 'their clinker-like rocks resemble skeletons from which all organic matter has been leaked, all sense of time. Looking at these landscapes, it's impossible to imagine anything ever happening within them. The neural counterparts of these images must exist within our brains, though it's difficult to guess what purpose they serve'. And Maitland, the protagonist in 'Concrete Island', comes to identify himself with the patch of wasteland on which he is marooned, more and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head:
'Parts of the island dated from well before World War II. The eastern end, below the overpass, was its oldest section, with the churchyard and the ground-courses of Edwardian terraced houses. The breaker's yard and its wrecked cars had been superimposed on the still identifiable streets and alleyways. In the centre of the island were the air-raid shelters among which he was sitting. Attached to these was a later addition, the remains of a Civil Defence post little more than fifteen years old. Maitland climbed down from the shelter. Supported by the grass blades swirling around him like a flock of eager attendants, he hobbled westwards down the centre of the island. He crossed a succession of low walls, partly buried under piles of discarded tyres and worn steel cable. Around the ruin of a former pay-box, Maitland identified the ground-plan of a post-war cinema, a narrow single-storey flea-pit built from cement blocks and galvanized iron. Ten feet away, partly screened by a bank of nettles, steps ran down to a basement. Looking at the shuttered pay-box, Maitland thought unclearly of his own childhood visits to the local cinema, with its endless programmes of vampire and horror movies. More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head. His movement across this forgotten terrain was a Journey not merely through the island's past but through his own. His infantile anger as he shouted aloud for Catherine reminded him of how, as a child, he had once bellowed unwearyingly for his mother while she nursed his younger sister in the next room. For some reason, which he had always resented, she had never come to pacify him, but had let him climb from the empty bath himself, hoarse with anger and surprise'.
- 'Concrete Island'
But this is an island in a sea of insentient tarmac and relentless, fast-moving, malevolently indifferent metal.
I propose to argue that the scientific approach to the natural world is grounded on inadequate metaphysical assumptions, thereby disenchanting nature as it interprets it as intrinsically meaningless. Max Weber, (1864 – 1920), explained in a lecture that it is a characteristic of modernity that one has the knowledge or the belief that if one only wanted to one could find out at any time that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work, but rather that one could in principle master everything through calculation but that means the disenchantment of the world.
'Scientific progress is a fraction, and indeed the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualization to which we have been subjected for thousands of years and which normally provokes extremely negative reactions nowadays. Let us begin by making clear what is meant in practice by this intellectual process of rationalization through science and a science based technology. Does it mean, for example, that each one of us sitting here in this lecture room has a greater knowledge of the conditions determining our lives than an Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless we happen to be physicists, those of us who travel by streetcar have not the faintest idea how that streetcar works. Nor have we any need to know it. It is enough for us to know that we can 'count on' the behaviour of the streetcar. We can base our own behaviour on it. But we have no idea how to build a streetcar so that it will move. The savage has an incomparably greater knowledge of his tools. When we spend money, I would wager that even if there are political economists present in the lecture room, almost every one of them would have a different answer ready to the question of how money manages things so that you can sometimes buy a lot for it and sometimes only a little. The savage knows how to obtain his daily food and what institutions enable him to do so. Thus the growing process of intellectualization and rationalization does not imply a growing understanding of the conditions under which we live. It means something quite different. It is the knowledge or the conviction that if only we wished to understand them we could do so at any time. It means that in principle, then, we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of the world. Unlike the savage for whom such forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control the spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and calculation achieve our ends. This is the primary meaning of the process of intellectualization'.
- Science as a Vocation'
Weber's lecture is composed in three parts, the external conditions of the vocation of science in the context of the increasing rationalization and bureaucratization of the university, the nature of the inner vocation for science given the scientific disenchantment of the world, and the role and value of the vocation of science for life under such conditions of rationalization, bureaucratization, and disenchantment, and each part can be understood as making explicit a given aspect of what it is to engage in scientific work under the conditions of our modern world and at the same time as dispelling certain idols precisely by making explicit the forms of self-deception about the reality of our conditions that are presupposed in constituting these idols as idols, and in this respect the lecture is concerned with cultivating the self-knowledge required by his audience if they are to acknowledge what is entailed by the commitment to scientific work, such clarity is his aim, which is no accident in virtue of it being within the provision of such clarity concerning our possible stances toward and activities within the world that Weber locates the ethical value of scientific work.
