I picked up a pamphlet called Elucidations in the CCA in Glasgow in August, it contains two essays by a Norwegian philosopher and mountain-namer I'd never heard of, Peter Wessel Zapffe.
Zapffe writes, in 'The Last Messiah': -
"Humankind is in a state of 'cosmic panic ... at the mercy of nameless possibilities'.
'... a species becoming unviable by over-eveolving a single ability, is not a tragedy specific to humankind. Thus it is for instance believed that certain deer in paleontological times perished because they acquired horns that were too heavy. The mutations must be considered blind, they labour, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.
In states of depression, the mind may be perceived in the image of such an antler, which in all its fantastic splendour pins its bearer to the ground.
Why, then, has the human race not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a relatively minor number of individuals succumb as they cannot endure the pressure of living, - because cognition hands them more than they can bear?
Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, permits the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially restricting the content of consciousness.
If the giant deer, at appropriate intervals, had broken off the outer tips of its antlers, it might perhaps have kept going for a while still. In fever and constant pain, to be sure, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for by creation's hand was it called to be the horn bearer before the animals of the field. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in meaning, in grandness of life, hence a continuance without hope, a march not up towards confirmation, but forth across its always renewed ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood."
Now, take a look at the tapestry Grayson Perry did for a Channel 4 programme in 2012 which set out to record the culture of upper class life in the UK. He met with self-identified members of each social class (working, middle, upper) and my favourite finding was Perry's observation that working class men who pay for expensive tattoos are investing a larger percentage of their wealth in art, and self identification with the artistic process, than a member of the upper class tends to when collecting high value art (a 'banker with a Banksy').
The man with the antlers is a member of the landed gentry Grayson interviewed. Perry was sympathetic to the burden of conservatism: holding onto the past, the name, the family artifacts and this is ground also covered by Zapffe with his Parable of Cats, in which cats stand in for humans in a study of the decisions that face the groups within a society when deciding whether to act in the interests on tradition or contemporary practicalities.
I might be mistaken in thinking a is connected to b, and the burdened human sharing something in common with a deer with large antlers could certainly be approached by two people independently of each other but these two examples now sit together in my personal index and I, of course, recommend both 'Elucidations' and the work of Grayson Perry.
