William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

On an anxiety of knowing

Everyone is anxious to know. Nevermind what, exactly. Amid a famine of facts and what are in fact famines there has never been more in the feed – or trough, shall we call it? – of information we scroll through than there is today. Has ever in history there been such evidence of what Aristotle called our inborn yearning for knowledge? Young people, as we’ve started calling kids, have to be forced to put down their phones by parents and preachers who can neither eat food nor pass it without TikTok open. There is, evidently, something on these screens we seek. We think, I think, of the best metaphor for the screen as the night: the “black”, or, better, “terrible mirror of the sky”; but if at its night it terrifies us, its day sends clouds and storms which we gaze upon as though endlessly, listlessly, interested in the gigantomachia of heaven and

the glare of revelations going by!

What else but divinity or the promise of it could drive so many to so many degrees of suicide? – I will be told I am only kidding and, worse, perverse where seriousness is called for, and as evidence too obvious the fact will be provided of our dissatisfaction with what such media serve, and worse, the destruction of impressionable minds by such feed as these furnish. – But then, who’s contradicting whom? Our dissatisfaction follows the promise of these screens, by both facts and fictions, viz., of transcendence. To what? Take another tack. While the dumber assume their ground and stand on it, without knowing they’re floating, the more brilliant and isolated minds of our age evince an anxiousness to say just what they mean, aware as they are, as the ignorant aren’t, of how far they are from knowing. I’ve seen it more than I can recount without tears. It is felt, I feel, that the reality of the world, the most apparent and motivating facts, are the specialty of one or another department of one or another room of the head-quarters of intellect, somewhere in New or Old England, though it summers on Long Island. Or else they belong to what are called think tanks – which are not, I’ve been told (but who knows?), brains in vats, or not yet, but places of employment, like universities, for otherwise unemployable PhDs – where, not unlike data collection centers, the given is chewed, digested, and passed on. I’ve met a scientist who knew more about the workings of nature than all but the 100 millionth person on this planet, and he, like you or me, Reader, spent his lunch break on his phone. I glanced over his slouching shoulder and found that, no, this was not Candy Crush, and no, this was not the new issue of Nature, but, believe me, Reader, Veritasium – the pop science YouTube channel. Are we not doomed? The ease with which the knowledgeable bear the (we are to infer) inanity of knowing matches the, I won’t say ease, but utter matter of factness with which the ignorant assert - and act upon! - the most outrageous falsehoods. And one becomes, indeed, anxious that one may be false to call them falsehoods, and prejudicial to call a factum fact, as though to voice one’s sense of what calls for saying required denying the world as others see it. Is this an anxiety that we might be unjust, or that we might find ourselves alone, apart from a community we took to be ours? But then, wasn’t this always the stake of speaking? Doesn’t having something to say always mean having something to say that others haven’t, at least not in, or facing, quite this way? and doesn’t this mean that our contribution is always, if contentful, a challenge to the state of the world as others see it? And in venturing this contribution do I not always risk rebuff? the possibility that I am wrong – and so, unjust to the facts and the eyes of those who see them – and out of step with others? Perhaps this state of society we’re in only, like modernist art, reveals what risks were always involved in judgment, and insists upon it. Then why, if this has always been so, are we so nervous to take them, or why have the same stakes come to seem so incredibly high? The modernists thought the revelation of stakes came with the loss of a tradition, or the confidence in one. Saving tradition for another occasion’s reflection, we can say that the relevation comes with the loosening of the bonds of community, hence with the loss of an audience, or expectation of one, for what one says. (This is what a social medium promises.) Such loosening isn’t in itself bad – some communities’ bonds should be loosened, or broken – but it does mean that in such a period (if it is not in fact a full stop) saying anything meaningful is bound to seem an inordinately difficult task – expressing anything contentful is bound to seem to involve a problem of form. What do we do, Reader? And who for? In such straits (I quote), perhaps you write for everybody and nobody; for an all but unimaginable future; in pseudonyms, for the anonymous; in an album, which is haunted by pictures and peopled with voices. But what happens if you are not a writer; if you lack that way of embodying, accounting for, a slackened conviction in a community, and of staking your own (in imagination, in a world of works)? What happens if all you want to do is talk, and words fail you?