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"Thinking Became a Garden of Its Own" -- The Five
I have long been intrigued with Gregory Bateson, a seminal influence in the fields of
anthropology, social science, and communication (cybernetics). Steps to an Ecology
of Mind was my first introduction to the idea of second-order change ("a capacity to
process and respond to information in self-corrective ways"). Imagine my
intellectual thrill to discover Bateson's poem, The
Manuscript. It brilliantly appropriates the Five's thought patterns and
language:
So there it is in words
Precise
And if you read between the lines
You will find nothing there
For that is the discipline I ask
Not more, not less...
Not the world as it is
Nor ought to be -
Only the precision
The skeleton of truth
I do not dabble in emotion...
Not that Fives lack emotion. They can be
passionate in debate. Typically, though, they seek distance in their relationships
(easier to feel secure while preparing a manuscript). Certainly the most waggishly
comical depiction of this need for personal space confronts us in W.H. Auden's I Have No Gun But I Can Spit (the "thirty
inches" taken quite literally from social science studies):
Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes...
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.
Carolyn Creedon cries out in Litany how her lover's response is conditional upon his being able to
keep her at slightly less than arm's length (perhaps he needs only elbow room):
...Tom, when we are in line at the
convenience store can I put my hands in your
backpockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook
of your shoulder blade?
no, but later you can lay against me and almost touch me and when i go i will
leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed
up against the thought of me...
Tom is both drawn to and afraid of physical affection and
spontaneity. He relates to her as best he can when he's with her ("...later you
can lay against me and almost touch me..."). After he moves away they
correspond. She begs, "...Will you come back from / Richmond and baptise me
with sex and water?"
...i will come back from
Richmond. i will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the
back of your wet neck and then i will lick the salt off it. then i will leave.
When she asks, "Tom, Richmond is so
far away. How will I know you love me?" his reply reflects the unhealthy Five's
fear of intimacy:
i have left you. that is how you will know.
Karl Shapiro offers a brilliant metaphor for the pleasures
of the mind in The Sickness of Adam (From
"Adam and Eve"):
...He began to walk
Slowly, like one accustomed to be alone.
He found himself lost in the field of talk;
Thinking became a garden of its own...
But Fives long for the intimacy their
habitual patterns keep at bay, even in Eden:
Adam fell down with labor in his bones,
And God approached him in the cool of the day
And said, "This sickness in your skeleton
Is longing. I will remove it from your clay..."
...He wet his right hand deep in Adam's side
And drew the graceful rib out of his breast.
Far off, the latent streams began to flow...
Developing Fives draw closer to others,
though they must get past their caution. Shapiro takes us further into Adam's
longing and fear in The Recognition of Eve
(From "Adam and Eve"):
...he crawled over and looked into her eyes,
The human wells that pool all absolutes,
It was like looking into double skies.
And when she spoke the first word (it was
thou)
He was terror-stricken, but she raised her hand
And touched his wound where it was fading now,
For he must feel the place to understand...
Adam could see her wandering through the
wood,
Studying her footsteps as her body wove
In light and out of light. She found a pool
And there he followed shyly to observe.
She was already turning beautiful.
Fives can expand, step out of their narrow
confines, give themselves and others the gift of connecting with their intrinsic
nature. Naomi Replansky's luminous poem, Housing
Shortage, unfolds the internal experience of this transformational shift:
I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides...
Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help
it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds...
...since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.
