omg omg omg 88
12-25-2010
, 04:19 PM
12-25-2010
, 04:21 PM
Quote:
For it concerned a certain child born in
a very primitive paleolithic village somewhere. Just where he did not
know; this was undoubtedly a part of the narrative’s protasis or exposition
which he had missed by finding himself forced to fly standby
and entering in as it were medias res. On the United leg. The sense he
got was of a certain extraordinarily primitive, Third World, jungle or
rain-forest region of the world, perhaps Asia or South America, and so
terrifically long ago as to be literally paleolithic or perhaps mesolithic,
as of course the anthropological origins of genres like this nearly always
are. The context in which my friend then subsequently had it related
to him by his acquaintance was if possible, he said, even more banal
and unexpected than a commercial airline flight, as if somehow the
quotidian and as it were modern everydayness of the narrative circumstances
made its archetypal parallels even more remarkable. But he
also emphasized extremely primitive and paleolithic, in the variant, as in
spears and crude lean-tos and pantheistic shamanism and an extremely
primitive hunting-and-gathering mode of subsistence; and in a certain
isolated village deep in the region’s rain forest apparently a certain child
is born who emerges as one of these extraordinarily high-powered,
supernaturally advanced human specimens who come along in every
culture every once in a great while, as history shows, although he said
the younger airline passenger, whom he surmised may have been a corporate
or academic scientist, did not use ‘supernatural’ or ‘messianic’
or ‘prophetic’ or any of the other terms the cycle usually reserves for
specimens like this, instead using terms such as ‘advanced,’ ‘brilliant,’
or ‘ingenious’ and describing the child’s exceptional qualities and career
almost exclusively in terms of cognitive ability, raw IQ — because he
said apparently at a very young age, an age at which most of the village’s
children were just beginning to learn the very basic customs and
behaviors that the primitive village expected of its citizens, this two- or
perhaps three-year-old child was already evincing an ability to answer
absolutely any question put to it.To answer correctly, accurately, comprehensively.
Even very difficult or even paradoxical questions. Of
course the full range and depth of the child’s interrogatory intelligence
were not manifested for some time; thus their emergence serves as the
comme on dit Threshold Experience and occupies much of the protasis.
That at first the ability seems simply a novelty, something for its
parents to so to speak dine out on and amuse the other villagers with,
something on the order of, ‘Look: our two-year-old knows how many
twigs you have if you hold five twigs and then pick up three more
twigs’; until of course one of the parents’ amused neighbors happens to
say or ask something that prompts the child to disclose that it also
knows everything culturally important about each different individual
twig the man happens to be holding, such as for example the village’s
official and idiomatic names for the trees the twigs derived from, and
the various pantheistic deities and religious significance of each species
of relevant tree, as well as which ones had edible leaves or bark that
eased fever if boiled, and so on, including which species’ grain and
tensile flexion were especially good for spear shafts and the small phytotoxic
darts the villages of this region used with crude reed blowguns to
defend themselves against the tropical rain forest’s predacious jaguars,
which are apparently the scourge of the paleolithic Third World and
the leading statistical cause of death after disease, malnutrition, and
intertribal warfare. After which, of course, in short order, after reports
of the remarkable twig prelection get about and the parents and other
primitive villagers begin regarding the child’s intelligence in a wholly
different spirit, it emerges that the child is also fully capable of answering
all manner of both trivial and also profoundly non-trivial questions,
practical questions that bore directly on the village’s subsistence-level
quality of life, such as for instance where was the best place to find a
certain kind of cassava root, and why were the migrations of a certain
species of elk or dik-dik — a species which the village depended for its
very life on hunting effectively— more predictable in the rainy season
than in the dry season, and why were certain types of igneous rock
better for fashioning sharp edges or striking together to produce fire
than other types of igneous rock, and so on. And then, of course, subsequently,
in a rather predictable trial-and-error heuristic evolution, it
emerges in the action of the protasis that the child’s preternatural brilliance
in fact extends even to those questions that are considered by
the village supremely important, in other words almost religious-grade
questions, questions which—substituting my friend’s own terminology
for that of the analytical younger man on the United flight— involved
not just cerebration or raw IQ but actual sagacity or virtue or wisdom
or as Coleridge would have had it esemplasy, and soon the child is being
called upon to adjudicate very complex and multifaceted conflicts, such
as if two gathering-caste villagers both happened on the same breadfruit
tree at precisely the same time and both claimed the breadfruit
