This is a followup to a previous post, The Cracked Ceiling of the Word House, in particular to the first comment to that post by Dr. C.
All of the below is taken from Italo Calvino’s The Uses of Literature (1982). It’s the chapter called Man, the Sky, and the Elephant. This was originally the “Preface to an Italian translation of Pliny’s Natural History (Turin: Einaudi, 1982).”
He [Pliny] is in fact scrupulous about inserting as little of himself as possible and sticking to what his sources tell him. This conforms to his impersonal concept of knowledge, which excludes individual originality. To try to understand what his sense of nature really is, and how much of it consists of the arcane majesty of principles and how much of the materiality of the elements, we have to cling to what is undeniably his own: the expressive substance of his prose. Look, for example, at the pages concerning the moon, where the tone of heartfelt gratitude for this “supreme heavenly body, the most familiar to those who live on earth, the remedy of darkness (“novissimum sidus, terris familiarissimum et in tenebrarum remedium” [ II. 41]), and for all that it teaches us with the rhythm of its phases and eclipses, joins with the agile functionality of the sentences to express this mechanism with crystal clarity. It is in the pages on astronomy in book II that Pliny shows himself to be something more than the compiler with an imaginative flair that he is usually taken for, and reveals himself as a writer possessing what was destined to be the chief quality of all great scientific prose: that of expounding the most complex subject with perfect clarity, while deriving from it a senses of harmony and beauty.
… Pliny’s rationalism exalts the logic of cause and effect and at the same time minimizes it, for even if you find the explanation for facts, that is no reason for the facts to cease to be marvelous.
… That the unknown lands on the fringes of the world should contain beings on the fringes of humanity should be no cause for wonder: the Arimaspi with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads, who contest the gold mines with the gryphons; the inhabitants of the forest of Abarimon, who run extremely swiftly on feet that point backward; the androgynous people of Nasamona, who assume alternate sexes during intercourse; the Tibii, who have two pupils in one eye and the image of a horse in the other. But the great Barnum presents his most spectacular acts in India, where one can find a people of mountain hunters who have the heads of dogs, and a race of jumping people with one leg only, who when they want to rest in the shade lie down and raise their single foot above their heads as a parasol. There is also a nomadic people with legs like snakes, and there are the Astomoi, who have no mouths and live by sniffing odors. Mixed in with these are pieces of information we now know to be true, such as the description of the Indian fakirs (whom he calls “gymnosophist philosophers”), or else things such as still provide us with those mysterious events we read about in the newspapers (where he talks about immense footprints, he could be referring to the Yeti or Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas). Then there are legends destined to continue down through the centuries such as that of the curing power of kings (King Pyrrhus, who cured disorders of the spleen by touching the patient with his big toe).
… Pliny’s main source is Aristotle’s Historia animalium, but he also goes to more credulous or fanciful authors for legends that the Stagirite rejected, or reported only to confute them. This is the case both with information about the better-known animals and with the mention of imaginary animals, the catalogue of which is interwoven with that of the real ones. Thus, while speaking of elephants, he makes a digression informing us about dragons, their natural enemies; in connection with wolves (though criticizing the credulity of the Greeks), he records the legends of the werewolf. It is in this branch of zoology that we find the amphisbaena, the basilisk, the catoblepa, the crocoti, the corocoti, the leukocroti, the leontophont, and the manticore, all destined to pass from these pages into the bestiaries of the Middle Ages.
The natural history of man is extended into that of animals throughout book VIII, and this not only because the knowledge recorded is to a large extent concerned with the rearing of domestic animals and the hunting of wild ones, as well as the practical use man makes of the one and the other, but also because what Pliny is doing is taking us on a guided tour of the human imagination. An animal, whether real or imaginary, has a place of honor in the sphere of the imagination. As soon as it is named it takes on a dreamlike power, becoming an allegory, a symbol, an emblem.
It is for this reason that I recommend to the reader who is wandering through these pages to pause not only at the most “philosophical” books (II and VII), but also at VIII, as the most representative of an idea of nature that is expressed at length in all the thirty-seven books of the work: nature as external to man, but not to be separated from what is most intrinsic to his mind — the alphabet of dreams, the code book of the imagination, without which there is neither thought nor reason.
Hmmm … “not to be separated from what is most intrinsic to his mind.”
[* cartoon is from The New Yorker]
-Julie
“nature as external to man, but not to be separated from what is most intrinsic to his mind — the alphabet of dreams, the code book of the imagination, without which there is neither thought nor reason.”
