breakage

A theme to my interests is the nature of failure. This is not out of perversity, an interest in pathos, or overmuch pity.

Instead, it is a focus on an element of human (indeed, living) systems. I told a friend long ago that the conviction I had gained during during my first adult years of reading was that "nothing works."

That is not despair, and I'm rarely understood when I say those words, or anything based on that idea.

What I do mean is that, in the realm of human or living things, "everything and everybody breaks or is broken". This is even though our minds, our language, our plans (and our, well, X) are built on the default assumption of function, continuation, appropriateness, and the like.

On the one hand, that gap between our way of dealing with and describing relevant objects and the nature of those objects it itself an instance of brokenness. But on the other hand, brokenness is itself partly an artifact of exactly that gap between the grid of apprehension and the sags, warps and kinks of the things apprehended.

The answer is not to throw out the compass and rule because the sea is rough, the earth is round and the waters are as treacherous as our selves. To the contrary, navigation is about precisely the apt apprehension of the transit from the straight lines used to the draping curves apprehended.

In our human realm, where living things, national plans and familial bonds are our subject - rather than the vastly simpler ocean and sky - the apt apprehension of the transit between our means and our objects becomes a matter for the understanding of breakage in the same way that in navigation it had been a matter for trigonometry.

To know something living is to know its failures. Or to know someone. I do not mean to give a kind of primacy to the breakage, except often a primacy in salience, but rather to point out the less recognized of peer truths.

I say less recognized. But posts like this have been uploaded at least since the penning of Genesis 3 and 4.