who should get the breadfruit, or for example if a wife failed to conceive
within a certain specified number of lunar or solar cycles did the
husband have the right to banish her altogether or did his rights extend
only to no longer sharing food with her, and so on and so forth —
evidently the passenger up ahead provided any number of exemplary
questions, some of which were very involved and difficult for either my
friend or his acquaintance to reconstruct. The point, however, is that
the exceptional child’s answers to these sorts of questions were without
fail so ingeniously apposite and simple and comprehensive and fair
that all sides felt justly treated, and often the litigants could not understand
why they had not thought of such an obviously equitable solution
themselves, and in short order a great many long-standing
conflicts are settled and perennial social conundrums resolved; and by
this time the entire village had come to revere the child and had collectively
decided that the child must in fact be a special emissary or
legate or even incarnation of the primitive Dark Spirits on which their
pantheistic religion was primarily based, and some of the village’s
shaman and midwife castes — members of what would later become
the new social structure’s professional consultant caste — claimed that
the child had in fact come spontaneously into incarnated form deep in
the circumambient rain forest and had been suckled and protected by
divinely mollified jaguars, and that the child’s putative mother and father
had in fact simply stumbled onto the child while out gathering
cassava roots and were lying about its having been conceived and born
in the usual protomammalian way, and were therefore of course also by
extension lying about their own legal paternity; and after a great deal
of discussion and debate the village exarchs vote to remove the child
from the parents’ custody and to make it an as it were ward or dependent
ex officio of the entire village, and to invest the child with some
sort of unique unprecedented legal status that was neither minor nor
adult nor member of any caste, neither a village exarch nor a thane nor
a shaman per se but something entirely else, and with the nominal
‘parents’ granted certain special rights and privileges to compensate
them for their supplantation by the village in loco— the exarchs apparently
having come in secret to none other than the child itself to
help them structure this whole delicate compromise — and they construct
for the child a special sort of raised wicker dais or platform in
the precise geometric center of the village, and they designate certain
extremely rigid and precise intervals and arrangements whereby once
every lunar cycle the villagers can all come to the village’s center to line
up before the dais according to certain arcane hierarchies of caste and
familial status and to one by one come before the seated child with
questions and disputes for him to resolve via ethical fatwa and are in
return to compensate the child for its services with an offering of a
plantain or dik-dik haunch or some other item of recognized value,
which offering was what the primitive but complex legal arrangement
provided for the child to live on and support himself instead of being
his alleged parents’ comme on dit ‘dependent.’ The context in which my
own friend then had the narrative related to him by his acquaintance
is unknown to me as anything more than ‘quotidian’ or ‘everyday.’
They would all line up before the dais to offer the child a yam, an
ampoule of blow-dart phytotoxin, et cetera, and in return the child
would undertake to answer their question. As exempla of this sort of
mythopoeic cycle so often go, this arrangement is represented as the
origin of something like modern trade in the villagers’ culture. Prior to
the child’s evection, everyone had made their own clothes and lean-tos
and spears and gathered all and only their own family’s food, and while
certain foodstuffs were sometimes shared at equinoctial religious
festivals and so forth there was evidently nothing like actual barter or
trade until the advent of this child who could and would answer any
question put to it. And the small child thereafter lived atop this platform
and never left it — the dais had its own lean-to with a pallet of
plantain leaves and a small hollowed-out concavity for a fire and primitive
cooking pot — and apparently the child’s entire childhood was
thenceforward spent on the central platform eating and sleeping and
sitting for long periods doing nothing, presumably thinking and developing,
and waiting out the 29.518 synodic days before the villagers
would again line up with their respective questions. And as the village’s
trade-based economy became more modern and complex, one novel
development was that certain especially shrewd and acute members of
the shaman and midwife castes began to cultivate the intellectual or as
it were rhetorical skill of structuring a monthly question in such a way
as to receive a maximally valuable answer from the extraordinary child,
and they then began to sell or barter these interrogatory skills to ordinary
villagers who wished to extract maximum value for their monthly
question, which was the advent of what the narrative apparently terms
the village’s consultant caste. For instance instead of asking the child
something narrowly circumscribed such as, ‘Where in our village’s
region of the rain forest should I look for a certain type of edible root?’
