frimile – Page 9 – Rare errors

Stories are templates for a more meaningful shared existence

February 16th, 2025

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Table of Contents
Introduction

A way of actively consuming stories is identifying templates that guide the progression of our actions, underpinned by an understanding of the roles people involved play in it, and an awareness that there is a beginning, a middle and an end to it.

But we cannot thoughtfully orchestrate a story in real life, at least not in the sense of tracing a blueprint for it, as if we were screenwriters and directors of the stage of life. Stories become stories in retrospect, when they are retold, not while they are lived. They are shaped through retelling rather than in the immediate experiencing of living it. Thus, while we may be calling the actual living through it a “story”, we are really describing the possession of a particular drive to follow through events of life in a way that is suitable for the telling of a good story later on (whether we tell it to ourselves or to others, either from our personal memories or shared memories).

What lies within our power is to simply begin a story anticipating the non-negotiable existence of a narrative arc that will frame it -which, again, acknowledges a sequence of events that gains meaning through a beginning, a middle and an end- and honor it. We will adopt a role imbued with the right amount of accountability, of stakes, that will eventually result in some kind of change in the state of things by the end of this story. Without accountability, we are doing a disservice to the natural flow of a story, the inherent momentum that drives it forward.

Accountability in this case embodies above all the two faces of a single coin: a reward cannot be reaped without a corresponding possibility of failure, humiliation, disappointment (and other negative states of being, be they more or less severe) and the obligation to bear its full weight. ¹Just as we cannot have heads without the possibility of getting tails, we cannot have the possibility of reward without risking failure and a hit to our reputation, well-being, loved ones, self-esteem, and so on. If we refuse to stake our names and our reputation as responsible (being the one who responds/answers to its consequences) for a certain course of action (ie. a cohesive sequence of actions that progress toward a final result), we’ll be the wiser not to expect any potential rewards for its successful accomplishment.

Even more, we might not even be capable of following that course of action through, as midway through it we might need to leverage our accountability -our names and reputation on the line- to secure the necessary resources to advance further. Indeed, we will need to demonstrate commitment. This is a consistent pattern in stories: without assuming proper accountability and involvement in the matter at hand, they won’t be allowed access to the real pulp of the situation, those highly consequential elements that alone can satisfactorily resolve the story’s core tension.

Stories represent Platonic ideals

I believe that this combination of forward motion through a story arc (or narrative momentum) and the adoption of accountability are really essential components for a story, especially when considering the attitude one can cultivate so that we infuse real life with the resonance and meaning of the stories that we live to consume.

And the combination of these two elements results in another indispensable quality of stories: that they represent a kind of Platonic ideal of how human relations are supposed to unfold.

Stories always pivot around human relations. Even stories about animals or objects are ultimately projections of our ways of making sense of human relations. This explains why, ever since the ancient fabulist Aesop, and certainly for millennia before him, we have been inclined to anthropomorphise animal psychology. The same applies with religion. Since time immemorial, we have explained the dynamics of nature, of the universe, of the cosmos (the order of things) in human terms, especially in the dynamics reserved to how humans relate to each other (agreement, disagreement, desire, love, collaboration, violence, misunderstandings, alliances, emotions, etc.). Ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean mythologies stand as prime examples of this tendency to humanise the cosmic order.

Still, why exactly do I say that they represent a Platonic ideal of human relations? Why do I use the term “Platonic ideal”?

Here I am using the term “Platonic ideal” in a very stripped down manner: it is the physically inexistent -only existent in the collective mind- model of something which all its counterparts in the real world (the messy physical world) aspire to be. Hence, all physical instances of a Platonic ideal are imperfect versions of it that nonetheless. If they weren’t pointed towards it, they simply wouldn’t be recognised as what they intend to be: you cannot have a chair that isn’t imperfectly seeking to physically, albeit imperfectly, embody what a chair is ideally supposed to be. Otherwise, it would be physically manifesting something else.

When we look back at how a particular set of human relations could have unfolded, we invariably reflect on how it could have always been better; if we only possessed a certain kind of lucidity in the heat of the moment, we could have pulled all the right levers of that situation which would have made it much more satisfying and meaningful for everyone.

This is nothing more than the widely known 20/20 phenomenon. We look back and realise that many things could have been done differently to make a situation all that more special. That ‘betterness’ becomes a parameter, measured against its Platonic ideal: how would that human relation have adopted its most perfect form? We could not know this in the heat of the moment, as all the imperfections and limitations of the physical world were at play as well, momentarily severing our bond to that Platonic ideal. They cloud our relation to the ideal with the immediate demands and complications that they bring to the table.

When we use our imagination to create or retell a story, we encounter that fantastic benefit of being able to simulate reality in our heads. In our heads, we can freeze time, play around with ‘what ifs’ and try to follow those sequences through. We can invent new elements that would make the story even more meaningful, even as we risk drifting into the bittersweet enjoyment of pure fantasy². Naturally, the real world does not afford the luxury of such manipulation. And it is not less important that we are not the only conscious being participating in it, other people are involved as well. This is the beauty of stories, and why they are essentially human relations. It is an amalgamation, a clashing of human agencies framed by particular circumstances.

In fact, a sign that Platonically ideal human relations are a guiding element in the creation of stories is that all too common situation where most people privilege the embellished story over a perfectly faithful account of real events. A story arranges events, exaggerates and downplays details, eliminates and adds elements in pursuit of its perfect form, so that it can become a proper, successful story. It is pursuing this ideal while trying not to fully sever its bond with reality, which is inherently imperfect. Again, this is a matter of accountability, because a story needs to relate back to the real world to some capacity, be it through symbolic resonance or a more literal correspondence.

Thus, with good stories we are constantly reviving those Platonic ideals of how great human relations could be. They help us rediscover that North Star -they help us recalibrate our course, and break free from the humdrum patterns in human relations that we easily fall into in modern organised life-. Additionally, they provide a much needed renewal in our faith in how much meaning and fulfilment (even if it is only at a visceral, emotional level) we can find when relating to each other in ways that are closer to these ideals. Needless to say, just like a star, a Platonic ideal is unattainable by definition; it is rather an orientation, a delimitation of what aspects we better focus on and nurture for something to become more like itself, and less like a corrupted version of its potential.

Archetypes mould the world. Platonic ideals uncover it.

Stories can then be not only templates for courses of action, and how they weave together to create a certain change in a state of affairs, a kind of renewal. They are also templates for human relations. From them we can observe how people navigate what it means to relate to each other, to learn from each other, participate in each other’s existence. It is to collaborate, help, nurture, challenge, desire each other. And we observe these in a form that is larger than life, because we do not aim so much to imitate them as to obtain guidance from them. Some have nominated these ideals as archetypes: the protagonist, the mentor, the trickster, the lover, the caregiver, the antagonist, and so on.

I agree that the definition of archetypes is one way of conceptualising and ordering this idea, but I choose to speak of Platonic ideals because of a fundamental distinction: the danger of working with archetypes is that they already have been defined, which can potentially become a slippery slope during both processes of conceiving a story and of analysing a story. If we are conceiving a story (this could be based on real events or not) we are indeed risking to mould our characters into one of these archetypes.

Then, if we are analysing a story, we might miss out on the uniqueness of certain character relations because we are seeking to make sense of them through the lens of these archetypes, which provide a smoother pathway into putting all the pieces of the story together in a coherent way: in the realm of archetypes, we already know what role they play in what moment of the story and in what type of story, and we know how they are supposed to behave with other archetypes. Hence, we can arrange all the elements of the story into a series of pre-existent theoretical types.

Conversely, when we speak of Platonic ideals, we are alluding to the existence of these abstract forms, but they are impossible to precisely delineate in all their details. In other words, we know that all these human relations taking place in the story are aimed towards being closer to their ideal, but we can only intuit some elements of that ideal, without any hope of capturing the entirety of it. This distinction is crucial, because if we are to consume stories with the deliberate purpose of becoming someone that lives in ways that are closer to matching the fulfilment that these stories create in us -as we vicariously experience them through the characters- we cannot limit ourselves to a limited series of archetypes theorised through an inductive study of patterns in an extensive corpus of stories, be they popular, mythological, literary, or folkloric.

Attempting to force a world that we do not control -and, ideally, do not want to control- into these intellectual constructs is a futile, unhealthy attempt at submitting the world to our self-written theatre play. Rather, the healthy approach is to find those forces, those attitudes, visions of others, habits and such, that pull us towards these mysterious ideal forms of human relations. That is in my opinion how we can attain more meaning in life, by letting it be inspired by art and not shallowly imitate it.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Platonic ideals beyond the antagonist archetype

As I see it, the most valuable stories are the ones that allow us to rethink archetypes. They are the ones that show us something that we might interpret at face value as a particular archetype and then fracture that image to push us further towards other possible ideals that steadfastly flicker behind it.