Hegel‟s philosophy of nature, grounded on more adequate metaphysical assumptions, re-enchants it, as it theorizes nature upon the basis of a metaphysics that views it as intrinsically rational, and that such a distinctive conception of nature serves to validate the logic of Ballardian inner space albeit Ballard has claimed that 'as much for emblematic purposes as any theoretical... ones I christened the new terrain I wished to explore 'inner space', that psychological domain... where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse'. Nature is given meaning and value: 'the geophysical changes which take place in The Drought [and] The Drowned World… are all positive and good changes… [and] a new kind of logic [is] emerging… to be embraced, or at least held in regard', claims Ballard. And for Hegel with the scientific approach we begin to observe, and we collect data from the multifarious formations and laws of nature, which may be pursued for their own sake into endless detail in all directions; and because we can see no end to this procedure, it leaves us unsatisfied.
'What is nature? It is through the knowledge and the philosophy of nature that we propose to find the answer to this general question. We find nature before us as an enigma and a problem, the solution of which seems to both attract and repel us; it attracts us in that spirit has a presentiment of itself in nature; it repulses us in that nature is an alienation in which spirit does not find itself. From this arose Aristotle's dictum that philosophy has its origin in wonder. We begin to observe, and we collect data from the multifarious formations and laws of nature, which may be pursued for their own sake into endless detail in all directions; and because we can see no end to this procedure, it leaves us unsatisfied. What is more, despite all this wealth of knowledge, the question, 'What is nature?' can always be asked and never completely answered. It remains a problem. When we see nature's processes and transmutations, we want to grasp its simple essence, and force this Proteus to relinquish his transformations, to reveal himself to us, and to speak out; not so that he merely dupes us with an everchanging variety of new forms, but so that he renders himself to consciousness in a more simple way, through language. This quest for being has a multiple meaning. It is merely the matter of a name if we ask, 'What sort of plant is this? If we know the name, it may be a matter of perception. If for example I do not know what a box-compass is, I merely have to get someone to show me the instrument, and then I can say that I know. In the question, 'What is this man?', 'is' refers to his status, but this is not its meaning if we ask, 'What is nature?' The meaning of this question, when we ask it because we want to know what the philosophy of nature is, is the object of this investigation'.
- 'The Philosophy of Nature'
In 'The Drowned World', as global warming melts the ice-caps, and primeval jungles and swamps re-emerge in tropical London, reinstating the ecology of the Triassic age, we find a similar scepticism towards the validity of the scientific outlook, as Kerans, an employee of a mobile testing station studying the new ecosystem, disengages himself from the company of scientists, 'who attempt to understand the changing nature of the world difficult to guess what purpose they serve', explains Ballard. Kerans is a scientist unlike Dr. Nathan in 'The Atrocity Exhibition', the latter 'represent[ing] the safe and sane voice of the sciences. His commentaries are accurate, and he knows what is going on‟. 'On the other hand', Ballard contends, 'reason rationalizes reality for [Dr. Nathan], as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects today about which we should not be reasonable'. That is to say, we should not cling to an outmoded rationalism, of the kind whereby the scientists in 'The Drowned World', like Dr. Bodkin, who in a sense know what is going on, fail to recognize the significance of the transformations presaged by the environmental changes taking place, thereby obscuring the proper concerns that need to be confronted.
Kerans is a scientist who intend to understand the changing nature of the world through a project of mapping the emerging land-masses and lagoons, with no end to their procedure:
'Leaning on the balcony rail, the slack water ten storeys below reflecting his thin angular shoulders and gaunt profile, Kerans watched one of the countless thermal storms rip through a dump of huge horse-tails lining the creek which led out of the lagoon. Trapped by the surrounding buildings and the inversion layers a hundred feet above the water, pockets of air would heat rapidly, then explode upwards like escaping balloons, leaving behind them a sudden detonating vacuum. For a few seconds the steam clouds hanging over the creek dispersed, and a vicious miniature tornado lashed across the 60-feet-high plants, toppling them like matchsticks. Then, as abruptly, the storm vanished and the great columnar trunks subsided among one another in the water like sluggish alligators'.
'Rationalising, Kerans told himself that he had been wise to remain in the hotel-the storms were erupting more and more frequently as the temperature rose-but he knew that his real motive was his acceptance that little now remained to be done. The biological mapping had become a pointless game, the new flora following exactly the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier, and he was sure that no-one at Camp Byrd in Northern Greenland bothered to file his reports, let alone read them. The biological mapping had become a pointless game, the new flora following exactly the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier, and he was sure that no one at Camp Byrd in Northern Greenland bothered to file his reports, let alone read them'.
