Recently I’ve been feeling out of words. My mind, when intending towards the object of my communication - you -, falters and recedes into my interior. What can I say to bring you comfort, or to rouse you to action? What can I say to myself to offer any change to my internal state, or the way I interact with the world? This at-a-loss-ness is a tell-tale sign of what Lacan would call the “Real”.
Jacques Lacan, the famous french Psychoanalyst defined the Real as “outside of language and inassimilable to symbolisation”1. I am, and I would argue, we are, experiencing the absencing of our meaning-making faculties. The primary human venture - to make meaning out of experience is being whisked away from our reach, alleviating itself from our grasp, evacuating itself from our collective consciousness.
Of course, we are still left with our opinions, our beliefs, our casual quotidian registers. We are not aphasics quite yet. There is still nots of human noise - “speech” occurring despite this impossibility.
What is occurring now is a space of pure action and reaction, a spontaneous confrontation with the Real. The Real is terrifying, not only because it involves pain and suffering, even cruelty and injustice, but because it is beyond our ability to assimilate it into our experience. The Real is terrifying because it resists sense - while it is potentially analyzeable at an abstract level, by understanding the levers of the political economy, collective psychosis, and greed, hatred and delusion, it resists capture by the immediate meaning-making of our narrativization hardware.
A year ago, I encouraged readers to go outside, to yoke oneself to the world, despite the terrifying insanity of the present. What has a year of this administration brought us? More suffering? More clarity of purpose?
Although it is becoming harder and harder to speak, impossible even, to put into words the suffering, callousness and cruelty of The State, we must try. We must try to communicate with ourselves and each other how we are feeling, what we believe the next right step is, what there is left to do. In this way we will survive, and resist the tide of ominous silence that accompanies the theft of our common liberty.
And, getting off my high horse - I must also admit a coincidental truth - that thoughts are thoughts and nothing more.
“All your thoughts are garbage. You may think that some of them are good but you should consider the possibility that all your thoughts are garbage.” ~Ajahn SumedhoThis gesture gives me tremendous relief because it allows me to let go of my attachment to thoughts, even to ones as beautiful as justice or ethics. This is not to say that these things don’t matter, that we shouldn’t strive towards our ideals, whatever they may be, but that we consider our ideals within a broader sense of what is. What that broader sense is, is up to us.
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