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Suppose there is something that prevents us from seeing, some screen that slides between us and the world, something that prevents us from even trying. What is it? My bet is that what gets in the way of our seeing clearly is our need to act, again and again, and, an essential consequence of that need, what we know, our knowledge of the world, — above all as expressed in words, names, the titles we give things.
Socrates took the words away from the people he spoke with, including himself. Though explaining nothing more than who they were and what they did, the person progressively lurched in speech, turned about, stammering, losing the ability to talk, until they hit rock bottom: speechlessness, motionlessness. He had brought them to the point where they didn’t know anymore what to say, what they had been saying, what they wanted to say. They lost the ability to act, to move, to utter. Past the hiccups, under the waves of frustration, confusion, one glimpses the lesson – a simple quietness. In the end Socrates was an usher, a doorman: whoever he was talking to he hurried to this silence and bathed them in it, including himself, over and over again. To him it was an essential pivot in real education, a cleansing, an awakening.
George Fox always began his worship with silence. Understanding that we must fast from language if we are ever really to taste it, that we cannot hear what we expect to hear if we are to hear aright, he would “famish from words” his listeners, on occasion sitting in silence for hours before giving way to articulate sound. In the process he breathed new life into worship, community, preacher and church. By sitting, waiting, and only then rewording, he reanimated the world, down to the days of the week and months of the year. Emerson too says that good as discourse is, silence is better, and shames it.
To live right one must cultivate a disdain for words, hollow words. They blind and deceive us, and put us to shame when we perceive the error. Good sense looks past words and titles to the thing itself, knowing the difference between the two and filling it up with reverence. How much of the good of physical exercise, of mindfulness and meditation, comes of being released from the stalls of language, the lazy arrogant stalls of language? And we who would otherwise live unintermittently in words — there is no course of treatment for us other than ritualistic silence, which washes us of our knowledge, our illusion of knowing.
The problem is that once we have a name for a thing, we think we know it and have no reason to look into it or investigate it anymore. “This is a school,” “this is a teacher,” “this is education,” “this is worship,” “this is wealth,” “this is health,” “this is success.” Once we have a name for it, we jump up like children when we see it coming, enthusiastically shouting out its title, and think we are done, — “what’s next?” We sort it, we put it in its drawer, its box, its place. But what conundrums are built into the giving of names and titles! As soon as we have a name for a thing, as soon as take ourselves to recognize it, to be seeing it again, we stop seeing it. We do not pause, do not approach it and look at it for its own sake and in its own right. “If we know it already, why would we?” How easy names make knowing! we seem to think.
Whatever usefulness there is in this, there is more ignorance. The recognized, the named is the gum in our eyes and, to start seeing clearly, we need to wash it out. Far from being easy, naming something correctly, naming it with its true, natural name, is a hard thing and a long process. We learn the true names of things at the end: at the end of the game, the end of experiencing it, the end of living.
In order to begin, we have to strip the names off things, the easy, conventional names. We have to let everything be strange, unplaceable, unspeakable. We have to enter into an obliteration of the conventionalities. And we have to struggle from there to find the words for what we see, and, struggling, learn to see, to speak, to know. Because knowing something is not naming it, seeing it again, recognizing it, but always seeing it for the first time, with surprise and curiosity, – being on the way to knowing it, — trying to know it and, in the end, failing to know it completely.
Did a part of this essay resonate? Did it make you think of something? Or do you have another perspective? Leave a comment and expand the conversation.
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If you’re interested in learning more about George Fox, the best places to begin are Rufus Jones’ writing about him, like this introduction, and William Penn’s testimony.
I love your exploration, your curiosity, your ongoing learning (to educate means in its original form “to draw up from the dark unknown into the light of conscious knowing”). What an exciting lifelong process of gradual illumination growing from within, expanding out. I look forward to joining your online community.
I am reminded how naming the plants and animals is the first power granted to man in the Genesis story. This showed the control and power that man has over nature. What a comforting illusion, although one that can really, as you point out, can take the life out of the living entities that surround us.
I am also reminded that the in the beginning was the word. It is the greatest power of our world. Or...not? Is there something deeper? Is word just the greatest way to manipulate and attempt to control our world?