I think Japanese animation auteur Hayao Miyazaki has achieved this repeatedly through his films. One of his most successful depictions of a particular type of human relation is that of the antagonist, an archetype which he consistently subverts. At first sight, his antagonists seem like typical malevolent characters lacking virtue, hell-bent on thwarting the “good” characters’ endeavours. However, he swiftly disrupts this first impression by revealing layers of understanding and compassion beneath their actions. His antagonists emerge not as symbols of evil, but as complex beings whose motivations arise from comprehensible needs and experiences, even when their methods may be misguided.

In Howl’s Moving Castle, the Witch of the Waste, the initial antagonist, undergoes a remarkable transformation. Once she loses her powers, She becomes another member of the moving castle’s family. Her heartbroken obsession with Howl is explored in more detail as she becomes a mellow, yet endearingly mischievous granny. She reveals an inoffensive, relatable childishness, with occasional glimmers of wisdom, rather than a wholly objectionable malevolence. Similarly, Madame Suliman, the antagonist of the story’s final acts, transcends the typical antagonist role in the story’s final arc. Her initial opposition of Howl’s pacifism gives way to a more contemplative stance, ultimately leading to her recognition of the war’s senselessness and decision to finalise it.

The story of Spirited Away also presents a particular vision of the antagonist, where the seemingly evil giant baby Boh becomes a friendly, innocent being once untethered from both his controlling relation with his mother the witch Yubaba and a body that is too appropriate for behaving like a giant baby. Once we witness Boh as a small, cooperative mouse, we discover that he is not an antagonist, but a product of the circumstances and relationships that he was born into. By the end of the story, he regains his former body while maintaining the kind disposition that he discovered he preferred while under the shapeshifting curse. Not less importantly, we as the audience are also made to experience the positive feelings that Boh’s integration within the hero’s circle can generate.

The witch Yubaba herself also traverses a similarly redemptive arc. While her actions remain far away from what most people would approve of, we obtain a glimpse of her insecurities and complicated personality when being introduced to her good-natured twin sister. Moreover, the story’s two main conflicts ultimately hinge not on the hero’s need of defeating or destroying her, but on two deeply human elements: her genuine, all too relatable even if flawed, maternal love for her child Boh, and her principled adherence to the contract that she had with the main character Chihiro. Indeed, by the end of the story, while she had the power to cheat her way out of it, she chooses to rigourously respect the contract’s conditions and liberate Chihiro and the dragon Haki from her captivity.

Many other of Miyazaki stories such as Ponyo, Princess Mononoke and Porco Rosso achieve the same with these types of antagonistic characters, each revealing their own particular complexities.³

Thus, the archetype of the antagonist shatters to reveal other kinds of Platonic ideals of human relations. These ideals show many ugly sides, yet they are still conducive to compassion, second chances, self-criticism and understanding, rather than invoking the need to submit the enemy as the way to eliminate a threat and resolve the main conflict⁴. These are the ideals that are worth adding to our templates. They are more meaningful and less destructive. Conflict is necessary, even indispensable, for a story to become a story. Yet, it is a conflict born out of an inability to complete the story’s entire arc towards conclusion and renewal, unless we overcome a particular set of frictions, of clash of interests -of ways of seeing what is valuable and what is not- that stand in the way.

I would even venture to say that without conflict a story cannot exist. It would be lacking fundamental fuel for forward motion. Nonetheless, a story where evil is clear and the only path towards meaning and renewal seems to be resisting the antagonist and removing them from the picture likely falls short of achieving true resonance. While there are of course situations where a relentlessly antagonistic force will not stop until achieving utter destruction, making obliteration the only way forward, such situations rarely reflect the complexity of real human relations.

Miyazaki’s art is a prime example of discovering and celebrating life’s deeper complexities, demonstrating how these nuanced narratives prove more compelling than stories built upon uncontested archetypes.

His statement “My films show the world’s beauty. Beauty otherwise unnoticed“⁵ speaks directly to this mission. Among these unnoticed beauties there are naturally those of these antagonists.

The bottomline

Stories serve multiple purposes, and one of these is to provide us with ideals of human relations so that we can imbue our lives with more meaning.

How do we do this? We will find ourselves in situations where a particular human relationship seems to echo one of these ideals. Once we identify this, we will know what elements of this relation we can emphasise (and reflect through our actions or appraisals of the situation) in order to bring it closer to its ideal. We can do this because we have been paying attention to the sources of resonance of all those stories we ardently wish life would resemble more. Those resonances that we feel in our gut are signals that we find ourselves in front of a Platonic ideal, that we are catching sight of the lineaments of that promised land.

Then, given that the formula could be boiled down to [more proximity to Platonic ideal = more meaning and fulfilment], as we steer our actions towards these ideals, we will indeed engage in more meaningful human relations. And eventually, by also understanding the role of accountability in human affairs, and the unfolding of these dynamics within the narrative arc of beginning, middle and end, we can become channels of renewal, through which more meaningful existence flows.

Will you stay in our lover’s story? Bowie’s art of making life a worthy story

As a final reflection, I find that David Bowie expressed this in the endearing song “Kooks”, perhaps unconsciously, yet fittingly as he was an inveterate pursuer of deeper meaning and fulfilment. His artistic journey -and surely his private life as well- epitomises this understanding of life as a series of meaningful narratives, approaching their own ideal form before giving way to the next. He understood how to navigate from story to story, knowing when to end one story and begin another.

Will you stay in our lover’s story?

If you stay, you won’t be sorry

‘Cause we believe in you

Soon you’ll grow, so take a chance

With a couple of Kooks

Hung up on romancing

He is inviting his soon to be born son into his and his wife’s lover’s story. In a way, he is weaving a new person into an ongoing narrative. He is acknowledging that we bond with each other through participating in common stories. Their story was one of being “hung up on romancing”. He is using the story as a means to connect their son under this common arc, that of their unique love story with all its particular qualities, relations, goals, challenges, circumstances and such.

When we live through stories, we are not doing it only for ourselves, we are interconnecting the world through bundles dripping with meaning and sense (sense as in having a direction, being orientated towards something). We dive finto one story and then leap into the next. We begin it, develop it and honour it all the way from its inception to its fitting conclusion, in order to cleanly wrap it up to leap to the next one, all while summoning others to join in and become part of these unfolding meanings.
1. Naval Ravikant succinctly explains the effects accountability in his book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: a Guide to Wealth and Happiness (2020). As with many of the book’s subjects, he explains it with a particularly essentialist simplicity suitable to be converted into a useful, intuitive mental model ↩︎
2. Fantasy is not inherently bad or escapist. It can certainly contain truths that are denied to more realistic or naturalistic depictions of life. Hayao Miyazaki -who will become an important element in this text’s argument- fittingly described the value of fantasy in the following declaration: “Of course I believe that other worlds exist. If they didn’t, life wouldn’t be interesting. It’s like love: you can’t see but it exists, simply because you believe it. It’s just a matter of believing.” ↩︎
3. His treatment of antagonist characters is highly deliberate, reflecting a thoroughly integrated view of life that he, perhaps more than most living artists, successfully and persuasively conveys through his art: “You must see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.” ↩︎
4. Idem. He has declared the following regarding his artistic intentions: “We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation.” ↩︎
5. Quoted from the documentary Never-Ending Man (2016) from the Japanese production company NHK. ↩︎
Scavenging the word “bourgeois”

February 14th, 2025

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⚘Branch thought from Why learn History #1 Protecting institutions for what they do vs. for what they are
Table of Contents
Do some words get in the way of expressing the ideas they contain?

What the idea of “bourgeois” evokes: more than necessary?

My impression is that the concept of being “bourgeois” used to wield a penetrating power, a particular potency in achieving its purpose. It served as an instrument to put our finger on, denormalise and/or denounce a way of looking at our daily life decisions and values, revealing it to be the historical product of socioeconomic conditions that developed fairly recently, namely with the dawn of the European Modern age (around the 17th century, then flourishing and consolidating in the 19th century, give or take).

Now, I am thinking about the associations it evokes at the top of my head, beyond its formal definition and the intellectual debates that developed around it across the decades. What do I associate this concept with when someone invokes it as a way of describing and qualifying a particular social phenomenon or attitude towards life?

The word evokes images of material comfort prioritised over deeper meaning: plush furniture, polite dinner parties, manicured appearances.

It carries undertones of spiritual and intellectual complacency: culture consumed as a status marker rather than deeply engaged with, education valued for credentials rather than transformation.

It suggests a preoccupation with respectability and social status, propriety over authenticity.

It certainly conjures the face of Karl Marx and other figures of 20th century: Soviet revolutionaries and politicians, the Cuban revolution, the Chinese revolution, Marxist intellectuals.

