Walker Percy - Lost in the Cosmos

The organism is needy or not needy accordingly as needs are satisfied or not satisfied by its environment.

The self in a world is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying its otherwise unspeakable self, e.g., mythically, by identifying itself with a world-sign, such as a totem; religiously, by identifying itself as a creature of God.

But totemism doesn’t work in a scientific age because no one believes, no matter how hard he tries, that he can “become” a tiger or a parakeet. Cf. the depression of a Princeton tiger or Yale bulldog, one hour after the game.

In a post-religious age, the only recourses of the self are self as transcendent and self as immanent.

The impoverishment of the immanent self derives from a perceived loss of sovereignty to “them,” the transcending scientists and experts of society. As a consequence, the self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services. Failing this and having some inkling of its plight, it sees no way out because it has come to see itself as an organism in an environment and so can’t understand why it feels so bad in the best of all possible environments — say, a good family and a good home in a good neighborhood in East Orange on a fine Wednesday afternoon — and so finds itself secretly relishing bad news, assassinations, plane crashes, and the misfortunes of neighbors, and even comes secretly to hope for catastrophe, earthquake, hurricane, wars, apocalypse — anything to break out of the iron grip of immanence.

Enrichment in such an age appears either as enrichment within immanence, i.e., the discriminating consumption of the goods and services of society, such as courses in personality enrichment, creative play, and self-growth through group interaction, etc. — or through the prime joys of the age, self-transcendence through science and art.

The pleasure of such transcendence derives not from the recovery of self but from the loss of self. Scientific and artistic transcendence is a partial recovery of Eden, the semiotic Eden, when the self explored the world through signs before falling into self-consciousness. Von Frisch with his bees, the Lascaux painter with his bison were as happy as Adam naming his animals.

I say “partial recovery of Eden” because even the best scientist and artist must reenter the world he has transcended and there’s the rub: the spectacular miseries of reentry — especially when the transcendence is so exalted as to be not merely Adam-like but godlike.

It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.

It is even more difficult for one god to get along with another god. Freud not only could not get along with the Jewish God but frothed and fell out when rivaled by a fellow transcender like Carl Jung.

Two gods in the Cosmos is one too many.

Thus, transcendence, like immanence, has its own scale of enrichment and impoverishment.

Different Reentry Problems of Artist and Art-Receiver: Mainly Quantitative It is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning meaning in the madness of the twentieth century, then to finish it, then to find oneself at Reed’s drugstore the next morning. A major problem of reentry, not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol.It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart’s Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come to the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderately sustained exaltation; at worst, a mild letdown.

Question: In the light of the above description of the semiotic predicament of the self — its unspeakableness in a world of signs — and in the light of the need of the self to become a self and, under the exigency of truth, to become its own self, that and no other — and in the light of the forces of impoverishment and enrichment as well as self-deception, which of the following self-identities would strike you as being (1) the most impoverished, (2) the most enriched?

(a) An Archie Bunker type who lives in Queens

(b) A mathematical physicist working as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton

(c) An Alabama Baptist

(d) A New York novelist removed to a pre-revolutionary Connecticut farmhouse where he is living with his fifth wife

(e) A Japanese Zen master recently removed from Kyoto to La Jolla

( f ) An American Zen postulant recently removed from Chicago to Kyoto

(g) A Dublin Catholic

(h) A Belfast Protestant

(i) A housewife who watches five hours of soap opera a day

(j) A housewife who attends a well-run consciousness-raising group

(k) A member of the Tasaday tribe in the Philippines before its discovery by the white man

(l) A Virginia Episcopalian

(m) An Orthodox Jew

(n) An unbelieving Ethical Culture Jew

(o) A Southern poet who has sex with his students

(p) A homosexual poet who calls himself a “flaming fag”

(q) A homosexual accountant who practices in the closet

(r) A four-year-old child

(s) A seven-year-old child

(t) A twelve-year-old child

(u) An Atlanta junior executive who fancies he looks like Tom Selleck, dresses Western, and frequents singles bars

( v ) A housewife who becomes fed up, walks out, and commits herself totally to NOW

(w) A housewife who sticks out a bad marriage

(x) A New Rochelle commuter who quits the rat race, buys a ketch, and sails for the Leeward Islands

(y) A New York woman novelist who writes dirty books but is quite conventional in her behavior

(z) A Southern woman novelist who writes conventional novels of manners and who fornicates at every opportunity

(aa) A Texan

(bb) A KGB apparatchik

(cc) A white planter in Mississippi

(dd) A black sharecropper in Mississippi

(ee) A Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus

(ff) None of the above, for reason of the fact that, whatever the impoverishing and enriching forces, it is impossible so to categorize an individual self — except possibly (r), and (bb), but even there, one cannot be sure. As anyone knows, a person chosen from any of the above classes may turn out against all expectations to be either a total loss as a person or that most remarkable of phenomena, an intact human self

(CHECK ONE OR MORE)

*Semiotics might be defined broadly as the science which deals with signs and the use of them by creatures. Here it will be read more narrowly as the human use of signs. Other writers include animal communication by signals, a discipline which Sebeok calls zoo-semiotics. But even the narrow use may be too broad. There is this perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.

At best a loose and inchoate discipline, semiotics is presently in such disarray that all sorts of people call themselves semioticists and come at the subject from six different directions. Accordingly, it seems advisable to define one’s terms — there is not even agreement about what the word sign means — and to identify one’s friends and foes.

The friends in this case, or at least the writers to whom I am most indebted, are: Ernst Cassirer, for his vast study of the manifold ways in which man uses the symbol, in language, myth, and art, as his primary means of articulating reality; Charles S. Peirce, founder of the modern discipline of semiotics and the first to distinguish clearly between the “dyadic” behavior of stimulus-response sequences and the “triadic” character of symbol-use; Ferdinand de Saussure, another founding father of semiotics, for his fruitful analysis of