- 'The Drowned World'
Science increases our understanding of the divergence and processes of nature, but it does not deliver an idea of nature. 'Nature reveals adaptive strategies far more complex than any human mind could devise', according to Glen Love. 'Surely one of the great challenges of literature... is to examine this complexity as it relates to the human lives which it encompasses'. 'Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism', 1996. The natural sciences think in terms of the understanding, that is, undialectically, or in terms of unchanging and uncritical categories. But in order to determine an idea of nature it is necessary that it corresponds to the scheme of things as revealed by reason, which proceeds dialectically, striving for completeness, treating categories as mutable and constantly amending themselves through the resolution of contradictions.
In the absence of such a theory we may find a view of nature that is either anthropomorphic or grounded in an inconsistent mixture of chance and purpose. Frederick Turner, for instance, has said that 'nature is the process of increasing self-reference and self-measurement. Evolution is how nature finds out what it is. In the first moment of the Big Bang it didn't have the faintest idea. It didn't even have the laws to obey. It lucked into the first ones, and has been improvising in the direction of greater definiteness and concreteness ever since'. 'Cultivating the American Garden'. As Andrzej Gasiorek has noted, for Ballard 'the idea that a science focused on external manifestations (climate change, biological mutation, topography) cannot engage with their hidden effects on the psyche is… significant'. Kerans‟ actions, his withdrawal from his fellow scientists, for instance, can thus be seen to be meaningful in the light of dialectically opposed perspectives. Kerans‟ sceptical perspective as to the validity of the scientific outlook, in opposition to a rationalist faith in order and the scientific method represented by Riggs, the military commander, produces a dialectic interplay through which fluid naturalized categories are preserved and changed.
According to Gasiorek, the novel presents this as 'the cornerstone of a superseded modernity'.
'By mutual consent the two biologists had dispensed with the usual pleasantries and small-talk that had sustained them for the first two years during their sessions of cataloguing and slide preparation at the laboratory. This growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune, reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis. Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance'.
- 'The Drowned World'
In preparation for this new environment an entirely different kind of topography of Kerans, emerging naturalized consciousness is required, a more important task than mapping the harbours and lagoons of the external landscape was to chart the ghostly deltas and luminous beaches of the submerged neuronic continents.
'Outside in the lagoon the sounds of Riggs' cutter droned past. Stretching his legs, Kerans walked over to the window, and watched the landing craft swing in a diminishing arc around the base. While it berthed by the jetty Riggs held an informal conference with Macready across the gangway. Several times he pointed to the testing station with his baton, and Kerans assumed that they were preparing to tow the station over to the base. But for some reason the imminent departure left him unmoved. Bodkin's speculations, however nebulous, and his new psychology of Neuronics, offered a more valid explanation for the metamorphosis taking place in his mind than any other. The tacit assumption made by the UN directorate-that within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions-was obviously fallacious, as the mounting flood-water and temperature would show when they reached the so-called polar redoubts. A more important task than mapping the harbours and lagoons of the external landscape was to chart the ghostly deltas and luminous beaches of the submerged neuronic continents'.
- 'The Drowned World'
That is to say, nature is modelled on mind, and mind is modelled on nature, though for Roger Luckhurst 'the lagoons (mark) the erasure of a determinable line between literal landscape and its 'metaphorical' resonances', corresponding to the Hegelian project whereby, as Stone explains, nature is understood 'as a sequence of forms of thought which are instantiated in, or combined with, matter in increasingly harmonious ways... [and] each stage in this sequence is the necessary consequence of the previous stage and, specifically, as its rationally necessary consequence, since each stage resolves the contradiction in the one before it'. That is, natural forms are to be described in 'specifically philosophical terms, as constellations of concept/matter relations', as opposed to Anaxagoras', (c. 500 – c. 428 BC), idea of a 'mind [that] arranged everything' as Jonathan Barnes put it. Socrates, (c. 470–399 BC), as recorded by Plato 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) noted, Anaxagoras 'made no [causal] use of Mind', rather, material causes are adduced, with Mind merely deeming things to be organized in the best possible way, that is, reason is a 'deus ex machina for the making of the world', as Aristotle, (384–322 BC), said. But for Hegel, 'reason 'grounds' nature… not by preceding it in time, but by proving itself logically to be nothing less than nature itself', Stephen Houlgate explains.
