That science fiction is the most popular literature in such places doesn’t surprise.
What other literature could make sense of, or put in perspective, a landscape where there is a hand-loom, a tape-recorder, a fresh butter churn, ampicillin forty minutes away on a Honda 750, and both men and women pushing a mule-drawn plow, cooking, wearing clothes when clothes answer either a functional necessity (boots, work-gloves…) or an aesthetic appetite (hand-dyed smocks, bearded vests…) and going naked when neither necessity nor appetite is present; or where thousands of such people will gather, in a field three hundred miles from where they live, to hear music from musicians who have come a thousand miles to play it for them?
What the urban humanist refuses to realize (and what the rural humanist often has no way of realizing) is that our culture’s scientific context, which has given us the plow, the tape-recorder, insecticides, the butter-churn, and the bomb, is currently under an internal and informed onslaught as radical as our social context is suffering before the evidence of Women’s Liberation, Gay Activism, Radical Psychiatry, or Black Power.
Much science fiction inadvertently reflects the context’s failure.
The best science fiction explores the attack.
43. The philosophically cherished predicates of all the sensory verbs in the Indo-European languages are, today, empirically empty verbal conventions — like the “it” in “it is raining.” The very form “I see the table” suggests that, in the situation “I” would commonly model with those words, “I” am doing something to the table, by “seeing” it, in some sense similar to what “I” would be doing to it in the situation “I” would commonly model by the words “I set the table.” Empirically, however, we know that (other than at the most minute, Heisenbergian level), in the situation we use “I see the table” to model, the table is — demonstrably! — doing far more to “I” than “I” am doing to it. (Moreover, though words like “I” and “see” were used to arrive at the demonstration, the demonstration itself could be performed effectively for a deaf-mute who had learned only the nonverbal indicators, such as pointing, miming of motion and direction, picture recognition, etc. The reading of various sense data as the persistence of matter and coherence and direction of motion, which is basically what is needed to apprehend such a demonstration, seems to be [by recent experiments on babies only a few hours old] not only preverbal but programmed in the human brain at birth, i.e., not learned.) A language is conceivable that would reflect this, where the usual model of this situation would be a group of verbal particles that literally translated: “Light reflects from table then excites my eyes.” Equally conceivable, in this language, the words “I see the table” might be considered, if translated from ours literally, first, as ungrammatical, and, second, as self-contradictory as “the rock falls up” (or “the table sees me”) appears in ours. By extension, all predicates in the form “The subject senses…” (rather than “The object excites…”) are as empty of internal coherence against an empirical context as “The color of the number seven is D-flat.” (Among poets, an intuitive realization of the hopeless inadequacy of linguistic expressions in the form “I sense…” accounts for much of the “difficulty” in the poetry of the last twenty-five years — a very different sort of difficulty from the labored erudition of the poetry of the thirty years previous.) As models for a situation, neither the “I see…” model nor the “light reflects…” model is more logical; but that is only because logic lies elsewhere. One model is simply, empirically, more reasonable. Empirical evidence has shown that the implied arrows “inside” these words simply do not reflect what is the case. A good bit of philosophical wrangling simply tries to maintain that because these arrows were once considered to be there, they must still model something.
There was a time when people thought electricity flowed from the positive to the negative pole of a battery. The best one can say is that there were many situations in which the current’s direction didn’t matter. And many others in which it did. Trying to maintain the meaningful direction of sense predicates is like maintaining that in those situations in which it doesn’t matter which way the current flows, somehow it is actually flowing backwards.
44. Galaxy of events over the past few months: the telegram announcing Marilyn’s collection of poems Presentation Piece had won the Lamont Poetry Selection for the year; the terribly complimentary statement by Richard Howard, which will go on the book’s back cover; a glowing review by the Kirkus Service that is so muddle-headed, one would have almost preferred no review at all!
45. Various deaf-mute friends I have had over the years, and the contingent necessity of learning sign language, have given me as much insight into spoken and written language as oral storytelling once gave me into written stories: Hand-signs, spoken words, and written words produce incredibly different contextual responses, though they model the same object or process. The deaf-and-dumb sign language progresses, among ordinary deaf mute signers, at between three and five hundred words a minute (cf. ordinary reading speeds), and the learner who comes from the world of hearing and speaking is frequently driven quite mad by the absence of concept words and connectives. (Logicians take note: Both “and” and “or” are practically missing from demotic sign language; though the sign for “and” exists, “or” must be spelled out by alphabetic signs, which usually indicates an infrequently used word.)
Lanky and affable Horace would occasionally leave me notes under my room door (on the ninth floor of the Albert) written with “English” words, all using their more or less proper dictionary meaning, but related to one another in ways that would leave your average English speaker bewildered.
There is a sign for “freeze”—a small, backwards clutch, with the palms of the hands down.
There is a sign for “you”—pointing to the “listener” with the forefinger.
As in English, “freeze” has many metaphorical extensions: “to stop moving,”“to treat someone in a cold manner,” etc. The two signs, mimed consecutively — ”freeze you”—can mean:
“You have a cold personality.”
“You are frozen.”
“Are you frozen?”
“Stop moving.”
“You just stopped moving, didn’t you!” (in the sense of“ You jumped!”)
This last is a particularly interesting case: the signed phrase could also be translated “You flinched!” The speaker who says, “You jumped!” models the beginning of the motion; the deaf-mute who signs, “Freeze you” is modeling the end of the same motion. In both cases, the partial model (or synecdoche) stands for the whole action of “flinching.”