Metalogue: Persistent Shade (MCB)
FATHER: Still awake and working?
DAUGHTER: How about you? You‘re a remarkably persistent shade, you know. Sometimes I wish you were properly dead.
FATHER: As well you might. Certainly I always argued that the civilization is in trouble unless we can accept the fact of our dying. But such immortality as we have is in our ideas, which is why I left you the chore of finishing this book.
DAUGHTER: And a nasty, manipulative trick it was, too. A kind of huge lever to pry me away from other kinds of work. But you know what really bothers me as I work on this? It‘s the mediocrity of what gets attributed to ghosts ad séances, as if vivid and splendid people went into a mode of being that thins them out to banality. That‘s what I want to avoid. Incidentally, an excess of piety doesn‘t help. And the I‘m going to close up shop. At least among the New Guinea Manus the Sir Ghost dwindles away and finally floats out to sea, after running everyone‘s life for a generation or so.
FATHER: I told you about that psychic that turned up at Esalen, didn‘t I, who would go into a trance and paint and sign mediocre Monets?
DAUGHTER: Quite. A friend of mine has a room in her house where Margaret used to stay, where people still report dreams of Margaret. They dream that she comes and tells them to get on with the job, finish the research, take up some responsibility. She bullies them, as, of course, she would have, but they don‘t dream the other side of it, the way she would have coaxed them into clarity and awareness of the next step.
FATHER: Hmm. Ever sleep there?
DAUGHTER: Yes, but I had other things on my mind and she didn‘t turn up in my dreams. Anyhow, she has lost her otherness for me, so I no longer think of her as a vis-à-vis. But you have always had a quality of otherness. Strange.
FATHER: Yes, well, you can‘t get around the unconscious. I never quite managed to lay my father‘s ghost, but, of course, it made me rethink the nature of evolution.
DAUGHTER: That‘s a pretty one, because you picked up the new dialogue with your father with the paper about beetle teratology. W.B. had discovered that when a beetle has a freak extra leg, what it has is two legs in place of one, one a right leg and one a left leg, "Bateson‘s rule." And what you discovered was that this represented not the addition of an extra degree of bilateral symmetry, but a loss, the loss at some stage of epigenesis of the information needed to determine the asymmetry of right or left in the instruction to grow a leg in that particular position. And that was critical for you in the whole move to thinking about Creatura, the biological world, as the world of information.
FATHER: Cap, I don‘t think I ever told you about –
DAUGHTER: No, but that you cannot do. You cannot provide new pieces to the puzzle. I can pull some out of tapes of yours that I never heard or writing I haven‘t read, or I can get pieces from my experience, often experience that has nothing at all to do with you. But maybe you can remind me of pats of the argument that I have heard somewhere along the line, and I can do what I have done before pulling them together and making connections that were never made. A lot of that happened at the Wenner-Gren conference, where I made a book
by drawing the connections between pieces of thinking that the participants had perceived as disparate, even as dissonant. I had an image once, of the "angel" of Angels Fear, as a nude male figure (because, after all, the unconscious is always up to all sort of other business) marked with points of light, like the diagram of a constellation. That‘s what you can do with this whole body of ideas I‘m trying to work with – you can point to a symmetry here, an asymmetry there, a gracefulness in the predestined curve of the spine, even though your own spine was all squunched over in the effort to conceal your height in your youth.
FATHER: Yes, well. It‘s all in the connections. It is, after all, a tautology that we are trying to map out.
DAUGHTER: So it will all in the end seem as simple as "If P, then P"?
FATHER: There are the basic ideas, which are probably mathematical in form and which are necessarily true but need to be discovered, and there are the connections between them. And there are the bits of data that allow you to see the connections when you try to map them onto the necessary truths. A beetle, perhaps. I wish you had gone on in maths instead of getting distracted by all that nonsense about the Middle East and academic administration.
DAUGHTER: Mmm. You‘re a bit of a bully in your own way, you know. And sometimes I have this image of, say, Euclid – not the real Euclid, who probably existed but built on the work of others, but a sort of mythical Euclid, who might have worked out the whole of the Books – and one of his disciples comes up to him and says, very proudly, "Look, I‘ve worked out three new theorems." And Euclid says, "Yes, that’s all in there. You have recognized something that was there, in the axioms, all along." And then the theorems are just stitched into the whole. Well, you see, they aren‘t new theorems, the theorems are immanent in the axioms. That‘s how the whole business grows.
FATHER: NO, no, that‘s exactly the point. Growing is precisely what a tautology doesn‘t do. Theorems may get added but there is nothing new in them. They are only the same old axioms and definitions blown up bigger and recombined. The Pythagoras theorem is all there in the axioms. Mathematicians spend their lives trying to show that there is nothing new – trying to "prove" the four-color theorem – trying to reduce it to fit the axioms. No "self-evident" propositions – but self-evident links. The essential requirement of tautology is that the links between the propositions shall be empty – i.e. shall contain no information about the subject of discourse.
