The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  What happened?

  The arrows tell part of the story but not the breakthrough. What seems to have lain at the heart of the breakthrough, what in fact was the breakthrough, was the fact that somehow the old arrow route, the six-billion-year-old chain of causal relations, the energy exchanges which had held good from the earliest collision of hydrogen atoms to the responses of amoeba and dogs and chimps, that ancient circuit of causes, my troop of arrows, had been shortcircuited.

  Then it was that I made my own Helen Keller breakthrough, a “discovery” which I was later to learn that Charles Peirce had hit on a hundred years earlier and from a different direction and to which no one had paid much attention, not even Peirce’s greatest admirers. Peirce’s “triad” or “thirdness” was rather part and parcel of a heavy metaphysic and so could hardly be seen as something that happened among persons, words, and things.

  What dawned on me was that what happened between Helen and Miss Sullivan and water and the word was “real” enough all right, no matter what Ogden and Richards said, as real as any S-R sequence, as real as H2SO4 reacting to NaOH, but that what happened could not be drawn with arrows.

  In short, it could not be set forth as a series of energy exchanges or causal relations.

  It was something new under the sun, evolutionarily speaking.

  It was a natural phenomenon but a nonlinear and nonenergic one.*

  15

  A NONLINEAR NONENERGIC NATURAL PHENOMENON

  (that is to say, a natural phenomenon in which energy exchanges account for some but not all of what happens)

  If the event which occurred in the well-house in Tuscumbia in 1887 was not primarily a linear energy exchange, what was it? I stopped drawing arrows and saw that I had a triangle (Figure 3).

  Undoubtedly there were three elements somehow involved in the event—Helen, the water, and the word water. But how? What was the base of the triangle? What is the nature of the mysterious event in which one perceives that this (stuff) “is” water? What is the natural phenomenon signified by the simplest yet most opaque of all symbols, the little copula “is”?

  My breakthrough was the sudden inkling that the triangle was absolutely irreducible. Here indeed was nothing less, I suspected, than the ultimate and elemental unit not only of language but of the very condition of the awakening of human intelligence and consciousness.

  What to call it? “Triad”? “Triangle”? “Thirdness”? Perhaps “Delta phenomenon,” the Greek letter Δ signifying irreducibility.

  Alpha was the beginning, omega will be the end, but somewhere in between, some five billion years after alpha, and x years before omega, there first occurred delta, Δ.

  The Delta phenomenon lies at the heart of every event that has ever occurred in which a sentence is uttered or understood, a name is given or received, a painting painted and viewed.

  What Helen had discovered, broken through to, was the Delta phenomenon.

  I sat there looking at this queer triangle, drawing it over and over again (Figure 4). Even though I did not have the words to name it or think about it, I suspected that Delta Δ might somehow prove to be the key, not perhaps for unlocking the mysteries of language and the human condition, but at least for opening a new way of thinking about them.

  Using the concept of the Delta phenomenon, mightn’t one set out to understand man as the languaged animal? Mightn’t one even begin to understand the manifold woes, predicaments, and estrangements of man—and the delights and savorings and homecomings—as nothing more nor less than the variables of the Delta phenomenon, just as responses, reinforcements, rewards, and such are the variables of stimulus-response phenomena?

  Mightn’t one even speak of such a thing as the Helen Keller phenomenon, which everyone experiences at the oddest and most unlikely times? Prince Andrei lying wounded on the field of Borodino and discovering clouds for the first time. Or the Larchmont commuter whose heart attack allows him to see his own hand for the first time.

  Or the reverse Helen Keller phenomenon: the couple who build the perfect house with the perfect view in the perfect neighborhood and who after living in the house five years can’t stand the house or the view or each other.

  Accordingly, I was wondering in Louisiana in the 1950’s: Is it possible that Delta Δ might provide the key to understanding not only what happened to Helen in the well-house but also how Americans who have everything are bored and French existentialists who write about boredom and despair are happy?

  What did I have to lose? The conventional wisdom was a mishmash: man set forth as “organism in an environment” but man also and somehow, though God alone knew how, set forth as repository of democratic and Judeo-Christian “values.”

  Delta Δ might be the new key, but it itself was a mystery. It described a kind of event, a natural phenomenon, yet something new under the sun. And recent. Life has existed on the earth for perhaps three billion years, yet Delta Δ could not be more than a million years old, no older certainly than Homo erectus and perhaps a good deal more recent, as late as the time of Homo neanderthalensis, when man underwent an astonishing evolutionary explosion which in the scale of earth time was as sudden as biblical creation. Was not in fact the sudden 54 per cent increase in brain size not the cause but the consequence of the true urphenomenon, the jumped circuit by which Delta Δ first appeared? The spark jumped, language was born, the brain flowered with words, and man became man.

