Free The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler Page A

is another sample from this game of definitions: What is
a sadist? A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist. The link-concept is 'kindness', bisociated with two diametrically
opposed meanings; moreover the whole definition is open to two different
interpretations:

(a) the sadist does a kindness to the masochist by torturing him;
(b) the sadist is torturing the masochist by being kind to him.

In both cases the sadist must go against his own nature, and the
definition turns out to be in fact a variant of the logical paradox about
the Cretan who asserts that all Cretans are liars. But we can get around
it by deciding that in either interpretation 'kind' should be understood
both literally and metaphorically at the same time; in other words, by
playing simultaneously two games governed by opposite rules. We shall
see that such reversals of logic play a considerable part in
scientific discovery (pp. 191-9). They are also a recurrent motif in
poetry and literature. One of my favourite Donne quotations is a line
from the Holy Sonnets :
'For O, for some, not to be martyrs is a martyrdom.'

I have given examples of the bisociation of professional with commonsense
logic, of metaphorical with literal meaning, of contexts linked by sound
affinities, of trains of reasoning travelling, happily joined together,
in opposite directions. The list could be extended beyond the limits of
patience. In fact any two matrices can be made to yield a comic effect of
sorts, by finding an appropriate link between them and infusing a drop of
adrenalin. Take as a random example two associative contexts centred on
the unpromising key-words 'alliteration' and 'hydrotherapy'. (The example
actually originated in a challenge following a discussion; I am merely
quoting it, with apologies, to show that in principle it can be done):
Gossip Column Item: Lady Smith-Everett, receiving me in her sumptuous
boudoir, explained that she had always suffered from 'the most maddening
rashes' until she met her present physician, a former professor
ofpsycho-hydrotherapy at the University of Bucharest. By employing a
new test which he invented, the Professor discovered that she had 'a
grade 4 allergy' against sojourning in spas and holiday resorts with the
initial letter C. No more visits to Capri and Carlsbad for Lady S-E.!

It is not even necessary that the two matrices should be governed by
incompatible codes. One can obtain comic effects by simply confronting
quantitatively different scales of operation, provided that they differ
sufficiently in order of magnitude for one scale to become negligible
compared with the other. The result is the type of joke made according
to the formula: the mountains laboured, the birth was a mouse.

With an added twist you get this kind of dotty dialogue -- between a
nervous bus-passenger and the conductor:
What's the time?

Thursday.

Good Lord! I must get off.

This is a serial affair in which not two but three matrices are
successively involved, each with a different scale of measurement. M1
has a grid of hours and minutes; M2 of days of the week. The two differ
in fact only in quantity but provide qualitatively different frames of
reference; the third matrix has spatial instead of temporal co-ordinates
-- where to get off, not when. It would be impossible to orientate one's
behaviour with reference to these three different grids at the same time;
yet that is precisely what the tri-sociated passenger is trying to do.

Let me repeat: any two universes of discourse can be used to fabricate
a joke. Lewis Carroll sent the following contribution to a philosophical
symposium:
Yet what mean all such gaieties to me
Whose life is full of indices and surds?
x² + 7x + 53
= xx/3'

The universes of verbal and mathematical symbols are linked by pure
sound-affinity -- with rhyme but without reason. When T. E. Lawrence
joined the ranks as Private Shaw, Noel Coward wrote to him that famous
letter beginning 'Dear 338171 (may I call you