Sounds good but is this reality? Does Science progress hand and hand with man’s dreams? Actually, with the exception of the Manhatten project (and men love to make things that go “boom”), many other endeavors have fallen flat on their face (e.g. the infamous War on Cancer declared by Richard Nixon) whereas truly startling discoveries (e.g. penicillin) have often be made by chance. (Actually, the Manhatten Project and the Appollo program were technical feats. I would argue that you cannot mobilize people to produce innovation.)
However, I would not argue that ex post facto scientists do not gather at the altar and celibrate their wonderful alphabet of dreams (reading from the code book of the imagination), they do. What stokes the fires of Science today? It has to be money in the form of grants. Does this stiffle inovative ideas? I would wager it does, but then, I was always for “blue sky” research.
Comment by Dr. C. — August 3, 2009 @ 5:31 pm
It’s interesting, though, how often science and technology do produce things that have been long-standing fiction or fantasy. See Technovelgy.com. Or going further back, to the Mabinogion, where we find fantasies of some rather recognisable houaehold items:
“… no vessels will keep warm the liquid that is put therein, except the bottles of Gwyddolwyn Gorr, which preserve the heat of the liquor that is put into them in the east until they arrive at the west … Some will desire fresh milk ; and it will not be possible to have fresh milk for all, unless we have the bottles of Rhinnon Rhin Barnawd, wherein no liquor ever turns sour.”
Comment by Ray Girvan — August 3, 2009 @ 7:27 pm
I wonder, though, sometimes, how far the correlation is in hindsight…
If we could look at all long term predictions in fiction and fantasy over a given period, analysing how many of them were realised within a given timespan, what picture would emerge? Idon’t have any expected answer to this … it might support the thesis or it might not; I don’t know.
Perhaps we could take the times from those covered by the existing examples and study as wide a range as possible of fictions and fantasies cotemporal with those…
Shifting back to Dr C’s comment … I think funding and blue sky research have always been in the same relation to one another: the latter has simply become more formalised.
Technology does, I think, tend to follow dreams to some extent: because it results from willed effort shaped and powered by what somebody thinks they want. Science is different; to some extent, what we discover is influenced by what we investigate; but its discoveries also tend to shape our dreams so the apparent effect is amplified.
Comment by Felix Grant — August 5, 2009 @ 2:37 am
Just a line to add subscription to this thread.
Comment by Felix Grant — August 5, 2009 @ 2:38 am
If we could look at all long term predictions in fiction and fantasy over a given period, analysing how many of them were realised within a given timespan, what picture would emerge?
I don’t know. The Predictions book I mentioned a while back had plenty that didn’t come true (such as universal personal air transport). More at Paleo-Future.
Comment by Ray Girvan — August 5, 2009 @ 7:24 am
“… chance … chance … chance” — Dr. C
What happened to determinism? And what exactly is this “blue sky” research? It has no causal source?
To both Ray’s and Felix’s postings, I would just say, I don’t see how you can ever sort it out. Take Nostradamus and palm readers and tea-leaf readers and Chinese fortune cookies and see how often they turn out to be true. Things will happen in the future (I feel safe in making that prediction). If you get a hundred guesses as to what, specifically, those things might be, given where we are now, there’s a good chance (for exceptionally intelligent people such as yourselves) that some of them will be close to the mark.
Further, on both “blue sky” and scifi, you are getting, necessarily, Bad Science mixed in with real, good, true, useful, (whatever is your chosen adjective for *not* Bad) science. A wider tolerance for Bad Science, in my opinion, yields a larger crop of good science. From more science, you get … more. (Blue sky = a certain degree of nuts = a considerable percentage of seriously nutty nuts.)
Comment by unrealnature — August 5, 2009 @ 9:25 am
I’m sorry, I didn’t explain what I meant by “blue sky” research. You know this already but let me bore you:
Any research should be performed under the rubrics of the scientific method. In medicine, this would a controlled trial. In basic science it would be repetition of experiments and validation of results. The “blue sky” part is what one studies. There are many people out there with novel ideas. Unfortunately, what is funded is frequently research that simply follows up on a known phenomenon. For instance, it is extremely important that we have equilibrium constants for as many chemical reactions as possible. But, measuring such constants is not very novel research though I bet you could get a grant for it. Blue sky research would be Fleming pursuing why the fungus killed the staph. He would not have been allowed to do this if he was using money for this from an NIH grant that was just to study the bacteria. In fact, some would argue that a large percentages of truly revolutionary ideas in science came about this way. One cannot plan for it. It just happens.
Comment by Dr. C. — August 9, 2009 @ 8:57 pm
The question remains, though, Doc: can we have open doors on what is studied, and simultaneously proscribe the study of loony tunes? I’m inclined to think that we cannot.
Comment by Felix Grant — August 10, 2009 @ 3:42 am