Another diary entry today, from November 6, 2003, discussing some ideas I’ve been working on with regard to unity, separateness, and relationship. Don’t read it if you’re hungry.

Diary Entry for 11/6/03
Any Way You Slice It.

I love the chisel analogy* — that to split a solid using identity shatters it into distinct parts separated into relationship with each other as opposed to the “relationship” of the whole to itself. Wow!

Another thing hit me coming out of the shower — jotted before I forget — goes back to the bread-slicing analogy I mentioned earlier.** Statements of demonstrable, verifiable [relationship between] fact[s] [are analogous to] a loaf sliced a certain way. But metaphor, analogy, simile, etc. are all “ghost facts” that apply to the same loaf if it was sliced another way. Metaphors, e.g., [could] point to horizontal relationships across vertical slices. But if the loaf were to be sliced horizontally along the metaphors, it would become the self-evident [relationship] and the vertical assertions would [instead] become metaphors . . .

Cognicentrism.

That’s why poets, writers, artists who use their art’s equivalent of metaphorical tools are hailed as “changing the way we look at/hear/see X,” because they’re “slicing the bread” differently than others.

Cultural anthropology says that a society is a group of people who slice the bread the same way. But to treat the bread slicing as anything other than [as] a way to deal with things at the moment — to take it so seriously as to declare that the slicing method and direction is “right” and others as “wrong” — is the unkindest cut of all. There are as many ways to slice the bread as there are uses for it. (Try making a meatball sub by slicing the bread along the narrow axis!) But to only know one way — and to use it for everything — is so narrow! So limiting! And so uncreative and unimaginative.

We in our society value specialists — the people who have mastered not even how to slice one way, but who have mastered one slice — that’s why memorization is so important here. Take for instance law. The success is determined by those who know it the most, to the point of knowing how to misuse, bend, or fudge using it. All they know is how to apply that one thing in all circumstances — to apply the letter of the law and to apply the kind of thinking (slicing) that goes along with it. They “law” everything they see.

We deride “jack of all trades, master of none.” But “master of one” leads to something far, far more damaging in so many ways — by concentrating on the one slice, how do I know what people are doing to all the other slices? To use another analogy here, how can you describe an elephant using nothing but the combined reports of specialists in toenails, knee joints, skin behind the ears, and tusk curvature (but not tusk composition — that’s a whole separate discipline with its own rules of membership and their own conferences!)?

This is a question about how we perceive. If we were somehow able to discern all the slices of the Loaf of Totality, and get them all lined up next to each other and touching, would we be able to see the seamless whole of the loaf? What frame of reference would we have? How, if all you have is the language of slices, would you be able to wrap you head around That Which Is Not Sliced?

What is the Unsliced and Non-Slicing Mind?

Ow.

Post Hoc:

I usually don’t edit diary contents when I post them here, but I did this time because I really wanted to make sure the ideas were expressed as clearly as possible . As the text says, this entry began as a quick jotting after a shower, so the original second paragraph was more of an incomplete shorthand than a coherent expression (whether it is more coherent now, I leave to the reader to decide!).

I was one of the last American students to actually learn how to diagram sentences. Then I went on to catalog films and organize manuscript and archival collections. Conceptual organization — the creation or discernment of relationships between parts and wholes — has always been part of my life. And perhaps now more so than ever; as a writer, I deal in the relationships between discrete states like nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, present and past tenses, and the “seven classic plots” (per vs. nature, per vs. perself, etc.).*** It is incumbent upon me, as I tried to express in this diary entry, to be very careful with the tools I use.

I really like the concept of factual relationships being nothing more than metaphors viewed askew.

For more on the idea of cognicentrism, see the third Tutorial School Dispatch. For more on specialization, read my review of Krishnamurti’s Education and the Significance of Life.

Another analogy might also work here. Cosmological theory says that prior to the big bang, matter and the forces that govern it were all “folded into” each other, a completely indistinguishable unity. With the explosion came the distinction between different types of matter and the forces that act on them under different conditions and over different distances, such as gravity, strong and weak forces, and electricity.

It is as if, in our willingess to apply linear classification processes (including language) to everything, we have created our own cerebral “big bangs.” What used to be whole in our heads is now exploded into separate fragments, each one still tenuously glued to every other one by invisible forces of “relationship control” that we call philosophy, religion, causality, society, etc.

Just a thought.

———-

Notes:

* From my diary entry for 11/4/03: “‘I’ is the hammer; ‘am’ is the chisel.” This concept was inspired by reading Meditation in Action by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

** From my diary entry for 7/6/03: “Cut a loaf of bread into three pieces and you can develop a science to explain how the pieces fit together, and a religion to tell you what it would be like if the pieces were all together, and a philosophy to tell you how the parts relate to each other and to the whole, and a society to tell you which piece is the most important one.

“Leave the loaf whole, and all you have is a loaf. You can eat it. Do we know how to cut it without each slice suddenly taking on a separate identity? That’s what Alan Watts was on about in The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. I can glimpse it — like a voice on a radio that you can only pick up for a second before it’s lost in static, while you’re tuning it. But the glimpse is just a flash that can’t be held. It’s both comforting and galling at the same time. Try to catch it, poof, it’s gone.

“Try, in other words, to name it…”

*** I’m a big fan of gender-neutral personal pronouns. Other languages have ’em, why can’t ours?

In her 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy introduced the term “per” in place of “he/she,” “him/her,” and “his/hers.” It also works great for those old phrases that use “man,” like “man vs. himself.”

“Per” is an elegant solution, not like those politically correct kludges (like “s/he” and “his or her” and (ugh!) plural possessives) currently blundering across the language landscape like a pack of hermaphroditic golems.

(And yes, I did notice that I wrote “In her 1976 novel . . . .” No, it’s not a mistake. I prefer to use the gender-neutral form only when referring to non-specified third persons. For named people, I consider per’s gender to be part of who per is.)

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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