They are the egg men . . .
. . . I am the walrusGoo goo g'joobThese phrases are quoted from the Beatles song "I Am the Walrus", which featured in their 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour. In J.C. Cooper's An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978, p. 60) the list relating to an edge includes “the life principle”, “potentiality”, “the germ of all creation”, “the primordial matriarchal world of chaos”, “the womb”, “all seminal existence”, “the perfect state of unified opposites”, “resurrection” and “hope” – several of which seem relevant to the Beatle's "I Am the Walrus".
So, who is the egg man? Humpty Dumpty?
The character of Humpty Dumpty as an anthropomorphic "egg man" is perhaps an echo of the many symbolic associations made where an egg stands for an integral wholeness, a completeness, and as such, has become an archetypal image in creation mythology, the cosmic egg, or world egg.
A stone Brahmanda
One of the earliest ideas of the "cosmic egg" comes from some of the Sanskrit scriptures. The Sanskrit term for it is Brahmanda (ब्रह्माण्ड) which is derived from two words - 'Brahma' (ब्रह्मा) the 'creator god' in Hinduism and 'anda' (अण्ड) meaning 'egg'. Certain Puranas such as the Brahmanda Purana speak of this in detail.
The Rig Veda uses a similar name for the source of the universe: Hiranyagarbha (हिरण्यगर्भ) which literally means "golden fetus" or "golden womb" and is associated with the universal source Brahman where the whole of all existence is believed to be supported. The Upanishads elaborate that the Hiranyagarbha floated around in emptiness for a while, and then broke into two halves which formed Dyaus (the Heavens) and Prithvi (Earth). The Rig Veda has a similar coded description of the division of the universe in its early stages.This "cosmic egg" concept was figuratively re-adopted by modern science in the 1930s and explored by theoreticians during the following two decades. Current cosmological models maintain that 13.8 billion years ago, the entire mass of the universe was compressed into a gravitational singularity, a so-called ‘cosmic egg’ from which it 'hatched', expanding to its current state following the Big Bang.
The Big Bang and timeline of the universe
A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of "inflation" produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by WMAP was emitted about 375,000 years after inflation and has traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe.
The "egg man" is a retrieval of the cliché Humpty Dumpty and an activation of the "cosmic egg" archetype
The relationship between cliché and archetype are explored in the collaborative project by Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson in a book and using as its title the simple but difficult idea: From Cliché to Archetype. This post links to a Re:LODE Radio page that includes an extract from a paper that reviews this work and the concept of "retrieval":From cliché to archetypeBy a Commodius Vicus: From Cliche to Archetype to Cliche (Journal of Visual Culture, 2014) by W. Terrence Gordon
The title of Gordon's paper reflects a set of connections to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (See Re:LODE Radio page Finnegans WOKE). The entire work forms a cycle: the last sentence—a fragment—recirculates to the beginning sentence:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
The relationship between the nursery rhyme cliché of Humpty Dumpty, alongside the surreal situations of everyday life, and the archetypes of creation mythology is achieved via the retrieval of these clichés generated in John Lennon's lyric.
Written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney, it was released as the B-side to the single "Hello, Goodbye" and on the Magical Mystery Tour EP and album. In the 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour film, the song is played out in a montage in which the band mime to the recording in the grounds of a deserted airfield that's animated by various antics of animal-costumed characters straight out of Lewis Carroll's "looking glass" world.
Alice goes through the looking glass
This video montage begins with a dramatisation of part of Alice's encounter with Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and end with an alternative film edit of I am the Walrus in the Magical Mystery Tour.
I am the egg man . . .
I am he as you are he as you are me - And we are all together - See how they run like pigs from a gun - See how they fly - I'm crying - Sitting on a corn flake - Waiting for the van to come - Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday - Man you've been a naughty boy - You let your face grow long
I am the egg man - They are the egg men - I am the walrus - Goo goo g'joob
Mister City policeman sitting - Pretty little policemen in a row - See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run
I'm crying, I'm crying
I'm crying, I'm crying
Yellow matter custard - Dripping from a dead dog's eye - Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess - Boy, you've been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down
I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob
Sitting in an English garden - Waiting for the sun - If the sun don't come you get a tan - From standing in the English rain
I am the egg man
(now good sir) See NOTE below
They are the egg men
(a poor man, made tame to fortune's blows) See NOTE below
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob
(good pity) See NOTE below
Expert, texpert choking smokers - Don't you think the joker laughs at you (ho ho ho, hee hee hee, hah hah hah) - See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snide
I'm crying
Semolina Pilchard - Climbing up the Eiffel tower - Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna - Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe
I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob, goo Joob, joob, jooba Jooba, jooba, jooba Joob, jooba Joob, jooba Umpa, umpa, stick it up your jumper (jooba, jooba) Umpa, umpa, stick it up your jumper Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa) Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper) Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa) Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper) Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa) Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper) Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa) Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper) Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa) Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper) Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa) . . .
