Traces
August 19th 2006 12:50
Three thoughts.
People shed. Every word you utter expels droplets into the air. Every object you touch you fingerprint.
House dust is mostly skin.
You come home to her room, after the funeral, and you find she's alive there -- you're surrounded, embraced. It's not simply that the objects are rich with memory, or that you view them as belonging to her, connected with her, or that her everyday thoughts, consciousness must have been shaped by this environment. It is also the traces, mental as well as physical -- the absence of randomness. Her hand creased this book in this particular way, folded this piece of clothing in this particular way. Everything is marked. Everything is arranged just so because she arranged, or suffered to be arranged. In everything, you see aspects of her and the patterning of her mind.
There is a general feeling, that people, events alter the nature of things. Your childhood home is hallowed, because of who lived there. Or this stone is tainted, because of the Aztecs who sacrificed on it. It's as if objects have souls, and human presence, actions infect them.
Five examples:
-- (1) magic seems often to operate with a logic of association; for instance, one might harvest ingredients that grow at crossroads, or use objects personal to the victim (this is at least true of ancient magic, and seems to hold in popular presentations of modern magic -- eg the voodoo doll);
-- (2) Shinto is a good example of a system that believes in defilement and purification (ie, traces left and requiring to be washed away);
-- (3) there is also the Shinto belief that things do have souls; all has a spiritual dimension, all is filled with "kami"; and particular objects and sites give special access to experience of kami -- for instance, the sword of a great emperor, because it is part of the emperor's identity;
-- (4) in modern psychic stories, impressions are often received on handling objects -- Frank Black in "Millennium", Allison DuBois in "The medium", etc;
-- (5) in Christianity, there's a long folk tradition of relics -- pieces of the saint, shards of the true cross, the holy grail, the Turin Shroud. And there sometimes appears a metaphysics of spiritual energy that imbues or moves through objects: in Mark's gospel a woman brushes Jesus' clothes as he passes her in the crowd; and she is immediately healed, and Jesus immediately notices -- he feels the "dunamis", the strength, the power, go out of him.
I once heard this question asked: "Jacques Derrida, will you survive your death?"
His response? -- "Of course I don't know. No one does. But we all leave traces."
Perhaps what he meant was simply this: that insofar as we have affected the world, we linger in it -- the uncountable butterfly effects arising from every action we've ever taken. These effects might go entirely unrecognized, but because of them no one dies completely.
***
People shed. Every word you utter expels droplets into the air. Every object you touch you fingerprint.
House dust is mostly skin.
You come home to her room, after the funeral, and you find she's alive there -- you're surrounded, embraced. It's not simply that the objects are rich with memory, or that you view them as belonging to her, connected with her, or that her everyday thoughts, consciousness must have been shaped by this environment. It is also the traces, mental as well as physical -- the absence of randomness. Her hand creased this book in this particular way, folded this piece of clothing in this particular way. Everything is marked. Everything is arranged just so because she arranged, or suffered to be arranged. In everything, you see aspects of her and the patterning of her mind.
***
There is a general feeling, that people, events alter the nature of things. Your childhood home is hallowed, because of who lived there. Or this stone is tainted, because of the Aztecs who sacrificed on it. It's as if objects have souls, and human presence, actions infect them.
Five examples:
-- (1) magic seems often to operate with a logic of association; for instance, one might harvest ingredients that grow at crossroads, or use objects personal to the victim (this is at least true of ancient magic, and seems to hold in popular presentations of modern magic -- eg the voodoo doll);
-- (2) Shinto is a good example of a system that believes in defilement and purification (ie, traces left and requiring to be washed away);
-- (3) there is also the Shinto belief that things do have souls; all has a spiritual dimension, all is filled with "kami"; and particular objects and sites give special access to experience of kami -- for instance, the sword of a great emperor, because it is part of the emperor's identity;
-- (4) in modern psychic stories, impressions are often received on handling objects -- Frank Black in "Millennium", Allison DuBois in "The medium", etc;
-- (5) in Christianity, there's a long folk tradition of relics -- pieces of the saint, shards of the true cross, the holy grail, the Turin Shroud. And there sometimes appears a metaphysics of spiritual energy that imbues or moves through objects: in Mark's gospel a woman brushes Jesus' clothes as he passes her in the crowd; and she is immediately healed, and Jesus immediately notices -- he feels the "dunamis", the strength, the power, go out of him.
***
I once heard this question asked: "Jacques Derrida, will you survive your death?"
His response? -- "Of course I don't know. No one does. But we all leave traces."
Perhaps what he meant was simply this: that insofar as we have affected the world, we linger in it -- the uncountable butterfly effects arising from every action we've ever taken. These effects might go entirely unrecognized, but because of them no one dies completely.
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Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
'Humans have evolved over tens of thousands of years to be susceptible to supernatural beliefs, a psychologist has claimed.
Religion and other forms of magical thinking continue to thrive — despite the lack of evidence and advance of science — because people are naturally biased to accept a role for the irrational, said Bruce Hood, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol.
...
People ultimately believe in these ideas for the same reasons that they attach sentimental value to inanimate objects such as wedding rings or Teddy bears, and recoil from artefacts linked to evil as if they are pervaded by a physical “essence”.
...
To demonstrate his theory he asked members of the audience if they were prepared to put on an old-fashioned blue cardigan in return for a £10 reward. He had no shortage of volunteers. He then told the volunteers that the cardigan used to belong to Fred West, the mass murderer.
“Most hands went down,” he said.
“When people did wear it people moved away from them. It’s not actually West’s jumper. But it’s the belief that it’s West’s jumper that has the effect.
“It is as if evil, a moral stance defined by culture, has become physically manifest inside the clothing.”
Similar beliefs, which are held even among the most sceptical scientists, explain why few people would agree to swap their wedding rings for replicas. The difference between attaching significance to sentimental objects and believing in religion, magic or the paranormal is only one of degree, Professor Hood said. '