Our Experience, Ourselves

Our Experience, Ourselves

by Lyn Paul Relph

Copyright 2012 Lyn Paul Relph

Smashwords Revised Edition 2015

ISBN: 9781476028866

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Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter One — The Grand Sweep

Chapter Two — The Greek Way

Chapter Three — Carpe Diem

Chapter Four — The High Middle Ages

Chapter Five — The Crash

Chapter Six — Chaucer’s Wife of Bath

Chapter Seven — Florence, Early 1400s

Chapter Eight — Maps, Illustrations, Anatomies

Chapter Nine — The New Authority

Chapter Ten — Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Chapter Eleven — Gulliver’s Travels (1727)

Chapter Twelve — Two Victorian Women

Chapter Thirteen — Fast Forward to the 21st Century

Preface

Once, just before the year 1400 CE, the writer Geoffrey Chaucer arranged for us to hear these words from the mouth of his original character The Wife of Bath:

Experience, though noon auctoritee

Were in this world, is right ynough for me.

(Middle English)

Though experience carries little weight in the world at large, it’s good enough for me.

(Modern English Rendition)

Thus quietly began a discussion, debate or culture war that goes on still. To what extent can we let experience be our guide through this world, even if that means ignoring or defying outside sources of authority commanding us to hear and obey? How valuable is our experience after all? or, How much is our experience worth? or, more broadly, What does our experience mean to us?

Chaucer probably first heard some form of this question on one of his trips to Italy around 1380; he is the prime suspect of carrying the bug back to England with him. But in passage the bug mutated: in Italy the question was, To what extent should a man let his experience be his guide? But as we see, Chaucer changed it to, To what extent may a woman let her experience be her guide? That little change is one of the main reasons why The Wife of Bath is immortal.

In the Western Tradition this bundle of questions has been argued up and down, back and forth, as far back as the records go. Ink by the barrel has been poured over such questions as, Which experiences are the really valuable ones, the ones that turn a life around? Not the humdrum, every day kind of thing T.S. Eliot pointed to when he complained, I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. Or questions like, Whose experiences are we talking about? Everyone has agreed all the way back that the idiots, madmen, conmen, asses, fools and jerks among us are beneath consideration: we’d be fools ourselves to believe what they report about their experiences. But on almost every other count dispute still rages, including the status of geniuses, savants, religious ecstatics, lunatics and women.

A closely-related set of questions ask How do we calculate the value of experience? Our commonest way is to monetize it. For instance, a recent NPR story on airplane mechanics reported that The longer mechanics work on airplanes the more skilled they generally become. An apprentice may start at $12 to $15 an hour and top out five to twenty years later upwards of $40 an hour. That translates into some $80K a year.

And what does that money add up to? It can be a ticket to a solid middle class life — a life of some financial comfort and security; solid job security; pride of accomplishment in an honorable line of work; plus a sense of worthwhile contribution to the general good and safer skies. The monetary means open access to manifold ends, even a life worth living.

Questions about the worth of experience have come to diminish the status of eyewitness testimony. Eye-witnesses have forever, it seems, been a preferred source of evidence. I was there, eyewitnesses say, I saw what happened, and I can tell it straight from the horse’s mouth. This is what the Wife of Bath says. And when eyewitnesses swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, judges, lawyers, jurors and journalists all agree to take the testimony seriously. But here at the beginning of the twenty-first century eyewitness testimony has lost much of its traditional luster. How many times, now, have eyewitnesses pointed at the accused and testified, He’s the one. HE did it! I saw him do it, only to have DNA evidence, years later, show that the accused was not on the crime scene at all? Biased witnesses can sometimes not see straight. Untrained observers can miss what’s really going on in the scene before them (law enforcement personnel and other trained witnesses provide more credible testimony). Elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales Chaucer passes on to us the stereotype of the philosopher who walks along staring up at the heavens and falls into a hole in the ground. Witnesses with a stake in the outcome of a decision can bend the facts or outright lie. Physically, emotionally or psychologically disturbed individuals are wide open to discreditation, as are the very young or very old. And witnesses from the powerless margins of society command much less respect than mainstream witnesses do, especially if those witnesses hold positions of power and authority.