NOTE: Also included in the lyric are these fragments taken and recorded from a performance of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear.
Slave . . Thou hast slain me Villain, take my purse . . . If I ever Bury my body . . . The letters which though find'st about me . . . To Edmund Earl of Gloucester . . . Seek him out upon the British Party . . . O untimely death . . . I know thee well . . . A serviceable villain, as duteous to the vices of thy mistress . . . As badness would desire . . . What, is is he dead . . . Sit you down, Father, rest you . . .
There is an obvious connection between an "egg man" and "the walrus" to be found in the Through the Looking Glass world of Lewis Carrol that Lennon so much admired and Alice's encounter with Humpty Dumpty and the Walrus in Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee's poetic nonsense rhyme The Walrus and the Carpenter.
Lennon explained much of the song to Playboy in 1980:
The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko ... I'd seen Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked Dylan and Jesus going on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsberg, in particular, I was referring to.
The words 'Element'ry penguin' meant that it's naïve to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol.
In those days I was writing obscurely, à la Dylan. [...] It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system.
I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? [Sings, laughing] 'I am the carpenter ...'m
Wikipedia cites author Ian MacDonald, who claims that the lyrics came from three song ideas that Lennon had been working on, the first of which was inspired by hearing a police siren at his home in Weybridge; Lennon wrote the lines "Mis-ter cit-y police-man" to the rhythm and melody of the siren. The second idea was a short rhyme about Lennon sitting amidst his garden, while the third was a nonsense lyric about sitting on a corn flake. Unable to finish the three different songs, he combined them into one. The lyrics also included the phrase "Lucy in the sky", a reference to the Beatles' earlier song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
Hush! Caution! Echoland
And, as already mentioned, the walrus refers to Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter", from the further adventures of Alice in Wonderland sequel Through the Looking-Glass. And while Lennon expressed dismay in the Playboy interview upon the realisation that the walrus in the poem turns out to be the personification of the persuasive and duplicitous capitalist villain, Re:LODE Radio considers the admittedly unintended juxtaposition of the "egg man" and "the walrus" creates a dynamic tension that adds another layer to the mystery of whatever it is that everybody can stick up their jumper. This can be explained by the notion that between archetypes and clichés there are always elements of both contrast and interaction.
The Walrus and the Carpenter . . .
The final piece of the song came together during a visit from Pete Shotton, Lennon's friend and former fellow member of the Quarrymen, when Lennon asked him about a playground nursery rhyme they sang as children. Shotton recalled the rhyme as follows:
Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, All mixed together with a dead dog's eye, Slap it on a butty, ten-foot thick, Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick.
Lennon borrowed a couple of images from the first two lines. Shotton was also responsible for suggesting that Lennon change the lyric "waiting for the man to come" to "waiting for the van to come". The Beatles' official biographer, Hunter Davies, was present while the song was being written and wrote an account in his 1968 book The Beatles. According to this biography, Lennon remarked to Shotton,
"Let the fuckers work that one out."
Pete Shotton . . .
Another "cosmic egg" connection with the song lyrics links with aspects of 1960's counter culture that Marshall McLuhan associates with "the West" embracing an alternative oriental version of . . .
. . . enlightenment!
Marshall McLuhan, who understood the world of advertising and electric communication, points out in The Medium is the Massage that "electric circuitry is orientalizing the West".
He quotes a sentence from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake:
"The West shall shake the East awake while ye have the night for morn"
As part of this 1960's counter cultural shift, and while the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in India in early 1968, George Harrison told journalist Lewis Lapham that one of the lines in "I Am the Walrus" incorporated the personal mantra he had received from their meditation teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
The Beatles in India
According to Pattie Boyd, Harrison's wife at the time, the words "semolina pilchard" refer to Sergeant Pilcher of the London Drug Squad, who waged a campaign against British rock stars and underground figures during the late 1960s.
