Meta narrative: One per-version

“Blackbird singing in the dead of night,
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.
All your life you were only waiting for this
moment to be free:
Black bird fly into the light of a dark black night.”

— John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Denis Diderot was an 18th century French philosopher, writer and art critic. He was co-founder and chief editor of Encyclopedie, a general encyclopedia whose aim, according to Mr. Diderot, was to change the way people think. Encyclopedie embodied the day’s innovatively fecund philosophy, which is now referred to as the Enlightenment. This 18th century philosophical perspective stressed human reasoning and scientific thinking, and was in stark contrast with much of the religious and political reliance on blind faith and obedience of the day.

But for me, the most exciting moment in the Mr. Diderot oeuvre is the short and unassuming narrative “Regrets On Parting From My Old Dressing Gown.” Mr. Diderot catapults one image: The writer’s shabby, crowded, and chaotic room undergoes metamorphosis.

It all begins when Mr. Diderot is given a gift of a beautiful new scarlet dressing gown. As soon as he wraps himself in its obvious beauty he is filled with more worry than the dragon guarding the Golden Fleece. The old dressing gown that “molded all the folds of my body without inhibiting it” was easily there to wipe dust off books or ink off pen nibs. In his old robe Mr. Diderot feared neither the explosion of fire nor the spilling of water. “I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of the new one.”

This is only the beginning. The room itself, next to the new robe, began to look tawdrier. So the broken straw chair was replaced by Moroccan leather. A new expensive writing table replaced the old rickety desk. Thread bare tapestry and rug: replaced. Beloved smoky frameless prints made way for new art pieces.

This story is usually quoted to illustrate the Mr. Diderot Effect, a term coined by Grant McCracken, an anthropological scholar of consumption patterns. That may be a possible meta-narrative, but I will to create one other. My creation tends more toward obliterating Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable feeling that rises out of the simultaneous holding of conflicting ideas.

Mr. Diderot’s fancy robed self did not match the other who inhabited a congenial dump. What to do? The first solution: Upgrade the dump. But the ordered and lovely room is stern and sterile. There is not much room here for play or naturalness or wild abandon.

Mr. Diderot himself comes to this in reverie at his expensive writing table. Above the table is a print of the oil painting “The Tempest” by Claude Joseph Vernet. This is a painting of a wild storm, with great ship background sinking. People clinging to wreckage reach out to others in a tree on the rocky shore. The tree is bent over and roiling in the winds. Mr. Diderot loves the fading light and the wild purity of this moment.

The uncontrolled passion of this painting lives within the walls of the perfect room, untouched by the ostensible security of the decorous appropriate. And in the ethereal beauty of the sea storm, amidst the wellbought and plush extravagance, Mr. Diderot finds himself at his desk in mind embrace with the beautiful ancient Greek courtesan Lais.

The successful honey-tongued orator Demosthenes was willing to pay a thousand drachmas for a night with her. When she saw him, she raised the price to ten thousand drachmas.

But she gave herself to Diogenes for nothing. This Cynic, honest devotee of reason, urinated on people who disagreed with him, defecated in the theatre, masturbated in public, and pointed at people with his middle finger.

With the flexibility of his hetaera, Mr. Diderot at desk whirled between worlds framed in 3D socialized order and framed in 2D phantasmal chaos. He also has Lais for nothing.

Immanuel Kant characterized the Enlight- enment as human emergence from self incurred immaturity, from lack of courage to reason without the guidance of others. Kant’s motto is “Dare to Know.”

Dare to wake up. Dare to deconstruct the narrative.

The earliest etymological root of the word narrative means to know. The skillful knower tells tales with collapsing and telescoping frames that allow for fancy robes and dumpy rooms, for the beauty of storms and the relinquishing to love. There can even be flying in the dead of night, on broken wings, in moments constantly aris-

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