a light hearted examination of
a problem in the opening lines of Merchant of Venice
ANTONIO. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
As I was waiting at the traffic lights at the onset of the countryside and leaving the small village behind me, a small open coupe drew up alongside. The driver was exercising his ankle on the accelerator pedal indicating a preparedness for a competitive chase. There was little question in my mind that given the test my car would acquit itself handsomely; although it was not designed as a sports car, it did have just under seven litres of engine capable of reaching sixty miles an hour in the first gear alone. I pumped the accelerator several times showing willingness and as the lights changed I remained still and he sped off like a human canon. I gently pulled away and turned left. The road ahead was a beautiful country lane, enough for three cars and perfectly quiet.
I was quietly smiling to myself and began quite unexpectedly to murmur vocally the first few bars of Grieg's First Piano Concerto. While I was gently daydreaming in this manner I observed ahead at some distance a small family of ducks crossing the road. The parents were completely unperturbed by my oncoming presence as I slowed down to a complete stop. They showed no fear, neither retreating nor hurrying ahead. The five very small ducklings were all over the place but in general followed their parents lead. As I contemplated the insular detachment of this group I compared the enormous complexities and differences between such animals and human beings. Not for them was the pre-occupation of pressing engagements, mortgage repayment deadlines, the weekly shopping, the minute calculation of which credit card might be the best to use at the next petrol filling station in order to maximise the fifty six days' free credit period.
Eventually they made it to the other side of the road. There were still no cars in sight. I gently resumed driving and picked up my humming where I left off. At that moment it occurred to me that a prior and very slight pre-occupation over a small programming problem, had been completely set-aside by this almost intrusive but delightfully pleasant composition.
What, how and why had this Concerto entered my mind? I tried to concentrate on the antecedents thinking back about the interlude with the ducks. I vaguely recalled my thinking about petrol and credit cards and then realised that I had been murmuring the tune prior to that incident. With some difficulty I went back further in time searching for the event trigger. I recalled the phantasmal car-chase and then it came to me.
While I had been engaged in the momentary competitiveness of the suggestion, I realised that due to a sharpening of focus, all other sensory input of the moment had been sublimated. I had taken a deep inhalation of the already sentient sea breeze that was only a few hundred yards away, simultaneously enjoying the sound of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto being projected onto the street by the corner Music Shop nearby the traffic lights. The descending four notes of the first bar carried a striking resemblance with the first four notes played on the piano in Grieg's opening phrase, which was the last piece of music I had listened to the previous day. Despite the fact that the key, notes and tempo were different, the sheer force of the declarative statement; for me at least in this particular instant, was the overwhelming fusion of similarity which acted as the touchstone in the lower level of consciousness providing the requisite thrust and inertia required to break surface into the light of consciousness, as I began to hum the music.
As I was musing over this and wondering what were the necessary conditions for such events, a very short summer shower was under way. It was clearly going to be of sufficient light density and brevity that I would not need to use the windscreen wipers, the car had recently been washed and I did not want the wiper crescent traces of their use to remain visible afterwards.
As the raindrops gently built up on the surface in front of me I noticed that at a certain point several droplets had reached the level of mass and proximity which made them combine into ever larger drops which eventually flowed towards the edge over the glass. I realised that the mechanism or stuff, which operated slightly below the threshold of consciousness, probably behaved in a similar fashion. It must be that events, laying below this threshold, are very likely to congregate in clusters of similarities and complexes. I can only guess that the structure, nature and form of these events, lying at many discrepant levels of latency, and persisting with various indications of maturity are like the vast differentia of objects visible to the naked eye through goggles when swimming underwater at sea.
This latency, that is a state between stimulus and response is a kind of readiness for the appropriate quartz or jasper, as touchstone for change. In the analogy of the sea water the stimulus can simply be the movement of the current depositing sediment at the seashore, or else a predator interested in devouring either a single or group of aquatic creatures further down the evolutionary scale.
In the analogy of the windscreen, the droplets of water acquire a specific magnitude whereby the surface tension is broken and their combination ensues, causing a 'flow' of 'content'. The origins of the content appear to grow from an amalgamation over time, of discreet contents, combining in accordance with some principle of similarity either in form, content, vector, mass, sound, heat, charge, atomic structure, other factors, or their combinations. The problem is whether those contents include the archetypes posited by Jung, as being part of a collective unconscious, and additionally the products of surfeits of appetite or behaviour, rather than domination of the spheres as argued where we choose to excuse ourselves by Edmund (King Lear) in:
Edm. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc'd obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.
Not for this essay is a debate on Free-Will and Determinism, I hope to apply a focus of what degree these above referenced influences may determine our lives.
In the mind, what is called the subconscious, for want of a better word; as described by Carl Jung in the structure and dynamics of the Psyche, is really only the deeper recesses and background of the conscious mind. I concluded that in this particular instance the trigger happened to be something like a formal similarity between the two pieces of music, or perhaps; but slightly more unfathomable, the latent memory of Grieg's piece of music had an emotional quality that matched my prevailing mood.
While all of this may or may not be true of reality, as far as I was concerned the analogies were sufficient in likeness for me, to be a very persuasive argument until subsequently refuted by superior equivalence. What began to grip my mind once again was the more fearful prospect that free will was again under serious attack.
If in general my thought processes were governed by elements of my subconscious mind, again possibly having links with the collective unconscious in such a powerful way, then what prospect did I have of being the free author of my own destiny? I reflected again in consternation at the prospect. I was aware as most people, of the enormous power of the subconscious, particularly highlighted by those unexpected moments while speaking an extremely well-rehearsed piece in public, when the wrong word or phrase comes out! Revealing an unintentional mistake that seems to reveal a subconscious intention.
For the most part the physical activities of every twenty four hours were completely dictated to me by the forces of nature inherent in my own creation. With so many hours given over to sleep, taking in and passing out of sustenance, going out to the park or the sea on a sunny day, and withdrawing home on a wintry day. What was there left in terms of activity that I could take the view of being purely acts of volition? Facing it squarely, even should I wilfully resolve to deprive myself of either asleep or food I would be acting in a suicidal manner. There did not seem very much point in such contra predictive behaviour were I to lack the existence required of me to examine the proof of my supposedly free will in the aftermath.
Analogy: The process of reasoning from parallel cases; presumptive reasoning based upon the assumption that if things have some similar attributes, their other attributes will be similar.