It makes me think of mid-20th century critical theory, of black-and-white scenes of student protests, banners, classrooms sit-ins, late-night alcohol-fuelled discussions among enthusiastic students, engaged chainsmoking public intellectuals. It brings to mind images of men in black coats and tall hats, of newspapers by fireplaces, of grainy colour photographs of American suburban tranquility.

It also makes me think of its reactionary opposites, such as so-called “Bohemian lifestyles”, of nomadism as a lifestyle, of intentional communities such as Kibbutzim or collective shared-housing, of hippies and biker gangs, of an artistic class of people expressing their loathing of bourgeois values.

Associations abound. “bourgeois” is a word loaded with meaning if there ever was one. It carries these vague associations alongside more specific ones -its provenance, its derivations, and so on. It is also loaded in distinct ways depending on who is saying it to whom. For example, a person who has concluded that Marxism is inherently evil, will see a particular series of associations highlighted, while a neutral person with a certain level of cultural knowledge might draw from a broader, more varied collection of associations.

The risks of using big fat abstractions

The point is that “bourgeois” classifies as one of those big, complex abstractions that have infiltrated common speak, and have become rather liberally employed.

When we use this term as an adjective to describe something, like a specific attitude that we see in another person, we are burdening this person with an extensive set of assumptions and views of the world that extends far beyond the few elements of the idea of “bourgeois” that we likely wish to convey.

And this can easily lead to misunderstandings: our conversation partner with might not know us well, or might have developed a conception of “bourgeois” that emphasises other parts of the term that we were not really thinking of when using it. They might even have adopted a negative predisposition toward our arguments, and look for some of the innumerable elements composing the term “bourgeois” that they could use to expose contradictions on our argument, or construe it as meaning something that was far from our intention.

In fact, “bourgeois”, that big, fat abstraction, contains plenty of useful, clear, real and/or timeless social, political and personal dynamics that could illuminate many of our current existential woes. Yet, it is also a sticky thing. It has tumbled down history’s slope for too long, gathering the debris, scraps, rubble of all the contingencies and twists and turns that it has participated in, and all the causes it has been weaponised for. It is a big, fat, snarled mess of meaning and associations (at least in its general understanding, among the unspecialised majority who would benefit the most by its insights).

The tragedy lies in how employing this term to try to capture something in words, something that the only single word we feel we can use to signify is “bourgeois”, we are setting up an enormous target for others to easily hit. And if that big, unwieldy, vulnerable target is hit, its fall will drag down all the useful elements with it as well (the useful elements among which reside those that we meant to communicate when using the term “bourgeois”).

That is a tragedy, as we were possibly meaning well: not to accuse of bad intentions, nor condemn of unacceptable behaviour, but to reveal something dysfunctional that, if addressed could improve the situation for everyone. In this case we would have been attempting to articulate and communicate it to others. Unfortunately, all that debris clinging to our word of choice has contaminated our expression beyond repair. These unwieldy layers upon layers of debris silence all the timeless truths, that incisive capturing of a particular attitude towards daily living that this term has once succeeded in doing. As a result, our word “bourgeois” fails to fulfil its purpose.

The bourgeois idea of compartmentalising life as a default state

For example, we can speak of a particular “bourgeois” attitude that would be worth extracting from the concept of a “bourgeois” way of life and put it in other words, more supple words carrying less debris with them. This attitude simply consists in living the rhythms of daily life and of personal planning, both short and long-term, with an unquestioned acceptance that the separation of work and leisure is an undeniable fact of life in society. It is an assumption that both of these spheres are unified by the red thread of the bourgeois project of acquiring a better home and climbing the social ladder. It is the assumption that there is a default state of life outside of work where we touch ground and where we “rest and recreate”. It is the conviction that these are the real material conditions of life.

When we come home after a day of work, and after we fulfil other responsibilities with, say, family, friends, chores, household affairs, we touch ground on this default state of “free time”, an empty box of time that needs to be filled with anything that does not belong to the other types of activities that I listed. And so, daily life becomes a cycle of a precisely scheduled alternation between these spheres, punctuated by holiday periods. Our sense of forward motion in life, of real forward motion, follows this previously mentioned red thread. These are the rails upon which the cycles of daily life turn, built from a particular set of aspirations: financial security, property ownership, career advancement, status acquisition, creating a family home.

Of course, this represents this separation at its most rigid. Real life is richer in details, variations and seepage between these areas. Yet, the tendency remains that whatever project we embark upon (although better than “project¹”, I would call it “embodying one’s authentic drives in the adventure of life”) always becomes secondary, subsumed under the cycle of alternating life spheres rolling along the rail of “bourgeois” aspirations. These two spheres are a default state of sorts, as they are the ground we touch upon once we abandon our projects, amateur pursuits and hobbies, which are meant primarily to fill up the empty box of the leisure life area, providing conversational subjects, and mostly ornamental additions to our identities, outwardly defined by our socioeconomic role and our selection of symbolic attributes such as taste, leisure preference, style, and such.

In essence, our more personal drives, life-callings if you will, can be dispensed with in the forming of our identity, as their content is not as important as their role in filling up the leisure and hobby compartment among our other life spheres. At least that is the socially acceptable thing to do, as long as we do not renounce the compartmentalisation of life in spheres, with the daily cycle of alternation between them and the red-thread of bourgeois aspirations.

Unfortunately, the reverse is not true: we cannot discard the latter (bourgeois convention) while retaining the former (authentic drive), because the established framework for the development of one’s identity and presentation to the world (which delineates what is acceptable to say, and what is repudiable and potentially conducive to stigmatisation) is not secondary to our authentic drives. That is, the bourgeois model is like the water filling a basin, and the authentic personal drive is seen as a cup superfluously submerged within it. The cup is supposed to be useless without the water, but the water can do away with the cup. In an ideal place, this relationship could very well be the other way around.

An alternative analogy might compare this bourgeois convention to soil, with authentic drives merely a plant growing and drawing sustenance from its fertility.

Successfully communicating some of a word’s ideas without letting the word get in the way

This is just a reflection upon one of the many sides of this prismatic idea of what “bourgeois” means. There are many more sides that can be examined, and which would also be appropriate. The idea of this exercise in extracting only one element of this big, fat abstraction is to redirect a listener’s attention back to the idea itself, while doing away with the rest of the accumulated baggage, which could lead to misunderstandings and futile derailments.

It is a practice of reclaiming useful ideas that have been buried within loaded terms, cutting them off from this lineage and infusing them into other discourses. It is a deconstruction of the term in smaller bits that can permeate the pores of a self-defeatingly unreceptive attitude (where a prejudiced misconstruction of the term would normally block access to beneficial insights from its content). Through this deconstruction -purging its best components from its baggage and reutilising them in new discourses- we are also renewing the idea’s relevance, because after all the word is just a word², not the idea that we intend to preserve.

When I described some of the truths within the concept of “bourgeois” as timeless, I meant the following: that our language does not evolve in a linear progression towards a superior, better researched language, where new words are better suited to describe the world because they have been developed by a more advanced society. In fact, even though the use of the term “bourgeois” can sometimes feel less like an appropriate qualifier to describe something and more like a statement of ideology, we are far from overcoming many of the problems that it addresses³. We have not outgrown this term, at least regarding many of the essential ideas it encapsulates, even though its historical baggage might be considered a relic that was more applicable to other times.

Of course, it is impossible to solve this issue of the communicative effectiveness of “bourgeois” without doing away with the word itself. This verbal carcass, beginning with “b” sound and ending with that French “wah” sound, cannot be restored to an ideal, tabula rasa state. It needs to be dismembered with the consideration that it deserves, its valued parts salvaged, and scavenged with due care. This follows nothing more than the most natural pattern there is: that circular, not linear, cycle of life, death and renewal that governs so much of existence.

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1. Curiously, project originates from the Latin pro-iacere: to throw [iacere] something forth [pro]) ↩︎
2. I am not saying that the word itself is not valuable, it certainly is because of all of its baggage and its historical potency. However, it does not hurt to seek other ways of giving an idea back its power. ↩︎
3. In fact in the ancient Romans’ Latin there was this distinction between negotium roughly translated as “busyness” and otium referring to “self-realisation activities”. In Spanish and Portuguese, these words have survived almost fully intact to the present, in the forms of negocio and ocio. ↩︎
Lexico-utopia: a Borgesian experiment on the language of light and knowledge

February 5th, 2025

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Table of Contents
Introduction

“I: I’m a very big Borges fan, and he often talks about one of the things he loves about English: the ability to choose from so many different backgrounds. He points out how different it feels to say the Holy Ghost, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, compared to the Holy Spirit.

