Sexual Selection of Carnival Attractions
I like making things up. It’s been what I’ve done for a job all my life. When making up an act you can of course just make something up completely, “here we are on the South Pole and these are not juggling balls but snowballs…” Personally I prefer that the stories I tell and the things I do are in some fundamental way true. At least from my limited point of view. I prefer my audience to suspend their disbelief sparingly. This is one tool to make my strange antics more real and relatable which again helps make them experience me as authentic.
Its the same way with this mythopoetic project. I talked in episode one about this being an imaginary exploration. In a sense it is, but it is not a random brainstorming thing, what Coleridge called fancy. I believe our project is based on the kind of imagination associated with creativity and the power to shape and unify what actually exists in the world. I believe the mythopoetic carnival can be viewed as a real thing. So, a part of this exploration is to ground it in reality.
I also want to underline that what I am doing here is merely discovering a setting, or a world for mythic characters to inhabit. Like the Norse Gods had Aasgard, and Midgard as their worlds with Yggdrasil, the world tree growing from the middle of it all with roots going into all the nine worlds, or realms of the norse mythology. The mythopoetic carnival is a place, and the fool, the Strongwoman, the tightrope walker are all inhabitants of this world. Myths are mostly about the goings on between gods and heroes. This is not our current project. We are merely making the foundations, the cosmology, or world building.
The landscape we are discovering and co-creating is in a liminal space, but I do believe it is more than simply made up. It is also in a very real way discovered. Last week, this and ongoing we will look at this inner landscape from different points of view. Last week we “grounded” the Mythic Carnival philosophically by likening it to Plato’s theory of Ideas. This was by no means exhaustive or intended to be some kind of mathematical or philosophical proof. It was merely one way I have been looking at this that makes me feel like what we are doing here isn’t just make believe. That it is connected to concepts already out there in the idea space.
Today we will look at it from the point of view of evolution.
Since my first introduction to evolution in biology class in year twelve at the Steiner School in Haugesund Norway, by teacher and author, Trond Skaftnesmo, evolution has resonated deeply with me. I think it’s a fundamental insight into the nature of reality. Its a key piece to understand how processes behaves, thus how so much of the world works, since so much, if not everything, in existence is a process and not a thing.
After having the evolution spark ignited in me by Trond, I moved onto reading the essay collections of Stephen Jay Gould, before getting onto Richard Dawkins, whom we’ll get back to, then onto Darwin, who’s pivotal work Origin of the Species is a surprisingly good and easy read. It’s essentially one gloriously, well crafted, book length argument, guiding you towards the brilliance of his idea. I then moved onto university text books, which were more of a slog, but great for more detailed analysis.
Anyway, to understand the origins of anything, species, flowers, or cultural phenomena like burial rites, fashion or, for our purposes here Carnival attractions, evolution is for me a most powerful and salient tool.
Everything changes. Most of the things we care about aren’t things, they are processes. Showmanship is a process, which we talked about in episode 8, “Where is my art?” Processes changes over time. Everything changes over time. As humans we change and further we actively change things over time. We’ve shaped dogs into peculiar and ever more cute or fierce breeds. Cows have been bred to have vastly greater milk yields. This is called selective breeding or artificial selection, but as we looked at artificial just means done by humans for the benefit of humans.
The natural world also has a way of selecting, this is called Natural Selection, and we’ll dig into some details about that in a bit. Natural selection takes longer to do what it does but it’s no less effective. In 50 million years natural selection turned a pointy snouted dog like animal, about 1-2 meters long, reaching to our knees when on all four, called Pakicetus into a 30 meter long blue whale. What a transformation. Dog like to whales. This is totally worth checking out, if you haven’t, its one of the most well documented and remarkable examples of evolutionary history. I’ll post a link to a documentary episode on YouTube that talks about it. It’s fascinating.
The idea that the natural world is in constant flux, is not really something I need to argue, as I think it’s self evident. This pandemic and the ensuing annihilation of the entire industry of showmanship is proof of this ongoing change. I also don’t think I need to argue for the fact that this process of change in living organisms is governed by the process of evolution. If you are doubting evolution I can’t help you here. I would recommend you seek some professional help. Because this, relatively simple, theory impacts everything. As Theodosius Dobzhansky famosouly put it:
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,”
The Shapes of life changing through of Time.