Two minutes and twenty three seconds into the recording the first of thirteen fragments of a dramatic reading can be heard in the mix, and at subsequent moments until the very end of the track. These dramatic readings were captured from a radio performance of Shakespeare's King Lear (Act IV, Scene 6), lines 219–222 and 249–262.
These sound texture were added to the song on 29 September 1967, recorded directly from an AM radio Lennon was fiddling with. Lennon tuned around the dial and settled on the 7:30 pm to 11 pm broadcast of the play on the BBC Third Programme.
The first excerpt (ll. 219–222) moves in and out of the text, containing fragments of lines only. It begins where the disguised Edgar talks to his estranged and maliciously blinded father the Earl of Gloucester (timings given):
Gloucester: (2:35) Now, good sir, wh— (Lennon appears to change the channel away from the station here)
Edgar: (2:38) — poor man, made tame by fortune — (2:44) good pity —
In the play Edgar then kills Oswald, Goneril's steward. During the fade of the song the second main extract (ll. 249–262), this time of continuous text, is heard (timings given):
Oswald: (3:52) Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain, take my purse.
If ever thou wilt thrive, (4:02) bury my body,
And give the (4:05) letters which thou find'st about me
To (4:08) Edmund, Earl of Gloucester; (4:10) seek him out
Upon the British party. O, (4:14) untimely Death!
Edgar: (4:23) I know thee well: a (4:25) serviceable villain;
As duteous to the (4:27) vices of thy mistress
As badness would desire.
Gloucester: What, is he dead?
Edgar: (4:31) Sit you down father, rest you.
BUT! What, may you ask, has King Lear got to do with Humpty Dumpty, the walrus and the egg man?
Capturing these phrases from the radio broadcast was, and at John Lennon's instigation, an addition to the layers and textures of sound, spoken word and meaning on the recording that echoes the artistic practice of John Cage, a possible inspiration. For Re:LODE Radio this choice of material generates a set of connections, intended (unlikely) or the result of magical and mysterious synchronicity or zeitgeist. But there are connections that can be made.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
So this is how the nursery rhyme runs. The "whole" and integral egg man falls, and the force of gravity results in the shattering of this "whole" into "fragments". The servants of the state, both military and bureaucratic, are incapable of restoring this "wholeness".
The fragmentation of the integral human being?
In his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan, analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness.
In this project McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book. Apropos of his axiom, "The medium is the message," McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. He also argued that the development of the printing press led to the creation of nationalism, dualism, domination of rationalism, automatisation of scientific research, uniformation and standardisation of culture and alienation of individuals.Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He writes:the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age.Quoting Shakespeare, James Joyce and . . .
Re:LODE Radio quotes Cole Porter, while in The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan includes quotes from Shakespeare, Joyce and William Blake that are paradigmatic in establishing the essential value of McLuhan's thinking. Wikiquotes for McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy includes the following:
Literacy, in translating man out of the closed world of tribal depth and resonance, gave man an eye for an ear and ushered him into a visual open world of specialized and divided consciousness.
King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translate themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. (p. 16)
The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear. (p. 18)
The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world. (p. 21)
Re:LODE Radio adds to this "foreground" with the following references:
In the Prologue McLuhan sets out how and why Shakespeare's play King Lear is relevant to his understanding of the significance of cultural dynamics in the early 1960's:
We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experienc- ing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience. Whereas the Elizabethans were poised between medieval corporate experience and modern individualism, we reverse their pattern by confronting an electric technology which would seem to render individualism obsolete and the corporate interdependence mandatory.
Patrick Cruttwell had devoted an entire study (The Shakespearean Moment) to the artistic strategies born of the Elizabethan experience of living in a divided world that was dissolving and resolving at the same time. We, too, live at such a moment of interplay of contrasted cultures, and The Gutenberg Galaxy is intended to trace the ways in which the forms of experience and of mental outlook and expression have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by printing. The enterprise which Milman Parry undertook with reference to the contrasted forms of oral and written poetry is here extended to the forms of thought and the organization of experience in society and politics. That such a study of the divergent nature of oral and written social organization has not been carried out by historians long ago is rather hard to explain. Perhaps the reason for the omission is simply that the job could only be done when the two conflicting forms of written and oral experience were once again co-existent as they are today. Professor Harry Levin indicates as much in his preface to Professor Lord's The Singer of Tales (p. xiii) :
The term "literature," presupposing the use of letters, assumes that verbal works of imagination are transmitted by means of writing and reading. The expression "oral literature" is obviously a contradiction in terms. Yet we live at a time when literacy itself has become so diluted that it can scarcely be invoked as an esthetic criterion. The Word as spoken or sung, together with a visual image of the speaker or singer, has meanwhile been regaining its hold through electrical engineering. A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us—along with its immeasurable riches—snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions, but as an organic habit of re-creating what has been received and is handed on.
