by Roman McClay
The Forest Service learned that now that the small fire had been doused, the fuel -stored in the over-protected forest- would be used in later, larger, catastrophic conflagrations. The smaller fires had once delayed the larger ones by using up the fuel before the massive fires could burn forever. But with intervention, pacification, meddling by man, the fuel for future burns just stacked up and up and up as the forest grew thick with dead wood and future doom.
Man, to his credit, saw this and backed off of that policy and began letting these smaller, more frequent fires burn themselves out naturally. But, man only sees what he wants to see; and so, man is pragmatic and lacks the poetry of soul necessary to see how metaphor illuminates larger phenomenon. Metaphor is more than cute language, or tricks, or legerdemains . Metaphor is information processed by the other half of your brain; the right hemisphere. It’s like info coded in another language, and it’s a language you ought to learn.
Metaphor and deep semiotics articulate the chaos -i.e., the unknown- that exists in each level of Darwinian instantiation: Self, Culture and Nature. Tropes show us that reality is more than just what’s in man’s hands; or even what’s on his tour d’horizon . In fact -and I wasn’t going to mention this at this time, but- the other thing you need to know about man, is that he is pre-programed to seek out meaning . Well, what does that mean? the reader asks.
It means that life -at the level of the human brain- isn’t merely about survival; that while evolution may only care -metaphorically speaking- about passing on genes; the human mind cares about meaning ; it cares so much that it is incessantly working to figure out what everything means .
And not just what it means when you’re hungry or angry. But, man wonders what it means when he feels certain ideas are important and certain codes and models of conduct within a social environment are important; because remember humans are eusocial, our natural environment is full of people; our environment is people. Men want to know what it all means. What does this society, this tribe, this family mean ?
Humans imbue the wind with intention, the trees with desire, the stars with power. You -and myself to a large degree- are teleologists . And this is useful for us. It works. And anything that works in Darwinian terms is true . Anything that survives for as long as our nervous system has -for millions and millions of years- works, and thus what it wants and gets is ipso facto , true.
Humans must obsess with meaning if they have any hope of navigating the world, especially the real world of our evolutionary pressure, i.e., the world of other people and all that clockworks inside other people and what other people -with their clockworks- think the world means. It’s important to find out what other people are thinking, and feeling, and what they think it all means.
Religion and philosophy and art and storytelling are all apps ; they are all systems of applying meaning to chaotic phenomena and the innate feelings inside most humans which can be just as chaotic at times. How to live in the world isn’t accomplished with more knowledge of the 50 state capitals or the periodic table; it isn’t accomplished by math equations or your engineering degree. How to live in the world is effected, made manifest, accomplished by understanding what it all means, why you’re here, why the people around you are here and what will allow you to live with them; what makes the good life -the good social life- and what manifests the meaning of life. And that meaning is achieved via religion, moral and aesthetic philosophy, art and literature and that -all of that- means story telling.
There isn’t a normal person on the planet, low IQ or high IQ, black or white, Jew or gentile, modern or prehistoric, that doesn’t love a story.
If that story imparts deep, ancient, biological -archetypal- meaning it will be remembered by the brain more easily. Certainly, if that narrative sheds light upon the tenebrous realm between the known aspects of man, culture and nature and the unknown parts of each of those three things, it will resonate with mankind. But the meaning is innate; thus, moral-code is not mere app . The story is the app , the moral code is far, far beneath that. Morality is first, primitive, foundational. Morality is in the math .
The penumbra between order and chaos is the domain of the storyteller. And it’s the locus of meaning -the battlefield where man’s unavoidable war is fought- and so, all but the hopeless and shallow and clueless pragmatic man -all humans besides that sorry creature- want and need the meaning of stories in order to survive; for their soul -the only thing real anyway- to survive.
