Signification

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

-Hamlet

Last night, the post-sunset sky was beautiful.  Overhead was a deep blue canopy with just a few of the brighter starts poking out.  Near the horizion the blue gradually changed to the deep orange which was touching the horizon.  It was lovely in its own right, but I think part of its beauty was it reminded me of when I was in Assisi and how the sky looked just the same that night right after the sun set.  Last night's sky visually quoted what I had seen before.  It's funny how our memories work like that.  I think Fall is one of my favorite seasons partially because there are so many memories which are associated with its sights and smells.  These memories aren't necessarily concrete either, but there is a certain emotional memory that becomes active.  There is something that stirs within me.  But this happens not just with Fall.  All the other seasons, particularly at the change of the seasons, have their own associations and their own different feelings.

Dusk in Assisi, Italy

These feelings are often inarticulate.  You can't really describe them, or why they are so moving.  Explaining them is about as difficult as explaining beauty.  But it's as though when you experience Fall, you experience not just this Fall, but all your Falls.  Indeed, if you stop to think, you might realize that its not just your Falls either, but all the Falls in the history of the world.  For the season are all part of this circle of life, an experience our fellow humans have shared for centuries.  It seems to me that every Fall, not only is the immediate experience there, but implicitly all of those other Falls are present as well.  They are re-presented. 

This phenomenon is recreated in many ways.  At the weddings of others, couples remember their own vows with joy.  At funerals, the sadness of loss is compounded as people recall other loved ones that they have lost.  When you see a wonderful sunrise, you think of other such sunrises.  Certain places have associations, perhaps that treasured place in the woods or the experience of being on a hill or at the seashore in general.  It happens when we see ourselves in someone younger because we were one like that, or when we recognize patterns in our own behavior.

This is the nature of a symbol.  It brings with it not just itself, but all the other things it represents as well.  It shouldn't be surprising that the good art makes heavy use of symbol, for symbols endow life with meaning and significance.  Think even of subtle ways art does this.  In Wagner's Ring, his delightful series of operas, there are musical themes which are associated with different characters or places.  These musical themes not only reinforce the significance of these characters or places, but also work in the opposite direction, bringing the places or characters into the music.  The same thing is used in well written movie soundtracks, such as the Lord of the Rings.  I need not list more overt artistic symbols, but the Scartlet Letter itself comes to mind.  Again, we need not be able to explain how these symbols work, but we somehow know that they bring extra meaning with them.  (P.S. If anyone has ideas about what the deer crossing the tracks in the movie Stand by Me was all about, let me know.)

As I have reflected elsewhere, the Lord of the Rings (the books, not the films) is effective perhaps because of the smallness of the events in the book.  Yes, the War for the Ring is exciting and the biggest thing to happen in any of the characters' lifetimes, but it is set against the background of a deep history of Middle Earth.  Sauron isn't the greatest evil that has even existed, but is a mere shadow of Melkor, the fallen Vala.  Aragorn and Arwen are only fully understood in the light of Beren and Luthien.  But symbols are also dynamic.  They can articipate the future.  One could make the case that Beren and Luthien can't be understood without Aragorn and Arwen either.  The reality goes much deeper than the surface.

As the literary symbols show us, we need not be conscious of the symbolism for it to work.  The characters of a book certainly don't have to know they are acting symbolically for it to be so.  This is reinforced by the fact that symbols are dynamic and can reach into the future.  So while many of my examples suggested that symbols have a reality that is only contained in personal memory and consciousness, this is not entirely true.  I want to suggest that symbols carry a certain meaning, regardless of whether anyone be aware of them.  However, memory is extremely important, because this is the way in which individuals become aware of the deep reality which surrounds us.

Because memory is so important, and I suppose something could be said about the way in which corporate memory can also help to preserve symbols and their meaning.  I mention, as once before, the importance of memory in the Christian and Jewish traditions, in particular giving meaning to the Eucharistic meal or the Passover meal respectively.  These symbolic meals are not 'mere symbols,' but are understood to make present the reality which they symbolize.  But, without taking away from the special significance of these religious memorials, I'm not sure that there is a such thing as a 'mere symbol.'  Symbols all seem to contain what they signify to varying degrees.

I guess the point of all this is that there is meaning all around you, if only you open your eyes and look for it.  Reality runs deep.

