Want to SlEeeP in my bed tonight?.
Who is Procrustes? And why does he want you to sleep in his bed? Wierd, bro, wierd. Is he indeed dead? Or perhaps alive like never before? If so, what does he want, and what are we to do?
Procrustes lived on the sacred road between Athens and Eleusis. His custom was to invite every passerby inside his house to rest for the night. You see, he was a smith and had made not any bed, but the perfect bed!
And so in his magnanimity and benevolence, he wanted everyone to try it.
There was but one problem: ... No one fitted the perfect bed…
Luckily he was a smith and could make some easy adjustments.
Many people would not have even blinked upon hearing his name: Procrustes, which means 'stretcher' or his original name, Damastes, which means 'subduer’ afterall he was a smith, stretching and subdueing the stubborn metals all day long
But they would soon find out, that metals wasn't the only material he stretched: Bone, skin, and muscle would be stretched and adjusted the entirety of the night, until they fitted Procrustes' so perfect bed -- and he -- the gods be praised -- always made it... Quite opposite the lives of his visitors…
The legend has as an undercurrent followed the stream of history, and has now crystalized in the expression: "Procrustean bed", which refers to whenever something or someone is forced to fit into some arbitrary measurement
And by profecy, I'll disclose, that this expression won't leave our culture anytime soon. The examples of a "procrustean bed" are abundant in today's bureaucratic and mechanichal world:
Of course, now, we must remember, that none of these are done in the name of some demon: of course kids need to learn to read and write, which requires certain amount of discipline, we want them to be competetive against the rest of the world, so they can find jobs they love; we want the students to know the important stuff, and we want workers to fill out forms to ensure a standard...
But these two things are exactly the problem: The standard we impose hinders the actual standard, and there is no
culprit here to blame, we want the standard in the name of security and well… high standards.
Oh yes Procrustes is still hammering, he is hammering in the depth! And we are dancing to the rhythm of his hammer: He wants to make a construction, not just for us, but the entire cosmos, and we're helping him achieve it.
Oh Procrustes, though son of Poseidon, are you the incarnation of the human, all-too-human drive? Perhaps you too became spirit, when you died?
But what is that drive? What is that spirit? Where is it coming from? It's so far... and yet?
Is is said, that language began as music: It was melodic and it was sung! Newborns process language mostly via their right brain hemisphere, as music is mostly processed via the right hemisphere: Melody, pitch, harmony, timbre, the emotional tone, and even body language and the overall context while the left hemisphere process: rhythm, and only simple rhythm, at that.
You see the left hemisphere is all about models, rules, measurements -- it's about effeciancy! And with time the melodic flow of language as our species sang, and our babies babble consolidated into precise, measured sentences, obeying the rules of grammar and morphology. And this consolidation seems not limited to language only.
Everything starts in the right hemisphere, and ends in the left hemisphere: And we know this from experience: Perhaps you've played a game, and in the beginning it was adventurous, it felt so vast, and the mechanics were mysterious, fun, and challenging -- but slowly over time, and you wouldn't be able to pinpoint when, then the adventure became a path, the vastness became but a map, and you wouldn't know whether you or the game were the more mechanical. The whole emotional tone was lost and became but a nostalgia.
The world you once journeyed through became a model that you controlled: where you knew every specific action that would produce the specific result.
"Everything begins greek and ends german", as Nietzsche would put it.
Iain Mcgilchrist explored these themes extensively in his books Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.
Two syndromes of many that he showcase to show the left hemisphere's modus operandi, way of operating, are Capgas syndrome and fregoli syndrome, that only happens after lesions to the right hemisphere, and so the person is reliant on only their left hemisphere, the hemisphere of models.
Capgas syndrome is the condition where you feel, that a familiar person has been replaced by an imposter. And Fregoli syndrome is where you think, that different people are in fact one person in disguise!
In both cases it shows how the persons are replaced by models of the person: “He's an imposter, because he doesn't fit the model”, “They are the same person, because they are all the model” -- And so the two syndromes are the inverse of each other, but both spin on the axis of the model.
The models became the real -- As procrustes bed was the real -- the measurement of perfection:
Models comprised of knowledge doesn't come from thin air, but must be build and cultivated on top of experience. But the knowledge contrieved from experience is never complete, and so aren't our models. Yet as we've seen the models tends to have a tyrranical passion of their own: soon the experience they came to model are hidden beneath the model itself, like the dragon beneath the king's lair -- the castle's cold hard rocks houses beneath it a fiery dragon! Both symbolizing the great chaos of raw experience subjugated beneath any system -- the terrifying complexity of the world we can ignore only by means of our models of conduct -- and it also symbolizes the fiery passions that lies beneath all rules, however cold and calculating the king may seem.
This is the pattern underlying our human existence: Like the wonderous, fiery passionate experience of the game now only is an ember of nostalgia beneath the monolithic structure of effectiscious models of mechanical calculated behaviour, so too is the melody of life, the timbre and tone of experience, the great almost unbelievable context of our lives, all become subjugated under the rhythm of Procrustes hammer. oh, what misery we most be witness to, what could be posible be done?
Procrustes one day, no different from any other, stood and waited for the next passerby: And behold! A traveler came! He invites him in for a nights rest, and the traveler accepts: And night came and Procrustes asks the traveler to try his bed, but then the traveler reveals himself to be Prince Theseus, Son of Aegeus -- the king of Athens. Thus he of course has heard and seen such "perfect" beds... he then makes Procrustes himself try to fit the bed: And behold, the modeler of perfection didn't fit perfection either.
The foundation of any model is never knowledge: But passion, a way of being! Axioms, the true foundation of any system or model, does in the last analysis litterally mean 'values'.
Nietzsche said something in the same vain:
"...as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.”
The root of all models is not logic and calculations, but will and value! And so every model of perfection cannot fit it's own ideal.
We too, as Theseus on his hero's journey must slay the models that kills and misforms our being and limits our expression and feeling. As we grow up, we take the patterns from our household and apply them to the world. We extract limiting beliefs from our grades in school and are given values -- axioms -- by society.
We develop cynicism and pessimism to defend ourselves, against the emotional impacts of life -- The great grey castle of pessimism, built on top of the passions of survival -- and whoever lives there for long must become numb and dumb to life: "Better life is sick than happy and healthy -- then it would hurt the more!”
"I am too old, it's too risky, I'm not talented enough, I need to be perfect before I start, people won't accept me if I change, who am I to this?" -- It's the song to Procrustes’ limited music, that dulls you to sleep in his bed.
We must re-evaluate our way of life: Where we feel most safe and secure, is perhaps where we should pay most attention, as the soft bed of Procrustes were just a lure. — There’s a reason the monster live beneath the bed.
As before we are not to blame models as such, for that belief would comprise a model: “All models are wrong, but some are useful,” George Box once said. We are to evaluate what serves us, the live ones. And for this endevour exist no models or systems: Only the passionate and attentetive hero-consciousness, that is in tune to the melody of life!
Though whole society is ensnared in models we must begin with ourselves, as a chained man is no liberator. And though we were giggling and babbling babies and became stiff, sorrow-, and sloth-ful adults we will -- perhaps not be babbling and giggling, but we will be singing and dancing to the melody of life! And as the baby followed in the tracks of culture, so must we run ahead of culture, and show culture the way of life, show it the fiery flames of passions that started culture in the first place, not to burn every model and every institution down, but to harness the flames, so that our models aids the hero once again, as Theseus too slew with his sword, traveled by roads, and sailed on the sea!
Let us part in good spirit with a quote of Nietzsche:
“I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.” -- Nietzsche