The Taste of Strawberries

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I recently re-read this lecture by Stephen Talbott entitled "Owen Barfield and the Technological Society."  In it, Talbott reminds his audience of how eloquently and urgently Barfield spoke of the necessity of learning to live in a world in which the insides of phenomena shine through the outsides.  Such a world must be taken as it is, moment to moment, through wide eyes, an open heart and an open mind.  We must come to know it slowly, allowing it to disclose itself as our intimacy with it grows.  We should know better than to ask impertinent questions and expect an honest answer, should know better than to come running at it with greedy eyes and a scalpel.  A mechanistic worldview is one that tries to find the insides of the world by taking the outsides apart, or by translating the parts into other parts.  Atomism just makes the outsides smaller while string theory just makes them weirder but the insides remain closed to our senses and our imaginations, so much so that they begin to seem like a projection of our own fancy.

To know both the inside and the outside of a thing, on the other hand, is to know it in its wholeness.  It is to know the inside as an expression of the outside and to know that neither can be fully apprehended without the other.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term "esemplastic" to describe this apprehension of the whole but it is also possible to think of it as an aesthetic knowing.  The analytical mind functions by taking things apart.  The aesthetic mind cannot function without an intuition of how things exist together, not as conglomerates, but in indivisible unity.  To alter one word of a poem, one note of a symphony is to utterly alter the meaning of each and every component of the piece and of the piece as a whole.  To alter meaning is to alter nature because what something means is what it is.  The beauty we experience in art is the necessity and harmony of relationship.  It is a view of the integral nature of a world in which everything, including each of us, has a place.

Most of us, however, do not like to be put in our place.  If our place proved too small and the world too big, we might find ourselves lost (that is if we forget or fail to realize how the whole world turns with the motion of each, single speck of dust). It is easier just to avoid the whole problem by spending a lifetime, or most of it, skimming the surfaces without ever diving into the terrifying whole.  We have an animal instinct of misguided self-preservation to keep our experience of art on the outside of ourselves by either reacting to it only viscerally or by returning as quickly as possible to our everyday surface consciousness.  Perhaps this is why many of the experiences in which we choose to indulge ourselves are designed to be no more than the action of the world's outsides on our outsides.  Experiences of this kind jolt but they do not awaken. 

Consider the fact that most of us have at least two sense memories associated with the flavor of strawberries.  There is the flavor of the fruit, itself—full and subtly varied, an expression of earth, vine, weather and season—and there is the taste of strawberry candy, of Lifesavers, soda pop and cupcake frosting too pink to believe.  This kind of "strawberry" is based on a recipe designed to suggest the flavor of fruit (in a form that, like the golem of Jewish legend, has no real life of its own) but the flavor is remade in a way that is calculated to have the maximum effect on our senses.  In this meeting of the self and the candy, both the qualities in nature that are being imitated and our responses to those qualities have been reduced to a formula.  The result is an empty shell that dissolves as quickly as the sugar dissolves in the mouth.  Another example of this kind of calculation would be the proportions of a Barbie doll or comic book heroine that are so exaggerated that they could not exist in nature (because the poor woman would be unable to stand) but that are designed to maximize certain animal responses.

Movies and TV shows are also often concocted according to a "jolts per minute" formula that calculates how often the audience should laugh, cry, shudder or scream.  We like this because our outsides are taken for a nice, safe ride around the outsides of the world while our insides remain asleep like a baby in the backseat.  This doesn't seem to us to be a problem because we think that being able to figure out how the formula works—when we explicate a poem, for instance, or analyze an artist's technique—means that we understand, that we really know the work.  The tragedy is that we apply this method, not only to works that are lifeless shells, but to works that are teeming with life and that are calling out to us to take part in the Life of the world.