What writer whose trinity was strongly co-ordinated would even dream of revising his work to conform with the majority report of a committee? Those whose Idea is in full control are especially obstinate and impervious to criticism; for in speaking for the father they speak with authority and not as the scribblers.
“Controlled environments” are another of modernism’s great obsessions. Extravagant amounts of energy are spent to keep buildings—as well as skyway systems, shopping malls, and domed stadia—at a constant temperature year-round via entirely mechanical means. The folly is not simply a touchy-feely isolation from the authenticities of nature, which can admittedly be cruel, but a larger disciplinary presumption that seeks to extend the centralized authority (central air, central government) of power ever more comprehensively. It is possible that this particular hubris may have pushed Gaia to the tipping point.
Fascination with this potential for control of our environment has prompted the invention of mechanical systems that have made natural thermal strategies seem obsolete by comparison.
In any control system that is functioning properly, the methods used to control a signal won’t be correlated with the signal they’re controlling.
Worse, there will be several variables that DO show relationships, and may give the wrong impression. You’re looking at variables A, B, C, and D. You see that when A goes up, so does B. When A goes down, C goes up. D never changes and isn’t related to anything else — must not be important, certainly not related to the rest of the system. But of course, A is the angle of the road, B is the gas pedal, C is the brake pedal, and D is the speed of the car.
The basic idea of legibility is that the act of making something comprehensible enough to control is itself an act that shapes the thing to be controlled, often with far greater consequences than the control itself. This is because it removes complexity that is deemed as irrelevant that makes it harder to control, and that complexity may be in some way essential to the health of the system.
My recall is a damn sight short of total. It’s so unreliable that I sometimes think I’m trying to prove something by it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is not exactly the sort of thing you can prove with any accuracy.
Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory any more?
Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.