(pages 1-2 The Gutenberg Galaxy)
In the electronic age which succeeds the typographic and mechanical era of the past five hundred years, we encounter new shapes and structures of human interdependence and of expression which are "oral" in form even when the components of the situation may be non-verbal. This question is raised more fully in the concluding section of The Gutenberg Galaxy. It is not a difficult matter in itself, but it does call for some reorganization of imaginative life. Such a change of modes of awareness is always delayed by the persistence of older patterns of perception. The Elizabethans appear to our gaze as very medieval. Medieval man thought of himself as classical, just as we consider ourselves to be modern men. To our successors, however, we shall appear as utterly Renaissance in character, and quite unconscious of the major new factors which we have set in motion during the past one hundred and fifty years.
(page 3 The Gutenberg Galaxy)
There is a recent work that seems to me to release me from the onus of mere eccentricity and novelty in the present study. It is The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl R. Popper, a work devoted to the study of aspects of detribalization in the ancient world and of retribalization in the modern world. For the "open society" was effected by phonetic literacy, as will shortly appear, and is now threatened with eradication by electric media, as will be discussed in the conclusion of this study. Needless to say, the "is," rather than the "ought," of all these developments, is alone being discussed. Diagnosis and description must precede valuation and therapy. To substitute moral valuation for diagnosis is a natural and common enough procedure, but not necessarily a fruitful one.
Karl Popper devotes the first part of his large study to the detribalization of ancient Greece and the reaction to it. But neither in Greece nor in the modem world does he give any consideration to the dynamics of our tech- nologically extended senses as factors either in the opening or closing of societies. His descriptions and analyses follow an economic and political point of view. The passage below is especially relevant to The Gutenberg Galaxy because it begins with the interplay of cultures via commerce and ends with the dissolution of the tribal state, even as it is dramatized by Shakespeare in King Lear.
It is Popper's view that tribal or closed societies have a biological unity and that "our modern open societies function largely by way of abstract relations, such as exchange or co-operation." That the abstracting or opening of closed societies is the work of the phonetic alphabet, and not of any other form of writing or technology, is one theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy. On the other hand, that closed societies are the product of speech, drum, and ear technologies, brings us at the opening of the electronic age to the sealing of the entire human family into a single global tribe. And this electronic revolution is only less confusing for men of the open societies than the revolution of phonetic literacy which stripped and streamlined the old tribal or closed societies. Popper offers no analysis of the causes of such change, but he does give (p. 172) a description of the situation that is very relevant to The Gutenberg Galaxy:
By the sixth century B.C., this development had led to the partial dissolution of the old ways of life, and even to a series of political revolutions and reactions. And it had led not only to attempts to retain and to arrest tribalism by force, as in Sparta, but also to that great spiritual revolution, the invention of critical discussion, and in consequence of thought that was free from magical obsessions. At the same time we find the first symptoms of a new uneasiness. The strain of civilization was beginning to be felt.
This strain, this uneasiness, is a consequence of the breakdown of the closed society. It is still felt even in our day, especially in times of social change. It is the strain created by the effort which life in an open and partially abstract society continually demands from us—by the endeavor to be rational, to forego at least some of our emotional social needs, to look after ourselves, and to accept responsibilities. We must, I believe, bear this strain as the price to be paid for every increase in knowledge, in reasonableness, in co-operation and in mutual help, and consequently in our chances of survival, and in the size of the population. It is the price we have to pay for being human.The strain is most closely related to the problem of the tension between the classes which is raised for the first time by the breakdown of the closed society. The closed society itself does not know this problem. At least to its ruling members, slavery, caste, and class rule are 'natural' in the sense of being unquestionable. But with the breakdown of the closed society, this certainty disappears, and with it all feeling of security. The tribal community (and later the 'city') is the place of security for the member of the tribe. Surrounded by enemies and by dangerous or even hostile magical forces, he experiences the tribal community as a child experiences his family and his home, in which he plays his definite part; a part he knows well, and plays well. The breakdown of the closed society, raising as it does the problem of class and other problems of social status, must have had the same effect upon the citizens as a serious family quarrel and the breaking up of the family home is liable to have on children. Of course, this kind of strain was felt by the privileged classes, now that they were threatened, more strongly than by those who had formerly been suppressed; but even the latter felt uneasy. They also were frightened by the breakdown of their 'natural' world. And though they continued to fight their struggle, they were often reluctant to exploit their victories over their class enemies who were supported by tradition, the status quo, a higher level of education, and a feeling of natural authority.These observations lead us straight on to a consideration of King Lear and the great family quarrel in which the sixteenth century found itself involved early in the Gutenberg Era.
