For some while, now, Julie
Heyward's posted extracts at Unreal
Nature have been strung on a theme: the provisionality of terms
and ideas where living things are concerned. Even the words “living
thing” are debatable, of course ... to what extent can you say that
“I” (for example) am “a living thing” when my being is an
ecology of interdependent cellular subpopulations, bacteria,
mitochondria, viruses, and all the rest of the band, not one cell or
particle of which remains unchanged from the moment I was born –
after nine months in which “I” was an increasingly emergent but
inherent part of another who bore me?
In Maggie O’Farrell's
novel The hand that first held mine, this morning, I
serendipitously encountered the following. One character is watching
over his lover, who has been rescued by transfusion from catastrophic
blood loss during delivery of their child:
He looks at the delta of veins at her wrist, the thin violet patterns in her eyelids, the trace of blue that runs through her cheek, the web of vessels at the curve of her instep. He wonders for the first time if they used just one person's blood to revive her or whether it was the blood of lots of different people. And whether she is still her, if the very blood that pumps around her body doesn't belong to her. At what point do you become someone else?
The provisionality and
slippage of any link between signifier and signified (and its
decreasing lcertainty as precision of definition increases – or
vice vera) is, of course, common currency. Daily sociolinguistic
intercourse (and daily social existence, for that matter) relies on
us ignoring it, skipping rapidly from signifer to signifier without
ever looking too closely and relying on Gaussian overlap to bridge
the gulfs between. But there is something particularly awe inspiring
about looking down between one's feet at the gaps in the very idea of
what we are.
“You have lost the idea of
me” laments one character to another, in Russell Hoban's The
medusa frequency. The idea of ourselves, of each other, is indeed
all we have – a delicate thing that disintegrates into
unknowability if examined more than tangentially.
Yesterday, Julie's restless
eye alighted on the boundaries of definition for life itself. At
school I was first offered five characteristics which defined life;
another boy pointed out that they could all be applied to fire.
Later, by a biologist with whom I was working, I was offered a single
characteristic (negative entropy) which cast the net so wide as to
almost be no definition at all ... and there, I think, is the key. In
everyday intercourse, we all know what we mean by “life”; but
when you try to pin it down to a definition, I genuinely doubt that
there can ever be one which is both watertight and meaningful or even
useful.
This distresses some. To me,
it simply emphasises the wonder of both science and art ... and of
existence.
- Maggie O'Farrell, The hand that first held mine. 2010, London: Headline Review. 9780755308453 (hbk)
- Russell Hoban, The Medusa frequency. 1987, London: Cape. 0224024647.
4 comments:
Ms. Ant looks at Felix scornfully over her half-eyeglasses. "Young man, dead is dead. The signifier is inviolable. Next, you'll be telling me the dog ate your homework."
But can't you extend it to what is "conscious?" And even further, to what has Free Will? Ha, the rocks in the stream will have it next, she said.
But then, Doc, we have the roblem of defining "conscious" ... yet another arbitrary (and fuzzy) signifier!
As to free will ... as we know, that involves enough conundra to tie up a millipede for eternity, even after you have done your excellent multi part exposition :-)
As a zen master once said;
"He who knows doesn't speak,
he who speaks doesn't know"
I've hard voices
seen the snakes
in the pit
been there
done that
and now know
that
i
the little me
knows nothing
and am glad
of that.
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