Which is a Latin word, and the feeling that they evoke is so completely different. We have a lot of choices.

F: Yeah, we certainly do. And actually, if you think about it, to heal someone is to make them whole. You heal them, and you give them health—those are all connected words: heal and health.

We heal; he’s a healer. In Latin, he’s a curer, or in fact, a curer of souls—a cure in the church, I suppose. So you curate.

And if you want to say it in Greek, you’d say a therapist. They all mean the same, but now they can take on a different meaning.”

The underlying webs of connotations and associations that words share due to their common etymological root is a fantastic property of language. Words that share the same etymological root can drastically diverge in meaning through the addition of suffixes and prefixes: for instance, to con-sider and ‘to de-sire both derive from the Latin sideris, relating to stars, yet have evolved to express very different concepts.

Many words of very close lineage can even address wholly different aspects of reality, because of their historical application to a particular area of life. One example of this are the words ‘virtue’ and ‘virtual’. Both originate from the Latin vir meaning ‘man’, initially conveying what Romans saw as attributes for an ideal virility, such as strength, efficacy, excellence, decorum or gravitas. Yet, through centuries of philosophical developments and then the emergence of the world of computer technology in the 20th century, ‘virtual’ evolved to be applied to a domain entirely divorced from virtue and virility.

In this interview fragment, Stephen Fry zooms out to address Borges’ observation about how different words originating from distinct linguistic families can come to refer to the same thing within a single language that has absorbed them all. An example of one such language is English. When prompted by host Anya Leonard, Fry elaborates upon Borges’ appreciation for the English language by drawing attention to the distinctive etymological domains that each way of referring to the idea of ‘health’ summons.

‘To heal’ is to make whole again, to restore wholeness by eradicating foreign elements that disrupt that whole. ‘To cure’ stems from the act of taking care of something, treating and attending to it. ‘Therapy’, meanwhile, derives from the idea of assistance, of alleviating a pain. it is something similar to ‘cure’ but carrying the scientific authority that Greek roots bring – ‘curing’, in contrast, evolved differently. It developed within the context of Christianity: of the Latin Church and Christian notions of caring for the Soul and Salvation.

These nuances and avenues of thought revealed by etymological roots and linguistic origins are the cracks and interstices that linger between synonyms and paraphrases. Within these gaps lies a richness in expression and thought that transcends mere conceptual definitions.

Even if we are not conscious of it, word choice can summon these etymological webs to which they belong. These manifest as connotative nuances that words bring. But they are more than mere shades of meaning. When examined with deliberate attention and wonder, we find that they reveal different metaphors, and that if we trace the threads of their etymological webs (ie. words connected by common etymological roots), we will find many other words that are also founded upon roughly the same metaphors.

Consider the word ‘culture’: while it can branch out to to the usual synonyms or words in the same conceptual domain, such as abstract concepts like civilisation, customs or tradition, it also rests upon another underlying web of words rooted in the idea of cultivation. This is the imagery domain it inhabits. Here we are evoking processes of things growing organically. We are talking of fertilising soil, sowing seeds, reaping harvests, separating wheat from chaff, fruits growing and ripening, and the list goes on. The metaphor provides thus a mental model that operates under the laws of the domain of cultivation in order to make sense of a phenomenon: what is the fruit? Who is sowing seeds? What would ‘fertilising soil’ entail in the act of creating culture?

The imagery of education

The same variation in imagery domains occurs with the notion of education. For one, it ties to the idea of culture through the shared metaphor of cultivation. We speak of ‘cultivating’ minds, which could translate into planting the right seeds, the right knowledge, and nurturing their growth. It could also extend to maintaining the soil of the mind fertile, meaning that we foster curiosity and self-reliance in finding the right way to learn. We can continue treading down this path by exploring how far we can stretch these analogies to better understand what ‘education’ actually means.

Similarly, the very word ‘educate’ is rooted upon the idea of conducts and guidance – e.g. abduction, deduction, ducts, introductions-. They are all children of the Latin ducere, which means to lead, guide or drive. The Italian word Duce, notorious in the contemporary age through fascism, quite literally means ‘Leader’. Thus, to ex-ducate means to lead out, to drive out (it is a compound word simplified into educate, the prefix ex denoting movement away from something. An educator is a kind of conduct with a gravitational pull that draws forth the best of a student. This force enrols and directs these positive inner forces latent within the student toward the external world, toward mastery and self-knowledge.

This is my own interpretation of the metaphor of course, improvised by blending a general notion of ‘education’ and ‘learning’ with the imagery that this metaphor evokes. And this is precisely the beauty of it: we are opening our minds to a rich exploration of an idea, beyond the abstract narrowness of a dictionary or academically sanctioned theoretical definition¹. We can turn it around, twist it like a kaleidoscope, or a curious artefact, in our minds. We can visualise cultivated fields, seasons, conducts, magnetic forces, and in doing so, renovate the meaning of each concept.

Ancient peoples such as Latin speakers, who moulded the bases of all Romance languages -and a large part of the vocabulary of other Latinate languages such as English-, had less abstract terms and concepts in their common intellectual repertoire to explain ideas such as education, so they would resort to analogies and metaphors closer to their more direct, embodied, physical relation with the world around them to convey the idea. This was especially true for the first stock of words that later would serve as a cultural substrate: the building blocks to construct more complex and precise concepts.

There are other words related to this conceptual domain: instruction and teaching. ‘Teaching’ is the Anglo-Saxon counterpart, related to the notion of showing. We show the learner how something is done. It is a word full of trust in the student’s self-discipline and agency. To me, it evokes the tough love of more practical, physical cultures in merciless climates like that of the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Unlike Mediterranean peoples, there was not time to sit among grapevines to meditate and debate on the nature of beauty and the intricacies of the metaphysical. In harsh climates, where shelter and sustenance had to be secured with responsibility and far-sightedness, effective participation and action was a crucial demand in order to survive. Thus, the ‘teacher’ showed the way, and then allowed the student walk it by direct application, advancing step by step through trial and error.

Lastly there is ‘instruct’. This word’s close relatives are quite evident: construction, destruction, obstruction, structure, infrastructure, even industriousness. The Latin root here is struere, which means ‘to pile up’, ‘to arrange’, ‘to build’. Hence, to instruct someone is to build solid structures within the student’s mind. We build tidy, ordered networks of knowledge, and we carve these paths (we could perhaps also call them knowledge templates?). We stack, arrange and reinforce edifices of knowledge within their minds, and we may forge connections while tending to and strengthening their mutual coherence.

Curiously, industry is, etymologically speaking, almost the same word as instruction: in-struere. They share the exact same etymological root. So, to be industrious can also imply the building of ordered structures. Yet, rather than building them into someone’s mind, they would be translated outside of the mind and into the world. These words carry connotations of dependability, durability, precision, and consistency that ‘education’ and ‘teaching’ do not necessarily possess.

A Borgesian experiment of a lexico-utopia.

Now, to come full circle, we return to writer Jorge Luis Borges: these almost conjurative powers of words can be further explored through a characteristically Borgesian thought experiment. That is, an experiment of the mind that blends dreams with rationality and extends ideas to their hypothetical limits. This approach to thinking is encapsulated in his declaration: “Me veo obligado a razonar, pero yo prefiero soñar”, which translates, with fair accuracy, to “I find myself compelled to reason, but I prefer to dream“. Thus, in a Borgesian experiment we follow the threads of rational thought, of coherence in cause and effect, and of a certain bond with our reality, but we do so while venturing into strange lands where the whimsical, thoroughly evocative, life-giving intentions of dreams and fantasy assume an unusual level of dignity.

This Borgesian world is a kind of lexico-utopia. A lexico-utopia could be defined as a conceptual or imagined place where language attains an ideal, harmonious, and perhaps perfected state.²

In this lexico-utopia, the essential ideas that drive the finest aspects of human society -of comunal life, relationships, individuality, flourishing and such- are all enriched by vast metaphorical domains baked into the language itself. Speakers are well aware and deeply understand the metaphorical notions, imagery, and laws that inhabit all words related to these ideas. And people are all educated, instructed, taught to employ them with mastery, either in communication or in their thinking. The result is that when thinking, conversing, or talking to each other, speakers operate with a level of nuance, clarity, and richness of imagery that thoroughly enhance communication. This results in generally heightened clarity, precision. evocativeness and poetic potential in thought and communication.

For the sake of brevity, I will only stop by a narrow set of entries from this lexico-utopian language: an idea close to both education and inspiration rooted in an intersectional domain where those of light, illumination and fire overlap. That is, it represents another family of education-related, underpinned by etymological roots connected to these elements of light and fire.