a professional consultant’s suggestion here might be that his client ask
the child something more general along the lines for example of, ‘How
can a man feed his family with less effort than we now expend?’ or,
‘How might we ensure a store of food that will last our family through
periods when available resources are scarce?’ Whereas on the other
hand, as the whole enterprise became more sophisticated and specialized,
the consultant caste also discovered that maximizing the answer’s
value sometimes entailed making a certain question more specific and
practical, as in for instance instead of, ‘How can we increase our supply
of firewood?’ a more efficacious question here might be, ‘How might a
single man move a whole downed tree close to his home so as to have
plentiful firewood?’ And evidently some of the village’s new consultant
caste developed into rather ingenious interlocutors and managed to
design questions of historic cultural importance and value such as,
‘When my neighbor borrows my spear, how can I make a record of
the loan in order to prove that the spear is mine in case my neighbor
suddenly turns round and claims that the spear is his and refuses to
return it?’ or, ‘How might I divert water from one of the rain forest’s
streams so that instead of my wife having to walk miles with a jar
balanced on her head in order to haul water from the stream the
stream might be made to as it were come to us?’ and so forth — here
it was not clear whether my friend or his acquaintance were providing
their own examples or whether these were actual examples enumerated
during the dialogue he overheard on the United flight.
a very primitive paleolithic village somewhere. Just where he did not
know; this was undoubtedly a part of the narrative’s protasis or exposition
which he had missed by finding himself forced to fly standby
and entering in as it were medias res. On the United leg. The sense he
got was of a certain extraordinarily primitive, Third World, jungle or
rain-forest region of the world, perhaps Asia or South America, and so
terrifically long ago as to be literally paleolithic or perhaps mesolithic,
as of course the anthropological origins of genres like this nearly always
are. The context in which my friend then subsequently had it related
to him by his acquaintance was if possible, he said, even more banal
and unexpected than a commercial airline flight, as if somehow the
quotidian and as it were modern everydayness of the narrative circumstances
made its archetypal parallels even more remarkable. But he
also emphasized extremely primitive and paleolithic, in the variant, as in
spears and crude lean-tos and pantheistic shamanism and an extremely
primitive hunting-and-gathering mode of subsistence; and in a certain
isolated village deep in the region’s rain forest apparently a certain child
is born who emerges as one of these extraordinarily high-powered,
supernaturally advanced human specimens who come along in every
culture every once in a great while, as history shows, although he said
the younger airline passenger, whom he surmised may have been a corporate
or academic scientist, did not use ‘supernatural’ or ‘messianic’
or ‘prophetic’ or any of the other terms the cycle usually reserves for
specimens like this, instead using terms such as ‘advanced,’ ‘brilliant,’
or ‘ingenious’ and describing the child’s exceptional qualities and career
almost exclusively in terms of cognitive ability, raw IQ — because he
said apparently at a very young age, an age at which most of the village’s
children were just beginning to learn the very basic customs and
behaviors that the primitive village expected of its citizens, this two- or
perhaps three-year-old child was already evincing an ability to answer
absolutely any question put to it.To answer correctly, accurately, comprehensively.
Even very difficult or even paradoxical questions. Of
course the full range and depth of the child’s interrogatory intelligence
were not manifested for some time; thus their emergence serves as the
comme on dit Threshold Experience and occupies much of the protasis.
