Page 30 - The Irony Board
P. 30
Into the Mind
The drive to
Abstraction
Is paved with
Concrete blocks.
Efforts to change oneself begin in the mind. Two methods are
commonly employed, alone or in concert: acquiring wisdom and
altering behavior. The final works in this section deal with those
subjective and objective pursuits of self-development from the point
of view of the individual; other aspects are discussed later.
The present poem is a proverbial pastiche indicating one
problem encountered on the path to wisdom. Since that saying is an
ironical one (“the road to hell is paved with good intentions”), and
“drive” is a pun, Gluckman is suggesting that the search for ultimate
truth is something less than holy; in fact, he suspects the quest to be
a sublimation of the will to power. Thus, a hint of Faust and a whiff
of brimstone underlies the image.
“Blocks” may be read three ways. Taken literally, it means that
one arrives at abstractions by means of mental operations performed
upon real objects; the concrete blocks are paving stones over which
one drives toward the goal. However, those stepping-stones may
also be stumbling blocks, since their nature is opposite to that of the
goal; the drive is still a path, but not smoothly paved. The final
interpretation is totally psychological, returning to the irony of the
original proverb: the emotional drive to gain conceptual power is
continually frustrated by non-conceptual obstacles, themselves
devilishly emotional in character. On this level, the first two lines
resonate with a figure of speech for the process of mental overload,
to be “driven to distraction.”
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