First Impressions, Second Thoughts

Is the first impression everything? How much does a photograph (of yourself, say) reveal and do the particular features suggest a pattern that one finds agreeable or disagreeable, that one instantaneously 'recognizes' (our obsession for routine, our compulsion to repeat is nothing, perhaps, but an attempt to reproduce this first impression)? As Jonah says, at a job interview they either like your face or they don't, you either 'fit' or you don't. Maybe, as in art or caricature, we depend on this ability to pick up certain vibes, to bundle information together. We intuit unity. Perhaps this is no more than a remnant of our survival instincts:http://www.imprint.co.uk/rama/(second lecture)

Thin slicing: our ability to derive the quintessential from a restricted amount of information and from a limited experience, to condense a series of fleeting impressions, distill things down to a few significant traits and tell-tale signs: body-language, speed dating, logos and brands, gut feelings, the bottom line, instinct, love at first sight...

Here's an interesting read that explains, perhaps, why someone like Bush could (miraculously) get elected:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17954

On Radio 4 this morning:
Recent MRI research shows that once people have formed their views they very rarely change them...most of the time they justify them or make sense of them by viewing them in a new light: black or white, us or them. Snap judgements that we just know are right. Blink.

A survey conducted by Border's shows that which books we read says something about attractiveness: men reading fiction -especially Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice- indicates an 'imaginative' side; women reading chick lit: desperados; men reading sci-fi: adolescent.

(surveys, science, evolution...is this the same black sun?How unlike you, how unexpected.)

Is there a continuum in the type of thinking represented by a conservative, a fundamentalist and a fanatic? Might it not be that a certain type of profession or a particular line of academic interest is drawn to one style of 'reasoning' rather than the other? For example, it is well known that some philosophers have edged towards a reckless mind, inclined to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. And one can very well imagine accountants , engineers, and economists-who are little more than glorified engineers anyway-being attracted to the first two modes of thought whilst it is less easy to envisage those from the arts or the scientific community having much sympathy with such a rigid outlook. (I've always wondered why so many accountants and computer science people are drawn to the Tablighis)

In a very real sense their temperament is fundamentally at odds with a mind-set that pictures things in terms of narrow binaries. Their thinking exhibits the full range of colours, as it were, dancing lightly through contradictions and anomalies without any great concern. Always open to re-vision and second thoughts, he is disdainful of any final settling of accounts. Like a fox that knows many things-even if superficially- he is a thinker of the late style: a dilettante willing to revisit and disrupt established truths and conventional wisdom. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a specialist who has sacrificed 'imagination' and worldly cunningness to the gods of rigour and truthfulness.

One of the first motivations for 'analysis' is the conviction that there is a problem-a problem that can be broken down into its constituent parts and then abstracted as stylized facts. It is only a small step from this to hold that all problems require technical solutions (It is no-co-incidence that Nazism would be thought of as an 'engineering of souls'). One wonders to what extent radical thinking is the by-product of the combination of 'analysis' and the Utopian striving for perfection. Not to understand the world, but to change it. (I'm reminded of how the 'revolutionary class' was not the "backward" peasants but the proletariat; how the Communists were in love with the machine and technology. Calasso, here.)

Metaphorical thinking, on the other hand, is always tentative even as it forges links between disparate 'objects'. Here, there is no question of perfection or imperfection: only connect! Whilst abstract thinking requires the move to generalisations, poetical thinking can hardly do without particularities. But even to state it in such terms is to set up a false dichotomy. We need to think and feel the stars.

Of course, rational thought is often sober, clear, calm and thankfully distant from its object and poets have been known to side with the forces of fascism; the allure of the mythical and the irrational or 'oceanic feelings' can and have led to untold barbarism. The sleep of reason brings forth nightmares. Herein lies the essential confusion. Is it an excess of reason or the lack of it that leads to madness? Was Nazism the embodiment of the hypertrophy of the mind and a love for lines of clear distinction, 'mechanism' and efficiency or was it the reflection of a tendency of the mind that wants to sink back into chaos and anarchy, primitive and tribal thinking...magical thinking?

Notes from Daniel Barenboim's Reith Lecture:

Improvisation: the first reaction is learned, as is the second. We move from one to two and therefore to the possibility of infinity. We get to the n th reaction and then it inheres in us, takes shape. Then and only then can we improvise. We achieve a conscious naivete, on the spur of the moment. What from the outside looks like pure creativity is, in reality, a deep internalisation of rules, techniques, standards, rituals, and experience. It is not pre-meditated but nor is it a creatio ex nihilo.

The Allama would say that finite thought and intuition are organically related.The spark that bursts into flames does so only after years of patience and sober reflection and then does the bewildered heart have any direction? What use, then, of 'first' or 'second'? Then, in such a moment, there is no Lahori soul, no west or east. There is only love and who is to say where that will take us, to what it will incline us to?

What remains true is the essential human quality of taking a step back from our first impressions (Sen: meta-preferences). That we, mercifully, have masks and can imagine other worlds. The whole world is a metaphor. That, astoundingly, there are second chances, second spaces. (Even libertarians and neo-liberals can regain their humanity).

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from, say, the sea, a purity of space.
---Er...W. Bronk