allegory

["samba -" <sambacomet@hotmail.com>]

Allegory

 

By Gregory Bateson
 

There was once a beautiful lady, whose habit it was to sleep on disused 
railroad tracks.

In that same country there lived also a brutal surveyor who ran the trains 
up and down the tracks. He was at heart an explorer and therefore was 
particularly attracted by those branches of the railroad system where no 
trains had passed within living memory. These were precisely those tracks 
where the lady delighted to slumber.

So it happened over and over again that she would be disturbed in her 
sleep 
and compelled to retreat hastily while a powerful and smelly engine dashed 
over the very place she had been happily resting.

Every time this happened there was a falling out between the lady and the 
gentleman. He maintained that she was an old-fashioned, trivial, and 
superstitious thing. She, in return, would spit out insults in a quite 
unladylike manner saying that he was indeed a thing, subhuman, and nothing 
but a small boy interested only in silly noisy toys.

And so it went on. For about two thousand years she would always be 
finding 
new and unexplored parts of the railroad system upon which to sleep and he 
always choosing those very branches of the tracks for the exercise of his 
monstrous vehicles.

He asserted that it was his right - and even duty - to map the railroad 
system and that the whole system was entirely his - especially the 
unexplored parts of it. He argued that the system was a single, entirely 
logical-causal network of tracks.

She averred that the tracks were designed for the rest and peace of the 
human soul and cared nothing for his dreams of causality and logic.

He mapped every detail of the tracks along which he ran his engines. She 
continually found other parts of the system not yet mapped.

One day the engineer carelessly left one of his maps beside the track and 
the lady found it. Gingerly, holding it only with the tips of her fingers, 
she picked it up. She handled it as if it had been left there by the devil.

It was curiosity that led her to open the map, unwilling to see what it 
might contain and therefore not really looking at its details. Looking at 
this from a distance through half-shut eyes, she was surprised to find 
that 
thus half-seen, the document was in itself beautiful.

At the next confrontation between herself and the engineer she said 
without 
thinking, ‘And you don’t even know that your own maps are beautiful.’

At this the surveyor was amazed. He gruffly replied that he was not 
interested in that.

She said to herself ‘Ah, then there is something in the universe in which 
he 
is not interested. That something belongs to me.’

‘For ever,’ she said.

After they parted, each considered what had been said. The surveyor was 
forced to agree that indeed the beauty of his maps and correspondingly the 
beauty of the railroad tracks were not within his province. She, on the 
other hand, was delighted and hugged to herself the secret knowledge that 
he 
would never invade what she most valued - the elegance and symmetry of the 
total system. Not its details but its foundations.

At their next meeting he asked whether she was still interested in the 
so-called beauty of the maps. When she rather defensively replied in the 
affirmative, he said in an offhand manner that he had perhaps something to 
show her.

He then confessed that while she slept upon the railroad tracks he had 
come 
quietly and had made a careful drawing of her body. It was this drawing 
that 
he wanted to show her.

He unfolded and placed side by side before her his map of the railroad 
tracks and his drawing. He said it was ‘scientifically interesting’ that 
the 
map and the drawing appeared to resemble each other in many ‘formal’ 
characteristics. He specially wanted her to see this strange resemblance 
between the two documents.

She briefly dismissed the matter. She said she had always known that. But, 
saying this, she looked away and smiled.