david spooner

I spoke at the Thoreau Society Gathering on "The Individual and the State: the politics of Thoreau in our time"
my specific Address was:
METAMORPHOSES OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
The text can be read on the EVENTS page of this Website.

Coming early 2012: FROM TADPOLE TO BUTTERFLY, AND THE GROWTH OF THE METAMORPHIC MIND

being the follow-up to THE INSECT-POPULATED MIND: HOW INSECTS HAVE INFLUENCED THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

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I was born during the Second World War across the water from Wales at West Kirby Cheshire. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s a mile from where Malcolm Lowry was born (New Brighton, Merseyside), and by coincidence was evacuated during the Second World War as an infant between 1941 and 1943 to a town one mile from the Lowry family home at Caldy, Wirral. In a word, Lowry brought creative magic to one`s native patch, even if his masterpiece and work of true genius, Under the Volcano is still seen by some as a bit "wibberlee-wobberlee" to use a favorite phrase of his. Nathaniel Hawthorne during his time as British Consul was also domiciled at New Brighton, while Melville famously chewed the literary cud with him when his ship put into port at Liverpool.
Growing up on the Wirral peninsula, within a short boat journey to Liverpool, one`s situation is defined by closeness to the pell-mell life of the big city without exactly being of it. You grow up a voyager to and from the great port. (Although it doesn`t appear in my published biographies, I was also one of the first members of the Beatles Cavern Club!)
Anyway in the course of time, I went to the University at Leeds in 1960. There I was awarded one of the original post-War firsts in literature, following on from the previous couple gained by the poet Jon Silkin and Richard Hoggart. I studied theater and directed under Hugh Hunt from the Abbey Theater, Dublin, and also worked with Stephen Joseph, founder of the modern theater-in-the-round. My doctorate was awarded by Bristol University in 1968 on the subject of Writers and the Spanish Civil War. I lectured at Kent University for 6 years, and for a spell at Penn State in the mid-1970s. All my books have been published by American companies; interest from British publishers has been zero.

My fascination with lepidoptera spans 40 years now, and I am delighted to have been an advisor to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in the successful rescue of the El Segundo blue butterfly on the dunes at LA Airport. As a foreigner I am honored to have received the American Medal of Honor for Natural History, as well as the Congressional Medal for Excellence in Literature. Recently I was admitted to the American Hall of Fame.

I founded Borderline Press in 1975 which was designed to publish some of the remarkable contemporary Scottish writers, many of whom were finding
difficulty getting published at this time. This was an essential part of the lead-up to the movement for Scottish devolution which has been primarily stimulated by the creative writers. The writers published by Borderline - Tom Scott, J.F. Hendry (part of the New Apocalypse movement with Dylan Thomas in the 1940s), Walter Perrie - were ahead of their time. And for good measure I published a Collection of John Cornford killed fighting the Franco forces in Spain, whose poetry had been out of print for 40 years.

I then lit out on my own as a writer, and only emerged fully as a writer in my 50s after the years of preparation, although some of my work had appeared in journals before that. Indeed my writings as a Trotskyist in the 1960s and 1970s were inspired by the work of perhaps the greatest literary journal of all time - the Partisan Review of the 1930s and 1940s, the epoch of Irving Howe and colleagues in their pomp. (It has been much remarked on that many of the recent British Labour Government`s ministers are ex-Stalinists, or offspring of Communist Party members and supporters,
including the new Labour leader Ed Miliband, which is why the UK has recently resembled the defunct Soviet state. Indeed where today in any country is a Minister of the intellectual and artistic stature of André Malraux?). All writing of value redefines the nature of freedom.

