Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Tommy Armstrong" <tfa AT brickengraver.com>]

I had not thought about the drug connection--but you are probably right. The
confines of a spp world are in many ways the antithesis of the human
experience or rather the way humans actually experience the world. Once it
was discovered, it essentially became the defacto method of viewing the
world, at least intellectually--and did so incredibly fast. Without it,
there would be no science as we know it today, there would be no structured
linear music, or the novel would never have come into being.

 For a novel essentially has a beginning, a middle, and an end--a plot--and
is told from the vantage point of the narrator. I remember in high school
plotting the plot of Madame Bovary on a chart--my English teacher thought it
to be the penultimate novel because of its careful construction. How
consistent it is, how it "holds together", the denouement, the rise the fall
and the conclusion. How it inexorably moves to the conclusion. I am sure
that English prof could clean up my thinking, and I of course would welcome
him to chime in. The Stream of Consciousness thing was really a rejection of
those confines. As was Jazz in my opinion--as it went in whatever direction
that the musician felt he wanted it to go at the moment of creation.
Improvisation is really a lot closer to the way I think humans actually live
and more importantly think. For example as I sit and write this, I have
jumped in my mind from high school to college to looking at a scroll
painting today that was in a take out Chinese restaurant to thoughts about
the drying beds at my sewer plant. Nothing linear about it--no real "rhyme
or reason" to why my mind went to those disparate thoughts.

 And I am not saying that humans are not capable of "scientific" reasoning,
which is essentially spp reasoning--I am just saying that it is not their
natural state. We are, I think non-linear creatures living in a linear
culture. I hesitate to say linear world, as that implies that the world is
linear--which no matter what the scientific experts say, it is not. 

 For me that is reality. And, yes now that I think of it, drugs are a way of
escaping that linearity and "going to a place" that is more human friendly.
Early Times does seem to work well, especially with Carol Sloane singing
Jazz. Of course to others, good weed listening to Jimi Hendrix is the
escape, or Opera or Mozart or whomever. 

French Impressionists such as Matisse abandoned it, i.e. spp as too
confining and not really conveying how humans actually perceived things. 
http://www.lyons.co.uk/html/large/Redroom.htm

Now don't get me wrong--I am no art historian or expert, but simply looking
at the above picture, to the "normal" westerner, to the person on the
street,  it looks much like what a child might paint. It was a rejection of
the use of spp. It is not trying to convey an "accurate (accurate in linear,
Cartesian sense) representation of the room, but what the room is, from a
non-linear human perspective, from the perspective of the artist.  

Try the experiment of just walking into a room with the "explorers hat on".
Try and keep up with what each and every vantage point and area of focus
that your eyes go to. One thing will stand out, you will focus on it and
perhaps think about it, then you will move your eyes until they come to rest
on something else. Its very much not a linear experience. If it was, you
could simply stand at the door, and absorb all the room from that vantage
point. But the eye can only focus on one thing at a time. It moves from
thing to thing constantly refocusing. The camera does focus on everything at
one time--a distinctly non-realistic way of depicting things from a human
perspective. And notice those photographs that are really good, that really
make an impact. They are invariably the ones that are focused on a single
subject. A really good photo only has one subject, for if it has two--they
are constantly competing with each other--and the work becomes un- unified.
Just as the human being can only focus on one thing at a time,

That multitasking stuff has from what I understand been "scientifically"
debunked.

Tommy Armstrong
PO Box 484 
Lillington, NC   27546
http://www.brickengraver.com
 
...with the method of science one beholds what is generally true about
individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.
 
Walker Percy
Signposts in a Strange Land






-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Karl M. Terrell
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 2:44 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] LITR

* * This communication is CONFIDENTIAL * *


Re: single-point and multi-point perspectives, do you see parallels to the
experimentation with psychedlic drugs during the 60s as a breaking away from
the former?  I refer not to a glorification of illegal drug use, but to a
brief (historical, I believe) period when young adults and a few others,
using LSD, marijuana, etc. as tools in a positive and creative way, were
attempting to break free of the restraints of what I think you refer to as
'single point perspective.'  Of course, it was doomed to failure, as we live
resolutely in an spp world, and because drugs are bad for your health, but
.... some vestige I believe of this experimental non-spp thinking (if you
will) lives on, and has been advanced as a force in our culture.  Some
aspects of this, as in the arts, and as applied to philosophies/practices on
how to live your daily life, have been to the good, and some aspects not.  

