side probe #1

THE CIVIL WAR OF THE SENSES: TELEVISION KILLS TELEPHONY IN BROTHERS' BROIL. (Finnegans's Wake, 52.18)

No greater cultural difference is conceivable than that between a society build upon the dominant values of the eye and one in which the values of ear and touch have serious ascendency and dominate over the eye.

Eric Havelock's Prefact to Plato (Oxford University Press, 1963) is an account of the tribal culture of Homer that preceeded the visual, newly alphabetised and detribalised world of Plato.

It is the story of the shift from the world of the bard and "counter-mosaic" to the world of Euclid and intellectual detachment.

For only the eye among all of our senses permits detachment and the individual or private values of civilisation and points of view.