disconnected

[calimac]

Well, it's happened again: something that's been puzzling me intermittently for decades, whenever it comes up.

Somebody uses the phrase "Only connect," in some context suggesting that they take it as a deeply meaningful personal motto. In this case it occupied an LJ userpic.

And I ask, "What does that actually mean?" By itself it's meaningless (connect what to what? and what else besides connect are you not supposed to do?), and context has never enabled me to make sense of it.

And I get one of two replies. Either I'm referred to the original source of the phrase in E.M. Forster's Howards End, or else to an essay by P.L. Travers that focuses on the phrase.

Here's the Forster paragraph.

"It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."

Now, I do not consider myself a particularly stupid person. But I cannot make much sense out of that paragraph. If the thrust is, "Put passion in your prose," then "Only connect" seems a very peculiar and unexpressive way of putting it; nor does that seem to be the thrust of Travers' equally uncommunicative essay, whose theme seems to be an inchoate series of ideas weakly summarizable as "find meaning in life." Well, duh.

I'm missing something somewhere. Tell me in your own words, not Forster's or Travers's: what do you mean by it?

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Why is it watery pish? Just because it doesn't speak to you? Obviously it speaks to some others.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Watery pish speaks to a lot of people. Rod McKuen was very popular in his day. So is ... I dunno, Deepak Chopra. Name your pish, people love it.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

But why is this watery pish?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If you have to ask ...

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I do, I do.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Another quotation not as famous as it's supposed to be, then? I was alluding to this guy.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Funny. I was responding in the manner of an exchange in Blazing Saddles.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A film I've never seen. So it, too, is not as famous as you think.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly: quotations are instantly and fully recognizable to people who are familiar with the source, recognizable at some level to a certain number of other people, and incoherent to the rest.

I would have bet money that you haven't seen Blazing Saddles.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And if they're incoherent, they can be explained. Jokes are often not funny out of context ("You had to be there"), but they can be explained, and I've seen any number of good, clear explanations of references and quotations, of things that I already knew and those I had not.

Also:

1) That would have been a perilous bet, as it's a film I've been meaning to get around to for years.

2) If you were so sure I hadn't seen it, and so sure that I wouldn't understand the reference, why use it?

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Poetry, which I mentioned before, is, I think, an example of words that cannot be explained, but must be experienced. To rephrase poetry is pointless; the new words may be clearer to more people (or not), but they are no longer the poem.

1) I generally bet my gut instinct. (Some people hate to play games with me, because I am more committed to an interesting game than to winning. Back when Risk was popular around here, people played a number of variations, and J suggested that "Carol Kennedy" should be a variation, meaning that I was in the game you had to remember that my move didn't necessarily tell you what was most advantageous to me.)

2) I was amusing myself by using it; I didn't expect you to take it as anything but a literal statement.

I have heard the line from Louis Armstrong; I just didn't think of it. "If you have to ask" (in quotation marks, so only the phrase is searched) gets 105 MILLION hits on Google; nearly a third of them are for the Armstrong quote, but if I had stopped to think of it as a quotation, I probably would have initially come up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though I would have immediately realized that would be an unlikely source for you.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't actually like Louis Armstrong either.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

"Either" added to what? Forster?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Or the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I like Armstrong quite a lot; I was exposed to his music fairly young, as my mother was crazy about him. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, some of their stuff yes, some no, but I LOVE their name.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My youthful exposure to Armstrong presented what I thought was a ridiculous old geezer croaking out "Hello Dolly" in a tuneless (see "YMCA") manner.

I have been assured he didn't always sound like that, but I subsequently heard some recordings of him singing in about 1930, decades before "Hello Dolly" was even written, and he sounded like that then, too.

Yes, I know he also played the trumpet.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Do you find all of Forster watery pish?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What I've read of Forster, which is very little, dismays me greatly. I once wrote an article using the fact that Forster disdained storytelling to the point of acknowledging only with the greatest reluctance, "Yes - oh dear, yes - the novel tells a story", as evidence of the decadence and uselessness of mainstream modern literary culture.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Then why are you spending any time and effort trying to understand what people who--apparently--admire Forster's writing see in a two-word quotation from it?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Because I was hoping that perhaps they could translate it into English. I strongly dislike the attitude of the other Forster quote, the one I just gave above, but, unlike "Only connect," I don't fail to understand what he means.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I should also clarify that the "watery pish" reaction came after I did begin to understand WTF he was talking about.