2011.05.26 — Beyond Fate by Margaret Visser: Begun

Margaret Visser.
Beyond Fate,
Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc.
ISBN 0887846793

This book has begun in a good, but not great manner. I thoroughly enjoyed Visser's Much Depends On Dinner and The Gift of Thanks. What I'm finding is that the text in this book is too literally a transcription of the oral lectures from which it derives. Visser's manner of oral presentation does not transcribe well to the written word. Briefly, so far — 20 pages — it strikes me that it would benefit from some editing.

Visser - Photo with Permission from John MacDonald

Nevertheless, Visser's argument and ideas are interesting and challenging. For example, she begins with by looking at "time-lines" with an examination of how our language predicates (is predicated by?) the notion of a beginning, middle and end with no going backwards. She makes an interesting link to how our pictorial methods of representing time, such as a line, also create straight and narrow thinking, a rigidity when it comes to accepting too easily what is perhaps something not really fated but that is instead an opportunity to exercise personal creativity in overcoming an ostensible destiny.

Here's a short extract showing the role the Greeks had in linking fate to geometry:

Ancient Greeks thought a great deal about fate, and when they did, the metaphors they used to think with were often spatial, indeed geometrical. The Greeks were obsessed with geometry. Among the first traces of them that we possess are their pots in the style called Geometric, after its most obvious characteristic, the geometrical patterns drawn on the curved clay surfaces.

Several hundred years later, by which time Greek thinkers — leaning heavily upon mathematical interpretations of religious ideas and religious interpretations of mathematics — had permanently altered the intellectual history of the world, we find Plato writing over the gateway to his Academy, "Let no one enter here who does not know geometry." Fate, for them, was a spatial and diagrammatic idea from the beginning. It was a gigantic blueprint, a "design" laid out in advance. A tendency to lean on linear metaphors continues both to inspire and to haunt our imaginations today. We need think only of the signs of the zodiac and their interpretation in astrology, or of palmistry, the reading of people's characters and fates from the lines on the palms of their hands. Geometrical metaphors in general can predispose us, when we are being careless, to cage up our vision and fail to let go of fatalism. I'll be giving in the course of this book lots of modern examples of the fatal diagram.

In traditional poetry, a person's life has often been imagined as a line representing time: a thread spun by the gods, by fate, or by the three Fates. In Greek, the names of these relentless mythical crones were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotment), and Atropos (Not to be Turned Aside). They indicated past, present, and future: the past as already spun and purely linear; the present an intersection, station, or point marked out upon the line; the future as what you think you can control but cannot, Roman, Scandinavian, and Germanic mythologies also knew three Fates. They spun or braided the ropes of events in world history. They also made individual fates for human beings, in parallel with a life, the thread starting at its beginning and being snipped off when the time came to die. Or the fate was complete from the beginning, and it remained only for the person to travel his or her allotted span, the "road" of life. The three witches in Macbeth are versions of the Fates.

deviantart 3 witches

Shakespeare, however, insists on his characters' free will: the riddling fiends mislead, but they never force decisions.

What the myths of fate express is the sense we all have at times that we are not in charge; that events, rules, and systems act upon us, or make us act, in ways not of our choosing. It is entirely right that we should realize this, but we have to discriminate between what is in fact changeable and what is not. The diagram metaphor — its very clarity, its self-evidence — leans heavily on the side of inalterability, of the hopelessness of change (11-2 my emphasis).

We'll see how it goes.

It is interesting to me, in a way, to pick this book up while reading Chomsky. He is fighting to wake up American's to their not being fated to ignorance and manufactured consent for brutal hegemony.

And I'm reminded of something Linda McQuaig said in an interview or panel discussion many years ago.

Paraphrased she pointed out that when it comes to fighting inflation, the press argue that we are powerful and will win the fight by tightening our belts, reducing our expectations and accepting diminished social benefits in our brave struggle against succumbing to the ignoble fate of bankruptcy. She added that when it comes to issues of reduced corporate taxation, unemployment and the social costs of free trade and 'globalization,' however, they become flaccid apologists who vociferously argue that we are helpless to these 'natural' economic forces and to accept them as it is our fate.