For instance, nature first presents itself, as it does in 'The Drowned World', in its externality, we find nature before us as an enigma and a problem, the solution of which seems to both attract and repel us, it attracts us in that spirit has a presentiment of itself in nature; it repulses us in that nature is an alienation in which spirit does not find itself, as Hegel explains, nature as the idea in the form of otherness. Since in nature the idea is as the negative of itself, or is external to itself, nature is not merely external in relation to this idea, but the externality constitutes the determination in which nature as nature exists. The natural form of externality, which in empirical terms is space, however, in itself is the contradiction of indifferent juxtaposition and of continuity devoid of difference. Or, to put it another way, it is internally differentiated, that is, material, and entirely homogeneous, that is, conceptual.
Kerans encounters such a contradiction at the outset of his neuronic odyssey, as he explores the sunken London planetarium, the allure of the water representative of a regression to a pre-conscious state of undifferentiated unity. Strangman, the pirate leader and organizer of the diving expedition, had said 'don‟t try to reach the Unconscious, Kerans; remember it isn‟t equipped to go down that far'. But Kerans' submergence evokes that which Jon Mills describes as „the self-absorption of the natural soul's undifferentiated unity... described by Freud as constituting the conditions for the 'oceanic feeling' – the unbounded, limitless bond with the universal... An ocean is a vast and expansive encompassing body with a seemingly endless surface, below which opens into an underworld of colossal configurations – a dark and interminable void'. As Brian Baker notes, 'Ballard's s.f. is immersed... in Freudian depth-psychology'.
Vangelis: Oceanic: Fields of Coral
But as he imagines he sees, in the cracks in the dome, 'the very configuration of constellations that had encompassed the Earth during the Triassic Period, he ties his air-line tightly on a door handle, possibly an unconscious attempt at suicide, 'determined to engrave the image of the constellations on his retina'. Kerans realizes that he had clung to his previous environment 'like a reluctant embryo to its yoke sac'.
'The shattering of this shell, like the piercing doubts about his true unconscious motives set off by his near drowning in the planetarium, was the necessary spur to action, to his emergence into the brighter day of the interior, archaepsychic sun. Now he would have to go forward. Both the past, represented by Riggs, and the present… no longer offered a viable existence'.
- 'The Drowned World'
Kerans' 'tale of spiritual initiation into the hidden powers of the subconscious', as Michael Delville describes it, thereby involves 'direct correspondences between inner and outer landscapes',given that, for Hegel, natural forms act rationally in a non-conscious way. As Hegel puts it, 'estranged from the Idea, nature is merely the corpse of the understanding. Nature is the Idea, but only implicitly. That was why Schelling called it a petrified intelligence, which others have even said is frozen. God does not remain petrified and moribund however, the stones cry out and lift themselves up to spirit'. As Stone explains: 'Living beings can... be said to act purposively insofar as they act, systematically, in ways that further their interests – without it being necessary that they consciously recognize those interests as purposes'. Environmental philosophers would concur with this. Paul W. Taylor, for instance, has argued that 'something can be in a being's interest and so benefit it, but the being itself might have no interest in it'. Living beings can have interests without consciously entertaining them.
By analogy, it is equally intelligible to say that natural forms act rationally insofar as they act, systematically, in ways that rational requirements dictate – without it being necessary that these forms recognize those requirements at a conscious level. Nature's rationality initially evinces an impotence, which, as Hegel said, 'is to be attributed to its only being able to maintain the determinations of the Notion in an abstract manner, and to its exposing the foundation of the particular to determination from without', there is contingency as well as necessity in nature, that is to say, the rational organization of nature is a non-conscious process engendering more harmonious instances of natural forms, and through an analogous process, exemplified through Kerans' neuronic odyssey, nature becomes no longer impotent, as the notion of better exemplifications, ('The problem with nature; properly explained by the means of modern natural science [is that] nature displays itself to reflection as simply incapable on its own of organizing itself into “better exemplifications' explains Houlgate), come to be comprehended by Kerans, through his non-conscious re-enactment of the history of our collective self-conceptions,(this is a more plausible explanation of Kerans' self-transformation than Gasiorek's invocation of Carl Jung's 'collective unconscious, with 'the archetypes emerg[ing] out of the dark abysm of time'), a history (as Jeanette Baxter puts it, 'in the drowned landscape of Ballard's text, the metaphor of submersion negotiates the complex nature of historical memory') grasped in terms of how identifiable failures (Lieutenant Hardman, the helicopter pilot, exemplifies one such failure, discovered dying by Kerans with burnt-out eyes, 'able to see little more than the dying sun', his 'real personality... now submerged deep within his mind... his external behaviour and responses merely pallid reflections of this'), of earlier self-conceptions have led, inevitably, to a modern self-conception, (a history outlined by Hegel in the section 'Self-Consciousness in 'Phenomenology of Spirit' wherein 'the self and the world are reciprocally related and... knowledge of the one affords knowledge of the other' as Michael Inwood puts it), not only as required by those failures, but also as having revealed itself as the truth.
