Content uploaded by John Bigelow
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by John Bigelow on Jan 27, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
The Song of the Grasshopper
Μουσάων ‘Eλικωνιάδων άρχωμεθ’ άεισ …
Theogony, Hesiod (ca 730 BCE)
Translation: From the Muses of Helikon let us commence our singing …
… I would rather spinooze you one from the grimm gests of Jacko and Esaup,
fable one, feeble too. Let us here consider the casus, my dear little cousis
(husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacosaghcusaghhobixhato
uxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract) of the Ondt and the Gracehoper.
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (1939) Chapter 3. Section 1.
Attempted translation: … I would rather amuse you by spinning a feeble fable from
Grimm’s or Aesop’s jests about Jacob and Esau. Let us here consider the case and
befalling, my dear little cousin and sister, [*] of the legendary Ant and the
Grasshopper who hoped for grace.
*[The string of 100 letters both imitates the sound of a grasshopper and resembles
another 100-letter-string, in the opening pages of Finnegans Wake, which represents
the Biblical ‘Fall from Grace’.]
My father was a Darwinian entomologist and he studied crickets in North America and
grasshoppers in New Zealand. When I was a child, he told me that once, on seeing a
fossilized grasshopper, he had been struck by the thought that, before it died, this individual
organism must have been singing its husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamna-
cosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract while dinosaurs were still walking
the earth. Its song was broadcasting precisely what kind of a grasshopper it was, to boost its
chances of successful mating. As with Scheherazade, singing the right song can be,
genetically, a matter of life or death.
My father also told me that the song this individual grasshopper must have been singing
was just the same as the one that grasshoppers are singing to this day. He said he could tell by
1
the shape of its hind legs, which had been etched into stone. I could see that this thought
moved him deeply and the episode has been etched into my memory.
But humans are not like grasshoppers. Artists, especially, are stubbornly ‘laboring for
inuention’ and they ‘beare amisse / The second burthen of a former child’, as Shakespeare put
it in his Sonnet 59, and so there are very obvious differences between Hesiod’s Theogony and
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.
When a grasshopper rubs one hind leg against the other, the resulting sound presumably
depends on the speed of movement, dryness of the legs, wind, echoes and other extraneous
factors. But it also depends on the shape and distribution of the serrations on those legs. And
that, in turn, depends largely on the grasshopper’s genes. Evidently the grasshopper’s genes
and its song, working together, have been so reproductively successful that they have
changed very little over hundreds of millions of years.
My father found this awe-inspiring. As Darwin said in the closing words of On the Origin
of Species, ‘There is a grandeur in this view of life’, in this vision of the way that the rich
complexity of life on this planet has emerged as the cumulative effect of a handful of simple
and elegant laws of nature acting unsupervised on one little reproductively successful
copulation after another across hundreds of millions of generations.
Although there are differences between humans and grasshoppers, there may be similarities
too. Is there anything remotely analogous to a grasshopper’s genes that may have been
handed down, along with the songs of our ancestors, virtually unchanged, across thousands of
years to twenty-first-century human beings? If so, then that is something that it would be
awe-inspiring to know.
Humans with exceptional memories have often been highly valued within their cultures,
especially in oral cultures, or when they have memorized iconic works like the Vedas, or the
Koran. Thomas Cromwell rose from humble origins to great heights under Henry VIII of
England; and he is said to have memorized the New Testament. There is a technique that
involves visualizing a complex structure of some kind and mentally ‘placing’ the things to be
memorized in various locations within this structure. And one version of that technique can
be found in one of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus.
The Timaeus opens with Socrates saying, ‘One, two, three, but where my dear Timaeus is
the fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my entertainers today?’ After
some preliminary dialogue, Timaeus recites from memory, uninterrupted, a long and detailed
creation story. According to that story, the material world was created not directly by the
Father of All but by a lesser divinity called the Demiurge or ‘craftsman’. And the Demiurge
2
took guidance from an abstract mathematical pattern that Plato described as the ‘soul’ of the
cosmos.