This is what a liberal arts education used to impart; it’s why we read Shakespeare and Seneca and Melville and Ms. Flannery O’Connor . These stories -along with the Sagas , the story of Job and the Analects of Confucius - give life meaning and help humans discover how to live in the world; almost anyone can get a job and survive in the modern world; but how many of you are actually human; how many of you know how to be an actual citizen, tribesman, with depth of character and heart and soul; know how to treat people and how to treat yourself? Yeah, not nearly as many of you as you think.
The pragmatic man only concerns himself with what works and what’s useful in a surface domain; what helps him make money or get laid or get the stain out of his tie. This man, the average man, rebukes the Artist, the Philosopher, the Gods, if they whisper into his average ear: hey, maybe it isn’t merely forest fires that follow this power law, this fractal math, this clockworks .
Maybe , the man of artful language and a strong soul, knowing he will get nothing but resistance from his audience, maybe , he says, maybe mankind is just like that forest fire, and putting out all these little fires in the hearts of man may seem to keep order, seem to protect us all from the wildfires of man’s passions, but all it’s doing is eliminating natural borders between men, breathing space, and allowing the kindling, the underbrush, the fuel of weak beings that link tree to tree, man to man to man from one coastline to the next, allowing it to build up and offer itself up to a long delayed but catastrophic fire now imbued with the power to burn a whole country, a whole civilization, a whole species to the ground .
The pragmatic man can dismiss the Artist because the Artist doesn’t have the mathematics to buttress his metaphor. The artist here-to-fore lacked the data, the science, the reasoned argument to make his artful -and thus True- case to the pragmatic man in the language, the modern language, that he could understand.
But I have that math; and the numbers show that mankind is a fractal phenomenon just like earthquakes and avalanches and forest fires; mankind is in self-organized criticality; mankind is a forest fire and avalanche on the brink. But the pragmatic man won’t believe it even when the mathematician agrees with the artist.
Why not? He’s pragmatic after all; he’s the pragmatic man! Ah, but remember, the average man, the pragmatic man, is weak and cannot handle such resistance. He is pragmatic precisely because he is weak; if he were strong he could handle art. He could peer into the dark forest of the unknown. No, he ignores art precisely because he is frightened of Truth; it has nothing to do with his right-reason; his rationality, his pragmatism. He is scared. So, he will ignore the math and science too; when it aligns with the art and the artist both.
He only allows in enough reality, enough truth as to effect his ability to manage his little world. He only need just enough information to get paid and laid. He need only a simple map of the terrain. He has no need of larger truths. What in the world would he do with them ? he asks. And he’s not wrong. What would he do -this landlubber standing upon the shore- with the knowledge that gives the Strong-Man, the Artist, the Mariner, the ballast that the sailor needs to drive his prow through the buoyant & sinking storm of the seas ?
Nietzsche , in a magnanimous mood, in a statement often overlooked by his detractors, openly questioned the result if the average man, the innately weak man, was subjected to a total tyranny of the exceptional; what if “the strong were masters in all respects, even in valuing ?” he asks and then adds, “should we really like a world in which the whole influence of t
he weak was lacking ?”
No, no because there is a useful Tao of weak vs. strong. For there to even be the exceptional the unexceptional must exists; and be allowed to exist. But the ancient, historical tyranny of the strong over the weak has given way -in the modern era- to the injustice of the multitudes of mediocre over the exceptional now. The pendulum has swung too far toward the democratic ideal, the rotam , the counterpoise has given power -by sheer weight and volume and inertia- to the pragmatic and honorless men -and their soulless womenfolk- over the exceptional, coruscating, and incomprehensibly strong; those who lack only in number and social-position in this modern democratic world.
Three weak beta chimps can overtake one magnificent alpha chimp. The Apollonian Greeks could bribe and gossip and cheat their way over the innately regal Spartans .