Light and fire

The interplay of light and fire provides an almost alchemical contraposition. Since the beginning of the so-called Age of Reason, light has been historically linked to rationality -and even before that, all the way to the god Apollo ruling over light, rationality and harmony-. The Enlightenment itself was conceived as the shedding of the light of reason to dispel the superstition that they maintained pervaded the so-called Dark Ages. Fire, conversely, is generally linked to emotion: we ignite our passions, burn with desire, boil with rage, possess fiery hearts and ardent zeal.

To speak of knowledge in terms of light and fire is to transcend the conventionally established polarity between reason and emotion. It is not about blending, synthesing, or combining them. It is rather to speak of this phenomenon as if there was a world where this polarity never became so deeply rooted in the culture.

Lexicon

Illuminating others (by shining upon them):

You reveal to others truth about themselves, so they can see their own nature in detail, in full blown colour. They see their hands manipulating things, they see what they are doing, they become conscious of it. You also make their shadow visible to them, what the shadow is obscuring, its silhouette, its size against other light sources. But it is you who does it, you are the source. Your own self dazzles them, you are the illuminator. They depend on you pointing reflectors at them until they learn to build their own light sources. Before becoming self-reliantly wise, they need to discover their own methods for illuminating the meaning of their unique qualities, their individuality, what is particularly theirs and which can be cultivated to the greatest reward.

Making others glow:

It is an unassuming, subtle kind of power: igniting in others knowledge of their intention, purpose, and undiscovered beliefs in others. You are the prime mover of this glow, but you emit no light yourself. This glow is not yet self-sustaining, like embers halfway to catching fire. But because you retreat into invisibility, this absence motivates them to seek to learn how to sustain their own glow.

The ideal is for them to witness the beauty of their radiance and that their capacity to glow. They become enamoured with their glow, intrinsically motivated to nurture this glow so that it perhaps grows brighter, or -more modestly- consistently for years to come.

A distinct quality of making others glow is that their glow will draw others in; the glowing individual illuminates others through their own inner light. Thus, it becomes essential that the one who kindles this glow transmits the ability to make that acquired wisdom patently visible to others, even if it is a glow as discreet as a wandering New Year’s lantern.

A related term is to blow embers: you know how to ignite what lies dormant. You know how to tell charcoal from embers: that which appears lifeless and spent but only requires a few puffs to reignite. And so, you yourself are rewarded by the warmth radiating from the bearer of embers: the glowing apprentice. It is the warmth of their rekindled vitality in the pursuit of knowledge, self-driven meaning, and forging paths to genuine human fulfilment.

Being like a sun:

You illuminate others with the radiance and steadfastness of the sun. Those to whom you influence their relationship with knowledge become somehow dependent upon your light. You reveal basic principles, rules of thumb to follow, so they can return to you when their journey through life becomes infertile, numb, barren of new meaning.

And your steadfast lessons are also radiant: they give warmth to knowledge and meaning. You make it come alive. And this living knowledge yearns to move, to get in contact with other knowledge, other beings that are truly alive. It seeks to reproduce itself, to nourish itself. You prompt, inspire and dispense sparks of clarity that, in fertile, receptive psyches will grow into something greater.

But your illumination follows the earlier pattern. You are not aiding them in becoming self-glowing. You only deal with individual idiosyncrasies, with the particular vicissitudes of life stories and how they were assimilated, only to the extent that your warmth inspires people to move forward into the world.

You seek to leave nothing to hide, to illuminate everything. You aim to make bright and clear the universal principles that rule the world; working out the details is someone else’s responsibility.

However, like certain things made to flaunt their attributes only in darkness, there are many entities that will invariably turn out dull and meaningless under sunlight. These are things with particular glows, only shining in the dark, like fireflies, gaslit street lamps, gems, metals and other glimmering materials. Early 20th century Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki captured this property of materials like lacquerware, gold and silver in his celebrated essay on Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows (1933):

Sometimes a superb piece of black lacquerware, decorated perhaps with flecks of silver and gold-a box or a desk or a set of shelves-will seem to me unsettlingly garish and altogether vulgar. But render pitch black the void in which they stand, and light them not with the rays of the sun or electricity but rather a single lantern or candle: suddenly those garish objects turn somber, refined, dignified.

Speaking of the virtues of darkness, this lexico-utopia includes an adjacent expression: one who illuminates like a candle.

Being like a candle, or the wisdom found in darkness:

In a world of shifting, breathing darkness, there exists an ineffable unity between things, as captured in this passage:

“The sheen of the lacquer, set out in the night, reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the drafts that find their way from time to time into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie. If the lacquer is taken away, much of the spell disappears from the dream world built by that strange light of candle and lamp, that wavering light beating the pulse of the night.“

Tanizaki emphasises how candlelight allies the night wind with the dance of light and shadow. The candle’s flame itself -and thus the light around- sways and flickers to the delicate tide of the occasional draft, of people’s breaths, of air moved by every slight movement in the room. The first quality of being like candlelight is then the ability to perceive of the thrill of these subtle connections that exist between things, to be engrossed by it, and to share this awareness to others.

Another evocative description of the effects of candlelight on our perception of the world is in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953):

“Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but-what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon“

Candlelight gives darkness a breathing presence. It creates space by allowing our surroundings to recede into dusk and darkness. These darkened distances enable clearer contemplation of what surrounds us. It lencourages us to leave thoughts wisely incomplete, like a question mark patiently waiting for its answer, all the while warmed by this central light that follows us. And the central candlelight draws people’s attention to it itself. It becomes that subtle but essential force which ties the things it illuminates momentarily together. They gather in shared space, all huddled together, in their common condition of being encircled by darkness.

It allows us to observe how the flame of our meaning-making endeavours is fickle and subtle, never leaving definitions as static, contrary to what we’d like to convince ourselves of. We may believe that we understand something, but our doubts about it surprise us from time to time. Sometimes they expand and sometimes they contract, like shadows in candlelight.

And similarly highlighting the moving quality of shadows, and the communal closeness that this light produces, we find these observations from a character from the novel Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortázar:

“Babs is a shepherdess of shadows,” Gregorovius said, “she works in clay, concrete shadows . . . Here everything breathes, a lost contact is established again; music helps, vodka, friendship . . . Those shadows in the cornice; the room has lungs, it palpitates. ”

As said above, being like a candlelight means making things breath. We animate what was previously only known in stasis, in a vacuum. We create a comforting scene out of it, fostering the communal warmth latent in our common bond with the candlelight. Maybe, like a dramaturg, or by playing shadow-puppets, we give light and shadows a face and a story. That is, we assimilate ideas by giving them movement, dancing in the haze between light and darkness: the advancing and retreating gaps of uncertainty, and the dim but restless light of provisional certainties.

“Yes, electricity is eleatic, it has turned our shadows to stone. Now they are part of the furniture and the faces. But here, on the other hand . . . Look at that molding, how its shadow is breathing, that volute that rises and falls. In those days man lived in a soft and porous night, in a continuous dialogue. The terrors, what a luxury for the imagination . . .” ³

The night becomes porous, where our imagination, like what we project onto darkness, interweaves with what candlelight reveals to draw forth new meanings from things. The dim light seeps into the unknown, gradually dissolving into it, becoming one with it. While developing his system of philosophy, Hegel came to a similar observation about the fertile nature of potential knowledge dwelling in darkness alongside the unknown.

“His studies, he later explained, had led him along labyrinthine paths to the deep recesses of his mind, to ‘dark domains where nothing is stable and definite and certain’.“⁴

The early Romantics, most notably Novalis, celebrated night as a realm of heightened perception and receptivity of the sublime.

“As they followed the flickering warm lights through the dark sculpture exhibition, the contours of the cold plastercast bodies softened in the theatrical play of light and shade. Except for the torches’ moving light, the rooms were shrouded in total darkness. How different the space looked at night – empty, quiet and magical, like Novalis’s celebration of darkness but writ in three dimensions. If imagination was like a building with many different rooms, maybe this was as close as one could get to walking through one’s mind.” ⁵

It can be said that a dark room mirrors the theatre of imagination. It is close to how our imagination would look like if projected on a screen: a darkened background and a few objects on focused display. The darkness in which they are shrouded resembles the primordial, watery, amorphous nature of our imagination, from which meaning surfaces. Our imagination constantly shifts, momentarily taking a crystallised, definite shape, only to dissolve back into the darkness as only a question, or a mere subtle perception.

And perhaps there are moments where we can only be inspired, educated, prompted on with things that need darkness to show their glimmer.

“As I gazed at the trays and bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I discovered in the gloss of this lacquerware a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond, a beauty I had not before seen.”⁶

Being like moonlight:

You guide others like the moon hanging above. You tint their vision to let them explore the other side of truths, truths only seen in the silver night, when it is silent and cold. Instead of textures and colours in full daylight bloom, you reveal outlines and dark looming masses. You draw attention to what remains concealed or overlooked in the tumult of truth by sunlight. You perceive and contemplate things with a sense of focused humility. The world appears as both simple and a majestic mystery.

