The silence of the country gets inside me like sand from a sandstorm. You can’t close up all the cracks. The sand comes through the walls somehow. After a weekend in the country, my brain has calmed down, no longer spiking raw against the surface of the city streets where I live. A lot of things seem petty. Pragmatic things stand out. So do relationships, and the stuff of character inside them, the core things that make or break them.
My cat’s eyes are green, and my kids are happy. My partner needed space, and she got it. I needed time with our kids. The roads were sleepy, and the fall was beautiful. The politics were divided on the signs along the roads in fields by gravel drives. Social media seemed stupid, and talking with people seemed like pretty much everything when it comes to community.
I don’t want to be book smart and world dumb, but book dumb and world lost, because then I can remain social. To be dumb is to be temporarily unable to speak. It’s to appear unintelligent because you are not playing the language game of the “smart.” I don’t want what smart people offer. Smartness lacks the civility of slowness. Speed is elite. There’s little philosophical about it, that is, if philosophy is practiced with others just as human society is, if others work on their own time, if to be open to others is not to foreclose meeting.
Ideal Oblivion
Wonder as a living art involves the virtue of getting lost in searching to make sense of things. There, in between the things that did make sense, you tarry, alive to the apparent impossibilities. This work of necessity trembles possibilities. Have you failed to see what could make sense? But why could it? Under which conditions would this part of the world come into view anew?
The best part of dumbness is being on the inside of what makes no sense yet involves some glimmer of order. The pattern doesn’t align, but there seems to be the hint of one. My world seems narrow; my ignorance sharp. But it isn’t as though I lack the mind’s agency. I just don’t know yet; I can’t seem to figure out the things in front of me.
Getting lost in the world is ideal in this sense: in being temporarily unable to speak, I am taking in the wider order. I am taking in the pattern, the idea in its early sense or etymology. To be dumb in this sense is ideal.
So it was that we drove into Minerva, Ohio, population around a few or more thousand. The kids and I were gone for the weekend. Misty was taking a break to tear up the upstairs bathroom floor. The general election was right around the corner (it was the weekend before Nov. 5). Among other things, I was going to think about my country, for I am responsible to others for being a citizen in this land where I live.
On the first morning, the gunshots ranged the ridges off into the woods. It’s deer season: time to kill large bucks. We are vegans, knowing that the population of deer can lead to wider dying when there isn’t predation. Yet the methods are everything, and behind them is the deeper issue: that this society’s relationship to the land is torturous; that there isn’t the social cohesion to have the conversation. Things are this thin between people who live together inside the same nominal governance: dumb when we meet each other, smart when we pass by.
The Devil’s Bargain
In Playing and Reality, Winnicott suggests that our capacity to represent order—the symbol—grows to meet the need for independence when we are deprived of momentary care and separate out from the all-encompassing parent. The “transitional object”—the teddy bear, for instance—becomes the thing that binds the anxiety of separation into a play of fantasy and disillusionment: this is like the parent, but not them. Such play becomes, iteratively, a sense of reality doubling as consciousness, a nascent sense of oneself apart from, adjoining the world in which one can potentially relate.
I am book dumb with this book in Minerva. In adult terms, the loss of the parent is the loss of moral relations. There is no grown-up in the room. How should I deal with the loss of moral relations? Clearly, by finding them again in the discourse I fabricate through meeting others in symbolization. When we talk together, we meet each other’s needs for contact while accepting and respecting each other’s distance. You can do this. I can do this. We check in on the edges of each other’s fantasies. We cause trouble for them.
So, I am sitting in the man-cave of my host while the kids play upstairs with his step-grandson, a happy and nice kid, said my son—observant, too, I noted. The host is an open and welcoming guy, too, straight up, and understandably pissed off by social B.S. He’s invited me into this zone because we got talking. I’m sharing stuff from my life too. Over some beers, this is what guys can do where I’m from; it’s a way to do “caring masculinity,” not abusive masculinity.
The B.S., he says, can be found in “city-slickers.” The bullshit is not about truth, as Frankfurt noted, but about relationship. Slick people don’t want to get messy with each other or seem vulnerable, and the way they do that is to perform elite status. In Winnicott’s terms, they engage in fantasy and flee disappointment; so, they end up unreal. Their fantasy is provided by social transcendence, which provides the illusion of protection against loss of love.
But the loss the infant experiences while crying and alive is the loss of contact, the withdrawal of the most primary social bonds. The abandonment among us who are adults is the withdrawal of relatedness and our societal core, the moral relations. Social inequality cannot manage that abandonment but contributes to it. The enclaves of the entitled and manipulative echelon have set themselves up against relatedness. This is their devil’s bargain.
Altamira Dreams
Socrates showed that philosophy is not about books but about each of us, getting by. What does it take to dig down into your own oblivion? The ignorance is the void, and it is the truth that emerges when the fantasy has come undone. But we can be here with each other, and we can talk. We can take space to think by ourselves; we can take stock, reflect, question, and make decisions that change the course of our lives, even if only subtly. The whole point of relating is to create a world that we experience as such, separate and connected, others moving in their own way, responsive, and oneself adaptive yet independent.
If the symbolizations are not helping in the man-cave, where do they help? If the discourse does not range the land with the deer shot, where is it going? If talking does not involve governing our lives together, what country do we share? Oblivion and philosophy join in the local and cosmopolitan task of being human, born of Earth, with a screwed-up past and an uncertain future, to dream with others through symbols that project and disappoint at once, tantalizing and incomplete.
The Cave of Altamira is a Paleolithic wonder of the world. Over 30,000 years old, the symbols along its ceilings show a time when, in the minds of Earth scientists Williams and Zalasiewicz, human beings expressed their anxious, excitable, and adventuring souls through wonder in the presence of other animals, rather than domination over them. For a thousand or more years, the deer painted by air brushes made from bird bone in that underground site of Paleolithic culture were hunted and admired, hungered for and revered. The symbols suggest that there was the presence of a parent in the room of that people.
Not so in America now. The dreams of the cave are civilized while the images of smart media are barbaric: “smart,” fast, judgmental and so-knowing, and intrinsically yearning for division of an “us” from a “them.” The media is no message in the sense of Winnicott’s symbol. It is the hardening of fantasy in the loss of relation unacknowledged as such. Perhaps the first order of governance should be the collective articulation of a social space that continually disrupts our own fantasies and partially dissolves them through the hard play of meeting. Then we can manifest the needs that have not been met.
In that play, I wish to be dumb. May I remain an idiot for whom the public is always a construction worked out among idiots unlike myself. May the smart people pass over me, and the earth remain under me, the season’s leaves crackling with each swell of wind, the energy of winter drawn inward toward listening, anger, and heart.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
