Friday 9 December 2011

"If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" (George Eliot in "Middlemarch")

We generally neglect huge chunks of life... and these chunks tend to remain in the gloom of our individual and social blind spots... zones of the unthinkable... like forever locked chambers in a mudcastle... everything takes place as if we need to let life pass us by just to cope with it...

Instead, we compensate... we build beautiful air castles where all chambers are open and clean and the walls are made of glass... and we're generally better of without knowing too much about what is going on on down there on the ground... where we're dirty and finite...

This has been said before... remember Bourdeiu's preaching about the salvation of misrecognition... or Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" famous postulate. Still I can't help but being attracted to that lethal "roar which lies on the other side of silence". It calls to me! And I feel like I was always here, waiting for its call. Perhaps I find the wide open chambers and glass walls a bit too clean and neat. There's something missing. I need some dirt!

And how magnificent it must be to sigh for the last time while drifting away to the roaring tunes of growing grass.