Plato’s Timaeus is the earliest surviving text that explicitly describes this ‘World Soul’ − but
Plato does not claim to have invented this mathematical structure. On the contrary. Early in
the dialogue, the guests tell Socrates that the story they are proposing to recite for him is ‘an
ancient tradition’. Critias says that when he was about ten years old he attended a ‘recitation
contest’ for young boys; and it was there that his grandfather, who was then over ninety years
old, was prompted to mention a story that he had himself memorized, in his own youth, under
the tutelage of his father, a close friend of Solon (‘the wisest of the Seven Sages’). Solon, in
turn, is said to have learned this story from ‘sacred registers’ in Egypt, which are said to trace
back 8000 years in Egypt and to record events 9000 years ago in Athens.
As Critias says, ‘the lessons of childhood have a marvellous way of being retained’; and he
assures Socrates that he would be ‘extremely surprised if any part of this story has gotten
away from me, even though it’s been a very long time since I heard it’. He also says that
earlier this same morning he told the whole story to his companions so that they too ‘would
have a supply of material for our speech’.
In the story that is subsequently recited by Timaeus, when Demiurge created the material
world he took guidance from a mathematical pattern that determined the ratios in which he
measured out a series of ‘portions’ that he drew from an initial metaphysical ‘mixture’ (a
blending of Being, Sameness and Difference):
First of all, he took away one part of the whole, and then he separated a second part
which was double the first, and then he took away a third part which was half as much
again as the second and three times as much as the first, and then he took a fourth part
which was twice as much as the second, and a fifth part which was three times the
third, and a sixth part which was eight times the first, and a seventh part which was
twenty-seven times the first. … [Timaeus 35d].
There are more portions and more numbers to follow; but these seven initial portions, and
their ratios, can usefully be displayed in the following layout, which the Roman Neo-
Platonists called the ‘lambda’ arrangement:
3
Plato’s World Soul
[the initial numbers]
1
2 3
4 9
8 27
In a spirit of mnemonic experimentation, I imagined this pattern as the hind legs of a
‘grasshopper’ that has been fossilized in the Timaeus.
Plato implies (in the Timaeus 35a-36e) that a truly great artist should aspire not merely to
copy the works created by other craftsmen not even the works created by the Demiurge. A
true artist should aspire to do what the Demiurge did to be a world-maker and to take
guidance directly from the World Soul itself.
According to the world-vision of the Timaeus, to take guidance from this Table an artist
does not need to learn the structure of this Table. Every living thing has the pattern of the
World Soul indelibly etched into the deep structure of its immortal soul. Hence this Pattern
can emerge − intuitively and instinctively – whenever we manage to glimpse the archetypes
concealed behind the superficial distractions that are forced upon us by the demands of our
embodied lives.
One piece of advice that a writer could draw from the World Soul is that it is good to weave
a narrative around approximately seven principal protagonists. Furthermore, for Pythagoreans
‘odds’ are male and ‘evens’ are female. Consequently, a second piece of advice is to aim for
an approximate ‘gender balance’ in a narrative.
Pythagorean Gender:
Female: Male:
1
2 3
4 9
8 27
In the spirit of experimentation, I visualize the female ‘leg’ of this Table as rubbing against
the male ‘leg’ to create a ‘mating song’. That mnemonic does not fit all narratives, but it does
fit some. When I recall the Arthurian legends, for instance, equally numerous males and
4
females come equally readily to mind: King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot du Lac, the Lady of
the Lake, Morgan le Fey, Merlin, Excalibur (metaphorically male) and the Holy Grail
(metaphorically female).