It is a way of assimilating the world through this mood. In moonlight, trees are not just their textured bark and leaves, they are shapes merging to create something different. Our perceptions and ideas undergo this same transformation, becoming simplified in outline yet exhibiting a new beauty, blending to form new ideas. Under moonlight, shapes flow into one another. We perceive and interpret these darkened, smooth silhouettes through their similarities rather than by their differences. Things remain incomplete, inviting imagination to complete them, to play with their possibilities.

In describing Romanticism’s essence, Novalis, that great extoller of night, emphasises the deeper meaning that this melting of usually ignored affinities between things can generate:

“By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite”⁷

In this mingling of shapes, shadows, silver light and glimmer, we rediscover the mystery of things: their hidden relations, unseen details, textures, and beauties.

So, someone being like moonlight teaches others to see in these terms. You reveal the world in these terms, and you guide others to do the same, when the world seems too inscrutable and senseless, and the knowledge we thought we had in daylight betrays us. We teach them to bathe their the dark night of their perplexity in moonlight, and let them explore it with new eyes, learning to see the beauty that the dark brings forth.

Like candlelight, moonlight provides a reminder that in darkness some things can be made to shine in ways they would not otherwise, and that some glows, made obsolete under sunlight, can only be observed in the dark. We float and dissolve into the void of mystery, where our subjective impressions merge with what exists. It represents a stance of humility before the vastness of the universe and all that we cannot know. Yet it also embodies an urgency to create meaning in spite of this, meaning that is wholly resonant with who we are and that makes us intrigued to move on and make more out of life, in a playfully enchanted back and forth with this mystery.

Moonlight is the quiet darkness, the still darkness, a world stripped to monochromatism, where colour sleeps. It is digesting the world around us as if we were alone with it and it were alone with us, only sharing our presence with the silent, elusive, luminous beings of the night.

Being like electric light:

It is light that eradicates shadow from every corner. It is sharp and decisive, yet offering neither warmth nor life. It leaves truths recorded and clean so we can easily think them, observe them, and navigate them in a space of fixed and static certainties.
It is that comfort of letting yourself act upon a temporary belief that there are timeless certainties in life – a world where all corners are lit and perfectly visible, so that you can navigate it with less wariness and doubt. You play only with these limited objects, combine them, use them, and talk about them and their permanently cast cast shadows and colours. You are overlooking the rest that other lights reveal, but it is comforting and liveable, with solid, static components that can reliantly be assembled into acceptable meaning.

Blazing:

Heat is motion. A blaze is overwhelming motion. It is the fast acceleration of meaning to let it burn its mark in the culture. It is a group effort of bouncing the blazing concepts between us, as if we sentient beings were blaze-carrying torches. We need to pass them on to others before delving too deeply into them. They need to be seen by many with their own particular perspectives, and they need to be quickly measured against reality, against other things. All alone they will quickly burn out. They are not particularly self-sustaining.

We revise our views through these blazing concepts, using them to delve into unknown but enticing areas of what we experience in the world. These are the “What ifs?” that in our gut we feel compelled to investigate. We let them guide us, ignite us, whether as a source of inspiration, free association or interpretation.

Some of what we explore we burn down so that the new can grow. It is meaning that is “unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing“, and as Friedrich Schlegel, another one of the early Romantics who rejected the divide between rationality and emotion declared: “it should forever be becoming, never perfected“, “inherently incomplete and unfinished“⁸. In this sense, meaning is something alive and in movement. It is a blaze that renews with each bounce, each new torch it alights upon.

A form of blazing meaning could relate to revitalising works of art: films, literature, theatre, image, and so on. I believe that we live to understand art and not the other way around. As we mature and grow more connected to the world around us and familiar with it, we become more attuned to the messages emerging from artworks, which in turn reveal themselves as increasingly profound, expansive and brimming with meaning as life itself. Consequently, we become better conducts for the meaning that artworks channel through us and then we diffract out into the world. We act as a prism of sorts, and the more moving our own diffracted version of the ideas within artworks are, the more they will touch other people and fire them up with a desire to pass it on again.

Eventually blazing meaning dies out. There is nothing else that is worth throwing at it, questioning it or forgetting about in order to fuel it. We stop thinking about it, but not before it left its mark in the culture with new meanings, senses and uncharted paths. It is the spark that set this process in motion, akin to the one described in the Bruce Springsteen song “Dancing in the Dark”:

“You can’t start a fire
You can’t start a fire without a spark“

Being like a reflective shine:

“He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were more often – he searched for a simile, found one in his work – torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people’s faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?”⁹

You refract people’s lights to them. You help them experience -discover- how their light affects others, how it appears, revealing aspects of their flame that they couldn’t or didn’t want to see, their “own innermost trembling thought”. You show them whata they really think and how it gains life and warmth through their own fire. It is an empathetic approach.

Conclusion: the perpetual renovation of the notions of meaning-making and knowledge-acquisition through different metaphorical domains.

These variations follow the same rhythms as Fry’s example of the distinct roots of ‘heal’, ‘cure’ and ‘therapeutic’, or the varied possible connotations among words that are near-synonyms such as ‘instruct’, ‘educate’ and ‘teach’,

We are adding another etymological root to the idea of ‘bringing, or inspiring, knowledge in other’, as well as ‘ways of producing meaning’. It is that power that we have to slip streaks of new colours into each other’s minds, to change the rhythm of our thoughts, and perhaps rescuing us from a despairing narrowness of thought that is not our fault. ‘Educate’, ‘teach’, and ‘instruct’, are some manifestations of this primordial human act. And we are including a new vision of this act, embedded in other metaphorical realms: for instance that of ideas as having heat and movement, or that of the ambiguous relationship of meaning with shadow and light, with what we think we see, how we perceive it, and how we engage with the inevitable unknown.

Coda: the plausibility of magical realism

There it is, a glimpse of some of the magic that Borgesian magical realism can engender. We explore something that could have been, a plausible alternative that could have happened had history taken a series of unlikely turns.

Yet, its dreamlike quality owes to the fact that the person imagining it is cutting it off from its origins. We do not concern ourselves with how exactly this status quo would have come to happen. We let it float in a clear mind sky of possibility, uprooted from the chains of causality that counterfactuals demand in order to explain how this utopia would have come to happen. And we allow ourselves to dream it, because we intuit that what could improbably have happened could still happen, and the world would become a bit more like a living dream.

✵
1. I am not implying that this narrowness is intrinsically bad. It is actually invaluable for certain kinds of academic pursuits and the construction of academic consensus on truths, the building upon others findings’ and being precise about the process we developed to getting there. ↩︎
2. The etymology is imperfect, as lexicon is Greek for book of language, while lexis is the proper word for language. Still, I choose to settle on this little inaccuracy for the sake of euphony. ↩︎
3. Hopscotch, by Julio Cortazar. Published in 1963. ↩︎
4. Found in Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf. Published in 2022. ↩︎
5. Idem. ↩︎
6. In Praise of Shadows, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Published in 1933 ↩︎
7. Magnificent Rebels. ↩︎
8. Idem. ↩︎
9. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. ↩︎
Revisiting Fellini’s 8 1/2

February 4th, 2025

frimile

This film is so special.

Why do we create art? Is it self-indulgence, escapism, search for prestige through a whimsical medium? Or is it to “bury all the dead things we have inside”, to make life more lived, love more loved?

The story depicts contradictions in the successful artist from the point of view of his own subjectivity. All in a very felliniesque way of course.
The world allows him to continue creating while he can get away never facing his own demons. Because he cannot say the truth anymore, as it wouldn’t be what they expect of him. He learns that he needs to live the truth instead, learn how to love again, pull his close ones closer instead of escaping them as he has always done, always dreaming of something beyond, chasing chimeras.

He is a victim of his own unbounded imagination: “Life is a celebration. Let’s live it together! Accept me for what I am, if you want me. It’s the only way we might be able to find each other. “

The film examines questions like: what is the point of being capable of creating all this celebrated art if all that vitalising beauty will never truly permeate the dullness of real life? Is he merely creating items for escapism? If he is such a genius, why can’t he enjoy his own life? Make his own people happier and more fulfilled?

The protagonist might be an artist, but he is grappling with universal questions about how to live, even after seemingly having reached an enviable state in life: of society celebrating the products of your personal imagination and eagerly waiting for you to continue creating on your own terms. The film opens with the iconic image of Guido suffocating in a car in the middle of a traffic jam, followed by a scene of him floating above a beach, tethered to the ground by a rope around his ankle. He is very much capable of flying and ostensibly free to live life on his terms, but something prevents him from truly breaking free and flying. He is hovering, floating, but neither fully airborne nor earthbound. He is not quite on the ground, connected to his surroundings and the important people in his life. Although elevated in the air, he is still a prisoner. Surely this is not a sustainable of living, and the film is meant to depict this limbo state of existential angst.