This crime has never ceased; the modern weak have prevented the strong from even moving roots below; boughs above so overcrowded in the overgrown forest of man. Each weak man is now endless fuel for the arson that must -the power law will not be flouted- eventually envelop the forest of mankind. Each strong man that at one time was able to dominate his milieu enough to give space, create boundaries between -and declare edges to- the forest of man, lebensraum to prevent conflagrations that would burn from one end of a continent to another, these men are now crammed in with the herd. They are forced to get along with the herd. They are prevented from doing their job: clearing the forest of dead wood.
Can you read the mathematic notations here? Can you see the forest for the trees?
The pragmatic man can eschew this information and spend his days making money and ingratiating himself with the herd; but the exceptional man, the artist, must escape from this modern, democratic, ideal. The pragmatic man can afford to ignore the truth -for now- but the artist must have it and cannot be prevented from it. He will have it like the pragmatic man will have his gruel. The artist must have meaning ; his life must mean something, or he’d rather die ; and if he is a unique, strong, noble artist he may -in fact- rather kill .
However, the artist must admit that his art is useless to the mediocre, the pragmatic; the great mass of men. He cannot expect or hope or desire to reach the public . The artist must only create for himself and his peers; on the whole no more than 1% of mankind, and truly even less than that. He cannot demand more of men, he cannot demand that average men become tougher, more honest or noble or heroic any more than he can demand a woman or child hold 200lbs above their heads.
But for his true peers, the artist must speak honestly and instinctively and nobly; this is how he creates and confers meaning. He cannot tailor his words and images and sounds for the dullards and bourgeois simpletons as if he has any chance of reaching them.
Melville -The Author- was called crazy ; Moby Dick was hated by all the moral men of his day. And even though lauded today it is gilded only to the extent to which is it misunderstood!
William Blake too was ignored and ridiculed in equal proportion by the denizens of the literary classes of his time. Today he is allowed to be great in the estimation of mediocre intellectuals precisely to the extent that he is dead and packed away. I could give a thousand examples from Socrates to Szukalski who had the bad taste to take the Truth seriously among the majority who lied in between their lies just to save time; and time is money, is it not to pragmatic man?
Life artists like Lenny Bruce read whole transcripts of his court proceedings to the audience. Johnny Rotten said, to the horror of the liberals and the sickly who posed as artists of their day, “well, the working class like The President so that’s good enough for me .” And for their heterodox utterances they were ignored, shunned or arrested, the closer they got to the truth. The public was -and is- like a masochistic home owner with too much fear to alert the police to an intruder to their home, much less lock & load that weapon themselves. The public first ignores what it will soon learn to lament, then hate, and in 1,000 years, say that they knew it was true all along.
And any true Artist of today -or forever- will necessarily be labeled insane or immoral or incomprehensible to the tastes of all good folk .
The liberal, do-gooder, tolerant, wet-with-sympathy, moo-cows outnumber the genuine and noble and exceptional by 100,000,000 to one. And they mistake their numbers for their value; and since we -as artists- cannot reach them even with logic or math or metaphor; since they have no use for the truth, let me tell you a story, a true story, of a man, of a genome, and an artist who decided quite by instinct, by trial-and-error, to even the score in more ways than one. Let me unfurl my feuilleton for you, both for you the exceptional and the mediocre; as long as you mediocre-types can keep up and keep quiet.
I had unfettered access to this man’s every move and shadow, every conversation and thought, my panoptic eye was on him for each hour of the day and he knew it and welcomed it and knew I’d give him an honest rendering.
It’s a story of a revaluation of all values to use Nietzsche’s le mot juste; or perhaps it’s a revanchist restoration of the most ancient of values. But, for certain, it’s a story of when those few in number but with a globular brain and a ponderous heart decided to change the equation in their own favor; to equalize each side as is -they say- demanded by the rules of the cosmos; and it’s a tale that shows how the mediocre people behave, act -or fail to act- when they have to stand on their own for once; without the crowded cushion of the herd to keep them upright. It’s a story of the individual and the group and which is which and who is who.
