I have read it many times, and I have thought about it a lot even in between readings. It is one of my favorite pieces of philosophy, and also one of the most difficult to grasp, but that is exactly why it is important, especially in the context of ethnographic research. We all have expectations about the way things are, or the way things should be. How many times have you written an essay with silly homonym errors, or easy punctuation errors in it, and missed them when you revise? I don’t know, but that is just because I lost track of how much I have written a long time ago, and I bet that there are some in this text as well. I would say that I have never caught all of my obvious errors on a first revision during the “door closed” part of the writing process. How does this equate to “Loss of the Creature?”

Well, your brain has an auto-correct function much like your word processing program does. The problem with that is that your brain does not highlight mistakes when you are reading somethingg that you wrote, it just corrects them in the space between your eye and your mind, so that you do not see them at all. I write pretty well, but when I give an essay of mine to my friend Gary Buckingham to go over, he inevitably finds numerous small errors, and sometimes big ones–yet I do not give them to him to look at before I edit, I have already done all I can do with the door shut. I would suggest that Percy’s essay points to the way this factor of human intelligence plays out in the real world. Where what we “know” corrupts what we see, feel taste, smell. Our brains auto correct function tries to square new experiences with old ones, our vocabulary (maybye “discourse lens” is a more exact term here) influences the way we see things, feel things, and do things. Our expectations of people and places formed by our living and relating to people over the course of our lives, our ethnocentristic worldview, predisposes each one of us to see things in a unique way.

Most of the time, in our day to day lives, the particular way we each see the world is close enough to that of those around us that we don’t even notice it at all. However, when you encounter something unexpected–whether it be violence, or a stunning sunset, or the most beautiful member of the opposite sex you’ve ever seen, or a radically disconcerting philosophy, your auto-correct shuts down in confusion because the experience is so new and different that it breaks the pattern of your previous experience of “life, the universe, and everything,” and leaves you with “the Creature” in all its beauty or horribleness, and no way to fathom just what it is or what it means in the context you find it in. Percy is telling us that we each have a “moral” responsibility to see everything in that way, yet none of us can hope to ever do that completely, which is why ethnographers spend so much time talking about themselves and their perspectives instead of just getting down to their observations and conclusions about a particular social interaction.

The ethnographer, if she wants to be any good at ethnography, has to participate in the dance that occurs by the fire, or the exercise in understanding idiom, from the perspective of the sub-culture or culture that he is observing, and not from the point of view that she normally inhabits, therefore, an awareness of ones particular perspective becomes essential to the work.

Here is a comment that I posted in reply to Joel earlier:

I would suggest that we all inevitably package our experiences in little mental cubbyholes, and that when we thereafter encounter something similar we tend to put in the same cubbyhole with that previous experience similar to it, and so when we think about different experiences, we tend to think of them in a patterned way. That way of thinking represses fully realizing the implications of new experiences, and restricts creativity. In any interaction with other people we have inevitably gone through something similar with someone else, and when observing other people we inevitably compare those observations to our own experiences interacting with other people. Therefore, we categorize our experiences and observations before we have even really experienced them or thought about them. Percy’s example of the ways that one might be able to strip of the categorization, “the experience package,” associated with an experience were three. One can just be mentally strong and flexible enough to resist categories (which I actually think is a false statement because categorization is how human minds work, and is what allows us to compile information, create tools based on that information be they symbols or hammers, and conquer the world), the second example is a bomb going off in the biology class that leaves the student on the floor with the dogfish right in front of his eyes(which is equivalent to the random encounter of the young man finding a dead one on the beach and deciding to explore its guts, example he used to introduce the fish to the essay at least in my mind), or the being apprenticed to a great man thing (good luck with that, truly graet thinkers are thin on the ground). So, we are left with the problem of figuring out how to remove our experiences from the packaging they come in. As Ned pointed out, drugs can work, but that is a very dangeroous course, and can complicate things worse than you want or just kill you.

The way I favor is reading as much as much stuff from as many different genres and disciplines as you can, and then consciencely trying to look at your day to day life through as many different mental filters as you can. Fasting and meditation also works, but I have never been good at the meditation part, and so does extreme sports, or fighting in the street, but those are dangerous also, I’m getting too old, and jail sucks.

The major point he is making I think is that you need to experience stuff like it is, not like it is supposed to be, and that follows from the idea that you should go into an ethnography without any expectations of what you will discover. There might be certain questions you ask, but don’t be thingking about the questions as you observe, just watch and experience the dynamics as they are, and most particularly do not try to judge any action until you can see how it fits into a particular environment. People like to judge things and categorize things–it gives us the illusion that we have some control over a situation–we are most comfortable when we know where we belong, and where everything around us belongs, but that is the perspective of ethnocentrism, and little can be learned if you are comfortable in your environment. The trick is to look at everything, every gesture, wink, word, move towards another, move away from another, sunset, dawn, car, plane, or knife as if you had never seen such a thing before. It is an impossible challenge, but with discipline and effort it is possible to take at least most things out of their packages and see them for the wonders that they are.

