I’ve decided to ride the Lewis and Clark route again this spring/summer, which means I’m spending a lot of time on the indoor trainer. One of the workouts I do calls for short bursts of high revolutions-per-minute pedaling, followed by a rest period. Specifically, I’m told to ride at 95 RPMs for a minute and a half, followed by a 30-second rest at 70-80 RPMs. Then there’s a faster round of 100 RPM spinning and rest, then 110 RPM. I can’t do it. Almost always, I push too hard, soaring past the mark. The Garmin cyclo-computer displays the punishing red arrow, so I slow down-- too much, undershooting the mark again.
The power is there, just not the finesse. It feels like something is missing--like a middle gear between fast and slow, like trying to taste the avocado in a scotch bonnet sandwich. I suspect an accomplished athlete would be able to modulate better. It’s interesting that surging and stopping both have a clinched feeling about them. They are furrowed-brow moves. But easing into a target speed feels open. It feels like asking a question.
In my previous newsletter, I introduced two sentences from Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature.” I love these sentences for their stability and elegance, not for their nuance. Here they are again:
A young Falkland Islander walking along a beach and spying a dead dogfish and going to work on it with his jackknife has, in a fashion wholly unprovided in modern educational theory, a great advantage over the Scarsdale high-school pupil who finds the dogfish on his laboratory desk. Similarly, the citizen of Huxley’s Brave New World who stumbles across a volume of Shakespeare in some vine-grown ruins and squats on a potsherd to read it is in a fairer way of getting at a sonnet than the Harvard sophomore talking English Poetry II.
If you’re still with me, you’ll be glad to know that Percy unpacks those sentences. What diminishes the Scarsdale student’s experience is a “package” that includes, among other things, a list:
1 dissecting board
1 scalpel
1 forceps
1 probe
1 bottle india ink and syringe
1 specimen of Squalus acanthis
The heart of the matter is that the Falkland Islander handles a dogfish, but the high school student handles a specimen.“ The dogfish itself is seen as a rather shabby expression of an ideal reality, the species Squalus acanthis,” Percy writes. He says we lose something when we view a thing or a person as a specimen. The “creature” gets lost in abstraction, in a “package.” The Falkland Islander’s dogfish is the creature itself, not put in a package or mediated by anyone. The Falkland Islander comes to the creature with what we would call “beginner’s mind.” Fresh. Open. Pure.
If we look into the ways in which the student can recover the dogfish (or the sonnet), we will see that they have in common the stratagem of avoiding the educator’s direct presentation of the object to be learned and restoring access to sonnet and dogfish as beings to be known, reasserting the sovereignty of knower over known.
Percy is “looking into” more than just sonnets and fishes. He is looking into how we see and interact with the world and with each other. Every time we talk about race or class or gender, we are talking about “specimens.” In the idyllic world of the Falkland Islander, none of those factors are real.
But the Falkland Islander is not real either. Neither is the high school student. They are “specimens”-- examples. Imaginary ones at that. I think Percy was aware of the problem. He was not a careless writer. He even includes a character in a novel as one of his specimens. Three characters present as real people. One presents as a work of imagination. You just don’t get more specimen-y than that. Even if they were real, how long could the dogfish last as a creature? Let’s say the Falkland Islander finds a second dogfish and discovers similarities and differences with the first. Patterns emerge in the Falkland Islander’s mind, abstractions. Is the creature still a creature at that point? Or is it a specimen? How much weight of abstraction can the creature hold?
There’s something beautiful about pulling back the abstractions that package our lives, but the pull of abstraction doesn’t go away. It would be better to look at our creatureliness and our specimen-ness as different layers of experience in creative tension with each other-- like syntax and line in a well-crafted poem.
I’ll say more about that in my next newsletter. After that, if you haven’t give up on me, I’ll tell you more about my Lewis and Clark plans.