The Clint Eastwood film Changeling (2008) retells a classic example, from Los Angeles in the 1920s, of how women’s reports of their experiences get only deaf ears. Christine Collins, the mom in the film, played by Angelina Jolie, has her nine-year-old son Walter kidnapped, which she reports to the police. After a while the L.A.P.D. recover a boy from Iowa, decide he is Walter and ‘return’ him to Ms. Collins. She says, This is not my boy. I know my boy and this is not my boy. But L.A.P.D. Captain J. J. Jones as played by Jeffrey Donovan insists, Of course he’s your boy, Mrs. Collins. We have identified him as Walter. Just give it some time and you’ll see.

Evidence piles up: this ‘Walter’ is much taller than the real one; this one is circumcised. Capt. Jones denies the evidence just as he denied value to Ms. Collins’s experience. He calls her upset, then agitated, then hysterical, finally insane and has her committed to the loony bin in Camarillo. Eventually the full story comes out, Ms. Collins is informed that Walter was murdered and Capt. Jones gets (most of) what he deserves, but along the way we go through stages of reaction from ‘this is outrageous’ to ‘what a son-of-a-bitch he is’ to ‘how can he get away with this?’

But of course the answer is, he can get away with it because he’s in the position of authority, and when the authorities find it in their interest they deny the value of ordinary people’s experience. Long experience can gain you the reputation of an expert; and the value associated with that makes you an authority, especially if you have written books on the subject. As the Pope said to Galileo (essentially), I don’t care what your experience tells you. The earth does not go around the sun. Rather, it’s the sun that goes around the earth; just give it some time and you’ll see. Your experience is worthless; it is of no value whatsoever. George Orwell in his famous novel 1984 runs through just such a sequence in the interrogation of Winston Smith:

Interrogator: How many fingers do you see?

WS: Four.

Interrogator: Big Brother says there are three.

Modern storytellers count on our outrage at this kind of abuse: eroding people’s belief or trust in their own experience is a fundamental kind of violation, a first stage of torture or a violation of their very right to life. Respect for the rights of others entails respect for their experience of life as they report it. It’s their life, and they’re the authority on the subject, just as they are the authority on their name. If you want to know what their name is and how to pronounce it, just ask them.

CHAPTER 1 — THE GRAND SWEEP

Epigraph: I said to Joseph Campbell, Are you a man of faith? and he said, No, I don’t need faith — I have experience. — Bill Moyers

We have learned a great deal lately about how important our experience is to us from investigators working down an evolutionary or natural history line. Take a look at your hand, for example. Flex your digits one by one. Touch your thumb to your fingers’ tips one by one. Rotate your wrist right and left. Tilt it back like a waiter carrying a tray. Bend it forward. You’re looking at what millions of years of encounters with our earthly environment have done to our hands. Our unique configuration of hand, arm, shoulder, body and brain is the result of all those experiences, and the index of how different we (and our experiences) are from our closest ape cousins. Experience is no less than who we are. Experience is therefore everything.

I’m paring an apple, holding the apple in my left hand and operating the peeler with my right. I draw the peeler across the top edge of the apple, shake the strip of peel into my compost bucket with my right hand while rotating the apple with the fingers of my left hand, so when I swing the peeler back up it’s in line to pull off the next strip of peel. My specialized brain is balancing my whole body, overseeing the movements of my eyes, arms and hands and anticipating what’s coming next all at the same time. It’s one hell of a feat, when you stop a moment to think about it.

Here’s where it all began, according to researchers: with the making of stone tools, with the process of knapping. The knapper sits with a patch of thick hide protecting his thigh (see Fig. 1), holding the uncut piece of flint or obsidian in his left hand (most of the time) and a striker rock in his right. With practice he learns how and where to strike the material in order to flake off a hunk of the size he’s after: arrowhead, spear-point, hatchet head, scraper and so forth. Then with the antler flaker he sharpens the edges. The resulting edge is as sharp as a scalpel. And those tools — the knapper’s toolkit (see Fig. 2) and the resultant blades — are what our hands are designed to produce.

