the things we couldn't say

There are things we couldn't say. We have words for such occasions as well. There are things we must not say, even if the heart speaks them.

One thinks of the medieval world as a world of correspondences, a world in which everything stands for something else. The metaphysical/shamanistic/romantic mind cannot allow anything to exist on its own, a name without essence.

For some the history of the world is this coming to see clearly. The great desire to stand or walk alone in the world, without the gaze of the other (Other), like Rousseau's first man who moves from heath to city, shivering in his loneliness, with only a dull remembrance of the former colours, the multivalent unity of thought.

Through time what survives? The most fundamental conditions of life and our responses to them. Our most fundamental gestures, when all has been said and done, retain the quality of something archaic and true, a central strain to our being that we cling on to through the vicissitudes of time.

In the light of experience. Something is furthered by modernity's rejection of the medieval world. The simple piety of ordinary believers will transform itself and flow, when religious sensibilities ebb, into a quiet and calm appreciation of an ordinary life. A frail, transient happiness.

And yet, and yet, without a sense of being anchored in a meaningful world the imagination will take us to strange lands, without a readable map. There will be no legitimation from the 'object' of our love, only the love itself which transfers value onto what comes within its reach. And so it is, we blow hot and cold, never sure of what will last and what will fall. In our hearts a part of us wishes it just so. Finally, a human being will find himself in the gaze of another human being and find his peace in the world and that will suffice. But there is another part of us which hasn't completely forgotten and it rejects any sense of 'home' or conformity, reconciliation.

The great paradox of the modern age is, as Hannah A saw, the more we believe life on earth is our only destiny, the more we desire to escape it, the more alienated we feel. And the great disasters of the last century..what were they but an attempt to build a kind of heaven on earth?

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Why do those in academia find it so hard to speak honestly, plainly? No doubt part of the problem is that academics are by temperament usually withdrawn from society in the first place (that is what drew them to academia, after all). But it is also that the emphasis on specialization, on technical and arcane language, contributes to the obfuscation. They write for one another and the structure of the Ph.D programme, as well as the nature of publishing, results in a very narrow measure of communication. It is also the case that the sheer number of people writing and thinking has the unfortunate consequence of people repeating truths that were well understood in a previous generation in but a more fragmentary fashion. In the rarefied air of academia there can only be marginal contributions to an already vast accumulation of knowledge with the result that it is rare for any one academic-unless she is a genius- to grasp something that even bears a minimal resemblance to the notion of "the discipline" as a whole.

It is impossible to keep abreast of all the developments in one's area, let alone have anything but a rudimentary understanding of the historical development of ideas in the field. There may be some vague notion of "the classics" -things you think you know but haven't actually read- but by and large history is deemed to be of very little importance. One finds oneself on the top of a mountain, not knowing how one got there or who came before, and all that is left is for you to do is find your own little space into which you can place you little tattered flag. You have a brief and dim understanding that there are other mountains "out there" but since they don't alter your own bearings they can safely be ignored.

And so it is we move about in life, imagining ourselves to have found some partial truth, congratulating ourselves on our new-won freedom from dogma, tradition, superstition, myth, looking down at the flatlanders and their erroneous ways. Only we have taken up the challenge of living in fragmentary times, nay, of even recognizing that time is fragmentary. We latecomers stand tall and wonder why it's so very cold.