The backbone of Plato’s World Soul also numerologically foreshadows a handful of
exceptions to the simplistic dichotomy between males and females. Some Pythagoreans said
that the number 1 is ‘both odd and even’ – others said that it is ‘neither odd nor even’ – and
still others said that 1 is ‘not a number at all’. Aristotle said that the numbers, properly so-
called, start at 2. In English it is a commonplace that ‘one is not a number’, as is echoed in
Shakespeare’s sonnet 136: ‘In things of great receit with ease we prooue, / Among a number
one is reckon’d none.’ If just one person came into the room, it would be silly to say that ‘a
number of people came into the room’.
For these reasons, the number 1 at the top of the Table could usefully be taken as reminding
us of something that is not stereotypically either male or female. For instance, one might
employ the number 1, at the top of Plato’s World Soul, to prompt recall of the ancient Greek
god Hermes – the father of the first hermaphrodite.
Plato, in his Timaeus, also associates the numbers in the World Soul with the ancient
chemistry of the four elements, fire, air, water, earth. Chemically, according to the Timaeus,
the elements air and water serve as ‘means’ mediating between fire in the stars above and
the earth beneath our feet. Plato links this chemical ‘mediation’ with a numerological
analogue in the structure of the World Soul, because 2 and 4 are geometric ‘means’ between 1
and 8; and 3 and 9 are geometric ‘means’ between 1 and 27:
Ancient chemistry Modern analogues:
1 fire [heat, energy, light]
2 air 3 air [gasses]
4 water 9 water [liquids]
8 earth 27 earth [solids]
The Timaeus 40d-41a also offers a brief illustration of the way that a narrative could
mnemonically ‘mirror’ some of the abstract patterns that are laid out numerically in the World
Soul. He offers a thumbnail sketch of the broad sweep of Greek mythology:
Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven, and from these sprang
Phorcys and Cronos and Rhea, and all that generation; and from Cronos and Rhea
sprang Zeus and Hera, and all those who are said to be their brethren, and others who
were the children of these. [Timaeus, 40-41].
5
This list made me aware of gaps in my knowledge of these gods. (Who, for instance, was
Phorcys?) However, the Timaeus respectfully mentions Homer and Hesiod; and, Hesiod’s
Theogony proved to be especially useful. What I found was that Plato’s genealogical-sketch
can be aptly arrayed on the World Soul in two groupings. The first grouping runs as follows:
Plato’s divine genealogy, Part 1:
The early gods.
Females: Males:
1 Phorcys [one of four ‘Old Men of the Sea’]
2 Rhea [sister and wife of Cronos] 3 Cronos [ate his children]
4 Tethys [fresh waters] 9 Oceanus [salt waters]
8 Earth [Gaia] 27 Heaven [Ouranos]
Females are on the ‘evens’ side, males on the ‘odds’. Within each gender, larger numbers
align with more senior family members. There are at least two distinct sub-species under the
chemical genus, water. Analogously, Gaia and Ouranos (‘the Firmament’) were both made
from kinds of earth but they are now estranged by the vast space between them, within which
their descendants live and move and have their being.
In Hesiod’s narrative, those early divinities were succeeded by a splendid new generation.
When each of Rhea’s first five children were born, Cronos took the infant from her and
swallowed it alive. But when the sixth child, Zeus, was born, Rhea tricked Cronos into
swallowing a stone, unwittingly, instead of the infant, who was stolen away to be raised in
close secrecy from his father. When this child came of age he caused his father to vomit up all
five of his siblings in a kind of ‘second birth’. Consequently, Zeus was both ‘the youngest’
and ‘the eldest’ playing a role almost like that of a ‘father’ to the others and he was made
King of the Gods of Mount Olympus.
The Olympian family then fought a titanic struggle against Cronos and the other Titans,
won the war, and cast their defeated elders down to Tartarus. The Olympian family then
moved directly into the variously assorted cosmic roles that had previously been occupied by
those earlier gods.
This narrative of Hesiod’s can memorably be displayed by supplementing the first Table,
‘Part 1’, with a second Table, ‘Part 2’, in which the Olympians take up the positions formerly
held by the elder generations.
6
Plato’s divine genealogy, Part 2:
The Olympians.
