Variations on a theme
[ by Charles Cameron ]
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Two stories — continents, centuries and cultures apart — yet as remarkable for their similarities as for their differences. The first concerns a US military defense attorney’s first meeting with a defendant at Gitmo, the second a zen monk…
I already knew the zen story, so the Gitmo version positively flew off the page at me.
I suppose some people will prefer one story, some will prefer the other: for me it’s the almost stereophonic effect of knowing the pair of them that I find more interesting than knowing either one of them separately.
Either one is impressive — together, they dance.
March 16th, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Quintessential Hipbone, time-binding. (OMG! I see how to connect to "Marginalia"…)
March 16th, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Good day, Critt, and thanks!
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I have a question for you: I have never understood time-binding — what is it?
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I see that it’s attributed to Korzybski, and I’ve seen it described as "awareness that allows us to experience time as sequential or linear" and confers the distinctively "human ability to pass information and knowledge between generations at an accelerating rate" — and also that "Time-binders are the masters of cause and effect".
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I don’t think that’s what I’m up to, although it may be a component.
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I’m actually more interested in what Northrop Frye called the synchronic reading of events than the diachronic — the way in which history rhymes more than the way in which it unfolds — for reasons that have to do with my understanding of ritual and sacrament. For me, therefore, the difference in centuries between the two tales, which could be understood as progress, or regress, is only one of the interesting contrasts:
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there’s [a] the oppositional mirroring between the general and the zennist, which has the curious property that the general may in fact switch his position of (apparent) superiority to one that parallels the zennist’s (and bow in acknowledgment, as in some versions of the tale),
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and [b] the parallel mirroring between jihadist detainee and military attorney, which has the no less curious property of being far more oppositional in terms of mutual threat than that between the general and the zennist, and would (if they were both free to leave the room and face off) in fact escalate and result in the death of one or both parties.
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And there’s also the oppositional mirroring between the two stories, and the question of whether either one will bow to (or kill off) the other…
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So what I called the "almost stereophonic effect" of holding the two stories in mind together is, for me, not so much one of cause and effect as of what Jung calls an "acausal connecting principle" — although I prefer to use such musical terms as counterpoint or polyphony.
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Hence my post title, Variations on a theme…
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So I very much hope you’ll explain what you see here — and mean — by time-binding, and also perhaps the connection you mention with Marginalia…
March 31st, 2011 at 4:29 pm
I’m coming back to this thread soon, Charles…. really.
March 31st, 2011 at 10:08 pm
I look forward to it…