That at first the ability seems simply a novelty, something for its
parents to so to speak dine out on and amuse the other villagers with,
something on the order of, ‘Look: our two-year-old knows how many
twigs you have if you hold five twigs and then pick up three more
twigs’; until of course one of the parents’ amused neighbors happens to
say or ask something that prompts the child to disclose that it also
knows everything culturally important about each different individual
twig the man happens to be holding, such as for example the village’s
official and idiomatic names for the trees the twigs derived from, and
the various pantheistic deities and religious significance of each species
of relevant tree, as well as which ones had edible leaves or bark that
eased fever if boiled, and so on, including which species’ grain and
tensile flexion were especially good for spear shafts and the small phytotoxic
darts the villages of this region used with crude reed blowguns to
defend themselves against the tropical rain forest’s predacious jaguars,
which are apparently the scourge of the paleolithic Third World and
the leading statistical cause of death after disease, malnutrition, and
intertribal warfare. After which, of course, in short order, after reports
of the remarkable twig prelection get about and the parents and other
primitive villagers begin regarding the child’s intelligence in a wholly
different spirit, it emerges that the child is also fully capable of answering
all manner of both trivial and also profoundly non-trivial questions,
practical questions that bore directly on the village’s subsistence-level
quality of life, such as for instance where was the best place to find a
certain kind of cassava root, and why were the migrations of a certain
species of elk or dik-dik — a species which the village depended for its
very life on hunting effectively— more predictable in the rainy season
than in the dry season, and why were certain types of igneous rock
better for fashioning sharp edges or striking together to produce fire
than other types of igneous rock, and so on. And then, of course, subsequently,
in a rather predictable trial-and-error heuristic evolution, it
emerges in the action of the protasis that the child’s preternatural brilliance
in fact extends even to those questions that are considered by
the village supremely important, in other words almost religious-grade
questions, questions which—substituting my friend’s own terminology
for that of the analytical younger man on the United flight— involved
not just cerebration or raw IQ but actual sagacity or virtue or wisdom
or as Coleridge would have had it esemplasy, and soon the child is being
called upon to adjudicate very complex and multifaceted conflicts, such
as if two gathering-caste villagers both happened on the same breadfruit
tree at precisely the same time and both claimed the breadfruit
who should get the breadfruit, or for example if a wife failed to conceive
within a certain specified number of lunar or solar cycles did the
husband have the right to banish her altogether or did his rights extend
only to no longer sharing food with her, and so on and so forth —
evidently the passenger up ahead provided any number of exemplary
questions, some of which were very involved and difficult for either my
friend or his acquaintance to reconstruct. The point, however, is that
the exceptional child’s answers to these sorts of questions were without
fail so ingeniously apposite and simple and comprehensive and fair
that all sides felt justly treated, and often the litigants could not understand
why they had not thought of such an obviously equitable solution
themselves, and in short order a great many long-standing
conflicts are settled and perennial social conundrums resolved; and by
this time the entire village had come to revere the child and had collectively
decided that the child must in fact be a special emissary or
legate or even incarnation of the primitive Dark Spirits on which their
pantheistic religion was primarily based, and some of the village’s
shaman and midwife castes — members of what would later become
the new social structure’s professional consultant caste — claimed that
the child had in fact come spontaneously into incarnated form deep in
the circumambient rain forest and had been suckled and protected by
divinely mollified jaguars, and that the child’s putative mother and father
had in fact simply stumbled onto the child while out gathering
cassava roots and were lying about its having been conceived and born
in the usual protomammalian way, and were therefore of course also by
extension lying about their own legal paternity; and after a great deal
of discussion and debate the village exarchs vote to remove the child
from the parents’ custody and to make it an as it were ward or dependent
ex officio of the entire village, and to invest the child with some
sort of unique unprecedented legal status that was neither minor nor
adult nor member of any caste, neither a village exarch nor a thane nor
a shaman per se but something entirely else, and with the nominal
‘parents’ granted certain special rights and privileges to compensate
them for their supplantation by the village in loco— the exarchs apparently
having come in secret to none other than the child itself to
help them structure this whole delicate compromise — and they construct
for the child a special sort of raised wicker dais or platform in
the precise geometric center of the village, and they designate certain
extremely rigid and precise intervals and arrangements whereby once
every lunar cycle the villagers can all come to the village’s center to line
up before the dais according to certain arcane hierarchies of caste and
familial status and to one by one come before the seated child with
questions and disputes for him to resolve via ethical fatwa and are in
return to compensate the child for its services with an offering of a
plantain or dik-dik haunch or some other item of recognized value,
which offering was what the primitive but complex legal arrangement
provided for the child to live on and support himself instead of being
his alleged parents’ comme on dit ‘dependent.’ The context in which my
own friend then had the narrative related to him by his acquaintance
is unknown to me as anything more than ‘quotidian’ or ‘everyday.’