1 [Plato’s sketch leaves a gap here]
2 Hera 3 Zeus
4 Demeter 9 Poseidon
8 Histia 27 Hades
In a mnemonic spirit we may note that 27 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 9 + 8 + 27; and this can remind
us that the realm of Hades is a ‘bottom line’ that ‘sums up’ the lives that have been lived
above the earth.
Plato’s two-stage thumbnail genealogy of the gods has a precedent in Hesiod’s Theogony
but with a difference. Plato names only nine of the gods; whereas Hesiod opens with a short
sketch that names nineteen.
At first, Hesiod’s 19 divinities struck me as ill-suited for mnemonic alignment against
Plato’s initial seven numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27. Nevertheless, on closer inquiry Plato’s World
Soul does fit Hesiod’s sketch much more neatly than I had at first expected. In the Timaeus,
the seven initial numbers in the World Soul are immediately supplemented with twelve more
auxiliary numbers:
After this he filled up the double intervals and the triple, cutting off yet other portions
from the mixture and placing them in the intervals, so that in each interval there were
two kinds of means … [Timaeus 36a].
Plato’s group of seven initial portions, taken together with the next twelve portions, yields a
sequence of nineteen portions. And this Platonic structure fits remarkably neatly against
Hesiod’s description of the Muses:
… uttering beautiful voice, singing of Zeus who bears the aegis, and the lady Hera of
Argos, who walks in sandals of gold, and the daughter of Zeus the aegis-bearer, pale-
eyed Athene, and Phoebus Apollo, and Artemis the archer, and Poseidon earth-
charioted, shaker of the earth, and holy Themis, and Aphrodite of curling lashes, and
Hebe of gold diadem, and fair Dione, Leto, Iapetos, and crooked-schemer Cronos,
Dawn, mighty Sun, and shining Moon, Earth, great Oceanus, and dark Night, and the
rest of the holy family of immortals who are for ever. [Hesiod, Theogony, lines 11-
21].
That genealogical sketch comprises 7 males and 12 females. And this 7-12 gender division
fits Plato’s description of the Platonic Table like a hand in a glove:
7
Hesiod’s Theogony:
1 Zeus
Hera Athene harmonic mean
Artemis Themis arithmetic
mean
2 Apollo 3 Iapetos
Aphrodite Dione harmonic mean
Hebe Leto arithmetic mean
4 Poseidon 9 Oceanus
Dawn Moon harmonic mean
Earth Night arithmetic mean
8 Sun 27 Cronos
This mnemonic is unabashedly patriarchal. Women mediate between dominant men: some
‘arithmetically’ (like matchmaking Hera), some ‘harmonically’ (like seductive Aphrodite).
In Plato’s Timaeus there are in fact four stages in the numerical construction of the World
Soul.
(1) The Demiurge lays out 7 initial portions.
(2) Then 12 further portions are inserted as ‘means’.
(3) Then there are 18 more portions (two in each of nine remaining gaps).
That yields a series of 37 portions; 21 on the ‘evens’ side, 16 on the ‘odds’.
(4) Then each of these 37 portions is divided into two distinct sub-portions.
That yields a final total of 74 portions, with 42 on the ‘evens’ side, and 32 on the ‘odds’.
The ratios resulting from step (3) match the frequency-ratios for the notes in the familiar,
diatonic, sol-fa musical scale. Step (4) doubles the number of portions and reduces their size
but preserves all the musical ratios. It also mirrors Hesiod’s and Plato’s story of the
replacement of the earliest gods by their Olympian descendants. In the spirit of mnemonic
experimentation, I visualized step (4) as mirroring the chemical process of cell division, or
mitosis, in which two chromosomes are divided down their entire length to create two copies
of themselves.
Having puzzled out these Ancient Greek mnemonic uses of the Platonic World Soul, I
experienced a phenomenon that is called ‘the frequency illusion’. If your daughter becomes
pregnant, suddenly there are obviously pregnant women everywhere you look. On mature
reflection, those optimistic expectations often met with disappointment. Nevertheless, there
8
was one tightly-interlinked chain of applications of the Table that did prove to be an
especially rich source of pleasant surprises.