And as intrinsically beautiful, contrary to Theodor Adorno's assertion that for Hegel 'nothing in the world is worthy of attention except that for which the autonomous subject has itself to thank', resulting in a 'turn against natural beauty…. Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hopes to inculcate'. On the contrary, if beauty has a meaning for us to the extent that it reveals something about what it means to be human, nature, insofar as it implicates and foreshadows Kerans' life, is beautiful, and not merely through disclosing some abstract although trite truth concerning his finite, material embodiment, as, for instance, 'the brevity of the flower's life show[s] us something about the contingency and brevity of our own lives', Houlgate explains.
'That he had travelled over a hundred and fifty miles southward he could tell from the marked rise in temperature. Again the heat had become all-pervading, rising to a hundred and forty degrees, and he felt reluctant to leave the lagoon, with its empty beaches and quiet ring of jungle. For some reason he knew that Hardman would soon die, and that his own life might not long survive the massive unbroken jungles to the south. Half asleep, he lay back thinking of the events of the past years that had culminated in their arrival at the central lagoons and launched him upon his neuronic odyssey, and of Strangman and his insane alligators, and, with a deep pang of regret and affection, holding her memory clearly before his mind as long as he could, of Beatrice and her quickening smile. At last he tied the crutch to his leg again, and with the butt of the empty.45 scratched on the wall below the window, sure that no-one would ever read the message: 27th day. Have rested and am moving south. All is well. Kerans'.
'So he left the lagoon and entered the jungle again, within a few days was completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun'.
- 'The Drowned World'
This is in effect a conceptual suicide, Kerans' self-conception obtaining priority over its instantiation in material form, whereby nature has found its consummation in living being, and has made its peace by shifting into a higher sphere.The purpose of nature is to extinguish itself, and to break through its rind of immediate and sensuous being, to consume itself like a Phoenix, in order to emerge from this externality rejuvenated as spirit.
'This is the transition from natural being into spirit; nature has found its consummation in living being, and has made its peace by shifting into a higher sphere. Spirit has therefore issued forth from nature. The purpose of nature is to extinguish itself, and to break through its rind of immediate and sensuous being, to consume itself like a Phoenix in order to emerge from this externality rejuvenated as spirit. Nature has become distinct from itself in order to recognize itself again as Idea, and to reconcile itself with itself. To regard spirit thus, as having come forth from implicitness, and as having become a mere being-for-self, is however a onesided view. Nature is certainly that which is immediate, but as that which is distinct from spirit, it is nevertheless merely a relativity. As the negative of spirit, it is therefore merely a posited being. It is the power of free spirit which sublates this negativity; spirit is nature's antecedent and to an equal extent its consequent, it is not merely the metaphysical Idea of it. It is precisely because spirit constitutes the end of nature, that it is antecedent to it. Nature has gone forth from spirit; it has not done this empirically however, for while it presupposes nature, it is already constantly contained within it. In its infinite freedom however, spirit allows nature freedom, and opposes it by exhibiting within it the action of the Idea, as an inner necessity; just as a free man is certain that his action constitutes the activity of the world. Spirit itself therefore, proceeding forth in the first instance from immediate being, but then abstractly apprehending itself, wants to liberate itself by fashioning nature from within itself; this action of spirit is philosophy'.