Independent scholarship is an enterprise I`ve never regretted, despite the inevitable material ups and downs. Far too much writing is hide-or celebrity-bound, institution-bound, and tho I`ve reached pensionable age lacking a pension, I never hung "my hat on a pension" in Louis MacNeice`s words. Books today are being misused as obscurantist power tools whereas "the beginning of wisdom," as in Sartor Resartus,` is "to look fixedly on clothes til they become transparent" One of the most remarkable tellers of insect tales is Aesop, rumoured to have once been a slave. Adopting the beady eye of the insect allows the critical perspective.

For now, I have recently finished a translation of the Nobel prize winner and Swiss writer Carl Spitteler`s novel, Imago. This is the first English translation since it was published exactly 100 years ago. This attracted both Freud and Jung at the time of its publication, and Freud named the first psychoanalytical journal after it. However Spitteler`s concept goes against the grain of the psychoanalytical sense of repression and "complex." The full translation is to be found on the Events page of this site.I am now translating, for the first time since its appearance in 1889, a remarkable sequence of butterfly poems in Schmetterlinge, largely the product of his sightings while walking the Alps.

I am an associate member of the Welsh Academy, and member of the Thoreau, Nabokov and Benjamin Constant Societies, together with honorary membership of the Fiat Lux Society at UC Santa Cruz. I also have membership of the International Diplomatic Academy and Académie Européenne d`Informatization, and am on the Board of the London Diplomatic Academy.

My main theme as an author has been insects in relation to literature and philosophy, following a 30 year study of butterflies. My four main books on this theme have been published only in the States, between 1995 and 2005. These were not actually influenced by Vladimir Nabokov`s great work in this subject, but the result of my own work recording the creatures mainly in Scotland. Indeed in 2006, I was fortunate enough to record the first Small Skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris) to appear in Scotland for over 150 years. This was a rare day indeed for an inveterate lepidopteral fieldworker, and was acknowledged as a notable natural history event.

The central conclusion of my thinking has been that we humans are not only related to the great apes by reason of biological history, but also indirectly to insects. The insect relation is more difficult to grasp, because it has to take in metaphysics and aesthetics. This brief resumé is not the place to trace in detail what is embedded in my books, though it is the place to emphasize that natural selection needs to be supplemented by the entomological process of mimesis, something that Darwin`s co-founder of the theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, delved into. I say "co-founder" almost from rote, but as the New York Times writer and polymath Arnold Brackman showed in his book A Delicate Arrangement, there is plenty of evidence that after receiving papers from Wallace solving the problem that had obsessed Darwin for 20 years on the mechanism of the divergence of species, Darwin played for time in 1858 while he
incorporated Wallace`s key findings into his Origin of Species. We would be referring to WALLACE`s Theory of Evolution rather than Darwin`s had not Wallace been intimidated by the position of Darwin and his Wedgwood relations in the British Establishment at the height of imperial power.

The ability of insects to imitate a leaf, as in the jagged Comma butterfly, or to present itself altogether as something other than an insect, as with the Buff-tip moth, is the same process of mimesis which is at the heart of all the arts, and more significantly, of the evolution of language. There is no dispute about natural selection, but the process of mimesis is far more significant because it feeds into all the creative arts which ultimately define the human. And beyond this, there are the key philological nodes.

As I argue in Insect-Populated Mind, the Greek origin of the word soul, psukhe, imitates the sound of breathing. It also means mind and breath of life. And Barry Powell has pointed to the root of mimesis in the Greek discovery of the atomic theory of matter translated into a theory of language where "graphemes represent the `atoms` of spoken language." The failure of contemporary Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins to integrate the significance of the arts and philology into evolutionary theory has led to the present futile impasse in thinking. The attempt to rescue the situation thru the invention of "memes" is banal and desperate.