That chain of surprises began when I used the Table to memorize the Seven Wonders of the
Ancient World. I began by aligning the number 1 with Pharos the Lighthouse at Alexandria.
This reminded me of a book that I fondly remembered reading in my youth: Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse. Woven into its domesticity and psychological interiority, this novel did
have a distinctly mythic feel to me. I also recalled that there were repeated references to uses
of visualization as a memory-technique. One of the leading characters, Mr Ramsay, even uses
memory-techniques to keep mental track of his eight children.
Guided by these hunches, I counted the named characters in To the Lighthouse and my
initial tally totalled 37: 21 females and 16 males. Encouraged by this first step, I associated
Virginia Woolf’s primary characters, Mr and Mrs Ramsay, with Plato’s and Hesiod’s
‘portions’ for Zeus and Hera; and this choice turned out to be memorable in several ways.
Thus, for instance, Mrs Ramsay is a compulsive match-maker (very like Hera). Zeus is a
thunder-god; and Mr Ramsay ‘volleyed and thundered straight into Lily Briscoe and
William Bankes’.
Lily Briscoe, William Bankes and Augustus Carmichael are visitors who are staying with
the Ramsays. I associated Lily Briscoe with Demeter, William Bankes with Hades and
Augustus Carmichael with Poseidon. It is therefore striking to find Virginia Woolf associating
Carmichael with ‘Neptune’ (Part 1, section 17), and with imagery like this: ‘A hand would be
shoved up, a blade would be flashed … he had only to put down his hand as he lay on the
lawn to fish up anything he wanted’ (3.6). And Carmichael is also likened to ‘an old pagan
God, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a French novel) in his hand’
(3.14).
To the Lighthouse:
1 The Lighthouse
daughter 4 son 4 harmonic mean
daughter 3 son 3 arithmetic mean
2 Mrs Ramsay 3 Mr Ramsay
daughter 2 son 2 harmonic mean
daughter 1 son 1 arithmetic mean
4 Lilly Briscoe [guest] [guest] 9 Carmichael
Marie [guest] [guest] Charles harmonic mean
9
Mrs Beckwith [guest] [guest] Paul arithmetic mean
8 Minta Doyle [guest] [guest] 27 Bankes [widower]
The narrative also supples just enough servants and peasants to fill the relevant further
‘intervals’ in this structure.
To the Lighthouse contains significant references to Jane Austen, George Eliot’s
Middlemarch, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, Rudyard
Kipling, Balzac, Shakespeare, Virgil, Cowper and Tolstoy. Consequently, I tried aligning
several of the works of these authors against the Table and the exercise truly came up
trumps with Jane Austen and George Eliot.
Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, opens with a thumbnail family tree for the
Dashwood family, mentioning seven characters in the first paragraph. Following this sketch,
the narrative revolves around three Dashwood sisters, who are to face four salient marriage
prospects:
Sense and Sensibility:
1 (wicked) Willoughby [‘A gentleman
carrying a gun, with two pointers …’]
2 Margaret Dashwood [under-age] 3 Robert Ferrars
[narrative focuses on Lucy Steele] [‘supplanted his brother’]
4 Marianne Dashwood 9 Edward Ferrars
[a romantic] [elder brother of Robert]
8 Elinor Dashwood 27 Colonel Brandon
[down to earth] [‘silent and grave’,
‘wrong side of five-and-thirty’]
Altogether, there are approximately 74 named characters in Sense and Sensibility.
Furthermore, there are approximately 42 females and 32 males, which mnemonically fits the
Plato’s World Soul.
