Lost in the Cosmos

the sign and its renewal through the “defamiliarization” of art is the Russian formalist, Victor Schklovsky.
    * Does ontogenesis shed any light here?
    The two-year-old comes bursting into the world of signs like a child on Christmas morning. There are goodies everywhere. For him, signifying the signified is like unwrapping a gift.
    What about a four-year-old? By now he should be a sovereign and native resident of his world, concelebrant with his family, at home in Eden. Listen to Gesell and his colleagues describe him: “The typical 4-year-old . .. tends to be rather a joy. His enthusiasm, his exuberance, his willingness to go more than halfway to meet others in a spirit of fun are all extremely refreshing ... He is basically highly positive, enthusiastic, appreciative. This makes him fun to be with, an engaging, amusing, ever-challenging friend. You have to be on your toes to keep up with spirited, fanciful FOUR, but at least you have an even chance of success ... With other children, things as a rule go rather well. FOURS enjoy each other; they appreciate the challenge that other children offer. This is an age at which children interest and admire each other most...” [Louise Bates Ames et al., The Gesell Institute’s Child from One to Six (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).]
    The four-year-old is a concelebrant of the world and even of his own peers.
    The seven-year-old? Something has happened in the interval.
    “More aware of and withdrawn into self... Seems to be in ‘another world'... Self-conscious about own body. Sensitive about exposing body. Does not like to be touched. Modest about toileting … Protects self by withdrawal. May be unwilling to expose knowledge, for fear of being laughed at or criticized . .. Apt to expect too much of self.” [Arnold Gesell and Frances ilg. The Child from Five to Ten (New York: Harper and Row, 1946).]
    * Here might be listed all the “existentialia” of Heidegger, the inauthentic ways in which the Dasein, or self, inserts itself into its world, e.g., Gerede, talk, gossip; Neugíer, curiosity.

(13) The Transcending Self:
    How the Self Characteristically Places itself vis-à-vis the World, particularly through modes of Transcendence and Immanence

    SCENE: A CORN DANCE at the Taos Indian pueblo in the 1940s. There has been a long dry spell. The dancers invoke the kachinas (god-ancestors) of the West who will come at the winter solstice and leave at the summer solstice. The dancers supplicate the kachinas by a monotonous and rhythmic pounding of bare feet on the hard-packed earth.
    It is not a notable festival. There is not much masking or face and body-painting, nor any sign of the flamboyant buffalo and deer totemism of the hunting dances. The costumes are dark, drab kilts. The dance itself is perfunctory, more light-footed and syncopated than most Pueblo dances.
    But it is a magical place.
    Over there is the squat adobe church of San Francisco de Ranchos de Taos. But here in the vast open plaza there is also the sense of the mysteries conducted within the old Great Kiva, of which hardly a trace remains.
    The setting sun is already reddening the upper slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not far away, nestled in the pines of the same Blood-of-Christ Mountains is a small shrine commemorating D. H. Lawrence, with a monstrance purporting to contain his ashes. Atop the shrine is a queer-looking epicene eagle with breasts: Lawrence as Phoenix rising from the ashes.
    All manner of artists and writers, mystics, dropouts, and peyote-poppers live in the foothills. But a little farther north, at Los Alamos, an elite group of scientists is conducting an experiment which will fatefully alter the entire course of human history.
    It is as if all the forces of the Cosmos had intersected here. The old cosmological gods remained even after the new God came. The new God remains after the transcending spirit of science and art has come. Even the old Brahman self-god of the East has lately arrived.
    It is a haunted place, haunted by old gods and now by new people possessed by spirits all their own. Jungians from all over are drawn here as irresistibly as flies to pheromones, knowing that they can find in this enchanted sky-country the very incarnations of their archetypes and demons.
    C AST OF C HARACTERS: Among those present at the Corn Dance are a nuclear physicist, his assistant, an old Pueblo Indian dancer, a young Pueblo Indian dancer, an English novelist, a divorcée, a