Coyote Anthropology

4. The Book of Symmetries

4 | the book of symmetries Who would believe there’s a pot of gold at the end of a RAINBOW ? Which end? Is it like a mirror, that uses the possibility of an inside to distract that of an outside, and vice-versa? Surely there must be something there, but where, exactly, is ‘there?’ It was with thoughts like these that Coyote pursued his course, or maybe it was the other way around. “Not a RAINBOW in sight. Gotta keep lookin’”; and he went on and on. Now who was it said that thing about “the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and with the wrong enemy?” Coyote had a certain dyslexia about everything—his thoughts and movements as well as meteorological phenomena—and he lost his footing and fell into what is known in those parts as an OXBOW LAKE. He couldn’t tell one BOW from another, and besides, it was dark down there and hard to see. Finally Coyote did make out something. “And who might you be?” “I’m the kind of gal you meet when you go looking for RAINBOWS and then fall into an OXBOW LAKE.” “Oh, there is so much I need to learn from you. For instance, what exactly is a pot of gold, and which comes first, the right or the left?” “Look, Mister, I’d be glad to tell you anything, if you will just kindly let me know WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO MY SHEEP.” Roy: “It is not what you say, but how you say it that counts—the voice, the character, the precise underdetermination of your words.” Coyote: “I beg to differ. It is what you really say that counts most—the overdetermination of fact behind the pictures we make of it.” Roy: “You’re both wrong. The underdetermination of overdetermination , or vice-versa, is merely a battle of rhetorics—the politics of representation. The best we can hope for is to bring these two into SYMMETRY or equilibrium with one another; the balanced fact, the balanced line.” Coyote: “The cause of the effect meets the effect of the cause; and at that point of suspension—what Don Juan calls ‘stopping the world’—the humorous and the serious meet and merge with one another. You know, Roy, you human beings are the craziest critters in the world. You honestly believe you can detach yourselves from that SYMMETRY and still have your way.” Roy: “I wouldn’t talk, Coyote.” Coyote: “We come to a point where the difference between organic and inorganic SYMMETRIES disappears—the vanishing point between what the old anthropologists used to call ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ All ‘cultures’ merge with one another—as you say, holographically —and so, in fact, do all ‘natures.’” Roy: “The anthropologist wants to be the figure as well as the ground. And so, in fact, the figure-ground reversal itself honestly believes it is an anthropologist.” Coyote: “Though it is really the interference-patterning between the two that counts most: the way in which any two polarities interfere with one another.” SYMMETRIES Roy: “We have studied biology as though it were evolution, and evolution as though it were biology. The one thing that matters most in determining the environment is the species that has created that environment through a process of mutual adaptation.” Coyote: “Add together all the species in that environment, in their communicative relations with one another, and you will have said something. They are not species at all, but multivalent us158 The Book of Symmetries ages, part of the SPECTRUM of life-empowerment. They are SYMMETRIES that the sonnet captures in epigrammatic form.” Roy: “None of the so-called ‘natural laws’ can exist in isolated form, alone and by itself. In every instance where gravity (which the Germans call Schwierigkeit and the New Irelanders call ‘female fight’) has been used or observed, it contains a fractional coefficient of angular momentum (anti-gravitic velocity), just as angular momentum is nonexistent without the presence of gravity . Neither of these forces would matter in the slightest but for the electromagnetic SPECTRUM, the emissions of which are solely responsible for everything we know about natural forces or laws.” Coyote: “But without the presence of mind, the sentience determined upon the tuning fork-like resonance of the interference patterning between cause and effect, all the so-called ‘forces’ in the universe would go for nothing. Even gods...