When a message is not understood, and the response is not understandable, we are left with a rhetorical nightmare. As Robert Lowell wrote in his poem Epilogue,
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
There are days when it all seems nuts, when nothing fits, and no explanation comes close to clarifying anything.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(Lowell, from Epilogue)
We've yet to give each one his or her living name. We seem stuck in making objects and categories of each other.
When the Man of Tao left the mountain,
The mountain turned as gray as ashes;
The white clouds hid away their smiles,
And the blue pines were filled with grief.
Suddenly came news of the Man of Tao’s return,
And bird’s song burst open the mountain valleys.
A divine light radiates from his precious temples,
And a dharma rain washes away the swirling dust.
- Su Shih (1073)
It takes one person to tell the truth. It takes many of us to accomplish and allow falsity.
Why asking “Why?” Makes No Sense and Also Makes Sense:
The Difficulty of the Mental–Rational in Comprehending the Act
We can apply this theory to a complex rhetorical piece of communication. The
destruction of the World Trade Center and the damage to the Pentagon can be
viewed as rhetorical, demonstrating a clear presence of a message. In addition to
the material destruction and the loss of life, the rhetorical message of the attack
was used technologically to inflict damage through influence. Of particular
interest here is the way in which this piece of communication obliterates the
sender–receiver model that has been popular in communication scholarship. This
model can say almost nothing about this communication. As noted below, the
absence of a self–proclaimed sender precludes the ground from which encoding can
be said to take place. In addition, because of complications arising from the
presence of multiple modes of awareness the decoding process is also impossible to
force into existence from a description of the communication. Likewise, the
“message” is ambiguous when cast in the form of the signitive or even the
argumentative. The result is that after the attack, most Westerners find
themselves asking, “Why do they hate us so much? Why did they do this? What
are they trying to tell us?” The answer has since been elaborated to some extent
and for various propagandistic and plainly rhetorical purposes. What is of concern
here is the immediate message, that of the act of crashing the planes into the
buildings.
...
If philosophy deals with concepts, rhetoric is the technology that enacts or expresses those concepts. Thus rhetoric is inherently tied to abstraction. The technological exercise of will and power, a consequence of the ego and of atomization and sectorization, is a mental rational phenomenon with its roots in magical consciousness. This form of expression is used to exert power over all aspects of the world (Mickunas, 1992). Rhetorical communication is a form of exercise of power and will.
...
History clearly demonstrates, and Gebser notes, that when civilizations fail to understand messages that work from very different forms of expressivity, from different communicative outlooks, the result is almost inevitably disaster. A response that treats this message as disputative in nature will fail in its purported intent of ending conflict. Instead, it will result in a failure to comprehend the self– examination necessary to be a receiver of such a message. Without this, there can be no appropriate response.
(--from Magic, Will, and Discourse: Rhetoric as Technology, by David Worth,
University of Oklahoma in Integrative Explorations (Vol. 1-8), The Jean Gebser Society)
We are slow to self-examination.
Slower yet to apply justice to those with power.
(Unless, of course, sex or fraud grabs headlines. Then we receive the message, still befuddled as to who sends it.)
We long for the return of the person of Tao, when bird song will burst open, divine light radiates throughout, and a dharma rain washes away the swirling dust.
As receiving responders we will practice heartfelt understanding -- becoming a clear presence of communion and integral action.
Alliance.
Silence.
I love being. Then being alive. As well as mind's awareness of being alive. Also loss -- reminding me that two relinquishes one and, through relative nihility, retrieves one by something falling away. Here, finally, the choice to fall into absolute emptiness -- where each is itself -- with, in, as, and through one another.
This meditation is a gift that Keiji Nishitani via Taietsu Unno gave at a conference entitled Encounters with Emptiness (Smith/Amherst Colleges, 1984).
