The Literary Mind.pdf

114 THE LITERARY MIND
Certainly there is considerable evidence that blending is a mainstay of early childhood
thought.
A two-year-old child who is leading a balloon around on a string may say,
pointing to the balloon, "This is my imagination dog." When asked how tall it
is, she says, "This high," holding her hand slightly higher than the top of the
balloon. "These," she says, pointing at two spots just above the balloon, "are its
ears." This is a complicated blend of attributes shared by a dog on a leash and a
balloon on a string. It is dynamic, temporary, constructed for local purposes,
formed on the basis of image schemas, and extraordinarily impressive. It is also
just what two-year-old children do all day long. True, we relegate it to the realm
of fantasy because it is an impossible blended space, but such spaces seem to be
indispensable to thought generally and to be sites of the construction of meanings
that bear on what we take to be reality.
A scientific model of thought frequently tries to begin with what is basic,
on the claim that scientists must do first things first and second things second
and exotic things sometime next century. This theoretical vehicle for getting an
explanation of mind off the ground has crashed and burned often. It is not
implausible that the concepts behind such models are wrong, that something
like imaginative blending and integration are basic, and that an explanation that
cannot handle "This is my imagination dog" has no hope of ever getting to even
the most basic perceptions and meanings, like the perception of a dog or the meaning
of "A dog has four legs," or even what is involved in an infant's pointing at a
dog and saying "Doggie!"
In the hard sciences, which attract so much emulation and envy, unusual
events are not dismissed as peripheral. On the contrary, unusual events often
command the most attention, on the principle that they are the most likely to
reveal general processes. The usual case can be accounted for as the result of
general processes working in minimal particular conditions. A scientific experiment
that tests for fundamental mechanisms is often elaborate and weird, something
not likely to occur on its own (particle accelerators, odd refractions of light
involving specially engineered mirrors, chemical reactions in zero gravity, and
so on). Physicists who noticed that the orbit of Mercury did not quite follow
Newtonian theory did not ignore it as an exotic event. On the contrary, it became
the central event, calling for new theories and extraordinary new experiments.
One of these experiments, for example, involved waiting for a total eclipse of the
sun, in order to measure the positions of stars around the outer edge of the eclipse,
so as to compare these measurements with theoretically predicted positions, to
see whether the light from the stars was being bent by the mass of the sun. A
more unusual, exotic, and "marginal" astrophysical event can hardly be imagined,
but such events often constitute the touchstones of the hard sciences. Physi-