Perhaps my own fleeting passage through this history explains part of my
attraction to Percy. 

Karl

-----Original Message-----
From: Tommy Armstrong [mailto:tfa AT brickengraver.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:21 AM
To: 'Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion'
Subject: Re: [percy-l] LITR

"But I will be all right as soon as I get home and take my drug, which is
the best of the consciousness-expanding community-simulating self
integrating drugs"

When Rich mentioned that essay I of course had to go and pull it off my
shelf and that is what I had underlined from it (among other things). I kind
of think it sums up a great deal of the insight and humor that is present
throughout Percy. He brings views of the world from a truly different
vantage points. That is his strength both then and now--an extra-consumerist
vantage point, an extra-science vantage point, an extra-political vantage
point. 

I once took a course in college a long  back named "Beththoven and
Revolution" by an incredibly smart and gifted professor named Dr. David
Green. In it we explored we explored all kinds of seemingly disparate things
like the Renaissance, Chinese Scroll Painting, the structure of Bethoven's
string quartets and symphonies, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Sartre, etc. And let me
not forget Mahler--that prof had listened to a Mahler piece every day of his
life for 10 straight years--something of an expert on him. The one
overriding thing that tied them all together was essentially vantage point.
When that sculptor, forget his name, discovered (or created) (or
rediscovered) single point perspective, and created those famous cathedral
doors it changed Western Civilization forever. Now it was possible for
people to study the natural world, for they could do it from a single point
of reference. Things can be measured and quantified and mapped. And thus
began linearity. 

The novel was one of the consequences of that type of perspective as was
calculus. 

Without that discovery by an artist at the beginning of the Renaissance (in
fact who started the Renaissance), there would have never been science as we
know it. 

The Chinese, however never discovered spp--and they had a view of the world
much closer to how humans actually see the world--multi-point perspective.
Scroll paintings do not exhibit spp. We Westerners now look at them (and all
art prior to spp) as somehow inferior, or at least, not as "sophisticated".
But the fact is that the human does not see like a camera--the ultimate tool
and demonstrator of spp. Even as we walk to the bathroom and take a tinkle,
our vantage point constantly changes, and not only our vantage point but our
area of focus literally hundreds of times. 

Now what I am saying is not that science and technology is not useful, but
this whole rational view of the world presupposes the validity of spp being
the "correct" perspective. But it is definitely not hardwired into the human
brain. In fact it was never even existent before those doors on that
cathedral were created. It took only a hundred or so years to become
hardwired into our culture--but not in our being. And there perhaps is the
genesis of schism of science and humanity. For what is natural for a homo
sapiens --constantly seeing the world from different vantage points and
areas of focus--and what is natural for the culture--seeing the world from a
single point of view--something to be measured, classified, and dissected,
are really at odds with each other.


Tommy Armstrong
PO Box 484 
Lillington, NC   27546
http://www.brickengraver.com
 
...with the method of science one beholds what is generally true about
individuals, but art beholds what is uniquely true.
 
Walker Percy
Signposts in a Strange Land








-----Original Message-----
From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Gray, Rich
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 9:45 AM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: [percy-l] LITR

Percy wrote the essay "Notes for a Novel about the End of the World"
while he was writing Love in the Ruins.  A common theme to both works is the
blessing of cataclysm, which jerks people out of their tranquilized
routines.  In their comfortable routines, Percy thought people -- Catholics
as well as other believers and agnostics -- were callous toward God.  

Tom More opens the novel in a serious rut: rejected by his wife, dependent
on alcohol, and largely unsuccessful in his psychiatric practice.  His
concern for the decay of America and his invention of the lapsometer mark
his attempt to throw off his stupefying midlife tedium.
Then the comedy kicks in.  Tom with the lapsometer seems like Don Quixote
with his lance -- they have a winsomeness, yet they are completely
ineffective in changing the world.

Rich Gray
________________________________________


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Visit the Walker Percy Project at http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy