“The assumptions of realism as it has been practised are simply wrong. People bring a great deal of memory and also a sense of present experience to everything that they do. If you see someone doing a simple action like hanging sheets on a line, there is absolutely no reason in that person’s perception that there is anything simple about it at all. I have all the respect in the world for reality, but I think the general assumptions about it are wrong.”
She thinks in metaphors because everything is a metaphor. This is her faith - the world, not as a factual cul-de-sac, but as an unfolding revelation. In her essays, this extends to inspiring attacks on the reduced view of humanity offered by contemporary science - in particular, the culturally illiterate view of religious imagery. “For heaven’s sake, the idea the dome of the sky is the skull of a murdered god. What is being described there? A very great deal. The idea that that is the kind of statement that could be displaced by something about gravity or the atmosphere - that’s a bizarre assumption. At a certain point in cultural history, there appeared this idea people are biological automatons, and everything to do with perception and emotion and birth and death is some sort of epiphenomenal thing that should be excluded from the definition of the real. This, to me, is very bizarre.”
I'm not sure I'm with her on metaphor (the point of figurative language has always seemed to me to be that it never quite fits, and it's the gap between descriptor and thing described that's most interesting), though I certainly agree that reducing everything to a physicalist description is not quite so interesting. Gilead is on the pile, anyway, and will likely move up.
1 comment:
Oh! I support anything Robinson writes moving up to the top of your pile...
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