Of course knapping flint and obsidian were not the only encounters our ancestors had with their environments. They had to erect roofs over their heads, they had to gather and process food, which meant they had to trail and take game. They had to turn skins and hides into clothes, coverings and beds. They had to weave baskets, rugs and cloth. baskets became bowls, they had to store food and transport household necessities from seasonal camp to seasonal camp. And when they weren’t gathering food they were hunting it.

We each train our hands to hold onto things: our bottle of milk, our little spoon, Mommy’s hand, our Teddy. No sooner do we solve one problem than the next problem presents itself — we have to find our mouth with the bottle and the spoon — and we go on to the next stage of training our hands. We learn to outsource bits of the brain’s work to the hand, so the brain gains freedom to address other problems. If we continue on into specialized work like juggling we discover a unique state where the eyes, brain and hands establish intimate, immediate contact, bypassing all the usual communication lags. If we go towards making guitar chords we develop sets of hand conformations and individual muscles in the hand and fingers. Richard Sennett sums the process up in his book The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008), Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding (page 9). Down through the human generations of evolutionary time much the same process has been going on.

Take a look at the two images in Figure 3, for example: at the same time we were learning to grasp things, take them, work on them and give them away, we were throwing rocks and other things. One of our most famous classical sculptural forms is the javelin thrower, whose body is entirely given over to the act of propelling the spear into, say, the eye of the hairy mammoth. We all have the capacity to develop this skill because our ancestors depended on it for survival. This is not training of the hand only, but the whole body in support of the hand.

The tennis player shows an even later stage of development, propelling the object (a ball this time) with a tool held in the hand. Baseball players getting a hit perform a similar action, but they corkscrew their bodies to meet the ball with the bat. Tennis players when serving are still doing a version of throwing the ball, but they jump into the air and their whole bodily effort is focused on smashing the ball down and across the net at maximum speed (up to 150 mph with today’s equipment and training). Like javelin throwers or shotputters they want to get their whole body into it.

The sling young David used in his legendary encounter with the giant Goliath reminds us always of how central our uses of stone are to the value we assign our experiences. I remember as a boy saving my pennies to bring home my own Wham-O slingshot so that with a stone (or steel bearing ball) I might save my people from destruction. I practiced long and earnestly until I could hit the target pretty regularly. Later, at summer camp, practice with bow and arrow felt familiar right from the start because of all those hours I had spent with my Wham-O. My body already knew how to stand.

* * * * * *

Recent brain research uses a different angle of attack on the questions How important is our experience to us? and What difference does experience make in our lives? Bruce Wexler, in Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), claims that the available evidence leads to this story:

The human brain, in the first two dozen years or so of life, is molded by its environment, both its physical surroundings and the cultural environment created by other brains. The first half of this book describes, with extensive supporting evidence from scientific studies, the ways in which the young brain is shaped by experience. at birth the brain is mostly unstructured, pure potential. As we engage our environments our brains develop structures that first enable us to assemble reliable perceptions of our surroundings, human and non-human alike; and secondly enable us to function in that world of ours. Such a set of experiences are essential for the proper functioning of our brains through the remainder of our lives, most importantly with regard to our perceptual gear and our mastery of language.

The mature brain, Wexler continues in the second half of the book, becomes set in its ways. After structuring itself to mesh with its environment, the brain becomes much less plastic in adulthood. instead of shaping itself to the input it receives, the mature brain seeks to reshape the external world to match its internal conception of what the world is about. That is, we form our ideologies in youth and then later in life interpret experiences so as to maintain and support our worldview, ignoring or discounting contradictory input when necessary. As if we have a stake in the outcome and may bend the facts or outright lie to avoid a loss.

