Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 1/12/23
The mountain climber observes the restrictive face of the mountainside above and just before him. His earliest memory, when, no more than an infant, he was yet lugged about in a carrier from national park to national park, is of the climber before him taking hold of the rock face and disappearing by familiar movements into the thin air. All about looks confused, but that is only because we lack the experience of the climber, whose long, toilsome, and a particular emphasis should be placed on thankless, practice summons handholds and footholds from the confusion. These are but rocks, in themselves inert, although in congress with man they provide the climber purpose. Through that conduit, they supply the crowd, myself among them, with a purpose we cannot find elsewhere. In our own lives, we can only go by trails, although, as these have previously been carved out for us by the parks commission, anyone really could reach similar heights as the climber, and maybe proceed higher. Little is known about the climber. As far as we have travelled, long as our caravan has come to stretch, we are only interested in watching the climber disappear into thin air, and our interest has nearly expired. We gather up our picnic and talk much about how we are going to continue decorating the caravan, what we are to write on the banners, and what colors we are to use, on our way down from the leveler area at the base of the crag. Word will reach us of where next the climber will make his ascent, and we will gather there, only just before he begins to climb and at a moment when he cannot conscience conversation, so absolute must be his concentration. Behind us, although we cannot be bothered to look between the pines, the bright lines made of synthetic fiber sway merrily against the rock face, conveying the tremor of his precise actions high above indistinctly toward the earth.
You can read more from Russell Block in The Rialto Books Review:
At the Eastern European café near the house, we talked about how mind-bending it is that the quantification of all human knowledge is unfathomable. From this morass, a tradition, whose methods have been various, has arisen that aims to vouchsafe our most important knowledge. There are various levels of emergence. Local knowledge may be vital to persons with proximity to the locality and all but useless to those removed from it by miles. In certain parts of the world, and in certain environments, knowledge might be salient, or even practically all-encompassing, a matter of life or death, on a block by block basis and fall off just as quickly. A matter like the germ theory of disease is relevant across the spectrum of humanity. Religion gestures toward the hypothesis that spiritual knowledge can be typified across the spectrum of humanity, but it winds up balkanized by earthly cultures. It acknowledges that the divine is unknowable, but that it erects a scaffolding around this unknown that acts as a filter, deciding between good and bad, or holy and profane. That heathens are bound to hell is, at one level of consideration, simply an acknowledgment that cultures strive for distinction, and these distinctions produce differential results for the populace. You can view damnation as a metaphor for the living benefit or detriment of a culturally enforced value. The threat of hell is of use in that it is a threat employed to enforce behavior, just as the promise of heaven is of use in that it is a promise; the rest may be no more than fodder for the imagination. (As I lay With My Head In Your Lap Camerado - Walt Whitman).
Half-Price Books, without, I do not think, quite meaning to do so, provided an oasis of aesthetic entirety in a locality that had been denuded of background knowledge or culture. Farmers, or even horticulturists possess a conception of nature, the knowledge of which articulates one’s relationship to the medium. The suburbs had ideas about construction or destruction, accounting or management, but these matters are applied, limited uses of human coherence. They were, moreover, siloed off in the distant, bland, and blandly distant, workplaces of suburbanites. A lack of robust knowledge on the part of the parents produces alienation in their considerate offspring. We were taught how to drive, but not how to reconcile ourselves to the time that would be spent driving in order to meet life’s evolving demands. The wealth of human experience is even more imponderable, and less recorded, than the domain of human knowledge, although modern methods of communication seem to have reversed the flow of this stream. A culture that emphasizes knowledge is greatly to be preferred, in part because allegory, the synthesis of knowledge and experience, is more relevant to our experience, and more reliable, than a culture of testimonials, which are more misleading than instructive. This is due to how readily each of us goes about misleading ourself.