Summer XIX. Literary associations

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XVIII. English class character

On my breakfast table there is a pot of honey. Not the manufactured stuff sold under that name in shops, but honey of the hive, brought to me by a neighbouring cottager whose bees often hum in my garden. It gives, I confess, more pleasure to my eyes than to my palate; but I like to taste of it, because it is honey.

There is as much difference, said Johnson, between a lettered and an unlettered man as between the living and the dead; and, in a way, it was no extravagance. Think merely how one’s view of common things is affected by literary associations. What were honey to me if I knew nothing of Hymettus and Hybla? -- If my mind had no stores of poetry, no memories of romance? Suppose me town-pent, the name might bring with it some pleasantness of rustic odour; but of what poor significance even that, if the country were to me mere grass and corn and vegetables, as to the man who has never read nor wished to read. For the Poet is indeed a Maker: above the world of sense, trodden by hidebound humanity, he builds that world of his own whereto is summoned the unfettered spirit...

Alpha.

I do wish he wouldn't use the word "cottager" quite so much. I suppose the word didn't then have it's current "urban" sense.

This section is particularly truncated because his literary references happen to not mean much to me. But I take his point. I might substitute The Cobb at Lyme Regis -- which plays such a crucial role in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It would be worth a visit, if you were at Lyme, in any case but the association with Austen would make it much more than just a quaint construction of old stone extending into the sea. Not only is there the association with the novel, but one assumes Miss. Austen herself must have been there at some point.

But honey... I rather think honey, and especially local honey, can stand on it’s own. I have a hard time imagining a poem that could make pesto or a buttery, garlicky pasta sauce taste any better. The descriptions of food in Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes inevitably make me hungry, but I can’t say they “inform” my experience of foods similar to the ones she describes. Though that is not entirely fair since there is too much of a difference between what she describes and what I can actually find. It would also help if I were twelve.

That tree falling in the woods.

This morning I was thinking about the old question of the unobserved philosophical tree falling in the woods. The original idea was that what we mean by “a sound” is not sound waves generated by a tree falling but the perception of those sound waves by a brain connected to the right kind of sound wave detection equipment. Without that equipment and the right connections, you won’t hear the sound. It is also possible to “hear” a sound without sound waves being involved if your brain is playing tricks with you or, presumably, if it was directly stimulated in the proper way. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, mentions, without going into much detail, his theory that bats “see” sound. He also writes about the astonishing ability of dogs to distinguish slightly different chemical molecules with their sense of smell. What if an animal could “see” with it’s nose? Synesthesia teaches us that the correlation of our senses and what they sense is not as direct as we usually think. We now know that our senses are limited -- Dawkins likens our vision to the slit in a burka with almost all of the electromagnetic spectrum being invisible to us -- and that what we do see is filtered by our brains. What we see is, to a large extent, what we need to see to survive, not what is really “there.”

Once again the perceptions that we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues -- what philosophers call qualia -- have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially salient to the animal concerned. In our case, or that of a bird, that means light of different wavelengths. In a bat’s case, I have speculated, it might be surfaces of different echoic properties or textures, perhaps red for shiny, blue for velvety, green for abrasive. And in a dog’s or a rhino’s case, why should it not be smells? The power to imagine the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle, is one of the privileges science grants us when it tugs at the black cloth of our burka and shows us the wider range of what is out there for our delight.

Suppose this is true. Suppose a bat experienced a tree falling as a flash of light either illuminating everything around it or temporarily blinding the bat. Would the tree have made a sound? Which brings us back to Phenomenology and Quantum Idealism again. From the perspective of Quantum Idealism, we have to ask a different question: Does the un-perceived tree in the forest even exist? From Husserl’s perspective we can’t say anything about the tree anyway. I suspect Husserl would say the falling “tree” does not make “a sound”.

But if the universe is, in a very real sense, consciousness, then there is no such thing as an unperceived tree falling. The particles (strings?) of the tree are linked to everything else in an essential way. The universe registers, in a small way, the falling of the tree. But does that falling tree make a sound?

This is why people ask me, “What are you thinking about?” at their peril.

Next: Summer XX. Jubilee + The Cat.