At this point in his career Fellini was going through this same crisis. Though enormously successful with 8 films in his oeuvre (hence the film’s title ‘8 1/2’), he still found the simplest forms of happiness the most elusive. He dove into Jungian philosophy in search of answers, and much of the results of this spiritual adventure can be seen manifested in this film.

The story is treated in a kind of oneiric, dreamlike sequence of memorable vignettes, some funny, others poignant, others unsettling. It blends memory with dreams, pure subjectivity and beautiful, hypnotic imagery. It is populated with characters dipping in and out between their real identities and their state as an archetype of sorts in the protagonist’s mind. All of this makes the film something magical but also understated, and poignantly realistic. Fellini isn’t scared anymore of trying to be honest while coming across as confused and slightly lost as he embarks on this quest. That’s the reason behind the name “1/2”, instead of being 9 as in his ninth film. He doesn’t know how to name it, he isn’t even sure if it’s a whole film, because it is a film about not being able to make a film. It is half a film because it is folding into itself, like a used napkin.

It is one of those films that will tell you something different every time you watch it depending on what moment of your life you are transiting.

It has so many great quotes like this one:
“My dears… Happiness consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.”

And my favourite one., which has stuck with me ever since the first time I watched it years ago:

“Guido: Could you walk out on everything and start all over again? Could you choose one single thing, and be faithful to it? Could you make it the one thing that gives your life meaning… just because you believe in it? Could you do that?”
Claudia: I don’t know… could you?”
Guido: No, the character I’m thinking of couldn’t. He wants to possess and devour everything. He can’t pass anything up. He’s afraid he’ll miss something. He’s drained.”
Post-utterance Clarity

February 1st, 2025

frimile
“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.” Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21, The Paris Review, 1954.¹

“Meanwhile, I’d put on my overcoat, and was waiting to say good night. He walked me to the door, where I put on my shoes. “Well, sayonara,” he mockingly bade me. “Tell them at the desk to get you a taxi.” Then, as I walked down the corridor, he called, “And listen! Don’t pay too much attention to what I say. I don’t always feel the same way.” Marlon Brando, New Yorker, 1957.²

It is not far-fetched to suggest that we must voice our thoughts to discover whether we truly believe them—or whether we understand them as we imagined we did. Our thoughts reveal their true nature only when spoken, showing us whether we truly hold them or merely imagined we did.

This premise reveals two sides: first, the trust and accountability that we need to extend to someone in what they say; second, the nature of the relation between language and ideas. I see this relation as a recursive type of interaction, where the idea that we mean to communicate through language is not a finished product before we utter it. It is rather a shapeless intuition. We can tell that it ‘feels right’ when we see it manifest, yet in its present state it is too nebulous for us to formulate it (ie. organise its components, give the idea structured coherence, imagery, an intelligible form).

The recursiveness in this relation between language and ideas lies in the provisional intelligible form that articulation through words bestows upon thought. When we speak, we have articulated an idea in words, allowing it to depart from our minds, and resonate out of our mouths as physical sound that another person will witness. In essence, words grant ideas both reality and a kind of substance.

It is only then—when we have tested a provisional shape, circumscribed by our eloquence, command of relevant terminology, shared cultural references,—that we can observe it and judge where we stand before it.

And I mean not merely judging how closely our words match the original idea. Rather, I mean something more subtle: that only when confronted by an idea taking any ‘real’ form (or ‘witnessable’, ‘shareable’, ‘crystallised’, ‘durable’, you name it), can we judge whether that initial, shapeless impulse is actually aligned with, or at least pointing towards, what we really believe —that is, a shapeless impulse which we considered something worth expressing as ‘our view’ or ‘the product of our mind’.

Often, it is only post-utterance that we discover that this initial idea does not represent us, that we do not believe in what we have just said. We realise we have grasped at something in this nebula of unformed ideas that was born out of something within ourselves that is, strangely enough, not who we are. Such deceptive regions of our thinking might include beliefs that we never truly reflected upon, and yet we decided to incorporate based upon an initial vague idea, or passing thoughts with implications we have yet to fully weigh.

This phenomenon can be called post-utterance clarity³: we do not achieve clarity until we have uttered the idea (or better said, after we have articulated it into words). Such clarity may expose whether we are truly capable of expressing an idea, whether we understand it, or —as Hemingway observed— whether we believe it.

It is a curious thing. And it is also troubling. The thoughts that are most authentic to our particular, unique experience of the world are the ones that are most resistant to verbal capture. Words (and above all concepts) are conventions, and they happen to be the limited ingredients that we must combine to organise and give utterable form to an idea. Thus, as we venture into the act of saying what we mean, we strive not to fall into the trap of allowing our idea to dilute into pre-existing slogans (political catchphrases, ideological formulae, stock metaphors, simplified concepts, and other fully articulated opinions that circulate in the public mind).

This means that when attempting to communicate our own idea, there is greater likelihood of missing the mark in our initial attempt, as we labour to find the right combination from the limited ingredients at our disposal. Faced with this inherent pitfall, the question is: what can be done when some thoughts —perhaps our finest ones?— must necessarily undergo the process of post-utterance clarity in order to be either developed further or discarded.

Many readers might identify with Marlon Brando’s claim (see quote above): that one does not always feel the same way about things. We might reframe this as acknowledging that a person’s can mind can shift frequently, capable of harbouring contradictory or incompatible thoughts simultaneously. We humans are complex being, rational and emotional, swayed by the tides of the wise, yet cryptic forces of our subconscious. We must express ourselves to discover and to explore ideas, even when momentarily seized by less agreeable kinds of moods that might prompt us to voice thoughts we may later disown. Nonetheless, there is a subtle distinction between saying things you might regret driven by a momentary emotion, and expressing the kind of thought that needs to be first expressed wrongly in order for it to eventually emerge. The latter can be still the case even if the ‘right’ emotion is there. And since the thought will almost unfailingly need to be ‘tested’, it is in a sense more a matter of intellect than emotion.

This regret reflects the other pole of the issue of post-utterance clarity: how do we foster cultural expectations that allow people to reach their most authentic ideas without fearing the repercussions of crossing that threshold – of expressing themselves themselves imperfectly (even wrongly) the first time?

Surely we have all experienced this, not least in matters of love: seized by infatuation, we encounter that cruel peculiarity of the human mind where we must first stumble upon our words before understanding what we truly meant to say, sometimes when it is too late. We do not gain the necessary clarity to say the reasonable thing until after we have uttered our feelings or thoughts in ways that betray our authentic thought.

As Hemingway says, one answer lies in writing. Through writing, we can test our ideas and refine them before sharing them with others, making it more fitting to be held accountable for our written words. Yet writing lacks spontaneity and the immediate feedback from other people’s minds of back-and-forth conversation; it stands too rigid and remote compared to real-time conversation, and its demand for commitment to the expressed idea can prove too binding. The thought becomes fixed, losing the fluidity and malleability of the spoken word.

I believe we must more widely grasp that expression does not equal intention. Expression is the act of pressing something from within the self outward. Intention is being ‘tensed’ towards a specific aim; like a bow tensed towards its target, a speaker’s utterances are shaped by a specific desired state of things: “this element, region, part of the world/reality should be like this”. Intention is thus not exploratory, as opposed to how Hemingway depicts spoken conversation.

In contrast, expression can be exploratory —the act of making something from within the self manifest in the world (even if only as words and sound) seeks no other aim beyond leaving one’s interiority, unwitnessed by none but the self. In other words, the arrow yearns to fly free, piercing the air above, bound to no target.

The responsibility rests both in the general culture and in the very speaker. The general culture needs to develop consensus around the idea that in a great majority of cases people are trying to express something by wrestling with all the intricacies of language, especially its under-attended difficulty in allowing authentic thought to gain form -a facility that is reserved to a certain level of linguistic skill-. Such consensus implies that one might be expected to comment on their misstep, revealed to them post-utterance, and admit this without a loss of dignity (on the contrary, such gesture should crown the person with dignity). The second consensus that needs to be nurtured is that embodied speech -speaking in person, with our vocal apparatus and body in the presence of others- has a singular quality that sets it apart from other instances of communication: it is the arena where raw thoughts are hammered into satisfactory forms, and ideas emerge.