A propos Nabokov, I do believe he owed far more to Ouspensky (the pre-Gurdjieff Ouspensky) than ever he admitted. Passages in Speak Memory where Nabokov writes so magnificently on mimicry in nature echo almost exactly Ouspensky`s: "In order to form an insect exactly like a leaf of the plant on which it lives, not one, but thousands, perhaps tens of thousands,
of repeated accidents would have been necessary." As Nabokov famously writes: "When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored
holes are generously thrown in. `Natural selection`, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous...mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator`s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."
Here he echoes Ouspensky`s contemporary Evreinov who advocated the theatricality of nature. As the great playwright dramatizes the nature of the human, so nature itself is a great theatre. When Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Lewis Wolpert at the GECCO conference(July 2007) made their obeisances to natural selection and emphasized the utilitarian (medical and electronic) advances possible through an understanding of mimicry in nature, they also intended to dismiss any more fully rounded expositions of evolutionary processes. A huge apparatus has been called into being in biology, genetics, zoology, which intends the phrase "natural selection" to be as discussion-suppression as subscription to the correctness of the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat"
used to be for confirming the complete loyalty of the communist or socialist. The puritan tradition with its moralising absolutism is a great enemy of nuanced intellectual progress, and constitutes as great a threat
to democracy as religious fundamentalism.
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SCHOPENHAUER, MUSIC AND THE ORDER OF THINGS
The World as Will and Representation locates the uniqueness of music in its capacity to replicate the sense of willing. On the other hand, Mallarmé valued music not for its euphonic elements, but for its structure. Putting these two definitions together suggests that the human will is predicated on a purposive search for symmetry, that in responding to music the human brain is not seeking out the superficial elements of sound, though it may be these that lead the listener into the labyrinth. When threaded into music, the will intimates some crucial element of human life itself. Music in the form of song associated with work rhythms probably preceded verbal language and the literary arts of lyric and tragic verse as Nietzsche suggests in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, so that it appeals to some primary life-impulse. In becoming engrossed in music until a sense of everyday time is lost, we enter the heartland of what I have defined as the Cosmic Cultural Faculty, a faculty which links us purely directly, if intuitively, to the patterns of the cosmos. As one leading researcher into the musical brain has vividly put it — “When music causes one of these `skin orgasms,` the self-reward mechanisms of the limbic system — the brain`s emotional core — are active, as is the case when experiencing sexual arousal, eating or taking cocaine.” Although there have been various attempts to lump this experience in with the main demands of natural selection, and thus discover a utilitarian and social function, this is merely routine sociological thinking.
Steven Pinker goes so far as to reduce the issue to the question: “if music confers no survival advantage, where does it come from and why does it work? I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tackle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.” But this is too simple and arises from his inability to estimate the impact of the shape of music, its patterning and appeal to human sensibilities. So he writes that “music communicates nothing but formless emotion.” Actually music expresses four structures; melody, rhythm together with meter, timbre alongside tone, and volume plus dynamic progression. The brain works through a considerable series of processes in order to organize this variegated set of events, and the more experienced the listener or practitioner, the faster these are absorbed. There are specific neural circuits that filter the music. Eckhart O. Altenmüller describes the system:
“After sound is registered in the ear, the auditory nerve transmits the data to the brain stem. There the information passes through at least four switching stations...[after which] the thalamus — a structure in the brain that is often referred to as the gateway to the cerebral cortex — either directs information on to the cortex or suppresses it....Early stages of music perception, such as pitch (a note`s frequency) and volume, occur in the primary and secondary auditory cortices in both hemispheres. The secondary auditory areas, which lie in a half-circle formation around the primary auditory cortices, process more complex music patterns of harmony, melody and rhythm (the durations of a series of notes). Adjoining tertiary auditory areas are thought to integrate these patterns into an overall perception of music.”
Schopenhauer wrote that “metaphysics is impossible as being the science of that which lies beyond nature, that is, beyond the possibility of experience.” Nonetheless experience itself is ambiguous. Insect metamorphoses seem to be remote from human experience. Even in artistic works, they seem alien except for works such as Kafka`s The Metamorphosis, Hardy`s The Return of the Native, or David Cronenberg`s film `The Fly.`
But if we look at classical music, matters are not so simple. Take the usual structures of symphonies and quartets. A symphony is a sonata for orchestra with, normally, four movements. In the first movement, themes are stated (the egg, or by some recent interpretations the proto-larva); the second movement proceeds slowly like a caterpillar; the third such as the scherzo of the Eroica tends to be febrile and anticipatory like a shimmering chrysalis trembling with incipient finality; while the fourth usually represents a summation, which as Berlioz analyzed in relation to Beethoven`s composition, leads “from tension to release, from compulsion to liberation, from the tragic to the joyous;” — with exceptions like the tragic last movement of Brahms`s Fourth Symphony. Undercurrents of profound sadness often underlie the “most capricious evolutions” of a Beethoven scherzo, and I would interpret this as the process of the loss of imaginal buds which accompany the pupal or chrysalitic stage of development, essential to achieve the state of the imago, but nonetheless a loss of youthfulness and an intimation of the end.
As listeners or performers, we travel through these stages as the musical form unfolds. The classical style constructed itself on the four-measure phrase once it had broken from the flowing continuity of the Baroque. The great Cantatas had decorated their music with vocal and instrumental color like the painted church images. As Spengler puts it: “Music frees itself from the bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant function, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration” So music became more abstract in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Charles Rosen estimates that it was about 1820 that the four-measure unit gained pre-eminence in rhythmic structure,8 but the four-movement symphony had already become dominant even by 1780, although three-movement ones continued to be composed. In other words, the very fabric of the great period of classical achievement is both an anthem to quaternity, and a reverberation of the insect connection. Robert Simpson catches something of this contradiction when he writes that the last movement of Beethoven`s Ninth symphony has the composer saying in effect “the visions of the first three movements are such as to reduce man to the apparent size of a microbe; but a man conceived them, so let us all rejoice in our potentialities.” The great works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and those who followed them, are metaphysical to our consciousness, yet have a very real basis in the natural world. Our experience of them is at one and the same time seemingly immediate, and yet so ghostly and phantom-like.
More than this, though, there are meta-musical patterns also. Brahms wrote 4 symphonies, as did Schumann, and his final works include the 4 Piano Pieces and 4 Serious Songs. So also of course Richard Strauss`s 4 Last Songs. Brahms`s Second Piano Concerto does not follow the usual 3-fold concerto shape, but rises to the symphonic four movements. He originally intended his Violin Concerto to have four movements, while his first Piano Concerto was conceived as a symphony based on Beethoven`s Choral Symphony. All Brahms`s symphonies have a four-movement structure, and all of their first movements follow a sonata shape. Their totality constitutes a hymn to the Tetradic, with their particular thematic continuity and integration through the four sections.

