This both is and is why information cannot pass directly between living creatures of any biological complexity. Information is the indirect evocation/creation of congruence, of pattern.
This is what discourse is and controls.
From one side, language can only be explained communally. From another, it can only be experienced individually. That’s because “community” and “individual” are abstractions that have been extremely efficient for negotiating lots of problems since writing came along. (Before that, we have no way to know for sure.) But as our population has grown so much bigger in (arbitrarily) the last two hundred fifty years, it’s begun to look more and more efficient to expand “community” from something tribal to something far more nuanced and ecologically inclusive. Some people see this as a return to tribalism. But it’s just as much a turn to science. As for “individual,” I can even entertain an argument that holds that “logos/discourse” was initially a metaphor put forward by philosophers such as Heraclitus and the Mesopotamian rabbis (which means “teachers”) to help stabilize the notion that language is never “our own,” but was always from another, at a time when there was not the technological or sociological support for a model that was, nevertheless, in its overall form, accessible to anyone who had ever learned to speak a language other than the one she or he grew up with, and/or watched a child learn its “own.” Most of a century later, Plato called all this prelearning “remembrance” and speculated it came through reincarnation. I don’t believe that was a step in the right direction, other than to nudge thinkers to pay attention to history. But little or nothing that creatures who have evolved do or think has only one use. That’s another thing evolution assures. That’s what we mean when we say an adaptation is efficient.
11
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer first made a large portion of the reading public for philosophy aware of the mediated (that is, indirect) structure of sensory perception for humans. But the fact is, this is true for all creatures who have senses as well as for plants that seemed to be slowly developing something akin to them. Remember that the next time you take a walk in the woods. Yes, 95 percent of our genes are identical with chimpanzees. But 50 percent of them are identical with oak trees. We share genes with lizards, chickens, pond scum, mushrooms, and spiders, not to mention gnats, lichens, elephants, viruses, bacteria, nematodes, and the rest of life’s teeming species. That’s why we eat each other in so many directions; and it’s why a number of species, such as poisonous snakes and poisonous plants, have developed defenses to keep from being eaten. The fact that we share as many genes with everything that lives is one, but by no means the only, bit of evidence for our direct connections. And that creatures with ears and eyes and tactile feelings look, sound, and move as if they are alive in the world and care about being so — that is, they exist as subjects — is another; but, again, by no means the only or determining one. We live in a world constructed of a vast number of suggestions — and a relatively few explanations (relatively few because we only have the ones, however, we’ve been able so far to figure out, in which there are bound to be inaccuracies and incompletenesses). Many of the explanations contravene the suggestions. The French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan called these two very human orders the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Different cultures have different Imaginaries and different Symbolics. What science says as a larger philosophy, at least to me, is that this multiplicity is a negotiable condition of the world, accessible to language and its potential behaviors, not an ontological bedrock of the universe: an effect, an illusion if you like that can be explained. I would only add: however you want to talk about it, it damned well better be. If not, we’ve had it.
12
At the New York Library Society on February 3, 1848, Poe had hoped for hundreds to support his new magazine, The Stylus. It was the same month in the same year in which France would erupt in a revolution that, for a few brief months, would result in universal male suffrage and the hope for even more reforms, and which, in the weeks following it, America would celebrate that victory almost as joyfully as Paris, with fireworks from Washington, D.C., to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and where, at his Pittsfield home, The Arrowhead, Melville was rushing through Mardi and Redburn so he could get started on Moby-Dick. Initially he’d planned to have a happy ending, say some critics, but all too shortly, within the year, the advances of the Revolution of 1848 had been rescinded — and Moby-Dick (1851) was rewritten with the tragic conclusion we know today, possibly on some level a response to the great historical disappointment, suggests the critic C. L. R James (in his brilliant reading of the novel Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, Herman Melville and the World We Live In [1952; reprint 1978]), written while James himself was “detained”—like Cervantes, like Thomas Paine, like Thoreau, like Gramsci — in James’s case on Ellis Island, in the first years of the 1950s.
13
That sharing is one of discourse’s functions, though it has not caught up to the expansion of population, cultures, and cultural encounters that has so increased in our last few thousand years. The dissemination of the unique — through an incredibly complex set of filters that the illusion of intelligence, not to mention intelligence itself, are what we and the world are — is among evolution’s most powerful tools as well as its fuel, as long as those filters can receive and utilize energy.
14
Readers of my Return to Nevèrÿon series may recognize this as relating to the “Naming, Listing, and Counting Theory” that occasionally crystallizes in one or another of its appendices.
15
George Bernard Shaw’s “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” (1891), “The Perfect Wagnerite” (1898), The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), and The Black Girl in Search of God (1932) are all still entertaining as well as informative, as is reading the plays themselves and their extraordinary prefaces.