The Table above aligns Lucy Steele and Robert Ferrars with Hera and Zeus; and, like Hera
and Zeus, they marry. Furthermore, Robert Ferrars, who is his mother’s favourite, secures the
inheritance of his elder brother Edward – even though: ‘What Edward had done to forfeit the
right of the eldest son, might have puzzled many people to find out’. It is mnemonically apt
that the above Table establishes a correspondence between this sub-plot in the novel and the
Greek myth about how a younger son, Zeus, becomes ‘head of the family’. This is clearly an
10
archetype; something analogous also happens in the Bible, in the story of Jacob’s theft of
Esau’s birthright.
We can also use the same Table to memorize the cast of characters from Jane Austen’s
second novel, Pride and Prejudice. This time there are more than three sisters; but just three
of them play leading roles in the marriage-dance that occupies this novel:
Pride and Prejudice:
1 (wicked) Wickham
2 Lydia Bennett [youngest] 3 Mr Collins
4 Elizabeth Bennett 9 Mr Bingley
8 Jane Bennett [eldest] 27 Mr Darcy
Again, there are about 42 female and 32 male named characters altogether, which neatly fits
the Table.
We could also use the Table to memorize the list of Jane Austen’s novels:
JANE AUSTEN:
1 Pride and Prejudice
2 Emma 3 Sanditon [uncompleted]
4 Mansfield Park [about the Navy] 9 Persuasion [about the Navy]
8 Sense and Sensibility 27 Northanger Abbey
Two of Jane Austen’s novels are intimately concerned with the Navy, namely Mansfield
Park and Persuasion – and the above mnemonic indirectly links those two novels with water-
gods like Oceanus and Poseidon.
Aligning the novel Emma with the number 2 on the Platonic Table will mnemonically imply
an indirect correspondence between the match-making heroine Emma and the match-making
ancient Greek goddess Hera, who was swallowed alive by her father Cronos. In Chapter 1 we
are introduced to Emma’s father as ‘hating change of every kind’ (very like Cronos). But
Hera is freed from her father by Zeus, to whom she is sister and cousin and wife. There are
echoes of all these mythic themes at the close of Jane Austen’s Chapter 38, when Knightly
says to Emma, ‘You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really so much
brother and sister as to make it at all improper’.
Encouraged by exploratory exercises like these, I turned to George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Here too, as with Jane Austen’s novels, it is relatively easy to identify three leading ladies
who face four salient marriage prospects:
11
Middlemarch:
1 Will Ladislaw
2 Rosamond Vincy 3 Fred Vincy
4 Dorothea Brooke 9 Dr Lydgate
8 Mary Garth 27 Casaubon
Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate are both drawn towards philanthropic ventures.
Dorothea becomes a rich widow and wants to spend her money on something that would
make the world a better place. Analogously, Lydgate has philanthropic plans for a new
hospital and he badly needs her money. Each admires the other. Superficially they would
have made a good match. But there is no force of chemical attraction between water and
water. Instead, water is drawn either down, into the earth, or else upwards, evaporating into
thin air. For Dorothea and Lydgate, sexual forces draw them in analogous directions.
Tragically, in her first marriage Dorothea is drawn down, down, down into the underworld
of the Reverend Casaubon’s dry and scholarly studies of dead Greeks and his fruitless search
for ‘the Key to all Mythologies’. And Dr Lydgate, too, in his youth, was drawn
metaphorically ‘downward’. He was initially bewitched by a dark-haired, dark-eyed and
deadly actress, Laure − who deliberately killed her husband on-stage and pretended it was an
accident.
On the rebound from this earthy infatuation, Lydgate is drawn to a vain and selfish woman
who might aptly be described as an ‘air-head’. Thanks largely to his unfortunate marriage to
Rosamond Vincy his philanthropic hopes all evaporate, as it were, into thin air. Dorothea’s
second marriage is to a young firebrand called Ladislaw and, alas, the deep and powerful
currents of her early ambitions are consequently scattered ‘in channels which had no great
name on the earth’.
