No Two Know The Same Thing, And This, The Twain Knows

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My wife and I woke on a Saturday morning; after stretching our bodies to realize their corporeality and after going through ceremonies of purging said bodies of torpor and fluid retention, we rejoined together in bed and began discussing with each other what dreams did rise to meet our unconscious through the night. We went through various permutations of story-telling antics, disseminating sense as if it were contained in hand gestures, nicitations, fluctuations and accents of voice, and general revolts of calm-bedlam that belied the sensibility of our dreams simply to translate the inherent “spirit” with which we experienced our dreams. Needless to say, vitamins, oatmeal, and orange juice were the comestibles in order after our vaudeville.

I told Amanda later that Saturday morning of a ceremony performed by a tribe of the Australian Aborigines—Unmatjera—that I had read about in Sir James George Fraser’s The Golden Bough which initiates male members of the tribe into adulthood. To paraphrase the litany of requisite rituals that comprise the ceremony, the young man is slathered, from head to toe, with dingo blood which is used to ward off devious and beguiling spirits who would seek entry into the cynosure’s body during the circumcision ceremony which follows the dingo-blood soak. The young man’s father than gifts him a churinga, or magic stick which is said to be part of the initiate’s spirit and therefore, in the remotest vales and purlieus of the young man’s former incarnations. He is to take the accumulation of his soul’s experiences upon the earth with him—codified as memories in his heart, and knots on the churinga—out into the forest, alone, and defend himself through the night and dawn against whatever revenant or gaberlunzie should manifest itself and seek revenge to the boy’s past deeds and heroics which might have fitted these monsters and beggars to their own extinction from bone (Fraser 803).

Granted, this story could be termed grizzly and bizarre, but as Amanda and I talked about it, she evinced a theory that caused me to pause in my eating of oatmeal, which in and of itself—refraining from eating—is a monumental event: she basically revealed that what causes revile and shock within her retaining my adumbration of the ceremony is that it(the ceremony)is contrary to her own algorithm of how a child ought to transmogrify from child to adult. Barbaric it might be, the ceremony—while parenthetic—reflects the zeitgeist of the Unmatjera’s interpretation of its witnessing the universe, the earth, the animals, the peoples, and spirits, which encapsulate and define the experience of being a Unmatjeran.

Thanks to the Unmatjeran, Sir James George Fraser, my wife, and dingoes, I was able to identify in our reading of Enduring Love that there is a case to be made that defining Jed Parry in terms of De Clerembault may seem apropos—insofar as Joe Rose is concerned—but compassed against how other characters in the novel respond to experience and interpret some facet of the experience for themselves in order to make sense of the experience, I daresay that Jed Parry may simply be a man who in a moment of turbidity, simply inferred a sign or signal in the only way he knew how with what faculties he was bedighted; as might any human being.

A most telling line of verse from Parry’s love letter to Rose reveals what he(Parry)saw and why he saw it in Rose’s face in the pasture—Logan set between them as a doleman, measure in rifts rather than in joints—is because Rose was beseeching Parry—in whatever phrasing of mien the face rotated through—to “mend [his] rift with God through the healing power of love”(McEwan 106). Nothing more; nothing less. Parry’s—Rose’s—own inabilities in continued attempts at rescuing Harry from the run-away balloon—although the boy was brought to safety organically by wind and route—causes both men, invariably, to kneel before the inefficiency of human capacity and serve another, more remote habitation of the self, a ceremony that causes Parry to infer that it is love and salvation Rose seeks from him.

And very well that Rose might have been cogitating through the realms of love and forgiveness and salvation because of the severity of the experience and the shared-failing of each man. It was not in the capacity of any man there that day to save the boy and Rose points to it: “Our misery in the aftermath was proof that we knew we had failed ourselves. But letting go was in our nature too. Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict: what to give to others and what to keep for yourself”(McEwan 15). What would Rose keep for himself—that quotient of misery in his failures—and what of it would he give away? Perhaps he was mired in the confluence of this reckoning when his mien met Parry’s; and perchance Parry—a man guided by his interpretation of God, love, and forgiveness—interpreted such ideas as “love,” “forgiveness,” and “God,” out of Rose’s glance. Did not Rose enact the same theory when going to see Mrs. Logan that afternoon, walking up her driveway and noting that “[i]t would have been too easy to assume that the sadness coming off the house was mere projection, and I made myself find the signs: the neglected garden, closed curtains in two upstairs windows, and, below the steps by the door, broken glass—of a milk bottle, perhaps” (McEwan116). So much is going on in Rose’s mind, eg, antecedents of the conversation he was to hold with Mrs. Logan, her husband’s death, etc., that he makes himself look for signs that the sadness coming off the house is not of his own devise—that this sadness exists in the world with Mrs. Logan—and Mr. Logan’s death more appropriately—as the fulcrum in its provenance.