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from other work in progress
The fact is that here in the insect world is the life science equivalent of modern physics` quantum universe. Metamorphosis occurs because the larval form, the pupal form and the adult form have evolved independently of each other to fit different environments.
Insects such as Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera undergo this complete four stage transformation known as holometabolic. Some other insects merely go through three steps, reaching maturity by a series of moults omitting the pupa form. This is not merely an issue of the microcosm in relation to the
macrocosm. It is rather a matter of organic changes that are common among the insects that have only a marginal echo in the life of mammals. Metamorphosis defines the core of quantum biology, a unique and multifaceted process that has implications throughout human culture, both directly and indirectly. (I have given an account of this in my
The Insect-Populated Mind: how insects have influenced the evolution of human consciousness (2005)). Insects can destroy their former selves and build a new stage of growth. It is a sleight of nature, an unusual
evolutionary maneuver, and it is built into the structure of our languages.
When Descartes came out of the shadows where he had been incubating his theories, he sensed an insect parallel with his own intellectual development. Larvatus prodeo, he announced, “I advance masked.” From the ovum emerges the larva, which means mask, - or ghost of its former self.
It is a caterpillar, the idea being that it `masks` its final form, be it butterfly or bee. Larva also signifies `person` in Latin, a being in a transitional state - as Herman Melville defined Queequeg in Moby Dick. On its way to complete realisation, a larva next morphs into a pupa related to `pupil,` awaiting transformation into an adult and parallel to the insect pupa changing into an imago.
The imago, or perfected insect, is the culmination of this fourfold metamorphic insect process. In ancient Greece the imago signifies the fourfold cluster of butterfly and soul and mind and
breath of life in one, psyche.
Could this helix of growth not be what Kant had seen as the “schema” within humans that unifies understanding and the objective world?
As he put it in Critique of Pure Reason: “This schematism of our understanding, with respect to its appearance and its mere form, is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true workings we shall hardly coax from nature or expose unconcealed to view.” (180) Hermann von Helmholtz supplemented by Henri Poincaré identified a quaternal pattern of scientific progress as saturation, incubation, illumination and verification, a more general example of the ova-larva-pupa-imago process.

