The Eye and the Beholder

Many years ago now, engaged in a study of packaging on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, I got involved with bottles-and-cans. That phrase became shorthand, later, for a significant uproar across the environmental community dealing with beverage containers, their discard as litter, and efforts to force industry to reclaim and to recycle them. In studying this matter I visited Coca Cola in order to understand better how this aspect of packaging worked. In that process I came to marvel. The more I learned about the subject, the more it expanded. An empty, bent, carelessly discarded small container along the roadside—barely seen as we drive by it—morphed into a vast commercial, engineering, and manufacturing colossus which was the central concern, indeed the living, of thousands of people across the United States. I came to think of these containers as the uniformed armies of the two great competing empires of Sugar-Water, and, indeed, later on, having visited the one in Atlanta I also traveled to upstate New York, and there I was appropriately awed by the glorious glass palace that housed Pepsi, the other.

Who says that life in business is a dull affair? You drive away from such a setting in the green-gold countryside at the wheel of your red Avis on a brilliant fall day, having admired very fine art on display in a vast building-circumambulating lobby, and you think yourself magically transported into another medieval time of duchies and princedoms, the dukes and princes of whom are powerful figures who visit—or are visited by—senators and presidential aides, and in your thoughts, as the palace falls behind you and the black ribbon of the road bisects breathtaking woods, you wonder what a strange thing it might be to expend your efforts serving Sugar Water, travelling over oceans in shiny airplanes on its behalf…and realizing that this strange notion may never ever occur to Sugar Water’s actual minions who, bless them, just think of what they do as the same-old-same-old-same-old job.

I was reminded of the strange, lens-like character of attention in the context of yesterday’s post about living in multiple mental worlds. Our ability to pay attention to many quite different realities would seem to have a scattering, a centrifugal force. Here is time spent on complex technical problems (at work), the right wine for the chosen meat (shopping), the matter-form duality underlying Aristotle’s concept of substance and the peculiar habitation of unformed matter and immaterial form (reading), and then (Saturday night) immersed in experience of the music and the husky words of the creator of Thunder Road. Oh my. Yes, indeed. And the loom to weave all this into a fabric?

As the world infinitely expands, proliferates, and complexifies the more we stare at it, as at every blink that gets us closer it only unfurls yet another even greater fractal layer of yet another depth of intricacy—or as this same complexity curls up into a simple object, then shrinks into a token, then turns into a concept, and then may actually disappear as we withdraw our attention—all this while that which is behind the attention remains the only fixed and immutable point. And that point—we can’t actually get at it at all—is ourselves. It does the weaving. How we do it, how well we do it, that is the crux of the matter.

* * *

Thunder Road bring memories? A puzzlement? To hear the song, click here. To read the lyrics, here. The combined effect of words and music will not be revealed, I don’t think, by close study, however intense, of either one or the other, no matter how well conducted.

Embedded

As I am preoccupied with pleasant enough but mechanical matters at the moment, I thought I would avail myself of the virtues of an image, as in: A picture’s worth a thousand words. I call this “The Man in the Tree,” an ever-thought-provoking presence that comes into view on one of my many walks in my neighborhood. The thought that unfailingly comes each timeI look at this tree just before crossing the street to its side is: As this man in the tree so are we embedded in the material. Clicking the image will enlarge it.

A Long Footnote to "Property"

One must always remember that to the mind of the Middle Ages a man’s lawful property was an extension of his personality—an exterior body, as it were, and, like that body, a sacred trust to be used and not abused, either by himself or by others.

Thus wrote Dorothy Sayers in her commentary to Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXIV, the first of two that deal with the fate of thieves in hell. To this she added, “This accounts for the severe view which Dante takes of offenses against property.” Sayers had introduced this point in her commentary on Canto XI already, saying at that point:

Property is regarded, in accordance with Roman law, as an extension of the personality. Consequently, to damage or destroy one’s or one’s neighbor’s good is a sin of the same type as the damage and destruction of one’s own or one’s neighbour’s body.

