Well, yeah, Lawrence, maybe the numbers do say that there are 90% too many,
but the fact that is is that it is the existent situation, I don't think the
reduction of the human population by 90% would be, um, all that pleasant,
particularly for those not in the 'saved' 10%. Question is: how to address
this? For poets, how to find a language that somehow draws back together
what is falling apart? I can't pretend to have the answers, just an
awareness of something going Terribly Wrong.
There is a Buddhist tradition about this century being the Age of
Destruction in which the human race will be vastly reduced in numbers. Not a
pleasant thought that.
My Neolithic speculations are of course speculations per se, but I notice,
at those crux moments of human history, when social and political and
material conditions suddenly allow speech to erupt, as for instance when the
leisured Greeks started using writing as not just a means for recording laws
and accounts, or for instance in the breakdown of censorship in the English
Civil War, conceptual pictures appeared that resemble very much those that
are 'modern' now, if clothed in an antique garb. So, re our hypothetical
Neolithics, I'd suggest that they were just as capable of the same
conceptual range as we are, but the way of expressing it would have been
different. I hold, with a certain tentativeness, to the 'crash' population
theory of the origins of h.sap sap: that is that we all descended from a
very small population, maybe numbered in the hundreds, that survived some
kind of ecological disaster, and by necessity broke out of traditional
habits in order to survive. Hence our very alikeness. And our genetic
similarities, I understand that the small populations of chimpanzees in West
Africa have a greater genetic diversity than human beings.
But I think it's fairly sure to say the basic drives of your average
Stone-Ager would have been akin to ours, the expression, because of the
difference of material culture, would have been different, but not the what
lay behind it. One thing I do agree with Marx about is the emphasis on
material culture determining what that culture can +say+. Put, say, Einstein
as a slave on a Boetian farm and though he might have been capable of
conceptualising Relativity he would never have had a chance to say so.
Put Shakespeare in a Tasmanian tribe during the nineteenth century
exterminations and the result is no Shakespeare.
What we, as poets, and I find it funny to use that 'we' as I find myself
increasingly forced into a kind of Bohemian individualism while becoming
more and more convinced of the falsity of individualism, is to start at
least opening paths into a language that brings back together what is being
pulled apart, how that should be done I haven't the faintest, but I know it
is what is calling to us, calling, calling.
All the Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lawrence Upton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 12:52 PM
Subject: Re: connection
----- Original Message -----
From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 1:19 AM
Subject: Re: connection
I'm entirely with you about human numbers. Cut it by 90% per cent, I say.
But
> For all intents modern humans are no different from our Neolithic
ancestors
> in psychology
makes me rather doubtful
What do you *mean by psychology?
What is the heuristic relationship between hardware and software in the
human brain; and to what extent is software an appropriate metaphor - at
this level not very is my suspicion
Our neolithic ancestors didn't have a lot of - now what shall we call it?
I'll pull the software stunt again - say somehting like what I mean and then
disavow it
Our neolithic ancestors didn't have a lot of concepts we have. But I doubt
that conceptualisation is all there is to it. How are concepts formed?
I realise that I am asking questions to which there are only tentative
answers yet. Therefore, I am doubtful of the reliability of your statement
L
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