In the sphere of human culture the development of the sonata and symphony follow a parallel course of egg to imago in their usual 4 movements, but one that is more instinctive, an oblique enactment of individual growth. [again see my Insect-Populated Mind for much more on this.] It is ironical that post-Kantian German philosophers from Wilhelm Schlegel to Hegel imagined they were entirely surpassing the original master.
The great atomic physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, remarked that every new philosophy is founded on a paradox. Where the intellect is concerned, the double world of insect-mind corresponds to the wave-particle fusion in quantum physics. Electrons can be produced simultaneously as wave and particle, though no experiment can allow the two to be studied at the same time.
So in life, the doublet of insect metamorphosis and mind processes can only be artificially separated. The particle equates with the living metamorphic creature such as butterfly, while the wave represents its transference into consciousness. So we use the phrase `brain wave`. They constitute a fused duality.
As the recent Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism somewhat archly and obscurely suggests: it is only “secret correspondences between the natural realm and the human mind that can activate true thinking.” The problem from the standpoint of formal and academic education is that this is a process of simultaneity, whereas academic education tends to encourage a procedure of division, separation and enumeration.
Certain `animal` structures inhere in the embryonic mind and are there in the ovum. The clues lie in strings of words conceived during the very birth of language, and apprehended before cultures had ossified into the Greek and Sanskrit mainstream, a type of molten big bang in the language world,probably occurring in the so-called Reptilian section of the
human brain.
It is not, pace Chomsky, that the embryos are forming for sentence structures. It is that as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it:
“There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined
Can utterly change the nature of man.”
Darwin only revealed the descent from the great apes. But as A.R. Wallace his co-founder of the theory of evolution saw, the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity follows a separate line of growth. So we dangle between ape and insect.(see my The Metaphysics of Insect Life).It was in the Devonian period, some 370 million years ago, that metamorphosis began to develop in the amphibians. They came onto land in the same epoch as early insects evolved. Still today, tailed amphibians
and anurans (toads, frogs) pass through a larval stage before they reach maturity. Insects with complete metamorphosis (holometabolic) diverged from a common arthropod ancestor some 300 million years ago during the Permian. The amphibians remain as makeshift creatures, at home neither in water nor on land. Their metamorphic stages are sometimes regressive.
And many marine invertebrates revert to a larval character as late adults, so that sedentary lives are often the culmination.
George Wald has observed: “a free-swimming echinoderm or unchordate larva, specialized almost wholly for motility and hence dispersal, metamorphoses into a sedentary or sessile adult, specialized for feeding and reproduction [first on plankton and then on the benthos or bottom of the
sea]. The winged insects reverse this order: the sedentary larvae, specialized for feeding and growth, metamorphose into highly motile, winged forms, specialized for coupling and reproduction.”
So holometabolic insects, those that pass from egg to caterpillar to pupa to imago, prepare for flight through a full-scale growth. They are the only taxa that pass through a transformation taking them from terrestrial to aerial life. And the angiosperms, the flowering plants such as magnolia, follow their evolution and transform via spores to provide the
nectar for the imagos, the perfected insects. This is approximately similar to Bohr`s idea of complementarity, with the spectral lines of the structure of atoms revealed through a spectrograph having its equivalent in parallel evolutions, or doublets.The flowering plants are thought to have originated in water and then taken to land.
This is a fourfold process. As we shall see this structure in nature has been appropriated by some of the greatest poets and composers. Quite beyond merely descriptive or passionate expression, here the writer or composer threads into the natural world at his and her heart.
The integration with that structure meets its point of fusion in the dialectic of microcosm (the poems, sonata) and macrocosm (the dimensions
of the universe).

