CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING (SHOOTING AT THE MOON)

"After the momentous lunch at the Corridor Restaurant, Elaine had returned to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of her numerous aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of competing emotions.   In the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of relief;  in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly influenced by pique,  she had settled the problem which hours of hard thinking and serious heart-searching had brought no nearer to solution, and although she felt just a little inclined to be scared at the head-long manner of her final decision, she had now very little doubt in her own mind that the decision had been the right one."

Yesterday (again) I remembered and considered, eyes fixed on the pavement, mind in the mud, "consciousness raising" and its ur-thorniness. 

Time's arrow, bull's-eye, getaway, takeaway, the whole damn thing.  

 Kevin Ayers: Shooting At The Moon (Link)

Text:  Saki, The Unbearable Bassington (1912)

SPACE II ("A SOLID LUMP OF THE INEXPLICABLE")

He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an empty homogeneous medium.



“Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are.  We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all.  That is the view of civilized man.  You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted.  Yes, but every living thing does not take that view.  An animal, for instance.  It feels a kind of quality in Space.  It can find its way over new country, because it perceives certain landmarks, not necessarily material, but perceptible, or if you like intelligible.  Take an Australian savage.  He has the same power, and I believe, for the same reason.  He is conscious of intelligible landmarks.”


 

“You mean what people call a sense of direction,” I put in.


“Yes, but what in Heaven’s name is a sense of direction?  The phrase explains nothing.  However incoherent the mind of the animal or the savage may be, it is there somewhere, working on some data.  I’ve been all through the psychological and anthropological side of the business, and after you eliminate clues from sight and hearing and smell and half-conscious memory there remains a solid lump of the inexplicable.”

From:  John Buchan, "Space" (1912)

Dr. Feelgood: Don't You Just Know It (1976) (Link)