A Conversation With the Dead
For most of us, there is an impossibility of existing outside of nation. It is a part of one’s self. It is the community from which you learned how to be. The long, yet to die, conversations between ancestral voices and traditions. There is no abstracted self, free from social reality in such a way that can lead to objective judging of social reality. In this way, the institutions that we are brought up with. The traditions we were born into are not impositions upon us, they are spirits of which we are imbued. The recognition of tradition as something which partly are, rather than abstractions we can intellectualise about with pure unadulterated reason, is important so we may understand what we are.
When one fails to notice the importance of this essential truth of our being, then no criticism can truly hit because it will always be hurled at an illusionary abstraction rather than a lived, or previously living, truth. This conversation of the dead, does not always have to be agreeable. It’s not a love for all that was done, thought and been. In this way, modernity has a selective speaking arrangement with the past. There is hectoring criticism, performative fainting at the horrors that were commonly believed. There’s rarely ever listening, or an attempt to understand. The desire is merely to batter down. It is a place where the most open-minded have their curiosity is subordinated by the hate. Ironically, those who are the least open minded are the most willing to listen. It’s not necessary to have an open mind to listen to an internal voice. Having an open-mind means that the voice escapes rather than stays within to be removed and rebuilt with ideas that conjured up with self-created delusions rather than are own inherited ones.
In the modern age, we have given up communicating with those who were and the ideas with which we were molded by. The focus has shifted onto the future, with all its possibilities, rather than what was. This decision has left us bereft of the self. The distinct lack of understanding of our intellectual inheritance, and disrespect for it in favour of more ideological reasoning, is a kind of mutilation of the spirit. Malaised communities exist, with a spectre of the past they can feel. The intellectual class has abandoned these people due to their own hubris. A whirling chaos of possibilities calls them, understandably, towards the future rather than the past. Such people are necessary, but there has been a deep imbalance now. We have been molded inexplictly, yet the explicit learning has been forsaken. The transfer of traditions from one generation to the next has been damaged in favour of the much more abstract. Traditions, unlike abstract intellectual ideas, are grounded within us. In their quality of being imbued parts of the self, they gain a rigidity. There is a possibility of knowing they are there, without knowing what they are.
