Trial Balloon

The Way It Ought To Be

January 30th, 2007

Posted in People and Ideas | No Comments »

In Allegory: A Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964), Angus Fletcher wrote that “when empirical science assumes a dominant role in modern culture, it becomes reasonable to think of the cosmos in everyday terms, or rather in physical and natural terms, and as a result there is a general loosening of the idea of ornament as the insignia of the universe. More and more phenomena have to be crowed into the universe that science keeps discovering, while the process of discovery is itself a sort to overall expansion. Kosmos has to expand with the expansion of knowledge itself.”

“At this point,” he concludes, “one may wonder whether the concept of kosmos still has boundaries” (145). Perhaps the very term kosmos has been made secular in the contemporary world, a place in which hierarchy in multiple, not unitary. Perhaps there is no longer any single all-persuasive framework (either religious or secular) in which to situate existence.

And so it was that Fletcher, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate School and one of the greatest critical minds of our time, provided The Eye like a Strange Balloon Moves towards Infinity as an image of kosmos. The artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) draws the “eye of the universe,” and Fletcher saw the macrocosmic significance of that image. In seeking to revive the term kosmos, or allegorical image, from its debased form as mere ornament, Fletcher reinvented the term kosmos as the essential type of allegorical image.

Yet it is Fletcher’s selection of the balloon that interests me. The eye may be cosmic in the traditional sense, but that balloon is contingent upon geography and climate and fired air. Redon’s image, it is important to note, is from a collection to Edgar Allen Poe, who also knew a great deal about sentience and localization. Place counts. Redon’s eye may be cosmic, but the balloon that holds it will always be dependent. The balloon will be trial.

What a wonderful idea, that of a trial balloon. The on-line version of the Oxford English Dictionary hyperlinks the idea with balloon d’essai: “An experimental project or piece of policy put forward to test the feeling or attitude of a person or body of persons; a feeler.” The earliest use was in 1833, rather late in that Benjamin Franklin had watched the 1783 flight of the balloon built by Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier. But the brothers had used animals to test their invention, so perhaps the idea of an attempt, or essai, was there from the beginning.

The ideas offered in this blog, posted every two weeks, will be centered on topics that are sensitive to location and place. The topics will be on the subject of the humanities. Yet that definition needs unpacking here. Michael Holquist, 2007 president of the Modern Language Association, defines the humanities as those areas of inquiry which place humans at the center of concern in his Winter MLA Newsletter President’s column. “Sociology, medicine, and the other disciplines outside of the humanities also devote themselves to human beings,” Professor Holquist writes. “Those disciplines do so, however, by conceiving human beings as types or groups. By contrast, the humanities comprise inquiries that conceive as their subject human being who are persons, individuals” (3).

Yet the lessons of localization tell us that such value-dualisms square well with theory, not so much with practice and never at all for individuals. My colleagues who practice health care do so with individuals there on the examination table in front of them. My colleagues who practice writing assessment think about the individual as representative of larger groups. It is the interaction—the individual in terms of the group, the group in terms of the individual—that constitutes the humanistic impulse. The disciplinary distinctions—who is in what department—get us nowhere.

The idea of transaction thus adds much to Professor Holquist’s definition, and so the definition of the humanities taken in this blog might best be stated as follows: “The humanities focus on transactions that occur between individuals and their contexts; thus, the humanities insist on the importance of process, the significance of context, and the uniqueness of individuals.” I don’t want to classify Robert Coles as a physician anymore than I want to categorize Walker Percy as a novelist. Both tell us that we had better think deeply about individuals and contexts, lest we are lost.

My blog entries will be therefore be trial balloons, little essays that will keep me from getting lost. The entries will appear every two weeks. With Thoreau, I ask readers to drink, see the sandy bottom, detect the shallowness and the thin current, and nevertheless stick around to see where eternity might remain.

Contingent Kosmos. Attempt. Radical Circumstance. Sentience. Feelers. There from the beginning.

Trial Balloon

The Way It Ought To Be

The Idea of a Trial Balloon

The Place of our Parents

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