By JOHN LYON
Once I asked a son who had served U.S. purposes in the metamorphizing USSR just what Russians are like. He paused a moment, and then suggested that perhaps a story they tell about themselves might best briefly reply to my question.
A peasant (or comrade?) is plowing his field when his plow hits what appears to be a rock and trips out. So the peasant goes to right the plow, and sees that the obstruction is not a rock but a huge stone jar. With some effort he unscrews the lid of the jar, and out springs a genie! The genie reports that he has been imprisoned in the jar for 600 years, and is so happy to be released that he will grant his rescuer any one wish he might make! There is but one condition attached to the wish, however, and that is that whatever he wishes, his neighbors will get twice of. The peasant reflects quite briefly, then says that he wishes to be blind in one eye.
The listener, after recovering from the structural shock of the unexpected wish, begins to reflect contrariwise about the idealized character of the Russian peasant he read about in Tolstoy’s later stories. These accounts must indeed have been fictional! The force of the wish remains, however, and the listener then briefly hopes that the parable may characterize, or be a caricature of, only Russians. If so, what a self-indictment! But, no, the force of the tale, despite its element of caricature, eventually hits home to the listener. We are all like that, he comes to fear, and he is shocked at what may underlie his “best intentions.”
But as is the case with such probing parables, other strange chains of thought are prompted in the mind of the beholder. He wonders, for instance, if the genie was also scandalized by the reductionism of the peasant’s wish, for the genie came from a political, social, religious, and economic order of things 600 years ago that was quite different from the envious peasant’s world. And “the order of things” inevitably shapes the order of thought.
To use Owen Barfield’s schematization, just what might the countryman of the fourteenth century “participate in” and, contrariwise, be “isolated from,” and whatever these might be, how would they differ from the parallel sets of circumstances which shape the mentality of twentieth-century man? (See, for example, Barfield’s provocative essay, “Participation and Isolation,” in the collection of his essays entitled The Rediscovery of Meaning, and, more broadly, his remarkably perceptive Saving the Appearances.)
Other reflections come to mind relating to the “leveling” tendencies of contemporary social action movements, movements of both body and mind. Owen Barfield notes that one of the broadest movements of our times is an increasing pitch of demand for the individual’s control of his life and destiny (cf. “Participation and Isolation”).
Ironically, however, that general movement, which used to be associated with “democracy,” comes, on the one hand, to be enshrined in the idea of “equality” (not the ideal of equality), and on the other hand the practice of “uniformity,” the latter described as resting on a perception of mankind as “an abstract class of quantitative units.” “Equality” is inevitably relational, while identity “comes as near as possible to being no relation at all.” Barfield finds the roots of the idea of equality to lie in “the superpersonal idea of justice,” while the “demand for uniformity is rooted in the meanness of the personal sting of envy” (“Participation and Isolation”).
We are back to the parable of the Russian peasant.
What, then, would be the contemporary American’s parabolic equivalent to the Russian’s wish for partial blindness? Might he wish to have only one hemisphere of his brain anesthetized? To be able to see and misunderstand only one side of any issue? To live in a Polyphemic two-dimensional world, so long as Odysseus were totally blind? To look at time and space, faith and science, history and society out of the mash of one totalitarian, apodictic, materialist, exclusive, intolerant ideology, so long as others walked about dazed in the “total blindness” of the love of wisdom, of faith, of hope, of charity?
As William Blake wrote, “Oh Lord us keep/ From single vision and Newton’s sleep.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress