March 29, 2019: In Defense of Reticence, Need for Ablution, Time And Space

"The operative word is reticence.  In reticence one finds space and time; in space and time one finds reflection; in reflection one finds wisdom; in wisdom, understanding."
                   ----from "The Quotations of Chairman Joe"

“Mount a small rebellion against the quickening of time”, exhorts conservative columnist David Brooks in The New York Times. (1) About this brother Brooks is quite right.

“There is a rapid, dirty river of information coursing through us all day. If you're in the news business, or a consumer of the news business, your reaction to events has to be instant or it is outdated. If you're on social media, there are these swarming mobs who rise out of nowhere, leave people broken and do not stick around to perform the patient Kintsugi act of gluing them back together.” (2)

Brooks' illustrated his point through reference to Kintsugi bowls which were made centuries ago and when broken in shards painstakingly glued back together with a technique, using lacquer and gold that rendered them more interesting and more valuable than they were before.

“There's a dimension of depth to them. You sense the original life they had, the rupture and then the way they were so beautifully healed. And of course, they stand as a metaphor for the people, families and societies we all know who have endured their own ruptures and come back beautiful, vulnerable and whole in their broken places.

“I don't know about you,” writes Brooks, “but I feel a great hunger right now for timeless places like these. The internet has accelerated our experience of time, and Donald Trump has upped the pace of events to permanent frenetic.” (3)

Indeed he has. But Disgustus is merely the symptom not the disease. Brooks in conjuring other examples to explain his need sheds additional light. He talks about an artist named Makoto Fujimara whose work requires time to appreciate. It is not the stuff—like so much modernist shit that can be beheld and dismissed at a glance. No, Fujimara takes time. It takes time to be drawn into his work, for his work to reveal its textures and complexities. Time, which in the modern age, appears to be in short supply.

Similarly, the savaging of time by the modern age when it comes to the Sabbath:

“The great philosopher of time is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. In his great book 'The Sabbath,' he points out that the first sacred thing in the Bible is not a thing, it is a time period, the seventh day. Judaism, he argues, is primarily a religion of time, not space

“'The seventh day,' he writes, 'is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity. Indeed, the splendor of t he day is expressed in terms of abstentions'

“The Sabbath, he continues, is not a rest from the other six days. It is the peak experience the other six days point toward. On this day the Orthodox do less and in slowness can glimpse the seeds of eternity.” (4)

Likewise, the Greek concept of Kairos, a time measured not quantitatively, but qualitatively, time measured not by the clock but by the experience.  It was the Greeks that gave us representative and participatory governance but a governance that required not only the comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the "polis" (5) but the need for reticence and reflection embodied in the concept of Kairos, a time when one must sometimes experience life "slowly, serenely, but thickly." (6)

Yes! Again, not to belabor the point, this is a modern malady that predates tRUMP by several decades. Over the last half-century, we have been about the business of warping time in the name of commerce. It was, after all, to meet the needs of the shipping industry that mechanical clocks were invented. (7) It was, after all, to meet the needs of the railroad industry that time zones and universal time became absolutely necessary. Finally, it was to meet the needs of the retail industry that the blue laws were overturned and commerce would continue every day of the week if, indeed, every hour. Gone is time and with it space. In what amounts to an ongoing assault on time the market forces have systematically eliminated more and more personal space.

The result is that we are now immersed in turmoil; constantly bombarded with enticements and demands, forever caught in the eternal 'now'; submerged in the cross-currents of an ever more incomprehensible ocean, as the underbelly—from cheap goods to tawdry politics-- is continually pumped unwelcome into our living rooms.

One gasps for air; one seeks the surface if only to momentarily gaze once again upon the stars and fix a position. This takes increasingly strident effort, for it demands that space be cleared and time at the surface.

Imagine if we actually, collectively, paused a day a week and took the time. Perhaps we would once again gaze upon the stars and fix our position; once again find our bearings; once again regain our peripheral vision. We would, for the moment, step back from the struggle,  our collective careening from pillar to post, from headlines to outrages. We might then regain perspective, contemplate our true place in the cosmos, and ponder the corruption of our politics, the bankruptcy of our economics, the tawdriness of our ethics and the sterility of our religions.  And, perhaps in the bargain, for the first time comprehend the outrage that mud now sits on the throne, and the throne on mud.

Alas, we possess no time; we are afforded no space; we are given no peace. The Sabbath and its sanctuary have long since been violated. The Capitalist Pig has long since seen to that. This too is a measure of what we've lost.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison

____________

1. Brooks, David. “Longing for An Internet Cleanse” The New York Times. Friday, March 29, 2019 Page A25
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. See previous post, " December 2, 2014: Generation of Swine, The Idiot, Bad Citizenship
6. Op. Cit
7. The sextant was used to find longitude but latitude required a reliable means of keeping time. One needs both a reading of longitude and latitude to fix one's position in the open sea.