A REVALUATION OF HOODS VIS-A-VIS UMBRELLAS

It took me a long while to get around to seeing a parallel between hoods and stars and/or triangles on the one hand, and brollies and crosses on the other, whether on the noumenal planes of space/antitime and time/antispace or, down below, on the phenomenal planes of volume/antimass and mass/antivolume, to divide each between, in general terms, its sensual and sensible alternatives. Previously I had tended to think of hoods as male and brollies as female, since there appeared to be a centripetal/centrifugal distinction between them, but then I began to realize that a sensual/sensible distinction could be discerned which was akin to the distinction between stars and crosses. The hood-wearer was in some sense heathenistic in his subordination, if male, to female criteria, to the female-like symbolism or implication of the hood which, in a manner of speaking, prevailed over him in metachemical (noumenal) or chemical (phenomenal) fashion, depending on the class standpoint, whereas the person utilizing an umbrella was more christianistic, as it were, in his holding aloft of a cross-like structure which, while shielding him from the rain, suggested a male symbolism in its phallic-like tubularity and erectness that connoted rather more with physical (phenomenal) or metaphysical (noumenal) criteria, again according to class. But of course there are two axes, one stretching from northwest to southeast and the other from southwest to northeast, on the intercardinal axial compass which I use to illustrate the distinction between state-hegemonic/church-subordinate criteria on the one hand, and church-hegemonic/state-subordinate criteria on the other hand, and while the one is characterized by the dominance of female criteria in free to bound somatic and bound to free psychic fashion, the other is characterized by the dominance of male criteria in bound to free psychic and free to bound somatic fashion, as in a kind of British/Irish cultural and ethnic divide. For me, this means that both the sensuality of the northwest and sensibility of the southeast of the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis will be dominated by objective criteria in unreflexive vein, whereas both the sensuality of the southwest and sensibility of the northeast of the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis will be dominated by subjective criteria in reflexive vein. In other words, a distinction between uncollapsibles in the one case and collapsibles in the other, whether with regard to hoods or umbrellas. Hence a descent from the uncollapsible hood of the northwest to the uncollapsible brolly of the southeast in the case of the female-dominated state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis, but an ascent, by contrast, from the collapsible (or fold-in) hood of the southwest to the collapsible brolly of the northeast on the male-dominated church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis. A descent, in the one case, from the noumenal sensuality of metachemistry and the noumenal antisensibility of antimetaphysics to the phenomenal antisensuality of antichemistry and the phenomenal sensibility of physics, but an ascent, in the other case, from the phenomenal antisensibility of antiphysics and the phenomenal sensuality of chemistry to the noumenal sensibility of metaphysics and the noumenal antisensuality of antimetachemistry. Those dominated, in autocratic fashion, by the noumenal objectivity of metachemical sensuality will be unreflexive and thus given to uncollapsibles of one sort or another. Those dominated, in theocratic fashion, by the noumenal subjectivity of metaphysical sensibility will be reflexive and thus given to collapsibles of one sort or another. The uncollapsible hood will find its antithesis, within an axis characterized by the dominance of objectivity, in the uncollapsible brolly; the collapsible hood ... its antithesis, within an axis characterized by the dominance of subjectivity, in the collapsible brolly. Therefore hoods are no more necessarily low than brollies high. Hoods, as argued above, can be high (and noumenal) or low (and phenomenal), pretty much like drama and poetry. Just so, across the sensual/sensible divide, brollies can be low (and phenomenal) or high (and noumenal), pretty much like fiction and philosophy. But a star and/or triangle vis-a-vis cross-like distinction between the two approaches to weather protection will continue, I believe, to prevail, as though in a contrast between left-wing (whether extreme or moderate, noumenal or phenomenal) and right-wing (whether moderate or extreme, phenomenal or noumenal) criteria, thereby suggesting that hoods are less christianistic than heathenistic and umbrellas, by contrast, more christianistic than heathenistic, despite appearances to the contrary.