I love the weekend papers - the collision of high and low culture; the way that things you've long forgotten are re-awakened as if new.
Yesterday's Guardian Review had a great piece by James Fenton on WH Auden and reprinted Musee des Beaux Arts - one of my faves.
It's a bit of a risk referring to poetry in a blog like this but as I re-read it, it made me see something important.
So if you don't mind, today we'll be having a bit of poetry. Then I'll say what it made me think about...
OK, so here's Wystan first:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specifically wnt it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood;
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrydom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an imortant failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I've read this many times over the years but the thing that struck me yesterday how well these few lines describe the distorted view of reality our individual experiences of our own minds gives each of us. Each of us may feel to be the centre of our own drama - a drama that we assume others are interested in when clearly they are not - the dogs go on with their "doggy life" and the ship sales "calmly on", ignoring Icarus's fatal fall from the sky. The "torturer's horse" rubs his rump on a tree, indifferent to the torturer's drama.
Why is this relevant to HERD and our attempts to understand mass behaviour?
Simply this: the way our brains are gives each of us the impression that we decide what to do as individuals (unless we're 'brainwashed' or 'hypnotised' by others, as we damningly put it...). We don't see the reality of things - the influences we get from other folk or how instinctively we respond to situations - we see things AS IF each of us were at the centre of our own universe. Our minds give us both an inflated view of our own position and of our mind's own role in shaping the world...It seems this way because our minds tell us it is.
Realising this - the distorting nature of Mind - is one of the biggest steps to appreciating how things really happen, how the Herd effect really works.
Right, enough deep stuff. Sigh of relief all round, no doubt. More tea anyone?