- 'The Philosophy of Nature'
___________________________________________
====
'Marey’s Chronograms. Dr Nathan passed the illustration across his desk to Margaret Travis. ‘Marey’s Chronograms are multiple-exposure photographs in which the element of time is visible - the walking human figure, for example, is represented as a series of dune-like lumps.’ Dr Nathan accepted a cigarette from Catherine Austin, who had sauntered forward from the incubator at the rear of the office. Ignoring her quizzical eye, he continued, ‘Your husband’s brilliant feat was to reverse the process. Using a series of photographs of the most commonplace objects - this office, let us say, a panorama of New York skyscrapers, the naked body of a woman, the face of a catatonic patient - he treated them as if they already were chronograms and extracted the element of time.’ Dr Nathan lit his cigarette with care. ‘The results were extraordinary. A very different world was revealed. The familiar surroundings of our lives, even our smallest gestures, were seen to have totally altered meanings. As for the reclining figure of a film star, or this hospital . . . ’
‘Was my husband a doctor, or a patient?’ Dr Nathan nodded sagely, glancing over his fingertips at Catherine Austin. What had Travis seen in those time-filled eyes? ‘Mrs Travis, I’m not sure the question is valid any longer. These matters involve a relativity of a very different kind. What we are concerned with now are the implications - in particular, the complex of ideas and events represented by World War III. Not the political and military possibility, but the inner identity of such a notion. For us, perhaps, World War III is now little more than a sinister pop art display, but for your husband it has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space. Dr Austin may disagree, but it seems to me that his intention is to start World War III, though not, of course, in the usual sense of the term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’
Zoom Lens. Dr Nathan stopped. Reluctantly, his eyes turned across the room to the portrait camera mounted on its tripod by the consulting couch. How could he explain to this sensitive and elusive woman that her own body, with its endlessly familiar geometry, its landscapes of touch and feeling, was their only defence against her husband’s all-too-plain intentions? Above all, how could he invite her to pose for what she would no doubt regard as a set of obscene photographs?
...........
'Einstein.‘The notion that this great Swiss mathematician is a pornographer may strike you as something of a bad joke,’ Dr Nathan remarked to Webster. ‘However, you must understand that for Traven science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography. How different from Lautreamont, who brought together the sewing machine and the umbrella on the operating table, identifying the pudenda of the carpet with the woof of the cadaver.’ Dr Nathan turned to Webster with a smile. ‘One looks forward to the day when the General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back-street bookshops.’
...........
Annotation:
'Fake Newsreels. Bizarre experiments are now a commonplace of scientific research, moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science is itself the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc., will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in 1940s wildlife documentary films'.
- 'The Atrocity Exhibition'
++++
Asylums with doors open wide
Where people had paid to see inside
For entertainment they watch his body twist
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist'
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
In arenas he kills for a prize
Wins a minute to add to his life
But the sickness is drowned by cries for more
Pray to God, make it quick, watch him fall
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
You'll see the horrors of a faraway place
Meet the architects of law face to face
See mass murder on a scale you've never seen
And all the ones who try hard to succeed
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
This is the way, step inside
And I picked on the whims of a thousand or more
Still pursuing the path that's been buried for years
All the dead wood from jungles and cities on fire
Can't replace or relate, can't release or repair
Take my hand and I'll show you what was and will be
Joy Division, 'The Atrocity Exhibition':
___________________________________________
The protagonist of The Drought, which tells of the aftermath of an extensive drought that has dried up the rivers and turned the earth to dust, causing the populace to head toward the beach in search of water, similarly embraces the new reality emerging around him, thereby pronouncing 'his involvement with the changing role of the landscape and river, their metamorphosis in time and memory'.
'Throughout the long summer Ransom had watched the river shrinking, its countless associations fading as it narrowed into a shallow creek. Above all, Ransom was aware that the role of the river in time had changed. Once it had played the part of an immense fluid clock, the objects immersed in it taking up their positions like the stations of the sun and planets. The continued lateral movements of the river, its rise and fall and the varying pressures on the hull, were like the activity within a vast system of evolution, whose cumulative forward flow was as irrelevant and without meaning as the apparently linear motion of time itself. The real movements were those random and discontinuous relationships between the objects within it, those of himself and Mrs Quilter, her son and the dead birds and fish'.
'With the death of the river, so would vanish any contact between those stranded on the drained floor. For the present the need to find some other measure of their relationships would be concealed by the problems of their own physical survival. None the less, Ransom was certain that the absence of this great moderator, which cast its bridges between all animate and inanimate objects alike, would prove of crucial importance. Each of them would soon literally be an island in an archipelago drained of time'.