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COMMA
Withered leaf
it seemed I found
the very one I`d younger seen
a masquerading mound

parchment crack
in crumpled brack,
a flicker of white
punctuates flight.

Your barbs on quite some different leaf
clasped me while thumbing literary sheaf -
"Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me."

You, comma, our breathing space in artifice
subterfuge in nature`s kiss
deceptive always close or far,
obstructing as you must
perfections of the copula.

(from my Creatures of Air)
A comma is both a butterfly with leaf-like eaten-away wings, as well of course as a grammatical weapon
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Hyatt Carter says the following in his new book Some Little Night Musings(January 2011 from authorhouse and available from Amazon):

THE HUMAN-INSECT CONNECTION:
"The emphasis that science has placed on our close “family” connection with the higher apes, a connection that becomes apparent when you visit the primate section of any zoo, can obscure the closer connection we have with insects on a developmental level or in terms of the evolution of consciousness.

I first became aware of this connection through the writings of David Spooner. One of Spooner’s main contentions is that the “primate connection has caused mainstream evolutionary theory to miss the all-round interrelationship of human development to entomology, and that this relation is enshrined in the greatest of the higher art forms and religion. There is a crucial oblique relationship between metamorphic insects and humans, a connection transmitted through the great works of music and literature, and through many of the paradigms of world religions.”

A friend with whom I aired this idea suggested that such a claim could be made only on the grounds of poetic license. There is surely something “poetic” about all this, agreed, but I believe it goes beyond poetic license.

Words with “psyche” as a component, such as psychology, express in their meanings an evocation of butterflies and an etymology that traces back to the Greek word ψυχή which signifies soul, yes, but also butterfly. If I am not mistaken, it’s the only word in Greek that does mean butterfly. The butterfly is an ancient and enduring symbol of the soul that finds cross-cultural expression in all forms of art. Twentieth-century Hispanic literature gives an almost sacerdotal role not only to butterflies, but other insects and other animals, such as frogs, that enjoy metamorphosis in their development.

There’s another etymological link between “pueblo” and “populus,” derived from the ancient Greek “papaillo,” meaning to flutter: the root of the French word for butterfly: “papillon.”

I believe people have always dimly discerned something of fundamental significance in the metamorphosis of insects and in the behavior of social insects such as bees and ants.

In metamorphosis, there’s a saltation, or a transcendence, that provides a metaphor that resonates with the soul, with the butterflies adding an aesthetic dimension that expresses the becoming of beauty.

And so I suppose what convinces me is the cumulative effect of this extensive network of interconnected meanings, one that I could keep extending, but the above examples should give a sense of the general direction.

Perhaps it would be better to claim less generality and speak not of all insects, but only those that express the fourfold cycle of complete metamorphosis. These are designated as holometabolous and this group of insects are four in number:

1. Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths),

2. Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps

3. Coleoptera (beetles), and

4. Diptera (flies).

If the idea of developmental levels that Piaget discovered in children can be generalized to describe the growth or expansion of consciousness in adults, both individually and collectively, then two complementary processes seem to be at work: within the limits of any level, incremental growth becomes possible as the landscape of that level is explored and mapped; but the shift to a new and higher level requires a saltation, transcendence, metanoia, satori.