As scientific and rational as Joe Rose is, he persistently forbears the identity of variegated self existing outside of the scientific and rationale; as if whatever “stuff” the self is resultant of exists in a time and order that is consistent with what amounts to solipsism. In one passage, he reflects a bit like a poor man’s David Hume when Rose notes that “[p]eople often remark on how quickly the extraordinary becomes commonplace. I think that every time I’m on a motorway at night, or on a plane as it rises through cloud cover into sunlight. We are highly adaptive creatures. The predictable becomes, by definition, background, leaving the attention uncluttered, the better to deal with the random or unexpected” (McEwan 151). The quotients of predictable, random, unexpected, extraordinary, and commonplace are set forth as defined by Rose’s gauging of them, a rudimentary tableau that is girded to his template viewing of the world. This seemingly allows no other’s algorithm placement in the determination of what has happened and how to deal with it. It is as if phenomenon and/or experience are essentially—for Rose—identifiable and classified by the spoors left after the experience relents and the skeleton hand unclenches its grip on your collar; experience being no more than the opportunity to dilute the mammoth into a puddle that is, again, measurable, quantifiable, and researchable so rather than the entirety of an experience being overwhelming, a synecdoche of sorts—for Rose, focusing on his failures as scientist, as hero, as altruist, as lover, etc.—allows the part that is familiar to cognition becomes the whole and therefore, any hypothesis wrung out of the microcosm is interpreted to represent the value of the macrocosm which has been sorely interpreted.

Hume wrote that “[we are] nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Hume 252). Neither man leave room for the essential faculty of man’s ability to discern, to perceive and discern what is presented to a human. The miasma of Rose punctiliously working a scalpel through what “went wrong in the system” that might have led to Parry’s irrational belief that he(Rose) is in love with him exacts the notion that Joe Rose is a man who believes the world to his own cognition and senses; whatever is recondite, is dismissible.

Yet doesn’t every character in the novel press through the singular experience shared that Sunday afternoon by focusing with their own eyes? through the prism of their own experiential self and its algorithms that govern how each man and woman “experiences experience?” While Joe may seem cold and unaffectionate, what would we term Mrs. Logan as when her husband’s death becomes the impetus to focus on whether or not he was having an affair on her? And what of Greene, who would rather lodge his notion of the shared-experience in terms definable by “his ankle, or the sick pay he should have been receiving on its account”(McEwan 156)? Or Gadd who barks that he will say what he has to say in “a coroner’s court”(McEwan 157)?

And what of Clarissa’s discerning in her letter to Joe that:
“You asked me last night if I realized that you had saved my life. In the immediate sense, of course, that’s true. I’ll always be grateful. You were brave and resourceful. In fact, you were brilliant. But I don’t accept that it was always inevitable that Parry was going to hire killers or that I should end up being threatened with a knife. My guess was that he was always more likely to do himself harm…by drawing Parry in, by overacting all along the way, by guessing his every next move [it was as if]you were pushing him toward it” (McEwan 235).
Rather than ascribing what is perceived as irrational behavior to a condition like De Cleremabult, Clarissa asserts that Joe’s over-analyzing of the situation, and not simply compassionately viewing from Parry’s vantage that perhaps a simply twitch of the lips or dilation of the eyes may have been the stimuli for Parry to reach what he perceived as a logical interpretation(while such an interpretation may very well have been not simply desultory to the stimuli created by Rose, but anachronistic)actually caused the calamity to befall Joe and Clarissa; and while Joe may have been the hero in saving her, he may also have been the flamen who called forth the plague and pestilence to which he was unconsciously aimed.

J.S. Wiener writes that “[t]he interaction between men and their environments, natural or artificial, will always invoke biological change, as immediate responses through developmental and physiological adjustment and as long term responses through selection and other agencies” (Wiener 7), the word, environment, here as portmanteau for all things surrounding Man: place, climate, culture, and Man itself. But this change, of biological concern, will always be glassed with the devices that allow man and woman survival as Gary Snyder expatiates:
“Staying power through history is related to the degree of intentionality, intensity, mindfulness, playfulness, and incorporation of previous strategies and standards within the medium—plus creative reuse or reinterpretation of the received forms, plus intellectual coherence, time-transcending long-term human relevance, plus resonances with the deep images of the unconscious” (Snyder 79).
Yes, Mankind does change and adapt to environment by that environment acting upon it; but, we must first fail—that is essential. We are only what we have experienced and inferred and as such, we must allow ourselves to fail with this calculus so we might endow to ourselves a creative reusing or “reinterpretation of received forms.” During the struggle to land the hot-air balloon, Rose recalls, that the men “heard nothing for our own shouting and swearing. What [the pilot] was doing seemed ridiculous, but his intentions, it turned out, were completely sensible. He wanted to deflate the balloon by pulling a cord that was tangled in the basket”(McEwan 12). Distanced from the moment, Rose sees rationale where at once he saw discord and antithesis to his own sensibility. Might the same rune be used to intimate that each person in the novel was correct as well as wrong? The factual experience that day of the hot-air balloon tragedy is incontrovertible; but what is malleable is how each person received and inferred data from that day and experience and came to a conclusion that befit how they fit together any piece of datum. The Irish poet and playwright James Cousins devised a wonderfully simplistic diagram to say as much:





Copyright of Journal of Generalism and Civics, Scotland

As a great friend of mine once said, “No two men know the same thing, and this, they know.”






WORK CITED
Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Print.
McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. New York: Anchor Books, 1997. Print.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of The Wild. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. Print.
Weiner, J.S. The Natural History of Man. Garden City, New York: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1973. Print.