They would all line up before the dais to offer the child a yam, an
ampoule of blow-dart phytotoxin, et cetera, and in return the child
would undertake to answer their question. As exempla of this sort of
mythopoeic cycle so often go, this arrangement is represented as the
origin of something like modern trade in the villagers’ culture. Prior to
the child’s evection, everyone had made their own clothes and lean-tos
and spears and gathered all and only their own family’s food, and while
certain foodstuffs were sometimes shared at equinoctial religious
festivals and so forth there was evidently nothing like actual barter or
trade until the advent of this child who could and would answer any
question put to it. And the small child thereafter lived atop this platform
and never left it — the dais had its own lean-to with a pallet of
plantain leaves and a small hollowed-out concavity for a fire and primitive
cooking pot — and apparently the child’s entire childhood was
thenceforward spent on the central platform eating and sleeping and
sitting for long periods doing nothing, presumably thinking and developing,
and waiting out the 29.518 synodic days before the villagers
would again line up with their respective questions. And as the village’s
trade-based economy became more modern and complex, one novel
development was that certain especially shrewd and acute members of
the shaman and midwife castes began to cultivate the intellectual or as
it were rhetorical skill of structuring a monthly question in such a way
as to receive a maximally valuable answer from the extraordinary child,
and they then began to sell or barter these interrogatory skills to ordinary
villagers who wished to extract maximum value for their monthly
question, which was the advent of what the narrative apparently terms
the village’s consultant caste. For instance instead of asking the child
something narrowly circumscribed such as, ‘Where in our village’s
region of the rain forest should I look for a certain type of edible root?’
a professional consultant’s suggestion here might be that his client ask
the child something more general along the lines for example of, ‘How
can a man feed his family with less effort than we now expend?’ or,
‘How might we ensure a store of food that will last our family through
periods when available resources are scarce?’ Whereas on the other
hand, as the whole enterprise became more sophisticated and specialized,
the consultant caste also discovered that maximizing the answer’s
value sometimes entailed making a certain question more specific and
practical, as in for instance instead of, ‘How can we increase our supply
of firewood?’ a more efficacious question here might be, ‘How might a
single man move a whole downed tree close to his home so as to have
plentiful firewood?’ And evidently some of the village’s new consultant
caste developed into rather ingenious interlocutors and managed to
design questions of historic cultural importance and value such as,
‘When my neighbor borrows my spear, how can I make a record of
the loan in order to prove that the spear is mine in case my neighbor
suddenly turns round and claims that the spear is his and refuses to
return it?’ or, ‘How might I divert water from one of the rain forest’s
streams so that instead of my wife having to walk miles with a jar
balanced on her head in order to haul water from the stream the
stream might be made to as it were come to us?’ and so forth — here
it was not clear whether my friend or his acquaintance were providing
their own examples or whether these were actual examples enumerated
during the dialogue he overheard on the United flight.
12-25-2010
, 04:31 PM
12-25-2010
, 04:32 PM
12-25-2010
, 04:34 PM
12-25-2010
, 04:36 PM
12-25-2010
, 04:38 PM