(Note: Something should be said about my use of the word 'symbol.'  In most, if not all, instances where I used the word, 'sign' might be an appropriate substitution.  Symbols are strictly defined as things with represent another thing, but are distinct from it.  So language is a symbolic system, where there is no intrinsic relationship between the sound of the word and its meaning (except perhaps in cases of onomatopia).  The word 'cat' could easily have been used to refer to what we call 'dog.'  This stricter use of the word 'symbol' gets blurred and acquires meanings similar to the word 'sign' in more common parlance.  I use the word 'symbol' in this other way. Hopefully, the reader has understood what I meant throughout the post.)

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the some of the characters escape from civilization into what is called the Green World, a forested place of enchantment.  It is here in the Green World, away from the constraints of society where love is able to flourish.  Granted, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Green World is not quite so simple as that.  There is plenty of romantic confusion until the lovers finally end up with the right people.  But my point here is not to provide a literary analysis of Shakespeare's Green World.  Rather, I want to seize upon the basic point (or at least the point I want to make): reaching the place of true love and enchantment requires movement away from other considerations and into the wilderness.

The lesson, as I take is, is that we all need to spend time in the Green World, able to completely forget about the cares of society.  We need a chance to eschew work, school, and all the familiar places. It is the Green World, where we learn to fall in love again.  Here, we learn to love the beauty against which our hearts have been hardened.  We learn to love life itself once more.  We learn to love the people around us once again (or for the first time).  Here, we learn to love God.

In a phenomenon which may be related, I've recently experienced the desire to surround my self with beauty.  This past week/weekend I was stuck in a car for several hours I had nothing better to do but listen to Bach and read Evelyn Waugh (at the same time!).  The Bach and the Waugh were amazing, and filled me with a desire to spend all my days immersed in beautiful things like those.  Then a rainbow showed up.  Ahh!  These are the moments we live for, moments that pierce the soul.  I hope I'll remember that moment forever, just like I remember going to see Jeremy Denk and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra perform one of Beethoven's Piano Concerti (No. 1 in C Major, I believe).  It was absolutely stunning, but perhaps not as memorable as Denk's encore piece, in which he played a movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata.  He executed the piece so well, that the audience literally laughed out loud at one of Ives' musical jokes.  Real laughter came from my mouth because of what someone played on a piano!  Or I remember the time I was able to go backpacking in the Sangre De Cristo mountains.  One incident in particular from that trip I remember.  We were on a precipice, several thousand feet up, from which we could the place where the mountain range on which we were standing began to rise out of the plain below.  The rock on which we were standing was most unusual: it was pitted.  We're talking softball sized holes that held rain water.  There must have been hundreds of them in the surrounding area.  They were made, so I was told, by lightning which naturally strikes the highest point in the area.  And as I was standing there, staring at the beautiful scene below me, I could feel energy start to build in the atmosphere behind me, that exciting, stirring change, which signals a storm is approaching.  I could see the thundercloud swiftly approaching.  Something was so exhilarating about that moment, on the verge of extreme danger and extreme beauty.  The situation also seemed to serve as a living reminder that all things are passing away, that we have to come down from the mountain eventually.  It's moments like these which we remember most, which we are forever grateful we experienced, which shape us into better people.

Now comes the plug for Aristotelian Ethics.  Like experiencing the Green World, experiencing the beauty described above requires a movement away from the ordinary.  It requires, in a word, leisure.  We do not recreate so that we can be a more effective production factor in our capitalist economy.  No, we work precisely for those moments of leisure so that we can nourish the soul, and learn what it really means to be human.  This is why civilization kicks barbarism's butt.  Civilization allows the flourishing of the arts.  When people are just trying to stay alive, living in a subsistence economy, the arts can't flourish.  It is only when a culture has 'left over' time, after keeping everyone alive, that time can be devoted to artistic pursuits.  We get individuals who can devote their time to nothing but creating beautiful things, and others who can take the time to appreciate them.  Here the arts flourish.

The astute reader will have noticed that I described the Green World as necessarily a place of removal from civilization, while at the same time praising civilization for giving us the arts.  Is there a contradiction somewhere in here?  I expect any seeming contradiction is resolved upon realizing that both natural beauty and artistic beauty are necessary at times to help us get in touch with that part of us which is most human, to sharpen our sensitivities, and to help us love.  Leisure is needed for both.

Thought: Philosophy is parasitic, just like the arts, coming out of society's collective leisure time.  It has a lot to do with love and beauty as well.  Lurking somewhere here might be a justification for my academic discipline.

Note to Self:  Read Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture.