Angels Fear

Dear Dialecticians and Colleagues Across
the Curriculum.

Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology
of the Sacred.  Gregory Bateson

Commentary on Chapter VII.

"Let not thy Left Hand Know "  

(What your Right Hand is doing)

Biblical quote you may have heard and wondered about.
What? What the? What the heck does THAT mean?
Can you imagine?  If some one put a gun to your
head (which is often what it takes to get in play
these days of trouble and turbulence) and
forced this issue: MAKE SENSE OF :
THIS--you'd come up with something.

Gregory  Bateson was raised atheist  but his old man,
William  Bateson, who coined the term “genetics,”
made his children study the Bible, so they wouldn't
grow up to be "empty-headed atheists".
 
 This chapter plays with the difference (x/z)
                     & relationship (Y)
between analogical process and logical process,
between unconscious habit on the one hand so to speak
and conscious purpose. on the other hand.
 
You probably know—loosely speaking , the left hand is
a kind of servant to the RIGHT brain  (the constellational
analogical  process of wholes), and the right hand serves
the LEFT brain  ( digital-logical, linguistic,  sequential):
 
  2 radically incommensurate KINDS of process,  yes?
                     (like Show & Tell).
 
 What does it mean, then—to keep these two hands
(processes) in some sense ignorant of each other
(so to speak)?  
 
What would happen if they fused?
What would happen if the distinction
and gap between Unconscious and
Consciousness collapsed?

It would be disastrous, yes?  Like completing the Tower
of Bable and collapsing the distinction between Heaven
and Hello. (Like, I said: like collapsing the difference
between "like" and "is"--eliminating the distinction between
logic and analogy. ).   

This chapter plays with this distinction and contains a
wonderful legend about a man who was given the gift of
being able to Understand the Language of  Animals —a
reward offered by King Cobra because  the man “separated
2 copulating snakes”—interrupting the amorous embrace of
the Princess Snake from the  lusty  entanglement of a
Commoner Serpent.
 
This is one of the best pieces in the book: an effort to explain 
why Some Things Can Not BE Said  or Told without destroying
the very thing I want to be saying and  talking about, damnit.
Some things can not be forced
 
To say IT is to reduce and destroy IT.
To force the issue is to contaminate the result.
 
Is
Do You Love Me?
Ever an effective question?  Bateson asks.