- 'The Drought'
But as the novel ends, with Ransom setting out on the next phase of his journey of self-transformation, his remissness in noticing the arrival of rain would seem to suggest that the inner landscape purports a greater significance: 'An immense pall of darkness lay over the dunes, as if the whole exterior world were losing its existence'. But The Drought is, in fact, another tale of positive self-negation, as Ransom achieves a 'final rest from the persistence of memory' through 'his absolution in time', a process ('That which is not in time is without process' says Hegel) that again can be interpreted in Hegelian terms, in particular, through the natural form of negativity, (in empirical terms this is time), the rationally necessary solution to the contradiction inherent in externality, that is, its homogeneity and internal differentiation, whereby externality 'is the pure negativity of itself, and the initial transition into time', as Hegel explains. However, there is one side of the temporal process that Hegel designates mortal moments of mutability, whereby mediocrity endures, and finally governs the world. Thought also displays this mediocrity, with which it pesters the world about it, and which survives by extinguishing spiritual liveliness and turning it into flat formality. It endures precisely because it rests in untruth, never acquires its right, fails to honour the Notion, and never realizes the process of the truth within it.
'The most imperfect endures, because it is an abstract universality, such as space, and time itself; the sun, the elements, stones, mountains, inorganic nature in general, as well as works of man such as pyramids, have a barren duration. That which endures is regarded more highly than that which soon passes, but all blossom, all that is exquisite in living being, dies early. The most perfect also endures however, not only in the lifeless inorganic universal, but also in the other inherently concrete universal of the genus, the law, the idea, and the spirit. We have to decide whether something is the whole process, or merely one moment of it. As law, the universal is also inherently a process, and lives only as process; but it is not part of the process, it is not within the process, it contains its double aspect, and is itself without process. In its phenomenal aspect, law falls within time, because the moments of the Notion show themselves as independent; but in their Notion the excluded differences reconcile and relate themselves, and are harmoniously reassimilated. The Idea or spirit is above time, because it is itself the Notion of time; in and for itself it is eternal and unbreached by time, because it does not lose itself in its own side of the process. This is not the case with the individual as such, on one side of which is the genus; the finest life is that which completely unites its individuality and the universal into one form. The individual is not then the same as the universal however, and is therefore one side of the process, or mutability, in accordance with which mortal moment it falls within time. Achilles, the flower of Greek life, and the infInitely powerful personality of Alexander the Great, are no more, and only their deeds and influences remain through the world that they have brought into being. Mediocrity endures, and finally governs the world. Thought also displays this mediocrity, with which it pesters the world about it, and which survives by extinguishing spiritual liveliness and turning it into flat formality. It endures precisely because it rests in untruth, never acquires its right, fails to honour the Notion, and never realizes the process of the truth within it'.
- 'The Philosophy of Nature'
Such mortal moments suffuse the narrative of 'The Drought'. With 'the death of the river' the populace withdraws into isolation in order to focus on survival, 'each of them... an island in an archipelago drained of time', with 'too many people now living out their own failures... the secret appeal of this drought', said by the Reverend Johnstone, who 'impos[es] his own fantasies on the changing landscape'. The exposed lake-bed engenders a feeling, in the zoologist Catherine Austen, 'that everything is being drained away, all the memories and stale sentiments'. The characters in 'The Drought' are drained of all sense of time and personal identity because, as J. G. Whitrow has said, 'mind is essentially temporal in nature', and 'memory is the means by which the record of our vanished past survives 'within' us, and this is the basis of our consciousness of self-identity'.
And after a decade's survival on the beach, that 'zone of nothingness', all manifestations of identity have also drained away:
'The atmosphere in the settlement was drab and joyless... [which] reflected the gradual attrition of life, the slow reduction of variety and movement as the residues of their past lives, the only materials left to them, sank into the sterile dunes. This sense of diminishing possibility, of the erosion of all time and space beyond the flaccid sand and draining beaches, numbed Ransom's mind'.
- 'The Drought'
'The Madwoman', 1905, Giacomo Balla
Ransom ponders 'what his own role might become, and the real nature of the return of the desert to the land'.
But although 'the crying land' endeavours to communicate its malaise, the worldwide drought having been caused by industrial pollution of the seas. The world is burning, a 'sphere of fire, which is the realization of the individuality of fire, together with its counterpart, the combustible substance' to quote Hegel, that is, the world, the combustible substance, is 'neither an undifferentiated substance... nor a positive substance only to be limited by differentiation, but which is rather an implicit negativity. Fire itself may be regarded as time in action, and this negativity as inwardly realized as dormant time'. Hegel's identification of fire with time is inspired by Heraclitus: 'To Heraclitus the truth is to have grasped the essential being of nature, i.e., to have represented it as implicitly infinite, a process in itself... fire is process... this is the real form of the Heraclitean principle, the soul and substance of the nature-process'.