Before we go any further, let’s have a quick refresher look at biological evolution. Evolution is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioural traits. That’s a bit of a mouthful, let’s unpack it a little.
There are four principles at work in evolution. They are variation, selection, inheritance and time. No offspring is identical to their parent, that’s variation. For now that’s all we need to know. Any variation, random or otherwise, that makes certain organisms better suited to their environment than others. A change in body shape or cognitive ability or the like can increases that individual’s chances of survival. The process of who survives we call selection. Any advantage in survival, such as longer neck in proto-giraffes, or a Brontosaurus, giving them access to more food in regions other animals can’t reach, increases their chances of surviving and having more babies. As long as the beneficial trait can be passed from parent offspring, the next generation will arrive with that same advantage. This is the principle of inheritance. Finally, all this, like everything under the sun, unfolds in time. Evolution is the unfolding shapes of life through time.
Lets look a little closer at inheritance. The fundamental element of biological evolution is a gene. This is the thing which makes it possible for us to inherit the traits of our ancestors. A gene is made up of DNA, and that’s all we need to say about that. You won’t be expected to know anything more for the test, but those of you who remember anything from biology class at school might remember that language, burial rites, and carnival attractions are not considered living beings. Hence they have no DNA. Is this where the analogy falls apart? Can we really use the theory of evolution to talk about carnival attractions. Yes, we can.
Circus acts are cultural phenomena, hence no genes, but genes aren’t the only kind of replicators. In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins came up with the concept of a meme. A meme is for cultural phenomena what DNA is for an biological organism. These days a meme is most commonly thought of as a picture of a cat, or sweet baby Yoda, with a funny slogan. But when it was coined it was posited as the unit for cultural content which can be passed from one person to another, analogous to the unit of biological heredity. Memes spread through culture like genes spread through the gene pool, with imitation replacing bodily reproduction. Monkey see monkey do.
A meme is an idea, a behaviour, or style that spreads between people through imitation. Monkey see monkey do. One person turns his cap around to be cool, others see it and imitate it. Next thing you know you have people wearing caps backwards all over the world. I saw a picture recently from a sporting event where twenty dudes at a sporting event, all with their caps backwards facing the sun. Every single one of them had his hand up to shade his eyes. Yet, they were all wearing the solution to their problem on their heads. Yet memetic drift, how the cultural imitation of wearing the hat backwards, left the dudes without any understanding of the true purpose of that hard brim sticking out at their hats.
Any phenomena, as simple as a hat worn a particular way, or as complex as a religion, can beneficially be thought of as memes. Self replicating ideas. The memes that survive are the ones which manage to spread themselves. Religions are strong replicators partly because they have built in features aimed explicitly at spreading themselves. Proselytising is a feature of most, if not all, religions, and this gives them viral power. Jehovas witnesses or as I discovered in Las Vegas, mormons go door to door to spread the their memes. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the link with proselytising and a gene’s function of heredity.
In episode 9, part one of the Mythopoetic explorations I tentatively argued that creating cultural and real world artefacts or idea creations are part of the natural behaviour of human beings akin to birds making a nest. I was thinking about this and was reminded of another of Richard Dawkins concepts namely the extended phenotype. A phenotype is an individual of a species, like you or me, and we are both expressions of the interaction between our genes and our environment. What Dawkins proposed in his 1982 book was that things like birds nests are an extension of the phenotype, an extension of ourselves, he was talking of things like beaver dams and also birds nests. He claims these are as much a part of the individual being as any other natural behaviour like eating or avoiding being eaten by a wolf. In Dawkins’ words:
“An extended phenotype is one that is not limited to the individual
body in which a gene is housed; that is, it includes
“all the effects that a gene causes on the world.”
This backs up my argument that cultural creations are part of natural biology. Perhaps not identical but certainly closely related. Now lets take a quick look at a different kind of biological selection process.
Sexy Peacocks
Just after Darwin wrote his book On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, he wrote in a letter to Asa Grey in 1860
“The sight of a peacock feather makes me sick.”
