Umberto Eco’s supplement to The Name of the Rose includes a great quote explaining his view of the postmodern condition. It’s pretty long, but I think it captures something we all feel, which is the presence of the past:
The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.
What I appreciate about this Eco passage is that it recognizes a thread of knowledge throughout contemporary human experience that ceaselessly declares been there, done that. It explains an undeniable feeling we all have that there’s nothing new under the sun. And the moments in which we manage to forget these notions are triumphant.
You might not think it, but this is a large part of why people play games. Lots of folks chalk it up to escapism, but, more pointedly, gaming is the last haven of innocence. What better way to rediscover how little you know than through play and exploration?
Tags: The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
2 November 2009 at 3:39 am |
[...] — once you’re familiar with the mechanics, once you’ve lost some of that blessed innocence, there’s suddenly all this freedom because you know what you’re able to get away with. [...]
2 June 2010 at 9:51 pm |
Once you let go of your preconceived ideas about human nature and how the sexes follow a “natural” pattern of robotic behavior based on mimicking the actions of one’s neighbors, you disavow your thinking process of the limitations imposed by your chaotic-blurred concepts. Having written so long and so widely about the one subject that obssesses your senses, you sometimes seem to forget to disengage those same feelings and thoughts from reality. You act upon your intuition that is flawed in the very details you so passionately seem to want to erase, correct or change. The desire is there, it’s latent and it’s real. What is not real is the image of your model self, and of the object of your affection. You seem to distort the real vision by contrasting opposites excessively and you lose yourself in the process of deciding which one of the many selected “models” is the real one you started out with and latched onto. It’s baffling to me that you repeat yourself in such a way almost as if you didn’t believe your own eyes, deceived by your screams for the fulfillment of that one desired result, to the detriment of the process involved.You dismiss the painful process you put us through, as if all the sins and mistakes you created and pushed against us were mere car dents that don’t need to be accounted for or even aknowledged. It’s incredibly cold, cruel and somewhat stupid on this person’s part to then insist on pushing for the same methods and expect different results.
An aside: I don’t care what charity you are playing with, go back to your books and instead of sucking their tresured lessons for personal profit, go and try to actually learn something about being a human being with a soul, not a shell on fours, carrying someone’s load for an extra couple of silver or gold coins.
Please feel free to teach yourself this season to defrost that scarred soul that has lost so much sensitivity through all these years of exposure to alien garbage, poor judgement, bad taste, awful company. Teach yourself to let go of those vices and addictions. Put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, walk those miles and stop fooling yourself by acting like someone else. Just write with your own words, never cower under the rug, don’t dust the furniture just to tell your mama you’ve done your share of the dirty work. Look at your “equipment” and use it like it should, for someone, somewhere, thought you had the “God-given” right to own it. If you don’t have one outside, then learn to use the one inside.
I think your lesson was to get a taste of your own writing style, attacking you full force in the face the very same way you have used against your readers for so many years. Yes I’m addressing you, you know who. Don’t you run away from me like a little sissy with a couple of Nazi horns in your tail. Don’t deny your anger, and don’t pretend I didn’t use it against you. Don’t deny you had every intention of hurting me to catch my attention, that otherwise would never have been tweecked by such spineless company of mutilated hearts and minds.
Now go fetch me some real food for thought, willya.
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