(pages 7-9 The Gutenberg Galaxy)
When King Lear proposes "our darker purpose" as the subdivision of his kingdom, he is expressing a politically daring and avant- garde intent for the early seventeenth century:Lear is proposing an extremely modern idea of delegation of authority from centre to margins. His "darker purpose" would have been recognized at once as left-wing Machiavellianism by an Elizabethan audience. The new patterns of power and organization which had been discussed during the preceding century were now, in the early seventeenth century, being felt at all levels of social and private life. King Lear is a presentation of the new strategy of culture and power as it affects the state, the family, and the individual psyche:
Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.Give me the map there. Know we have dividedIn three our kingdom;
The map was also a novelty in the sixteenth century, age of Mercator's projection, and was key to the new vision of peripheries of power and wealth. Columbus had been a cartographer before he was a navigator; and the discovery that it was possible to continue in a straight-line course, as if space were uniform and continuous, was a major shift in human awareness in the Renaissance. More important, the map brings forward at once a principal theme of King Lear, namely . . .
. . . the isolation of the visual sense as a kind of blindness.(page 11 The Gutenberg Galaxy)
Blindness, hubris, reversal . . .
In Marshall McLuhan's chapter in Understanding Media on Reversal of the overheated medium, he writes:
In the ancient world the intuitive awareness of break boundaries as points of reversal and of no return was embodied in the Greek idea of hubris, which Toynbee presents in his Study of History, under the head of "The Nemesis of Creativity" and "The Reversal of Roles." The Greek dramatists presented the idea of creativity as creating, also, its own kind of blindness, as in the case of Oedipus Rex, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx. It was as if the Greeks felt that the penalty for one break-through was a general sealing-off of awareness to the total field.
(pages 48-49, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan)
. . . Humpty Dumpty and King Midas . . .
This video montage includes a clip from the Max Fleischer Color Classic animation of 1936 Greedy Humpty Dumpty and a 1967 track from The Hollies: King Midas in Reverse. The story of King Midas is referenced on occasion in Marshall McLuhan's works when considering the consequences of the social and psychological impact of technology.
"What is, then, the power common to all media? It is the ability to ‘transform’ and ‘forge’ everything they come into contact with, like King Midas of Greek mythology."
(Quoted from the paper: The Philosophical Topicality of Marshall McLuhan by Carmine Di Martino, New Explorations Studies in Culture and Communication Vol 1 No 1, Spring 2020)
Break boundaries and reversal of the overheated medium
A "break boundary" according to Kenneth Boulding, and as quoted in Marshall McLuhan's chapter in Understanding Media: Reversal of the overheated medium, is the point:
"at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes."
