The Loss

Kyran (Luchen Zhang)

Paul Woolridge

College Writing

13th July

The Loss

I think “The loss of sovereign”(488), as Percy mentioned for many times in “The Loss of Creature”, is the loss of ability to discover the essence of creatures around.

The sightseers are separated from the gladding scene by the “symbolic complex” (482), which is a barrier between them. They are misled by the preformulation in the pictures or postcards, and the sightseer “measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex” (482). They are delighted when the scene they see now is consistent with what they learned from the past. They are losing their right of discretion because the “symbolic complex” they used to measure things, is not obtained from their actual experience, but from others’ perspectives. They are surrendered to “the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex” (482), and can never gain the exclamations that Cardenas felt when he approached the Canyon without the “wall”, the symbolic complex in front of him. However, even that they occasionally have the chance to see and know something with their sovereign, they are also trapped in the role of surrender. Percy says an example of a couple’s life in an Indian village af ter they were disgusted with their experience in Mexico, and they feel “Now I am really living” (486).Actually, they are not satisfied with what they experienced in the village, but are pleased with the experience makes they like two true sightseers. As Pe rcy states they “are filling the role of

sightseer[s] and the sight is living up to the prototype of sights” (486). The couples share their feeling with their ethnologist friends, is not for the purposes of sharing but “they need the ethnologist to certif y their experience as genuine” (486).They want to show their completion of being successful sightseers, and that is the aim of going sightseeing. As a result, they lose the right to authentically know and see the World without consciousness of their loss.

The same thing happen to the layman, the natives in the New Mexico desert, who “knows nothing of the nature of the object he has found and does not care to know” (488). His role is the finder and returner, and he just wants to gain the certification from experts, but does not concerns about the thing he found. The layman downrightly believes what the authority says, and totally ignores his discretion and awareness of the object, and he still does not realize that this capacities are disappearing from him.

I think this loss is like what the students lost in the banking education. They are surrendered to the t eachers, like the sightseers are covered by the “symbolic complex” and the layman is suppressed by the experts. They lose the ability of critical thinking and transforming, and they learn knowledge through others’ narration. Rodriguez tells that when he was in high school, he wanted to be a teacher after he grows up, and he “never tried to explain that it was not the occupation of teaching I yearned for as much as it was something more elusive: I wanted to be like my teachers, to possess their knowledge, to assume their authority, their confidence, even to assume a teacher’s persona” (552). Students are mimics, not explorers. This is similar with that when the sightseers wants to

satisfy themselves by comparing the present and the preformed past. They do not appreciate the scenery seen through their eyes, but through the pair of glasses made of “symbolic complex”. They lose the talent to ju dge things from their own perspectives.

Discretion is the ability for an individual to experience the world by himself from his aspects. However, people have been losing these capacities without their consciousness. Their eyes are covered by the masques deliberately put by the experts, authorities, or the narrators. We need to recover from it, and we need that ability to know ourselves and the world truly and better.