Ours, they never tire of repeating, is a world of information. Ours is an ‘economy’ and a ‘network’ of ideas and exchanges. We should think of it like an abstract painting – like one of those 1970s child-fingerpainting-on-canvas things you would see hanging at a contemporary art museum. The foreground teems with heaps of verbal and imagistic trash. Vulgar clichés. Pornographic scenes. Moronic aphorisms. Dishonest pseudo-memoires.
How do we organize the mass of information that surrounds us? How do we preserve our sanity and our senses in the face of such stimulation? ‘Post-modern thought’ – understood, per David Bentley Hart, as the West’s awakening from the “nightmare of philosophy” and acceptance of “the irreducibly aesthetic character and ultimate foundationlessness of truth” – revels in flea-bitten symbolisms and compulsions to erratic capitalization. It tells us that we are Subjectivities faced with the Fact of the Other. Our “greatest minds” (academics, if you can hold the thought without laughter) are hyperconcerned with mapping the boundaries of ever-shifting categories. They speak in prattling and apologetic prose (“effete writing” as a more forthright blogger might say). They are yesterday’s mute and inglorious Miltons – un-tongue-tied at last. Liberated by education for all. Theory for all. Symbols for all.
We cede to the system. In fact, we are happy to interpret the world as a symbol because we wish to imagine our lives as such. We would like to believe that the events that befall us are prefigured unities that will eventually, one day, coalesce into ‘something.’ What thing? Preferably a narrative. Or, if not, a singular metaphor or message. This sudden tragedy, this unforeseeable joy, this must be a sign of something. Of what? Cosmic intervention, narrative resolution, the existence of a single, irradicable aesthetic force that compels us to seek beauty.
This is delusion. No universal lies behind the personal. No symbol can, or should, efface particularity. Our lives are essentially our own. Our potshards are not those of our neighbor. Our tragedies and victories belong to us.
The world is vast and bewildering in its variety. It is not what the Freudians would have us believe – a collection of symbols and archetypes configured in combinatorically enumerable ways. Symbolism is a secure, and ultimately illusory, retreat. There is no cure except to embrace your difference. Sit with your potshard and examine its jagged edges. Resist the (immediate) urge to uncork yourself and decant the blather that first comes to mind. Sit. Examine. Resist. Finally, you may look at that of your neighbor. Take care first to notice where his fractures and yours coheres. Observe that, here, his curves and yours flattens. Notice the discoloration at this corner and the bronze shine on that. Sit. Examine. Resist. Meaningless solidarity is that born of symbols. We desire a different kind of solidarity: that of ships passing in the night, illuminated and endarkened by each other’s fleeting shadows.