Among his Dogs and Playthings, Who is Stirred

A Performance of Titus Andronicus Staged by Your Genetic Material.

I had promised some thoughts on the transubstantiation qua interchangeability of inheritable qualities in a previous post. The thing about inheritance is in the physical tangible sense the conversation does not just hinge on the a priori but demonstrates on the most basic level how we understand all a priori debate. In the pejorative sense we instinctually recognize the details of deformation in the parent body manifest in the child; this recognition of the duplicated other is as fundamental as shrinking away from a punch. Whether or not the actual genetic trait is as obvious as a hunchback the introspective Quasimodo provides the perfect signifier for the collective understanding of these a priori shortcomings; i.e. the pockmarks on a mother’s face predict and explain the poor skin that isolates the daughter. As I previously mentioned, this basic recognition is the explanation for all knowledge of the preexisting. To borrow a phrase from Spinoza, we identify the chain of cause and effect that explains away the present dependent on our intrinsic physical understanding of how children look and develop into their parents.

Yet common knowledge still fails us in its inability to recognize the similarity between these (perceivably) inescapable physical traits and the (assumed) avoidable mental ones. The thought that the development of the personality is a posteriori of any genetic interference is pure ridiculousness. The development of the hunchback ego follows a surprisingly identical path to the one of the hunchback father. Outside the sheer improbability of a cultural shift in the perception of hunchbacks, the same could hold true for countless repeated generations. And, personally speaking, if the Disney film can’t make hunchbacks lovable I don’t know what could (other than key passages from Malone Dies and Finnegans Wake).

You could probably read every word of Finnegans Wake and not realize this is the protagonist.

Although I’ve gone a long way to get to a simple point, Death Mask is right when she suggests sleep-eating could be dependent on her mother, just not in the way she might have hoped. In a sense, her sleep-eating was preordained; it exists as an a priori trait similar in all aspects to her hair and eye color. And in case anyone misunderstands me as arguing for the viability of fate, I suggest you read this post again. Now, ask yourself, what is the difference between fate and inevitable universality? Anything?


Big things cracking at YHTALMM. Sometime this week we get our first guest lecture, followed by sleep-eating in classic movies (by Death Mask) and the dissembling aspect of the corporal body (By HC Earwicker).