The message of the landscape in its externality is unreadable. As Hegel argues, 'in nature, the unity of the Notion conceals itself ... Nature is self-alienated spirit; spirit, a bacchantic god innocent of restraint and reflection has merely been let loose into it'. In 'The Drought' 'the dead trees', for instance, are forming 'brittle ciphers on the slopes'. But what can be read by Ransom is the landscape in its negativity, the mutability manifest in the crippled Vanessa Johnstone's 'blanched features', for instance, from which 'all pain and memories had been drained', engendering a realization in Ransom that 'the past no longer existed. From now on [he] would both have to create [his] own sense of time out of the landscape emerging around [him]'.
This proves to be another side of the temporal process, that is, 'time as the negative unit of self-externality, is also purely abstract and of an ideal nature. It is the being which in that it is, is not, and in that it is not, is. It is intuited becoming' as Hegel explains. Ransom abandons his 'first hopes of isolating himself among the wastes of the new desert, putting an end to time and its erosions', embracing 'a very different kind of time [that] was being imposed upon them', as he leads a 'long journey up the river... an expedition into his own future, into a world of volitional time where the images of the past were reflected free from the demands of memory and nostalgia', and free from the dried-out solutions, 'the extinction of spiritual liveliness', of the beach populace, towards a superior state of awareness of the ideal nature of universal time. Like Kerans, he thereby honours the idea of nature, having intuited the process of truthwithin it: 'To his surprise he noticed that he no longer cast any shadow on to the sand, as if he had at last completed his journey across the margins of the inner landscape he had carried in his mind for so many years'.
The significance of nature in 'The Drowned World' and 'The Drought' cannot, therefore, be limited to that which can be determined about it in scientific terms, although, as Hegel himself said, any philosophy of nature has to confront nature‟s „contingency, caprice and lack of order… [its] inability… to hold fast to the realization of the Notion'. For this reason the foregoing analysis may appear paradoxical, in that nature, the natural form of negativity, for instance, is not explicitly self-determining reason, but rather immediate existence. Dana Phillips is therefore incorrect in his assertion that 'notoriously, 'nature' is one of philosophy's least precise and most contested terms', treated 'like the other terms they use in their arguments... like 'being'.'
Thus universal time, or eternity, is unendingly present, as an alternative to Ransom's particular time, or mutability, his dead past, his arid present. But then, Ballard is 'a writer of texts', as Luckhurst has said, 'that lure theoretical framings only to throw them in question in enlightening ways'.
'The storm had subsided the next morning, and Ransom made his farewells to Quilter and Miranda. Leaving the house, he waved to the children who had followed him to the gate, and then walked down the avenue to his former home. Nothing remained except the stumps of the chimneys, but he rested here for an hour before continuing on his way'.
'He crossed the rubble and went down to the river, then began to walk along the widening mouth towards the lake. Smoothed by the wind, the white dunes covered the bed like motionless waves. He stepped among them, following the hollows that carried him out of sight of the shore. The sand was smooth and unmarked, gleaming with the bones of untold numbers of fish'.
'The height of the dunes steadily increased, and an hour later the crests were almost twenty feet above his head. Although it was not yet noon, the sun seemed to be receding into the sky, and the air was becoming colder. To his surprise he noticed that he no longer cast any shadow on to the sand, as if he had at last completed his journey across the margins of the inner landscape he had carried in his mind for so many years. The light failed, and the air grew darker. The dust was dull and opaque, the crystals in its surface dead and clouded. An immense pall of darkness lay over the dunes, as if the whole of the exterior world were losing its existence'.
'It was some time later that he failed to notice it had started to rain'.
- 'The Drought'
___________________________________________
‘Légèreté de Rose’, 1915/16, Giacomo Balla
Dedicated to my lovely One. Our River of Love will never run dry. 🌹
Oh my father, he was born beneath the water
And my mother, she was born to no one's daughter
And I, I was born beneath the dying sun
Born from the mouth of a river that would not run dry
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la lie
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la lie
Oh, the river that runs with love, it won't run dry
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la lie
Well, I awoke this morning in the blackest night
And a million stars were aching in the sullen sky
And I heard the great machines as they bled and cried
And I saw the end of the world, I had no question why
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la lie
La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la lie
Hold on to the one you love and kiss her before she dies
Oh, the river that runs with love, it won't run dry
Oh, my father made the water when he cried
But the river that runs with love, it won't run dry
And the sun will burn a hole in the purple sky
But the river that runs with love, it won't run dry
Coming up next:
Finite mechanics: Inertia, Impact, Fall.
To be continued...