i'd rather teach one
bird to sing
than ten thousand stars how
not to dance.
--e. e. cummings
Garcia Lopez de Cardenas
discovered the
Grand Canyon and was amazed at the sight. It
can be imagined: One
crosses miles of desert, breaks through the
mesquite, and there it is at
one's feet. Later the government set the place
aside as a national
park, hoping to pass along to millions the
experience of Cardenas.
Does not one see the same sight from the Bright
Angel Lodge that Cardenas
saw?....
A man in Boston decides to
spend his vacation
at the Grand Canyon. He visits his travel
bureau, looks at the folder,
signs up for a two-week tour. He and his
family take the tour, see
the Grand Canyon, and return to Boston. May we
say that this man
has seen the Grand Canyon? Possibly he
has. But it is more
likely that what he has done is the one sure way not
to see the canyon.
Why is it almost
impossible to gaze directly
at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and
see it for what it is--as
one picks up a strange object from one's back yard
and gazes directly at
it? It us almost impossible because the Grand
Canyon, the thing as
it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex
which has already
been formed in the sightseer's mind. Seeing
the canyon under approved
circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head
on. The thing is
no longer as it confronted the Spaniard; it is
rather that which has already
been formulated--by picture postcard, geography
book, tourist folder, and
the words Grand Canyon. As a result of
this preformulation,
the source of the sightseer's pleasure undergoes a
shift. Where the
wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his
penetration of the thing
itself, from the progressive discovery of depths,
patterns, colors, shadows,
etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by
the degree to which
the canyon conforms to the preformed complex.
If it does so, if it
looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he
might even say, "Why it
is every bit as beautiful as a picture
postcard!" He feels he has
not been cheated. But if it does not conform,
if the colors are somber,
he will not be able to see it directly; he will only
be conscious of the
disparity between what it is and what it is supposed
to be. He will
say later that he was unlucky in not being there at
the right time.
The highest point, the term of the sightseer's
satisfaction, is not the
sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is
rather the measuring
up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed
symbolic complex....
How can the sightseer
recover the Grand
Canyon? He can recover it in any number of
ways, all sharing in common
the strategy of avoiding the approved confrontation
of the tour and the
Park Service....It can be recovered by leaving the
beaten track....It can
be recovered by a dialectical movement which brings
one back to the beaten
track but at a level above it. For example,
after a lifetime of avoiding
the beaten track and guided tours, a man may
deliberately seek out the
most beaten track of all, the most commonplace tour
imaginable: he may
visit the Grand Canyon by a Greyhound tour in the
company of a party from
Terre Haute....It may be recovered as a consequence
of a breakdown of the
symbolic machinery by which the experts present the
experience to the consumer.
A family visits the canyon in the usual way.
But shortly after their
arrival, the park is closed by an outbreak of typhus
in the south.
They have the canyon to themselves....
[A loss of sovereingty]
has come about
as a consequence of the seduction of the layman by
[planners and experts].
The layman will be seduced as long as he regards
beings as consumer items
to be experienced rather than prizes to
be won, as long as
he waives his sovereign rights as a person and
accepts his role of consumer
as the highest estate to which the layman can
aspire.
As Mournier said, the
person is not something
one can study and provide for; he is something one
struggles for.
But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he
knows that there is
a struggle, he is going to be just what the planners
think he is.
---Walker Percy, The
Message in the
Bottle (1954)
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