“O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B. Yeats
Emerging from the rhetorical swamp of the latest string of tweets, one must ask: how can we know the message from the messenger? How can we credit policy proposals that emerge from self-serving vulgarities of both speech and deed? The proponent and the proposal are fused and deceit and distrust ride high.
Tolstoy writes: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Contrast Tolstoy with the aesthete Nabokov: ‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike….”
A lightbulb went on as I was reflecting on the dire dilemma – Tolstoy or Nabokov or (where is Freud when I need him?) – and the more salient proposition became clear: “all true friends give us energy when they hear our stories. Storytelling to everyone else drains our energies.”
Others have expressed the same sentiment in different ways. Recall Sir Francis Bacon’s observation that a friend is someone with whom one gains greater joy by sharing a joy and reduces sorrow by sharing the sorrow.
The cacophony of media-designated, and self-proclaimed, pundits is amplified as much by empty rhetoric as by disregard and disdain for facts. Philosophical skepticism has come out of the closet and strode off the campus – only to be disowned by its very practitioners . For them: better to be wrong than in doubt, but better yet, better always to be known to be right and never, ever in doubt. For them: to be right, in and of itself, is trivial. To venture through television news is to enter a theatre filled with shrieking voices that would silence timbres of orchestral cymbals. With truth-falsity conjoined and let loose with passionate intensity fueled by greater conviction, elected officials emerge as the distillate of a rhetorical chemistry set purchased at a discount from the Five and Ten Cent Store.
Who can express receipt in loss, and loss in receipt? What has been lost remains: but for me, it is missing. And yet, the receipt brings discovery. But the loss remains and sorrow is its companion.
Composed on June 23, 2017
In the wake of the “defeat” of Britain’s Conservative party this week, a former senior government official made the following remark:
“Theresa May is a dead woman walking,” George Osborne, whom May fired as chancellor of the exchequer last year and now edits London’s Evening Standard newspaper, told BBC Television on Sunday. “It’s just how long she’s going to remain on death row.”
Clearly my postings have been powerless to instill sensitivity to the power of metaphor. With Trumpian-inspired rhetoric swirling loudly and venomously, the corrosive spread of eerie rhetoric into commonplace discourse is upon us. To call out George Osborne’s rhetoric is to deal with gnats. To call out deadened rhetoric generally is to resist the sustenance that gnats provide to more formidable bugs.