DAUGHTER: I tell you it grows.
FATHER: No! The hole idea that the axioms shall not grow!
DAUGHTER: All right. Don‘t shout at me. So the axioms and stuff don‘t grow. But in that sense a seed does not grow. It only gets blown up, as you call it; and its DNA consists of commands or "injunctions" that tell the embryo – the seedling – how to grow. Isn‘t it the same with the tautology? The axioms telling the tautology how to grow?
FATHER: All right. In that sense, yes. The seedling doesn‘t add anything new as it grows – or not much …
DAUGHTER: So now I start thinking of myself as a gardener. A gardener with a word processor. You know what your problem is? You may not believe in the existence of ghosts, but you do believe in the existence of ideas. Bloody hovering.
FATHER: Hmm,
DAUGHTER: You know, you never gave me the good lines when you were writing the metalogues.
FATHER: There‘s still the other problem for Angels Fear, the problem of the misuse of ideas. The engineers get hold of them. Look at the whole god-awful business of family therapy, therapists making "paradoxical interventions" in order to change people or families, or counting "double binds." You can‘t count double binds.
DAUGHTER: No, I know, because double binds have to do with the social contextual structure, so that a given instance of double binding that you might notice in a therapy session is one tip of an iceberg whose basic structure is the whole life of the family. But you can‘t stop people from trying to count double binds. This business of breaking up process into entities is pretty fundamental to human perception. Maybe correcting for it will turn out to be part of what religion is all about. But you became so grumpy about it, and rather nasty to people who admired you immensely.
FATHER: I kept trying to get people to think straight, Cap, to clean up their premises.
DAUGHTER: It looks like possessiveness. And just as you can‘t count double binds, you really can‘t own ideas. Look, I just saw a connection, I think. You know how you were always asking audiences to look at their hands – how many fingers do you have? Or, perhaps you have not five fingers but four relations between fingers?
FATHER: And then I suggested that might make them think rather differently about possessiveness. How do you won an idea, a relationship?
DAUGHTER: See, what I think is going on is the same process that produces the monstrous beetles with extra limbs, the same thing is creating a monstrousness in the family-therapy industry, and other places too. Some of the information has been lost, an essential part of the idea. Now that‘s useful. Instead of scolding those who have to work out their epigenesis with essential ideas or connections missing, we can try to identify the missing pieces. At least leave them with the right questions. Maybe Angels can help on that.
FATHER: When you start talking abut being useful, you sound like your mother. I‘m going to take a nape and let you get back to work. Good oatmeal they have here in Hades, but the coffee is pretty dreadful.
FATHER: Still awake and working?
DAUGHTER: How about you? You‘re a remarkably persistent shade, you know. Sometimes I wish you were properly dead.
FATHER: As well you might. Certainly I always argued that the civilization is in trouble unless we can accept the fact of our dying. But such immortality as we have is in our ideas, which is why I left you the chore of finishing this book.
DAUGHTER: And a nasty, manipulative trick it was, too. A kind of huge lever to pry me away from other kinds of work. But you know what really bothers me as I work on this? It‘s the mediocrity of what gets attributed to ghosts ad séances, as if vivid and splendid people went into a mode of being that thins them out to banality. That‘s what I want to avoid. Incidentally, an excess of piety doesn‘t help. And the I‘m going to close up shop. At least among the New Guinea Manus the Sir Ghost dwindles away and finally floats out to sea, after running everyone‘s life for a generation or so.
FATHER: I told you about that psychic that turned up at Esalen, didn‘t I, who would go into a trance and paint and sign mediocre Monets?
DAUGHTER: Quite. A friend of mine has a room in her house where Margaret used to stay, where people still report dreams of Margaret. They dream that she comes and tells them to get on with the job, finish the research, take up some responsibility. She bullies them, as, of course, she would have, but they don‘t dream the other side of it, the way she would have coaxed them into clarity and awareness of the next step.
FATHER: Hmm. Ever sleep there?
DAUGHTER: Yes, but I had other things on my mind and she didn‘t turn up in my dreams. Anyhow, she has lost her otherness for me, so I no longer think of her as a vis-à-vis. But you have always had a quality of otherness. Strange.
FATHER: Yes, well, you can‘t get around the unconscious. I never quite managed to lay my father‘s ghost, but, of course, it made me rethink the nature of evolution.
DAUGHTER: That‘s a pretty one, because you picked up the new dialogue with your father with the paper about beetle teratology. W.B. had discovered that when a beetle has a freak extra leg, what it has is two legs in place of one, one a right leg and one a left leg, "Bateson‘s rule." And what you discovered was that this represented not the addition of an extra degree of bilateral symmetry, but a loss, the loss at some stage of epigenesis of the information needed to determine the asymmetry of right or left in the instruction to grow a leg in that particular position. And that was critical for you in the whole move to thinking about Creatura, the biological world, as the world of information.
