Convention excuses us to mentally slumber while still allowing raw emotions to gurgle up. We emote while the trappings of con-ventio (Latin for with agreement) organize and arrange how we make sense and reflect on these emotions. Convention provides a scenario or a drama that plays itself out in a predictable, time-honored, public-sanctioned path (patho-pathos) that accounts for and measures radical interruptions of exteriority. Emotions (from Latin exmovere – to move out) move us and stir us. They rouse us from our sleep, our gravitational heaviness. They demand a response.
We are historical beings not just beings with historical facts (i.e., The Civil War ended in 1865). We sleep together oh wonderful humans! We dream insentia, in our absence. We always elude the lucid, the interrupting (radical) beyond of other (alterity), the profound emotion with our dreary, repetitious enumerations. We help each other sleep in our shared signs, our flag waving patriotism, our “knowing” gossip laden tribes, our righteousness in the face of “evil”. We dream in the drunken, inebriation of our idolatrous universal. This is what it means to be historical beings.
Our historical-ness makes us old. As we get old, we live in a place that no longer exists (if it ever did) and thus we live in our absence. It becomes embarrassingly noticeable as we get “older”. We are not quite “there”. We live some siren song of the past and only when we bump into a wall in our night-ness do we raise our heavy brows momentarily. The pleasant surprise of a delectable new taste gets reduced to a bland diet of sustenance. Passion and sensuality become something that happened in the “good ‘ol days”. Photographs freeze perpetually the “once when I was”, the “used to be”, the “at one time”. We sink in rigor mortise that reaches out well ahead of our merciful death.
Religion seeks to capture, dream away, our death as well but the grim reaper is wilder than our historicality. Our convention pales in the face of that moment to come when our most glorious or hideous, slumbering collective imaginations (image-ings) no longer offer us solace but pull us into a radical vortex, a neuter, a thing that can’t be dreamed away. Truly, death comes mercifully to the “old”.
When death comes to the young, the future, the yet to be, we are thrown back upon ourselves, we feel strong emotions and we must co-invent (convention) a reason, a purpose that justifies, venerates, martyrs, placates (holds the place of) the loss until the emotion can subside and we can return to the leveling everydayness of our dreams.
My friends we are all co-geniuses (co-originators) of a place to dwell. A place that gives meaning, explanation and consolation. Alas, all our places get old and sink away, die and are forgotten. The young must continually re-invent, re-wrest truth-dreams, spruce up the ‘ol dwellings until they too move to oblivion.
Such strong undercurrents pull us under and under-mine our confidences. Is this a sinister attempt to toy with us? I think not. I think everything must be taken as a wake up call to our soul. We must shed the weight of sleep, rouse ourselves and look as newborns into the face of profundity. We must throw off the weightiness of our conventional, historicising slumbers and welcome the radically new, the other that is beyond us. We must welcome the stranger as strange, as wild, as someone with news that grabs us and questions us. My friends, death is our best clue that we are yet babes looking with fascination into eternity – not endless co-leveling-dreaming but horizons yet to be, radical otherness beyond our collective imaginations, a language yet to evolve. These emotions, sensations, loves that momentarily awaken us are hints of what we have yet to learn. They may question and even topple our conventions but rise from your ashes in a sun-dewed, new day that allows only the eyes of an infant. The distant call is to grow beyond ourselves, our desire to sleep (sink) together and welcome that other that desires our attention for the first time.