This is at first glance a peculiar statement. I, like most people, find just the opposite to be true. Delight is a more apt description of my emotional encounters with peacock tails. I’d say I feel delighted even when I see the much less decorated peacock hen.
For Darwin it wasn’t really the sight of the feather itself which was so repugnant but how it failed to conform to his idea of natural selection. The myriad of eyes on the tail stared back at him, challenging the natural order, and defiantly refusing to drop its gaze. The tail was a grain of sand, in Darwins eye, threatening, not completely knocking out his theory, but goading him with the fact that there were still things he didn’t understand.
The word “irritant” reminds me when we talked about pearls in episode 9. In a way the peacock tail could be seen as the grain of sand, irritant, that triggers the creation of a pearl in an oyster. The pearl is a treasure, not to the oyster, but for humans. If the tail is the irritant, the treasure is the insight it eventually would bring Darwin.
The extravagant tail, which can stand five feet tall on a peacock didn’t seem to aid the peacocks survival, which is the be all and end all for natural selection. The tail’s overgrown size would be a direct hindrance in flight. How could it exist, when the sheer weight and size of it would aid the predators chasing the peacock rather than the peacocks themselves? Darwin was sickened by what lay behind the visual display. The mockery the tail made of his powerful insight of natural selection. The tail was a mystery, it simply shouldn’t exist. What could possibly justify the existence of the tail?
After much consternation and studying of things like stag-horn beetles, which have completely outsized horns which they don’t use for fighting, he came upon the answer: chicks dig it. Or in the case of the peacocks the hens dig it. He called it sexual selection and it is an entirely different selection process.
Natural selection is really a survival selection, the one who survives can get on with having kids and thus have their lineage preserved for eternity. If you survive you live, which is a prerequisite for procreation, if you die you don’t live and procreation is unlikely. The great arbiter of natural, or survival, selection is death.
The arbiter of Sexual selection is the female of the species, and her choice of mate. If she likes what she sees, she might allow the male to mate with her. There is a plethora of ways to get the female to like them and these strategies have evolved into some of the most elaborate behavioural creations. Like the elaborate dance displays of the birds of paradise, the artful nest or bowser creations of the bower birds, and the ostentatious tail of a peacock. In the human race we could imagine the male punk’s yellow Mohawk and leather jacket, with safety pins placed just right, and tartan pants ripped and patched in just the way she likes it, the female punk might allow the male punk a chance to mate with her.
The Victorians were rather displeased with the idea that women played such an supremely important role, as pivotal as death, in shaping how men looked, and behaved and how species evolved. The idea was abhorrent since at the time women were not considered smart and important enough to be trusted to vote responsibly. From a very limited and obscure point of view you can say that certain aspects of men their physicality, and also parts of their behaviour is the way it is because females fancied it in the past. (This is meant strictly in a biological sense, as male behaviour towards women is an angry wasps nest I’m want to stay well clear of. To be clear I’m not blaming my own shortcomings and inadequacies physically or behaviourally on the female of the species, for those I take full responsibility.) For now it is enough to say that living things, and by extension cultural things, go through and are shaped by selection processes, including but not limited to sexual and natural selection.
Now, if we take these ideas of selection and shine its spotlight of illumination on carnival attractions what do we learn?
Selection on the Midway
The Mythopoetic Carnival has many attractions, not all of them are equally able to capture the attention and interest of carnival patrons. Not everyone will buy tickets to every attraction. Some attractions are more attractive than others. Let’s imagine this process along the Mythic Midway. We walk along the sawdust and gravel covered path and see long lines of patrons buying tickets for the Ferris Wheel. Next to it there is another attraction with hardly anyone buying tickets, lets say this is a pygmy village. The difference in line up for tickets is selection in action. Whether the selection is sexual or natural is maybe a question for another time.
The pygmy village, which was a thing at the Chicago World Fair in 1893 was still an attraction when my friend and collaborator Hamish McCormick’s father went to an agricultural fair in Australia when he was young. As he remembers it it was just a few short africans sitting in an enclosure, every now and getting up to bum a cigarette from someone in the crowd.
