Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 11/2/22
A robust notion about the world, to my surprise, came to mind yesterday. I cannot account for its origin, seeing as my brain has not been open to expansive consideration of late. Too much in the way of practical concern has kept my mind from ranging the field of all possible concern, alike in name, but different entirely in aspect. The idea is this: acute incidents in life’s flow create a node that persists after the rationale for its constitution has receded. As with airline networks, the larger this node is, the more novel experience, whose origin and terminus are unrelated to the larger node, has to first be routed through this node. Shakespeare presents a network with a mapping that is unique, one where echelon is everywhere subjugated to human invention, rather than the opposite way around, as is so often the case in life. Allowing for all possibilities is akin to transcendence. In our early adulthood, our network is overcharged with energy. The lucky few who have a surprisingly robust network of experience, by dint of natural ability, a conducive environment, fortunate occurrences, or perhaps a kind of genius, do not need to suffer from energy that surges across a network without an outlet. If a beneficial natural environment can be a boon to our perception, then its degradation, which the internet automates, can result in truly chaotic suffering. Secondary maps of meaning, like literature, are incredibly important for the decommissioning of acute personal nodes, through which the entire field of experience is forced to travel.
This routing, as it is not the result of all being in its right place and considered in its own right, becomes analytic, egomaniacal, and obsessive. A schema has to be devised as to why the manifestly incongruous schema is, in a perverse sense, congruous beyond all doubt, and this results in complexes that are all too common. The egoist, in his desperation to be unique, fails in the first order, and the second order effects can only ever be the emergent phenomenon of what is fundamentally a failing. To exist in a state of distraction is to further congest the network, whereupon the whole does not find clever routes, but rather defaults to its norms, and so compounds the inequity of experience. Before literary criticism can be posited, an argument is required that supports its continued relevance in modern life. This requires an observation of the contrapositive, that life has a self-subjugating and deranging quality in the absence of literary consideration or the consideration of any sufficiently robust aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual domain.