Indeed, this view of property really arises from Natural Law. Not surprisingly, therefore, we find it present in most legal codes, not least in African customary law and in Islamic law. The interesting aspect of this interpretation of property is that, much as in John Locke’s thought, which as simply an updating, in is own time, of natural law thinking, property is linked to the body because it is linked to life. It is an “extension of the person” because the person depends on property in order to make his/her livelihood. Land, cattle and tooling were, together, the foundation of agricultural survival; tools and materials were the extensions of the craftsman without which he could not practice his trade. I would also note that we also experience this extension psychologically—and law recognizes this feeling. The following excerpt from Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality, by Meir Dan-Cohen (Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 217) will illustrate that:

Tort liability often extends beyond the unintended consequences of one’s bodily engagements. The famous tort cases involve escaping water and straying animals, but for our purposes a more mundane example will do. An unexpected wind blows a vase out of my living room, and the vase lands on a passerby’s head. Even if I had not myself placed the vase or been otherwise involved, I would be mortified more intensely than, say, my neighbor, as we both helplessly watch the vase traveling toward the passerby, and I would be expected and inclined to rush to the rescue with greater urgency than any Samaritan who happened on the scene.

Notice first how closely the phenomenology here resembles the win-spilling case [described earlier]: just as bodily involvement was the source of responsibility for the win-spilling, ownership of the vase links me inexorably to the passerby’s injury.

We have here, therefore, a logical basis for property-as-extension-of-body (meaning its economic support functions), a psychological identification because we own something, and a legal recognition of that fact.

Now to this I would add some observations. First, property as an extension of the body for its maintenance made a lot of sense in pre-modern times when property, for the vast majority, was the means of making a living—be it by agriculture or trades. In those days property had a functionally closer association with life than it has today. If we were to bring natural law up to date, to modernize it properly, as Locke was doing for his time, we would include as an intimate core, of the concept of property, that which provides us our actual, continuous source of income—much like a shop-materials-tools or land-cattle-and-implements functioned in medieval and in earlier times. And that functional equivalent would be — our job! But we don’t have a right to jobs. Not like medieval man had to property. If you apply the life-liberty-property slogan to the ordinary modern human, you would see that, in our age, we are actually deprived of one element in this trinity—despite all the endless talk about the sanctity of property.

Worth thinking about.

A Flux of Matter

Within the last week I’ve come across two articles each of which makes the point that the human body carries, inside and out, ten times as many bacteria as it has cells. We have somewhere between 60 to a 100 trillion cells. The numbers below begin to be as great as those in the astronomical above. The source I’ve managed to locate is a New York Times blog entry by Olivia Judson entitled “Microbes ‘R’ Us.” I can’t locate the second one—nor yet reports of the unveiling of some new scientific paper—hence I assume that Judson was probably the source of the second fragment I saw somewhere else.

Judson’s blog differs from earlier stories of this sort in one respect alone—namely its estimate of a total upper boundary of the number of bacteria in or around the body. Not that anyone has ever really counted the critters, but the human mind loves factoids, and soon everyone will know about the quadrillion bacteria we carry without so much as bending under the weight. The mere fact that we carry bacteria by the billions, trillions has been known for quite some time, of course. Our digestive functions vitally depend on bacterial cultures. The bacteria feed on our food, transform it, and we digest the “treated” product much more easily. Such bacteria are called commensals, a word coined from Latin rooting literally meaning “with-eaters.” When antibiotics destroy too many of these helpful parasites, we are in trouble until they are reintroduced and multiply.

Bodies may be likened to standing swirls or vortices of matter, analogous to constant swirls created in flowing water by structures on the river bed that cause turbulence below and on the surface. Matter constantly flows in and out of me—my breath for one. I’m constantly losing matter whenever I so much as touch something; I gain it back as I breathe, eat, drink. My cells have a finite life and are replaced. In each of my cells tiny power-plants, the mitochondria, have their own DNA and cycles of life; they are true symbionts. If I had instruments fine enough to see and measure at the elemental level, my body would extend a vast distance from its core, what I call the body, because I radiate heat, and matter escapes from me and floats away into the air. Not least I host—and benefit from—vast colonies of independent living things. To the extent that my health depends on them, are they really separate from me? Or part of the body? Where, if anywhere, do we draw the line? What, if anything, do I mean by me. This swirl, this standing wave of turbulence?

These are the kinds of thoughts young people think—and those who’ve failed to grow up or haven’t simply accepted the current explanations and therefore are still curious. Heraclitus (535-475 BC) has provided one of the answers—the one that captures all of the above: “Everything flows, nothing stands still.” But that’s the sound of one hand clapping. And for balance I need another hand.