FATHER: Cap, I don‘t think I ever told you about –
DAUGHTER: No, but that you cannot do. You cannot provide new pieces to the puzzle. I can pull some out of tapes of yours that I never heard or writing I haven‘t read, or I can get pieces from my experience, often experience that has nothing at all to do with you. But maybe you can remind me of pats of the argument that I have heard somewhere along the line, and I can do what I have done before pulling them together and making connections that were never made. A lot of that happened at the Wenner-Gren conference, where I made a book
FATHER: Yes, well. It‘s all in the connections. It is, after all, a tautology that we are trying to map out.
DAUGHTER: So it will all in the end seem as simple as "If P, then P"?
FATHER: There are the basic ideas, which are probably mathematical in form and which are necessarily true but need to be discovered, and there are the connections between them. And there are the bits of data that allow you to see the connections when you try to map them onto the necessary truths. A beetle, perhaps. I wish you had gone on in maths instead of getting distracted by all that nonsense about the Middle East and academic administration.
DAUGHTER: Mmm. You‘re a bit of a bully in your own way, you know. And sometimes I have this image of, say, Euclid – not the real Euclid, who probably existed but built on the work of others, but a sort of mythical Euclid, who might have worked out the whole of the Books – and one of his disciples comes up to him and says, very proudly, "Look, I‘ve worked out three new theorems." And Euclid says, "Yes, that’s all in there. You have recognized something that was there, in the axioms, all along." And then the theorems are just stitched into the whole. Well, you see, they aren‘t new theorems, the theorems are immanent in the axioms. That‘s how the whole business grows.
FATHER: NO, no, that‘s exactly the point. Growing is precisely what a tautology doesn‘t do. Theorems may get added but there is nothing new in them. They are only the same old axioms and definitions blown up bigger and recombined. The Pythagoras theorem is all there in the axioms. Mathematicians spend their lives trying to show that there is nothing new – trying to "prove" the four-color theorem – trying to reduce it to fit the axioms. No "self-evident" propositions – but self-evident links. The essential requirement of tautology is that the links between the propositions shall be empty – i.e. shall contain no information about the subject of discourse.
DAUGHTER: I tell you it grows.
FATHER: No! The hole idea that the axioms shall not grow!
DAUGHTER: All right. Don‘t shout at me. So the axioms and stuff don‘t grow. But in that sense a seed does not grow. It only gets blown up, as you call it; and its DNA consists of commands or "injunctions" that tell the embryo – the seedling – how to grow. Isn‘t it the same with the tautology? The axioms telling the tautology how to grow?
FATHER: All right. In that sense, yes. The seedling doesn‘t add anything new as it grows – or not much …
DAUGHTER: So now I start thinking of myself as a gardener. A gardener with a word processor. You know what your problem is? You may not believe in the existence of ghosts, but you do believe in the existence of ideas. Bloody hovering.
FATHER: Hmm,
DAUGHTER: You know, you never gave me the good lines when you were writing the metalogues.
FATHER: There‘s still the other problem for Angels Fear, the problem of the misuse of ideas. The engineers get hold of them. Look at the whole god-awful business of family therapy, therapists making "paradoxical interventions" in order to change people or families, or counting "double binds." You can‘t count double binds.
DAUGHTER: No, I know, because double binds have to do with the social contextual structure, so that a given instance of double binding that you might notice in a therapy session is one tip of an iceberg whose basic structure is the whole life of the family. But you can‘t stop people from trying to count double binds. This business of breaking up process into entities is pretty fundamental to human perception. Maybe correcting for it will turn out to be part of what religion is all about. But you became so grumpy about it, and rather nasty to people who admired you immensely.
FATHER: I kept trying to get people to think straight, Cap, to clean up their premises.
DAUGHTER: It looks like possessiveness. And just as you can‘t count double binds, you really can‘t own ideas. Look, I just saw a connection, I think. You know how you were always asking audiences to look at their hands – how many fingers do you have? Or, perhaps you have not five fingers but four relations between fingers?
FATHER: And then I suggested that might make them think rather differently about possessiveness. How do you won an idea, a relationship?
DAUGHTER: See, what I think is going on is the same process that produces the monstrous beetles with extra limbs, the same thing is creating a monstrousness in the family-therapy industry, and other places too. Some of the information has been lost, an essential part of the idea. Now that‘s useful. Instead of scolding those who have to work out their epigenesis with essential ideas or connections missing, we can try to identify the missing pieces. At least leave them with the right questions. Maybe Angels can help on that.
FATHER: When you start talking abut being useful, you sound like your mother. I‘m going to take a nape and let you get back to work. Good oatmeal they have here in Hades, but the coffee is pretty dreadful.
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| Jacques-Louis David, Madame Recamier, 1800. Oil on canvas, 173×243 cm. Paris, Louvre |
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| René Magritte, Perspective I: David’s Madame Recamier, 1950. Oil on canvas, 60×80 cm. Private collection |
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