To Edward T. Hall, November 3, 1967
Dear Ned:
I think I made my most exciting discovery while reading Nil by Robert Martin Adams. His inventory of discontinuities and negations in the 19th century revealed to me that the cultures of the world have often been engaged in trying to restrict the continuum of visual space by various strategies of negation, nihilism, discontinuity, etc. Not knowing the properties of visual space, or the spatial properties of any of the other senses, has thus resulted in a huge waste of time and energy. As a result of my brain operaition (I am still on sedatives two years later), several years of reading got rubbed out and I am now re-reading many books including The Silent Language. What a ball! On page 45 of the paperback (about four pages into Chapter 3) you raiss the quesiton of the specific properties of a culture. You would probably tackle it diffeerently today, but you simply omit the approach of indicating the preferred stress on each of the senses as a means of defining a cultural pattern. For example, the whole of Adam's Nil can be stated simply as the efforts of 19th century art and poetry to break out of the dominatn forms of visual space: uniformity, connectedness, and continuity. The position of auditory TV image in visual culture is often absurdly high, as in the importance attached to "music" as a separate package deal. Since writing Through the Vanishing Point with Parker, I have hit upon one means of identifying the cultural bias of any society by its special phrase or phrases for "knowing something throughly and totally." e.g. the American phrase: "I know it inside out" is a puzzler to Englishmen and Europeans. It betokens the supremacy of manipulative and kinesthetic savvy in the Yankee world at least. It woudl probably mean nothing in the South. The Greek word for this is despotein, a sort of aerial perspective. The Englishman says: "I know it like the back of my hand." The Russian says: "I know it like the palm of my hand," the one indicating a visual, the other a tactile bias. The German says: "I know it as if it had given birth to it". The Jap says: "I know it from top of head to end of toes." (I.e. the interval of the MA, or touch and interface.) The Hindu says: "I know it nerve by nerve", and the Thailander says: "I know it like a snake swimming through water", and so on. Such phrases indicate not a single isolated sense, of course, but a mix of senses, with fairly adequate marks of which dominates. They can be used as touchstones, which can be checked out against the rest of the culture very readily. Would it be possible to get a kindof symposium of such observations concerning these phrases, as is attempted by a very large number of languages? Would you be willing to contribute a few yourself? Would not a mere inventory of such phrases be useful? Even without full discussion fo them as marks of a cultural bias in the sensory life? Now that the satellites have enclosed the planet in a man-made environment, "Nature" is no more. Only programming and understanding of the ecological field remains as a human task. Ecology and Echoland are close. Linus Pauling's The Nature of the Chemical Bond stresses the acceptance of physicists and chemists of resonance as the physical bond of the universe, i.e. interfaces but no connections, as in wheel and axel. Yet, scientists remain heavily biased on the visual side oas a result of the unconscious effect of our Western culture. THat bias has ceased with the young since TV, because the TV image is not visual so much as tactile, not convergent or bifocal so much as Cyclopean. Optometrist friends report a mental separation of the activity of one eye in teh young today -- especially in teh well adjusted or viable young. This separation appears to be the result of TV viewing on one hand, and near-point reading distances on teh other. Greetings to Mildy and warm regards.
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