So, you may wonder how I could know all the details of tableaux and au combat , of what was said and thought and felt, how the history of so many people could be re-counted with such detail and precision. I will say again, I had unfettered access to the brain of a man who lived a capacious and variegated life; a thousand lives stuffed into one lifetime and one genome.
He let me in; I didn’t have to pry or trick or bully or force or deceive; all I had to do was offer one thing and ask one thing more. I merely had to treat him with the respect you people might have shown a beast you had been charged with assuaging as it lay supine, pregnant maybe with cub or felled with illness, and you knew that this beast was dangerous and powerful, but you loved it anyway. You loved it not in spite of latent danger, but because of that. You can imagine such a creature, yes? As long as it is not a man, but some feral beast of the forest you allow to be wild still, yes? You people still like bears, wolves, hawks, lions, right? Some of you like the asp even, I imagine.
You might too have sat up with it, cared for it, and listened as its feral bravura -unconcerned as it would be with your ersatz notions on law and order- breathed into the world; maybe you heard its raison d’être run through its every hair and along the entire surface of the hide and deep into its bones and basal ganglia. Ah, we rapt listeners sat up nights and succored it as it lay sedated and vitiated by pain and labor, labored breathing and its predatory instincts off-line temporarily as its body focused on gestation or healing of some kind.
We both might have tentatively caressed its pelt, pulled its lips back to reveal those 4 or 5-inch canines, those black gums; maybe you placed your small hand on top of its large paw as if trying to fill a print in the mud or the snow; the imprint, the mesmerizing evidence of some beast that came before -and likely after- you in evolution; you and I both marveling at the size and weight of this beast’s latent manu duri .
You, possibly, lowered your head with its hairless, modern, human ear and placed it upon this beast’s pantheris , follicled, forested chest and felt the merciless explosions of tectonic heart under the surface through your bare, neotenous cheek and jaw as it lay on this ancient and capacious chest of a 500-pound Tigris -or Ursus maybe- who knows? The specific beast is not what matters to my aim here; I am speaking just of your natural awe and love for wildness in nature, yes?
The sound you hear comes second -it having been raised to the surface by that middle-earth magnet of Heart forcing off sound, as exhaust, as it first attra
cts and claws and unflinchingly mauls its own blood into its cardiac maw of valves- and the sound, well, it is more than a thump or a thud, much more than a beat beneath.
Your ears hear a sonorous sound pulled apart by your brain, unwoven like Newton’s rainbow, you hear the expulsion of blood through the arterial valves and the cavitation of vascular intakes like vineyard gravel being forced into a hopper making fine sand from this rock; you hear a crescendo of a rhythm within a rhythm -a mise-an-abyme of natural effort- of unconscious yet constituent work done by the old brain, the cerebellum, the bellicose, relentless part of the beast’s brain that electrifies and tasks this mass of heart-motor to perform no matter what else happens inside or out; to beat and flex and squeeze its sanguinary fist and unfurl and clinch and accelerate and decelerate over a billion times before it gives out.
The heart is ancient and anciently ruled.
And this trial & error and long-tested heart-core, you feel beyond your young cheek and face, you feel it burrowing deeper into your chest and gut, your own small heart and in the enteric neurons of your now roiling salt-water sea of a belly; you feel it upon and beneath the surface of whatever it is that registers sound in your neo-cortex, down into your limbic region and a little lower layer , a little deeper down into your brainstem itself; your own body begins to pulse in sympathy, parasympathetically with this beast as its form, its soul now holds you in its ancient and atavistic and unapologetic -yet open palm- paw; open like the door left by the Inquisitor.
You realize, not intellectually, but viscerally, metaphorically -and thus Truthfully- with those enteric gut-brain neurons, with your own heart and your own balls, that this beast’s nobility lies in its violence and power and murderous malice, that its regal virtue is its unthinking allegiance to its own will and dominance and that it wears its crown with taut but unstrained neck muscles, that it holds it scepter without ambivalence, that it takes Rome as an osprey takes a fish, by sovereignty of nature…