Here, there is an opportunity to recall the overarching theme that Tolstoy explicitly
articulates in his second Epilogue to War and Peace. Tolstoy said that human history is not
the product of any intelligent design by God, and nor is its course directed by any Great Man.
It is, rather, the unsupervised, cumulative effect of uncountably many virtually infinitesimal
forces that are exerted by the individual lives of all the men and women who have ever lived
on this planet. As George Eliot put it in the closing sentence of Middlemarch, ‘… for the
growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill
with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’.
12
Eliot’s and Tolstoy’s idea about human history is a cousin of the biological theory that the
history of life on this planet is the cumulative effect of the mechanisms of population
genetics. Each individual reproductive act has at most a virtually infinitesimal effect on the
future course of events on the large scale. Nevertheless, biological diversity is a consequence
of nothing more than the unsupervised, cumulative effect of all those individual reproductive
acts.
Darwinian theory is a theory of evolution, which is described as ‘descent with
modifications’, and where the modifications that survive the test of time are ones that
originally occurred merely by chance but fortuitously turned out reliably to boost the
frequency and fidelity of reproduction. And Darwinian theory also explains long periods of
biological descent without any significant modifications. Some genes are optimally adapted
to a given reproductive niche. And sometimes this niche continues to exist, somewhere on the
globe, over long periods of time. In that case, none of the unavoidable copying errors, or
mutations, that arise from time to time will ever raise the creature’s propensity to be
reproduced into future generations. That is the reason why both grasshoppers and their songs
have remained virtually unchanged for so many millions of years.
It is not just biological genotypes and phenotypes that have propensities to be reproduced
with only occasional and minor variations. Anything that is copied can have the fidelity and
frequency of copying either depressed or elevated by the chance occurrence of minor
variations. Thanks largely to a book by Richard Dawkins on The Selfish Gene, the word
memes came to be used for any patterns (and not just genes) that have a robust propensity to
be copied with relatively high fidelity and frequency. A good Platonist should not forget that
there are many important differences between genes and the many and miscellaneous other
things that go under the name of ‘memes’: popular songs, for instance. But a Platonist also
looks for abstract mathematical similarities that can be instantiated across those deep
differences.
Like genes, memes can undergo ‘descent with modification’, or evolution. And, also
analogously to genes, some memes become optimally adapted to the reproductive practices
within a given cultural context. When they reach optimal adaptation to their niche, then as
long as this niche continues to exist, these memes they will continue to be copied. For this
reason, some fables that were probably already ancient when Aesop wrote them down survive
relatively unaltered to this day like the story of the ant and the grasshopper. Changes in
social context will have necessitated alterations in some of the details, including the language
13
in which the story is told. Nevertheless, underlying structural characteristics will have
changed hardly at all.
As both the genes and the song of the grasshopper have survived virtually unchanged across
vast tracts of time, so too do the mnemonic archetypes that were embodied in Hesiod’s
Theogony, and both embodied and described in Plato’s Timaeus, evidently survive in works
by Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. It is possible that this same Table might
usefully be applied to the works of various other ‘grace hopers’ who are broadly analogous to
those ‘three Graces’. But no doubt it would be prudent to begin with a handful of relatively
concise and user-friendly works before embarking on anything as opaque as The Waves,
which followed To the Lighthouse. Or Finnegans Wake.
14
References
Austen, Jane,
Works, 6 vols., Clarendon, Oxford, 1954.
Dawkins, Richard,
The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976.
Eliot, George,
Middlemarch, ed. B.G. Hornback, W.W. Norton, NY, 1977.
Hesiod,
Theogony [in Greek], ed. M.L. West, Clarendon, Oxford, 1966.
Theogony and Works and Days, transl. M.L. West, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Joyce, James,
Finnegans Wake, Faber and Faber, London, 1939.
Plato,
Timaeus, transl. Benjamin Jowett, Collier Macmillan, London, 1949.
Woolf, Virginia,
To the Lighthouse, Hogarth Press, London, 1927.
The Waves, Hogarth Press, London, 1931.
15