Now, in our Mythopoetic Carnival, if the ticket line was permanently short, the pygmy attraction would eventually disappear due to a lack of interest, due to the lack of resonance with the mythic carnival patrons. It does not matter what the reason is for it failing to capture the hearts, minds and attention of the Crowds. The point is that the Ferris Wheel, which was first exhibited at the Chicago World fair, continues to have long lines today. You can expect an hour of cuing up to get on the London Eye. When I went on a big wheel at the winter wonderland in London’s Hyde Park a few years ago, it was the same. The Wheel has captured something in our imagination, there is a resonance between something inside us and the wheel.
Carnivals has existed for a very long time. The exact origins are somewhere in our deep history. What time does a carnival become a carnival. As far back as people have gathered there’s been Showmen presenting their tricks. Exactly how the single attractions or performances evolved into a carnival in general or to the Midway at the Chicago World Fair is a topic we can look into further in a later chat. (This bears similar to the evolution of a single cell organism into multi celled organisms or perhaps to the proliferation of mammals following the extinction of the dinosaurs.)
But even if we just look at the evolution from the Midway in 1893 and onwards certain attractions, the Ferris Wheel and Little Egypt with her seductive dances, have remained staples as carnival attractions, the pygmy village, not so much.
Names and individuals aren’t the core of the memes.
The Big Wheel I rode in Hyde park, did not carry Ferris’ name, and although Little Egypt at one point was one particular woman, (apparantly her name was Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos and there’s some footage of her, filmed by Edison that ill post a link to.) I am sure that when she needed a break from, the show talker out the front, gathering the next crowd, would quickly bestow the title of Little Egypt on some other girl.
This is a feature of the most prevalent carnival attractions. They are not reliant on names. Girls removing their clothes and or dancing seductively sells tickets regardless of who it is. There will be a short tantalising display on a small stage by the entrance, just raunchy enough to capture the imagination and desire to buy tickets. Although someone famous would possibly pull bigger crowds, it is not necessary, the Act itself is inherently interesting to human beings, or a selection of them anyhow. The meme, the core of the Act goes beyond any individual.
The same goes for sword swallowing. If the carnival barker, as he’s known in popular culture, tells you someone is going to swallow a twenty-five inch, razor sharp cutlass sword, the name of the person is not what’s going to sway you one way or the other. Nobody thinks, “Oh its John Doe swallowing that cutlass, I like Henry Brown’s cutlass swallow better.”
The cooch show, as girl shows were called on carnivals is a feature of the Mythopoetic Carnival, they are perhaps an example of sexual selection. I don’t know. :-) The way they are presented, is always at the whim of the popular imagination. Presented as strong warrior women of the Amazon, or just Hot Girls Nude, depends on where and when they played, as well as the audience they wanted to attract.
The Fortune Teller, the Strongman, the Bearded Lady, the Fool, the carousel, the roller coaster and the Ferris wheel are staple attractions at the Mythopoetic Carnival exactly because they have been proven to resonate with Carnival Crowds. This is a likely way the Mythopoetic Carnival got its inhabitants, and possibly how the mental midway came to be.
In real life the patrons selected the attractions and thus shaped the real world midway by the way they spent their time, attention and hard earned cash. As to our inner midway, whether the attractions there exist because the carnival patrons bought tickets in the real world and then by osmosis they made it into archetypal attractions for our mental midway, or, that the patrons bought the tickets in the real world because they felt it resonated with something inside them, is hard to know. Do people like real world fools and fortune tellers because it resonates with the archetype of the fool and fortune teller already existing in our psyche. Was it the inner that attracted them to the outer manifestations or was it the outer that leaked in and became the inner? Like the chicken and the egg, what came first is a complex question with possible mythopoetic solutions for another time.
The carnival is what it is and contains what it contains because it’s systematically been subjected to selection pressures, of different kinds, sexual, artificial and natural. Like how the peacock hen found the male peacock’s tail attractive for long enough to shape it the impressive display it is today, the Carnival Crowds’ fascination, and resonance with certain attractions, has shaped them into the staples of the Midways in a reciprocal process of interaction.
The attractions at the Mythopoetic Carnival are displayed along the midway because they mirror the inner landscape of humanity. In this way the mythopoetic carnival is a reflection of our soul. It is the inner geography of humanity reflected back at us. The Mythopoetic Carnival is human nature revealed in participatory games an attracions. The carnival is a picture of the human soul.