And here is an excerpt from a paper I wrote awhile ago in which I referenced this article:

 Unfortunately and conversely, some of the best “genre” or “popular” fiction suffers the same fate because it is not well promoted and so does not come to the attention of a sufficient number of either academic or popular audiences. For instance, Daniel Keys Moran’s Tales of the Continuing Time, is a beautifully written and philosophically deep series of books set mostly in a near future but with links to the far past and other galaxies that explores human technology, biology, parapsychology, politics and morality in an interesting way, yet I believe that they are all out of print—except perhaps The Last Dancer. And at the same time, a book like The Da Vinchi Code, becomes a huge success. I don’t get it, Dan Brown’s book has an interesting premise, and is well plotted, but his characters are cardboard cutouts and he could not write his way out of a paper bag—but he is rich and Moran lost in the translation from thought to reality. 

So, back to the task at hand, which is to discuss fantasy and experience in a literary framework. Whoops, lost my literary framework somewhere. No, actually my literary framework is life, the universe and everything, if you don’t mind my stealing a phrase from Douglass Adams. I do not see literature as a separate discipline because it is integral to my understanding of life. The written word has taught me more than any actual, physical interactions I have ever had with other people, and all the interactions I have had with other humans have been constructed out of language—even the times I have been in violent confrontations, even my job as airborne infantry soldier for the U.S. Army many years ago. They asked, “What is the spirit of the Bayonet?”

 We answered, “To Kill!”

I never had to, but I would have, and not given it a thought until much later, I was bespelled by the language. Even the day to day requirements of life—cooking, cleaning, defecating, and loving are all defined by our relationship with others and hence with language. That pretty much means that everything that a human being experiences in life is ambiguous and contingent, a metaphor with no correspondence to the original thing. Except that Nietzsche overstated the case—our metaphors are the only way we can approach correspondence with the original thing, and often they are close enough that we can manipulate the physical properties of such a thing to our benefit, which is why science works. Magic works because of language, because language filters through and shapes experience into images constructed out of itself.

Language is magic, it creates the world in our minds. Magic is a fantasy. Life is constructed out of language, therefore life is fantasy.

Now I am reminded of Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” wherein he discusses the “packaging of experience” that occurs in an academic setting, and on “packaged vacations” like cruises, or bus trips to the Grand Canyon. He states that a young man walking down the beach and finding a dead dogfish in the surf who then decides to cut into it with his pocketknife and becomes fascinated with its inner workings is in a much different relationship to the dogfish than is a young man who walks into a biology classroom and finds that today he is going to dissect a dogfish and learn the proper referents for all of its parts. The student in the classroom has a packaged experience, and it is properly sterilized, organized, and categorized by the language of the institution. However, the boy on the beach is experiencing the thing in itself, and any categorizing he does will of necessity be on his own terms, and there is no need for him to do so, the dogfish is just another interesting thing that he has come across and wants to know more about, while to the student in the biology class, the dogfish is a “specimen” of “a species,” which he is required to know about to achieve the goal of passing the class. In this way, the dogfish loses any meaning in and of itself and becomes meaningful only as a part of the process of becoming educated.

I am not trying to say that education is a bad thing, I enjoy school, and feel that it is important for more people to become educated so that they will be better able to function in an increasingly complex and data intensive world. However, that is not to say that an educated understanding of a thing is the best way, nor the only way—Percy says that there are three ways for the biology student to actually experience the dogfish as itself. One, he can be mentally strong enough to simply “wrest control of it from the educators and the educational package.” Or he can recover it “by ordeal” for instance if a bomb went off in the room and the student found themselves laying on the floor in the aftermath with the dogfish right in front of their face, and suddenly it is clearly not a “specimen” but a real thing, and thirdly he says that it is possible for the student can get lucky and be taken as apprentice by a “great man,” or a “genuine research man” who appreciates the thing for itself and is able to impart that feeling to others (Mind Readings, 130). Percy’s point in this essay is that the categorization of experience lessens it, mutes its impact, and that by assigning a label to a thing one is attempting to control it, and, while that is a very human desire, the attempt to control experience makes it less valid, deprives it of a certain elemental force, and makes it easier to ignore (Dyer 2009).

 I think that these all say similar things in different ways, and all of them result from the study of Percy’s essay in the relation to other things I have experienced, and to any small ability I might have acquired over the years in taking experiences out of those packages that I have found them in. Furthermore, I would claim that even though we can never take our lives completely out of their packaging, it is worth the effort required to know that we are packaging them, or receiving them in packages, and that we need to get rid of the wrapping before we can fully appreciate their significance, or discover the hidden manipulations implicit in their packaging.