  At any rate the Alabama well-house was the place to set out from.

  If one could ever fathom what happened when Helen knew that water “was” water, one might begin to understand a great many other things, perhaps even why people get bored in Short Hills and move to the Gulf Coast to enjoy hurricanes.

  The Strangeness of Delta

  The longer one thought about the irreducible triangle and its elements and relations, the queerer they got.

  Compare Delta Δ phenomenon with the pseudo triangle of Ogden and Richards: buzzer→dog→food. The latter is a pseudo triangle because one needn’t think of it as a triangle at all but can conceive the event quite easily as a series of energy exchanges beginning with buzzer and ending in the dog’s salivation and approaching food.

  But consider the Delta phenomenon in its simplest form. A boy has just come into the naming stage of language acquisition and one day points to a balloon and looks questioningly at his father. The father says, “That’s a balloon,” or perhaps just, “Balloon.”

  Here the Delta phenomenon is as simple as Helen’s breakthrough in the well-house, the main difference being that the boy is stretching out over months what Helen took by storm in a few hours.

  But consider.

  Unlike the buzzer-dog-salivation sequence, one runs immediately into difficulty when one tries to locate and specify the Delta elements—balloon (thing), balloon (word), boy (organism).

  In a word, my next discovery was bad news. It was the discovery of three mystifying negatives. In the Delta phenomenon it seems: The balloon is not the balloon out there. The word balloon is not the sound in the air. The boy is not the organism boy.

  For example: Where, what is the word balloon? Show me the word balloon as I can show you the sound of the buzzer. Unlike the dog “understanding” the sound of the buzzer to “mean” food, the boy does not understand the particular sound balloon—which his father makes and which enters his ear—to mean the balloon. For it is precisely the nature of the boy’s breakthrough that he understands his father’s utterance as a particular instance of the word balloon. Where is the word itself? Is it the little marks in the dictionary which you point to when I ask you to show me the word balloon?

  Charles Peirce said the word balloon is not a concrete thing at all but a general one, a law.

  What about the balloon itself? Cannot one at least say that what the boy is pointing to and “means” is that particular round red rubbery inflated object?

  No.

  It is precisely the nature of the boy’s breakthrough that
the object he points to is understood by him as a member of a class of inflated objects. A few minutes later he might well point to a blue sausage-shaped inflated object and say, “Balloon.”

  What about the boy himself? Can he not be understood, as the dog is understood, as the organism within whose neurons and molecules certain interactions occur which lead to his uttering and understanding the name?

  No.

  For it is not the case of the boy being the site where certain interactions and energy exchanges take place, arrows flying along neurons and jumping synapses. Something else happens. However many arrows fly along the boy’s neurons (and they do), he does something else. He couples balloon with balloon. But who, what couples? Who, what is the coupler? Do you mean some part of his brain does the coupling? I could not say whether it is his brain which couples, his “mind,” his “self,” his “I.” All one can say for certain is that if two things which are otherwise unconnected are coupled, there must be a coupler.

  Then what can one say for sure about the three elements of the Delta phenomenon?

  Only this: The boy in Delta is not the organism boy. The balloon in Delta is not the balloon in the world. The balloon in Delta is not the sound balloon.

  An unpromising beginning.

  Indeed there was not much to be said for my own Helen-Keller breakthrough (was this the nature of the beast too, that it couldn’t be said?) and very little to be sure of. Only this: the Delta phenomenon yielded a new world and maybe a new way of getting at it. It was not the world of organisms and environments but just as real and twice as human.

  Would it be possible, I was wondering then in Louisiana, to use the new key to open a new door and see in a new way? See man not the less mysterious but of a piece, maybe even whole, a whole creature put together again after the three-hundred-year-old Cartesian split that sundered man from himself in the old modern age, when man was seen as a “mind” somehow inhabiting a “body,” neither knowing what one had to do with the other, a lonesome ghost in an abused machine?

  Perhaps it was not a case of exorcising the ghost, as the scientists wanted to do, but of discovering a creature who was neither ghost nor machine.

  These hopes have not of course been realized. What follows here is only a very tentative exploration of the terra incognita, an edging into it from its opposite sides.

  From one side, the far side, set out with man’s breakthrough—with Helen Keller or with species man perhaps in the cave in the Neander valley a hundred thousand years ago or with any man two years old.

  What does it mean for a good organism to break through into the daylight of language?

  Set out from the other side, this side, the near side, with the full-blown woes, estrangements, and peculiar upside-down delights and miseries of the late twentieth century.

  Two unique happenings: man learning to speak and man behaving as he does now.

  Does one have anything to do with the other?

  Is the organism who breaks into Delta daylight and learns to speak also and for this very reason the same creature who feels bad in Short Hills when he should feel good and feels good in hurricanes when he should feel bad?

