Page 66 - Effable Encounters

Lost and Found

well as on perception and behavior. That phenomenon is well
documented, of course, and we do provide footnotes and an
appendix listing much of the accepted research supporting it. This is
not to say that the work done by a writer or composer or painter
during the productive decades between those two steep curves is
totally uninspired. Our point is that the activity of the unconscious is
mediated or constrained in ways that are not as powerfully manifest
at either end of the curve.”
“Did that cockatoo pay / For that kaka toupee?”
“Eh!”
“Oh, don’t mind Ransom: he is irrepressible. And please don’t take
it personally. I can only hope he won’t repeat on national TV some
of his epigrams about me! But that is a perfect example of what
happens in the third phase of life: the mental matrix of apprehension
and representation, of psychological analysis and catalysis, reverts in
many cases to its original condition. In essence, ‘losing it’. In some
people, notably those without an active mental life, this appears as
one or another form of dementia, marked by physiological
dysfunction.”
“I think most of our viewers can relate to that, Demi. We’ve all
witnessed the disoriented actions and utterances of elderly people. It
is a sad thing to observe, not at all like the toddler’s scrawl and
babble.”
“Yes, it is sad, Percy, and Ransom believes that difference in
emotional response has obscured the similarities between the two
states: dementia mirrors ementia. The same qualities obtain:
spontaneity, amorality, disruption of accepted causality and self-
control. Shakespeare recognized this symmetry in his ‘seven ages of
man’:

Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, /
Is second childishness and mere oblivion, \ Sans teeth, sans
eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

“And if I read your book correctly, Demi, Ransom King saw this
coming in himself; did not deny it, did not fight it, but rather
accepted it early on and tried to make something of it. Thus this
apparently final work, Lost and Found.”

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