(page 48, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan)The principle that during the stages of their development all things appear under forms opposite to those that they finally present is an ancient doctrine. Interest in the power of things to reverse themselves by evolution is evident in a great diversity of observations, sage and jocular. Alexander Pope wrote:Vice is a monster of such frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with its face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.A caterpillar gazing at the butterfly is supposed to have remarked. "Waal, you'll never catch me in one of those durn things."At another level we have seen in this century the changeover from the debunking of traditional myths and legends to their reverent study. As we begin to react in depth to the social life and problems of our global village, we become reactionaries. Involvement that goes with our instant technologies transforms the most "socially conscious" people into conservatives. When Sputnik had first gone into orbit a schoolteacher asked her second-graders to write some verse of the subject. One child wrote:The stars are so big,The earth is so small, Stay as you are.With man his knowledge and the process of obtaining knowledge are of equal magnitude. Our ability to apprehend galaxies and subatomic structures, as well, is a movement of faculties that include and transcend them. The second-grader who wrote the words above lives in a world much vaster than any which a scientist today has instruments to measure, or concepts to describe. As W B. Yeats wrote of this reversal, "The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream."Associated with this transformation of the real world into science fiction is the reversal now proceeding apace, by which the Western world is going Eastern, even as the East goes Western. Joyce encoded this reciprocal reverse in his cryptic phrase:The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for morn.The title of his Finnegans Wake is a set of multi-leveled puns on the reversal by which Western man enters his tribal, or Finn, cycle once more, following the track of the old Finn, but wide awake this time as we re-enter the tribal night. It is like our contemporary consciousness of the Unconscious.The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion. In our present electric age the imploding or contracting energies of our world now clash with the old expansionist and traditional patterns of organization. Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as "explosive," or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about the population explosion and the explosion in learning. In fact, it is not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population. Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives. In education, likewise, it is not the increase in numbers of those seeking to learn that creates the crisis. Our new concern with education follows upon the changeover to an interrelation in knowledge, where before the separate subjects of the curriculum had stood apart from each other. Departmental sovereignties have melted away as rapidly as national sovereignties under conditions of electric speed. Obsession with the older patterns of mechanical, one-way expansion from centers to margins is no longer relevant to our electric world. Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes. It is like the difference between a railway system and an electric grid system: the one requires rail-heads and big urban centers. Electric power, equally available in the farmhouse and the Executive Suite, permits any place to be a center, and does not require large aggregations. This reverse pattern appeared quite early in electrical "labor-saving" devices, whether a toaster or washing machine or vacuum cleaner. Instead of saving work, these devices permit everybody to do his own work. What the nineteenth century had delegated to servants and housemaids we now do for ourselves. This principle applies in toto in the electric age.(pages 43-46, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan)
The animation film of Greedy Humpty Dumpty has the nursery rhyme character engage in an act of hubristic greed that results in a "fall" that includes the collapse of a "Tower of Babel" like construction.
The Tower of Witless Assumption
Joyce's Finnegans Wake (like Shakespeare's King Lear) is one of the texts which McLuhan frequently uses throughout The Gutenberg Galaxy to weave together the various strands of his argument.
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
"The word "Babel" is referred to at least twenty-one times in the Wake, particularly in its very first pages, when Finnegan's fall represents, on one of its myriad levels, the fall of the Tower of Babel (the "bauble top" - FW 5.02). The resultant cacophony creates the form of the text, with its incorporation of seventy or so different languages. Joyce's aesthetics, however high-flown and elitist they may seem, thus emerge, at least in part, from his deep and extended engagement with attempts to solve the problem of Babel - attempts not confined to literature and the avant-garde but pervasive also in popular culture."
Verbivocovisuals: James Joyce and the Problem of Babel by Jesse Schotter, James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Fall 2010), p. 89) Published By: University of Tulsa
One of the most famous works in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection is the ‘The Tower of Babel’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted around 1560.
Bruegel made ‘The Tower of Babel’ around 1560 when he was approximately 35 years old. He visited Rome and took inspiration from the Colosseum for the tower’s architecture. Towards the top of the building, however, the arches take on the more pointed form found in Gothic cathedrals.The Tower of Babel was a popular theme in the 16th century, especially in Antwerp, where Bruegel worked. Antwerp was a busy harbour city, visited by ships from all over the world and numerous languages could be heard on its streets. This made the Old Testament story of the confusion of tongues all the more relevant. Bruegel painted two other versions of the ‘Tower of Babel’. One is in the Kunsthistorisch Museum in Vienna that is discussed in this video montage that begins with an ad for Guinness known as "infinity" (is that Rutger Hauer on the TV?), and using the recording of the Bond theme song "We have all the time in the World" by Louis Armstrong, showing how the image still continues to work its power in an age of reproducibility. The James Bond theme and popular song sung by Louis Armstrong was composed by John Barry with lyrics by Hal David. It is a secondary musical theme in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the title theme being the instrumental "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", also composed by Barry. The song title is taken from Bond's final words in both the novel and the film, spoken after the death of Tracy Bond, his wife. Armstrong was too ill to play his trumpet therefore it was played by another musician. Barry chose Armstrong because he felt he could "deliver the title line with irony".The song was released as a single in both the US and the UK under the title "All The Time in the World" in the UK to coincide with the release of the film in December 1969, but did not chart in either market. The recording became a hit in the UK twenty-five years later, in 1994, as a result of a Guinness beer commercial. Armstrong's version was then re-released on vinyl and CD and reached No. 3 in the UK Singles Chart.
The tower . . .
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