  Is there any other way to understand why people feel so bad in the twentieth century and writers feel so good writing about people feeling bad than in terms of the peculiar parameters, the joys and sorrows of symbol-mongering?

  There is a difference between the way things are and saying the way things are.

  Here, in what follows, only a few trails will be blazed into this dark forest, my only tool the Delta Δ blade of the symbolic breakthrough, Helen’s magic Excalibur which she found in Alabama water.

  In the beginning was alpha, the end is omega, but somewhere in between came Delta, man himself. Man became man by breaking into the daylight of language—whether by good fortune or bad fortune, whether by pure chance, the spark jumping the gap because the gap was narrow enough, or by the touch of God, it is not for me to say here.

  But it happened, and to this day man knows less about what happened than he knows about the back side of the moon.

  * I am aware of course that other phenomena can be described in a sense as nonlinear, e.g., action of a force field, gestalt perception, transactions in a neural net, etc. Yet these events lend themselves to formulation by equation and to explanatory models which discern this or that causal or statistical relationship within a structure.

  The utterance or understanding of a sentence does not so lend itself.

  2

  THE LOSS OF THE CREATURE

  EVERY EXPLORER NAMES his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful—except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered.

  Garcia López de Cárdenas discovered the Grand Canyon and was amazed at the sight. It can be imagined: One crosses miles of desert, breaks through the mesquite, and there it is at one’s feet. Later the government set the place aside as a national park, hoping to pass along to millions the experience of Cárdenas. Does not one see the same sight from the Bright Angel Lodge that Cárdenas saw?

  The assumption is that the Grand Canyon is a remarkably interesting and beautiful place and that if it had a certain value P for Cárdenas, the same value P may be transmitted to any number of sightseers—just as Banting’s discovery of insulin can be transmitted to any number of diabetics. A counterinfluence is at work, however, and it would be nearer the truth to say that if the place is seen by a million sightseers, a single sightseer does not receive value P but a millionth part of value P.

  It is assumed that since the Grand Canyon has the fixed interest value P, tours can be organized for any number of people. A man in Boston decides to spend his vacation at the Grand Canyon. He visits his travel bureau, looks at the folder, signs up for a two-week tour. He and his family take the tour, see the Grand Canyon, and return to Boston. May we say that this man has seen the Grand Canyon? Possibly he has. But it is more likely that what he has done is the one sure way not to see the canyon.

  Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is—as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer’s pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, “Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” He feels he has not been cheated. But if it does not conform, if the colors are somber, he will not be able to see it directly; he will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be. He will say later that he was unlucky in not being there at the right time. The highest point, the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex.

  Seeing the canyon is made even more difficult by what the sightseer does when the moment arrives, when sovereign knower confronts the thing to be known. Instead of looking at it, he photographs it. There is no confrontation at all. At the end of forty years of preformulation and with the Grand Canyon yawning at his feet, what does he do? He waives his right of seeing and knowing a
nd records symbols for the next forty years. For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future.

  The sightseer may be aware that something is wrong. He may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him. The harder he looks at it, the less he can see. It eludes everybody. The tourist cannot see it; the bellboy at the Bright Angel Lodge cannot see it: for him it is only one side of the space he lives in, like one wall of a room; to the ranger it is a tissue of everyday signs relevant to his own prospects—the blue haze down there means that he will probably get rained on during the donkey ride.

  How can the sightseer recover the Grand Canyon? He can recover it in any number of ways, all sharing in common the stratagem of avoiding the approved confrontation of the tour and the Park Service.

  It may be recovered by leaving the beaten track. The tourist leaves the tour, camps in the back country. He arises before dawn and approaches the South Rim through a wild terrain where there are no trails and no railed-in lookout points. In other words, he sees the canyon by avoiding all the facilities for seeing the canyon. If the benevolent Park Service hears about this fellow and thinks he has a good idea and places the following notice in the Bright Angel Lodge: Consult ranger for information on getting off the beaten track—the end result will only be the closing of another access to the canyon.

  It may be recovered by a dialectical movement which brings one back to the beaten track but at a level above it. For example, after a lifetime of avoiding the beaten track and guided tours, a man may deliberately seek out the most beaten track of all, the most commonplace tour imaginable: he may visit the canyon by a Greyhound tour in the company of a party from Terre Haute—just as a man who has lived in New York all his life may visit the Statue of Liberty. (Such dialectical savorings of the familiar as the familiar are, of course, a favorite stratagem of The New Yorker magazine.) The thing is recovered from familiarity by means of an exercise in familiarity. Our complex friend stands behind his fellow tourists at the Bright Angel Lodge and sees the canyon through them and their predicament, their picture taking and busy disregard. In a sense, he exploits his fellow tourists; he stands on their shoulders to see the canyon.