From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: Re: It fills us. We arrange it. It decays.
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 00:40:47 GMT

John McCarthy writes:
>At first I asked whether what Wilde said about action could have
>been triggered by Conrad's statement, but then I bestirred myself
>and looked them up in the Britannica.  Conrad's _Nostromo_ was
>published in 1904 after Wilde's death in 1900.  Actually, the
>reverse question is more interesting.  Did Conrad express opinion
>about Wilde's ideas or about Wilde as a person?

Actually, I'm more interested in knowing why you think that
question is interesting, than I am in the question.  Why?  Because
Conrad, unlike Wilde, was not a critic, and so his putative ideas
about Wilde's writing wouldn't necessarily be interesting at all.
Conrad's view of Wilde, if he had one, would most likely be 
A) a brief anecdote, as many others from that time period have
contributed, about what a great conversationalist was Wilde,
or B) some vague impression and/or judgment of his character
based on second-hand reports of his behavior.

Hmmm....what does your question spring from?  A kind of Borgesian
playfulness, like wondering what Wilde would think of William S.
Burroughs--or better yet, wondering what influence Burroughs had
on Wilde's writing?  Or does it stem from an urge to reify the
chance connection made between them--not by the fact that they
both had opinions on action--many people have had opinions about
that--but by the fact that I happened to read their opinions on
the same Saturday night?  I'm not being cantankerous: I have a
long-standing fascination with people's urges to relate things
to the "real world" of historical events, facts, solid objects,
that sort of thing.  For me that imaginative space between Wilde
and Conrad is more than sufficient.  It would never occur to
me to seek its mapping in the "actual" events of their two lives.

I've pondered over this question a lot as a teacher of psychotherapy.
I can never understand what moves my students when they ask insis-
tently, "But did such-and-such *really* happen?"  I can see where
it makes a *little* bit of difference, in terms of understanding
a person's psyche, whether Event X in the remote past *really*
happened or not, but so much more important is the web of connections--
often as capricious in origin as this Wilde-Conrad connection--
between their memories and their current lives, their fantasies
and their fears.  When I say, ultimately, "Who cares?" to my
students, they get most exasperated with me.  My students also
tend to want lots of lab tests and brain scans to back up their
clinical observations, too--more of this urge for the undeniably
concrete.  (In what sense is any event said to *really* happen,
anyway?)

I guess this is the same thing about my living in the world of dreams
and ideas--which are very real, indeed!--rather than living in the
world of "action."

		*	*	*	*	*

On another note entirely, I would also be most interested in hearing
Professor McCarthy's opinion about the new toy out from MIT Press:
_The_Computational_Brain_, by Patricia S. Churchland and Terrence
J. Sejnowski.  I confess to a weakness for books dealing with
brain circuitry, especially that of the hippocampus--a weakness
dating back to when I first read Paul "Triune Brain" MacLean's
comparison of the hippocampus, with all of its cells in neat
little rows, to "a keyboard on which the various elements of the
sensorium can play."  But some of the books of that ilk I've
purchased--such as M. Abeles' _Corticonics_:_Neural_Circuits_of_
_the_Cerebral_Cortex_--serve more in the role of keeping me 
honest when people look at my mind-brain bookcase and ask, "Have
you *read* all of those?" than in actually getting read and under-
stood.  Churchland, I've found readable, though.

Alternatively, if Prof. McCarthy is not planning to read this new
tome any time soon, his reasons for not doing so would also be
interesting.  (I think we've used the word "interesting" and its
synonyms and cognates quite enough times in this discussion so
far, don't you think?)

							--Fiona
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books