can be caricatured
as 10,000 pseudoscientists
in search of something to measure
for if you tried to reconstruct
the 20th century human psyche
or diagnose the 20thC human predicament
based solely on those ten-thousand's
testimony
your reconstruction would be shallow indeed
not even recognisably human
abstract statistics on human lab-rats
or at best stilted case-histories
feigning 'objectivity' by suppressing humanity
but imagine we could offer them
ten million family snapshots to measure
to classify by apparent emotional relationships
to trace the emergence of character traits
toddler dances unselfconsciously
kindergartener mugs self-consciously
girl tween begs the camera to flatter her
adolescent grows surly
open personality closes up
too cool to grin
first love imbalanced
one leads, one follows
intimations of disaster
even in the wedding pix
tough guy transformed by fatherhood
etc etc etc
the classic literary themes
now accessible as objective data records
ready for a new strategy of 'measurement'