In our individual quests for growth, we begin as caterpillars, devouring what books, gurus, and teachers have to offer. But a deep understanding, when things start to fall into place, comes only with a chrysalitic phase wherein our slumbering dogmas are liquefied so that the imaginal cells of the new system can bring forth the butterfly of transformation.

Developmental processes, such as evolution, are impelled by at least two types of change that may be characterized as vertical and horizontal. The horizontal line is the gradual advance, step by small meandering step, sanctioned by those of a Darwinian persuasion, whereas sudden spikes give evidence of a vertical exuberance.

And so Newton’s metamorphosis of scientific thought kept scientists busy for centuries with highly interesting incremental work, whereupon Einstein comes along to invite us all to ride with him on a beam of light up to a new level. Celeritas!

Metamorphosis, a significant evolutionary breakthrough if ever there was one, exemplifies this vertical strategy and, in the case of the butterfly, does so beautifully.

In light of all this, perhaps I should sign off as —

Gregor Samsa"
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OTHER WORK IN PROGRESS
In the wake of the French Revolution, the German writer Novalis posed a number of issues about language and consciousness that still await answers. One contemporary saw Novalis as a bird of paradise “without feet, condemned to hover evermore in the air.” The writer Margaret Fuller wrote in letters, “I wish to talk about such an uncommon person, - about Novalis!...the good Novalis, most enlightened, yet most pure; every link of his experience framed – no beaten – from the tried gold.” Novalis had realised that the mental GROWTH of the individual was the key to the value of their insights. So he was doubtful as to the virtue of the academic mind. Such an orderly trained intellect “goes in swiftly – but also comes out swiftly –He soon reaches the second stage – but there he usually remains. He finds the final steps difficult and, once he has attained a certain level of mastery, can seldom bring himself to revert to the condition of a beginner.”
Now what may these stages of intellectual progress be that Novalis is referring to, and why should this academic mentality need to return to “the foul rag and bone shop” of the mind before proceeding to the third stage? For Novalis, it is ordinary people who are best equipped to tackle the higher echelons of development. The “confused,” as he calls them, ““penetrate slowly, they learn to work with difficulty, but then they become masters and teachers for ever... Confusedness indicates superfluity of strength and powers, but lack the sense of proportion. Precision – and true sense of proportion, but scanty strength and power. That is why the confused man is so perfectable (sic) compared with the trained man who so soon finishes as a Pedagogue.”
Consider the following 4 language elements in their interrelationship. They reveal a tale of insect evolution, running in allegorical parallel to human intellectual and spiritual maturation. This is the metaphor that is humanity, and it coincides with the “peculiar property of language” which as Novalis says in his Monologue, “is concerned only with itself.” But neither he nor his predecessor Fichte can reveal it in detail as the “truly scientific” original language. But not only was language when fully revealed Delphi itself, the route to self-knowledge, but also “the dynamic element in the physical realm.” Language appears to be a mere utility. We use it as common coinage for every conversation. And in the world of politics and economics as Novalis shrewdly notes, “where there are many words, there must also be much activity – as with the flow of money.” This is on the same cultural lines as Keynes` percept that capital is generated by animal spirits in human action. But at root language is far more than these things.
If one can distinguish its inner structure, there appears an entire natural philosophy, elements of which were prceived by Norman O. Brown in his intellectual brainbuster, Love`s Body. So ovum, the egg from which all develops appertains to the child`s mind, which I shall argue is not a tabula rasa. The next stage is larva which means mask or ghost. It is also a caterpillar, the idea being that it `masks` its final form, be it bee or butterfly. It also signifies `person` in Latin. Whence larvatus, possessed by a larva and meaning `personality.` When Descartes finally announced himself to the public, he wrote `larvatus prodeo.` On its way to complete realisation, a larva next morphs into a pupa related to the word `pupil`, awaiting transformation into an adult, parallel to the insect pupa awaiting metamorphosis into the imago. The imago or perfected insect is the culmination and real deal in this metamorphic world. It is not merely an `image,` and although in human life it often disconcertingly appears as an eidolon (as Helen of Troy was described) concealing and inspiring a more profound message. Most commonly it is represented in ancient Greece by a butterfly.
Could this helix of growth not be what Kant had seen as the “schema” within humans that unifies understanding and the objective world? As he put it in Critique of Pure Reason, “This schematism of our understanding, with respect to its appearance and its mere form, is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true workings we shall hardly coax from nature or expose unconcealed to view.” It is ironical that post-Kantian German philosophers from Wilhelm Schlegel to Hegel imagined they were entirely surpassing the original master before Marx shortcircuited the process. Certain `animal` structures inhere to the mind. The clues lie in strings of words conceived during the very birth of language, sensed before cultures had ossified into the Greek and Sanskrit mainstream, a type of molten big bang in the language world.
It is not, pace Chomsky, that the embryos are forming for sentence structures. It is that as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid put it:
“There lie hidden in language elements that effectively combined
Can utterly change the nature of man.”
Darwin only revealed the descent from the great apes. But as A.R. Wallace his co-founder of the theory of evolution saw, the intellectual and spiritual evolution of humanity follows a separate line of growth, and one I would argue via the insect. So we dangle between ape and insect.
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The first item here is from the crucial correspondence between the Nobel prize-winning scientist Wolfgang Pauli and Jung - crucial because nowhere else do we have such a detailed account of the dreams of a pioneering scientist and the comments from one of the two greatest psychoanalysts:
Let`s remember the epoch-making (cf. also epoché pace Husserl) correspondence of Pauli and Jung in this general connection:

"Dear Mr. Jung - "I was once at a meeting where someone was talking
about the oracle of the I CHING. It struck me that the one consulting the oracle has to `draw` three times, whereas the result of the draw depends on the divisibility of a quantity by four. This reminded me vividly of the {medieval} `world-clock vision,` in which the motif of the permeation of the 3 and the 4 was the main source of the feeling of harmony..."

Now 3fold tends to relate to female experience, 4fold to male: there is much more on this in my The Insect Populated Mind, though as Paulus Ryanto has pointed out in his brilliant thesis on Husserl, "The knowledge of the world cannot stop at a mathematical formula of it." Which is to say that the dialectic of 3 and 4 is only a key to opening a deeper understanding of how humans function and not a dryasdust abstraction on which we settle.

Pauli continues, "I have come to accept the existence of deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time. [These layers] are particularly often represented by wave or oscillation symbols (which still remain to be explained). The relationship to these images is strongly affective and connected with a feeling that could be described as a mixture of fear and awe. (You will perhaps say that the curves are an IMAGO DEI.)"

Now, I would suggest that these oscillations are the abstract diagramatic of an intimation of the lepidoptera (psyche in Greek = butterfly) that lay behind the processes involved in setting up these quasi-psychological connections. Indeed I would even suggest that there is here a suggestion - no more – that an ambiguity in IMAGO is etymological, both the perfected flying insect and the image. Let us recall that the Gaelic word for butterfly is dealbhan-dé meaning the `fire of God`).

Pauli seems to be suggesting some sort of insect rhythm when in another letter to Jung discussing problems of the relation of physics to psyche, he raises his "phobia about wasps". He writes that "I recognized that behind it lurked the fear of a sort of ecstatic state in which the contents of the unconscious (autonomous part systems) might burst forth, contents which, because of their strangeness, would not be capable of being assimilated by the conscious and might thus have a shattering effect on it."

Here Pauli has reached the limits of physics, an apprehension of a potential mental nuclear explosion so to speak.
THE LIFE SCIENCES AND BEYOND THAT EXTERNAL ORGANIC LIFE BECKONS!!

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