All Is Sand

Following on from last night's scribble, I was reading a piece in the TLS [18/10/24] over a pint in the Anglesey Arms by Menai Bridge this afternoon, by Boyd Tonkin, about The Warburg Institute in London. The Institute was founded by Aby Warburg, who had amassed a massive collection - sixty-thousand books and a vast stock of photographs and sundry archive material - in his home city of Hamburg. He escaped Germany with his collection in December 1933, just before Joseph Goebbels would commence wreaking havoc on what the Nazis would term 'decadent culture'. With sponsorship - and not inconsiderable family money, the Institute was founded.

The thing that stuck out of the piece for me was the modus operandi of the Institute's classification system, which conformed to what became known as "Warburg's Law of the Good Neighbour": whereby, to quote the TLS piece, '... the arrangement "meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it... and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought"'. The point here is that, in like or at least similar manner to the propagation of internet-founded memes, much like the old 'urban myths' that have circulated for centuries, happenstance and conjunction, deliberate or otherwise, form the basis of collective memory.

From the individual to the collective, it is the sharing of one person's uniquely personal perception of events with others that form the group knowledge that has allowed our survival as a species. Not being as physically capable as what would otherwise be the apex predators out there that would simply use us as a foodstuff, is completely offset by intellect and guile, underpinned by language and the ability to readily share knowledge and experience from the individual to the many, forming the basis of high-level social behaviour, and resulting in the nexus where individual, personal thought abstraction becomes collective action, outside of Plato's Cave.

Conversely, that very process of sharing inherently harbours the threat of the propagation of untruths, either by accident or design. We have existed in this intellectual/philosophical/political/ethical/religious/etc. no-man's land of doubt and uncertainty since language emerged, with the concomitant abstractions from direct experience that it allows. Belief can only exist with the sharing of ideas and experience through language, and because language is open-ended and interpretive - inherently as subjective as individual, direct sensual experience, it itself is interpretive by definition, and so, open to the misrepresentation of whatever original truth previously obtained. As with Borges' "The Book of Sand", reality and certainty are not quite as fixed as we would like, excepting personal, individual, indivisible experience.

This atomisation of experience and the inherent powerlessness and cynicism it engenders, however, is always tempered by the passing on of actual truth by those that know of, or have actually experienced and need to pass on that experience. Tonight, Jane passed me a slender volume: "The Christmas Truce", a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, illustrated by David Roberts, about the eponymous event that took place at Christmas, 1914 in the early days of the First World War, when, by common agreement, hostilities would cease and both sides would share share songs, gifts and play football; despite being, in the eyes of those remote people responsible for the conflict, 'mortal enemies'. But the crux of this timely and apposite gift of poetry, is, as Jane pointed out, that this particular volume was a gift from grandparents to their granddaughter: the passing on from one generation to another that which none of them had direct experience of, except the knowledge of it's having occurred, and the lessons that need to be heeded for the future. This is as close as we ever get to truly shared experience; and language, and our stories, whilst not perfect or absolute, are our best tools and hope in passing on our "world" to the future.