When we find that our inner map of reality differs in some important way from the real world, we don’t like it and we try to restore a good fit between the two. That’s where things get interesting. Wexler discusses two examples of changes in the outside world that can overwhelm us and require great effort to adapt to: the loss of a spouse, and moving to another country. Children of immigrants typically do better in terms of learning the language and adopting the customs of the new country, as their brains are still absorbing and adapting to the world around them. Older immigrants have a much harder time of it. Some succumb under the weight. Travelers are subject to the same stresses, as we shall see later on.

Wexler seems to reach final answers to all these questions: our experience adds up to nothing less than who we become. If we miss or lack crucial encounters with our surroundings we lose the ability to develop certain capabilities evolution has made available to us. If our problem-solving doesn’t continue to lead to more problem-finding throughout our lives, our outlook, our category set, our values, our attitudes and our ability even to cope with the suddenly new are damaged or ruined.

So the basic shape of things seems to be this: we encounter our environment with our bodies; we find problems, solve them and move on to next problems, developing habits and skills as we go; through those experiences taken all together we develop a body set, a mind set, an attitude set, a set of basic how-to strategies, an emotional palette, a knowledge set, a belief set, a character set, a personality, a sense of self, an aims set, a sense of the possible, an ethic, a view of the world and a sense of our place in it.

* * * * * *

Thus it has always been. And these experiences have always been necessary for human survival. How to find food. How to recognize food. How to tell the edible variety from the poisonous. How to make the poisonous edible. Little tricks and recipes for survival have to turn into cultural traits, or customs, passed down the generations. Customs can become laws. Pamela H. Smith, in The Body of the Artisan (University of Chicago Press, 2004), emphasizes how these techniques and recipes become large bodies of knowledge, as they did for the Polynesian mariners who first sailed from Tahiti to the Hawaiian Islands. The old taught the young about the stars by laying out stones in the sand: with the sun by day and the stars by night they kept in touch with north, south, east and west. They could read winds and ocean currents and make adjustments to keep their course true.

The Sioux were another people who lived by a large body of knowledge. They got horses from the Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s and ventured out onto the great plains of North America, breaking completely away from their old way of life. In just a few short generations they became horseback people, bison people whose survival was completely entangled with the survival of the great bison herds. They have survived the disappearance of those herds, but only just.

Which makes me think of another melancholy story that played out in Ireland, where the potato arrived about the same time as the Sioux took to horse, and in just a few short generations the Irish forgot how to grow anything but potatoes. Three million of them died when potato blight destroyed successive crops in the early 1840s. Like the Sioux they survived, barely.

Bodies of knowledge such as these, which can be huge and culturally unique, can likewise be very fragile; dependent, say, on the survival of a single storyteller whose untimely death can tear the heart out of a culture. Homer’s Iliad, for example, or the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, survived only because a traditional storyteller learned to write, or some scribe wrote down the story told by the last traditional storyteller who, like all the storytellers before him, had learned his lore by mouth and by heart. Without either of these treasures our own lives would be measurably impoverished.

Those epics point to another universal area of human experience, self-defense and war, technologies common to hunting and war, strategies of hunting and strategies of war, plans of attack and defense. Archaeological finds tell us how war technologies advanced from spear to spearthrower to bow-and-arrow to longbow to crossbow. How units increased from the equivalents of squad to platoon to company, and foot-soldiers — infantry — were joined by cavalry, war chariots, artillery, siege machine crews, trenching and undermining crews. How defenses went from ditch-and-dike ring forts to palisaded encampments to castles and keeps to walled cities. These were hands-down the totally essential bodies of knowledge and skillsets necessary to survival. Take them away and all the people are dead or enslaved, spelling the death of a culture and a language. So it evolved that the people charged with the maintenance of these arts of war, the warlords, became the kings and nobles of all the societies we are ordinarily encouraged to learn from. Their body of experience became the most important, the most valuable, of all. Homer’s Iliad will come back around again after a little longer look around the prehistoric world where memory alone and oral transmission extended the life of stories beyond the life of the first teller.

The Calendar Problem

Observations of sun and moon became a body of knowledge that brought forward the calendar problem. If you begin counting nights, for example, you will soon see that the moon comes back around every 28 nights. Count days and it’s 365 sunrises before the sun is back to where it was when you started counting. Once you have a mathematics you can compute that 13 moon cycles (months) account for 364 days. Add one free day and you account for a full normal solar year.

Keep counting days, however, and you find that the 364-day year divides neatly into four 91-day periods marked by the winter solstice, spring equinox, summer solstice and autumnal equinox. Add one free day and you account for a full normal year.

It’s that thirteenth moon that’s the problem: thirteen doesn’t divide neatly by four. You have to make it become 12: then your calendar comes out neat and pretty. So the 28-day ‘month’ has to go, but 12 doesn’t divide neatly into 364 or 365: you end up having four months of 31 days and eight of 30 days in the typical year. So how did the number 13 get to be unlucky’? Because of its connection with the 28-day month. And what’s wrong with the 28-day month? It coincides with ocean tides and the female menstrual (monthly) period. That’s where the bad luck comes from. (In many cultures a woman is not allowed to touch weapons because they are man’s territory; and once upon a time in The West fiddlers wouldn’t let women touch their instruments.)

On the other hand the 28-day month breaks down so very neatly into four seven-day ‘weeks,’ 52 of which constitute a 364-day year. So we compromise. The 12-month calendar still comprises fifty-two seven-day weeks, but the dates fall on different days every year. By a 13-month calendar your birthday would be on the same day every year. If you were born on the thirteenth of any month, that would be a Friday, any month, any year. Imagine how different our astrology would be with thirteen signs and Monday’s Children the category name for a quite specific group of people sharing a quite specific set of traits.

For Western Europe, however, the charismatic individual man-god Emperor Julius Caesar decreed, just before the end of the pre-Christian era, that ours would forever be a 12-month ‘Solar’ calendar: nothing ‘lunar’ for us because that way lies lunacy and the feminine. Astrologers were pleased, we can imagine.

* * * * * *

So the great wheel of fortune divides into twelve compartments, a 360° circle broken down first into 90° quarters corresponding to the hours 3, 6, 9 and 12 on our clocks; east, south, west and north on our compasses; spring, summer, fall and winter on our calendars. And each quarter is further divided into three hours, three months per season per year and three sub-directions like north-northeast, northeast and east-northeast. The number 13 is forever unlucky. East is where the sun rises and where we all come from to be born. West is where the sun sets and we die. In World War One dying was referred to as going west. Fighter pilots refer to six o’clock as what’s behind us. The sun travels over the surface of the earth from east to west, then goes underground for its return to the east and to start out again, the chariot of Phoebus, the next day.

At the street level of Western culture Fortuna, Lady Luck, has remained the deity of everyday life. She is the Goddess of Risk, to whom we pray when we roll the dice, and to whose home among the lucky stars we may give thanks when we win a jackpot.

In the daily scrimmage for survival she becomes the random. We know that most of the species on earth have died out in the long course of earth history, thanks to the work of the random. We also know, when we refer to the random as ‘Murphy’s Law,’ or Murphy’s Axiom, that if something can go wrong it will go wrong, and that no good deed goes unpunished. So we hedge our bets, try to manage our risks, don’t stick our necks out too far and pay taxes to insurance companies because they promise to reimburse us when fortune turns against us and bites us in the ass.

One thing I haven’t been able to understand: why is there such cross talk between believers and evolutionary science? Why can The Creator not be The Random? The Mystery, the ultimate true One is beyond our understanding no matter what, so why cannot the One be the Random? Random is as good a word for mystery as any. The Random is clearly the most creative force we know of, and no matter how sophisticated we get at simulating The Random, our results are never the real thing, they’re only ‘nearly random.’ Technically, grammatically, the word random is like the word perfect, it’s digital not analog, either full on or full off. One thing cannot be more perfect than another: each thing is either perfect or it’s not. And if we are inclined to worship The Creator, we should probably insist that each created thing is perfect just as it is. We certainly tell that to those whom we love. The same holds for random.

The Charismatic Individual

In the world Fortuna rules, charisma is called luck. Charm, a better