On the speaker’s side, they need to recognise that words have weight, and that it’s best to clumsily articulate one’s thoughts with the words one finds to be the most precise in an imperfect and provisory manner. The poorer choice is to assume that echoing pre-formulated slogans or deploying worn labels will suffice to ‘communicate’ meaning. One might be tempted to believe that it would be easier to perform the act of speaking by employing these. Yet the inevitable result is that this won’t be true expression. Instead, it will result in the mere channeling of an idea drifting in the current of general discourse, and that will likely fail to reflect one’s true thinking, values, identity, and so on.

Authentic thought is valuable enough that it is worth acknowledging the universal human condition of post-utterance clarity. Many ideas need to pass through this initial failure to find an outer form most adequate to them. It is like secluded areas in a map that are only accessible through a series of treacherous terrains. And it is a pity that many of them never see the light of day, stifled by inhibitions and discouragements. They are casualties product of a lack of consensus on what communicative contexts an utterance will be treated as exploratory expression or as articulated intention.
1. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway ↩︎
2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1957/11/09/marlon-brando-profile-truman-capote ↩︎
3. Yes, the pun is intended. The feeling in both cases is similar in many ways, one in the realm of mind, the other in the visceral domain. They share, above all, that profound sense of unburdening oneself of something. ↩︎
The difference between the essential and the accessory in our activities

December 11th, 2024

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When we speak of efficiency, the pursuit of saving time and effort, we are implicitly essentialising an activity towards its desired outcome. The outcome becomes the gravitational force, its looming figure overshadowing the majority of potential benefits hidden along the process itself.

By ‘essentialising’, I mean that the we are defining the activity in its most skeletal form: the action as thee starting point and the desired outcome as the finish line. So, given that the essence of the activity is the outcome, to be efficient means to strip the activity down to its essence, which is to get to the outcome as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Everything else is seen as accessory, just a means to arrive to the outcome, which can be replaced if we devise a more efficient alternative. Hence, the activity that we set out to perform more efficiently is ultimately reduced -in its most essential, distilled form- to the will to execute a certain outcome with minimal expenditure of time, effort and other resources.

The path to the outcome becomes accessory. It is not a part of the essence of what we mean to do. If we want to have a coffee at a café, the process to get there is secondary to this action. We don’t think to ourselves that ‘we want to have a coffee in an exalted mood, on a windy day, after having heard great news, at a café where my crush waits on tables, coming to an important realisation along the way’. In reality, we think ‘we are going to have a coffee at the café’, everything else is another action, or an accessory circumstance, event that happens on top of the simple act of going to a café to drink coffee.

Sure, we can articulate all these as pre-conditions to ourselves, but truth remains that they are all secondary, and that only the ‘drinking coffee at a café’ part is essential.

How do we know this? The test is simple: we can strip away all these conditions from our statement, and the activity remains the same: we are still going to be drinking coffee. However, if we remove the ‘drinking coffee’ part, then the activity falls apart. All the other pre-conditions conditions were dependent on this specific, essential component. This is the essence of the concept of essence. Essence is indispensable.

I believe there is another concept adjacent to the distinction between essence and accessory. It is the concept of witnessed methodology.

If we went purely by its etymological roots, methodology refers to the path that we choose to take to get somewhere¹. Bruno Latour offers an enlightening observation about this word:

If earnest scholars do not find it dignifying to compare an introduction of a science to a travel guide, be they kindly reminded that ‘where to travel’ and ‘what is worth seeing there’ is nothing but a way of saying in plain English what is usually said under the pompous Greek name of ‘method’ or, even worse, ‘methodology’ ²

It can be thus seen as a series of signs scattered across a territory guiding you along. They tell you where the path is, where to turn, and recommend what to look at, what to ignore, and so on.

From there, a witnessed methodology is one where you are aware that you are following a path to get somewhere, that you are seeking something specific, but you also remain open to witnessing what the path can offer.

With a witnessed methodology we are essentialising the whole path a posteriori. Once we reach our goal, we can take stock of what we experienced, not in terms of how effectively it took us to the end, but of what happened along the way, what made it an essentially unique journey. We can find a name for what we experienced. Then, we can seek to repeat that experience, to transform it into a kind of ritual -or routine-. We can seek to understand the benefits that it produced, pursue them further, and adjust the conditions of our life to make this methodology more accessible and repeatable.

In an essentialised methodology, any part of the journey can serve as an end in itself. Without these parts, the activity itself ceases to exist, as they are all essential to its nature. Witnessing a methodology simply means that we are retroactively tracing it, not by evaluating it in terms of how efficiently it led to the outcome, but by reflecting on what happened along the way that we consider essential to it and desirable to be perpetuated.

For instance, we might come across something in a post, such as a particular, unique image. We choose to explore its origins. We can check online what that image is about, where it comes from, and so on, or we can ask the author of the post directly about where they found it, why they chose it, what it means to them. Similarly, instead of consulting a large language model for a solution to a problem, we might ask someone personally. We ask for directions from a passerby, or inquire about a song that is playing instead of relying on Shazam³.

The destination remains the same, but with a different methodology we open a small conduct -or a door, whatever metaphor you wish- to human connection and interaction. We might learn other things that we weren’t actively seeking but that we needed, or that delight us. We are invoking those moods that infuse our surroundings with an invigorating, encouraging energy, beneficial not only at the individual and interpersonal level, but more broadly at the societal level by fostering social cohesion.

These are moods such as generosity, feeling useful to someone else, gratitude, selfless collaboration, and the list goes on. And we are ultimately exposing ourselves, affirming our presence in the world, and perhaps leaving an imprint in the minds of other people (as they do in our minds).

We are making a statement about the fundamentally human habit of reaching out to one another for answers. Above all, we are engaging with a fellow person by treating them more as an end in themselves than as a means to an external goal.

And this is just one of many examples. Another one is living in a relatively small city and choosing to take the bus instead of riding a bicycle to get somewhere. Beyond all considerations of efficiency, you are opting for a mode of transportation that costs money and that in total takes longer to get you to your destination. While with a bike you might get there sooner, exercise, breathe fresh air and save money, you will miss an opportunity for reflection and quiet.

Intention comes from ‘tension’, from ‘stretching yourself towards something’. Like a sponge, if we stretch too much towards something, like an essentialising goal, an absolute intention, we lose permeability. We become impervious to the real richness of the world.

On the bus, you have time to sit and contemplate, to let thoughts surface, to observe both your surroundings and your inner subjective processes. In a sense, choosing to ride a bike every time can make you a victim of your routine and your limited intentions. You get from point A to point B, where you want to get quicker, but in order to do so you need to ride on the road, to be exposed to the elements, to pay attention to your surroundings, push pedals, change gears, use brakes.

Hence, there is a danger of over-occupying one’s day with pre-conceived tasks and activities, and the places where we will carry them out, leaving little room for the breathing space in-between. That permeable membrane that makes the world around us more fecund, fertile and rich, instead of a constant means to get somewhere else. It spares us from constantly thrusting the force of our intentions upon our environment, when maybe the right next step forward is hiding somewhere along the way, or we realise that the activity’s goal was actually a dispensable stepping stone to what we were truly seeking.

So, returning to the distinction between essence and accessory. Commuting by bike or bus are different things. The bike or the bus are not accessory to the act of commuting. Each one implies a different state of being, almost like different rituals meant to bathe the day with different tones, scents and impressions. If one were to look back at it from a standpoint of a witnessed methodology, one would notice and reflect on the differences that each type of experience generated. One would trace the method, the path that this experience took, with all its unexpected stops and effects, such as connecting with another human, or finding the answer to a difficult decision and a renewed sense of inspiration during a bus ride. Then, next time, one would take them into consideration when deciding on how they want to get somewhere, be it literally or metaphorically.

Yes, this is definitely a long-winded way of saying ‘life is about the journey, not the destination’. Yet, it also introduces a way to put this into practice with more assiduity and, dare I say, humanity.

As a coda, I share this passage from Keith Richards autobiography “Life”. Faced with the sudden death of a friend, Richards decides to embark on a quest after an arbitrary target that will take him along to an adventure with a friend. The target is to find who he says is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world‘, a girl he had met once or twice and who happened to live in Munich, which was close to Innsbruck where he was staying at the time:

In order to deal with Gram’s death, I said, I can’t stay in Innsbruck tonight. I’m going to rent a car, and we’re going to Munich and we’re going on an impossible task. We’re going to look for one woman. Because I knew about her, I’d seen her once or twice, and she fascinated me. I know this is pointless, but we’re going to go into Munich to look for her. Let’s go tonight. Let’s just forget about it and go do something else. I hate all that crying shit, and moping. There’s nothing you can do about it. The fucker’s dead and all you do is get mad at him for dying. So you take your mind off it. I’m going to look for one of the most beautiful women in the world. I’ll never find her, but that’s what we’ll go for. A focus. A target. And Bobby and Irented a BMW, this was one in the morning, and took off. The target was Uschi Obermaier. If there was one thing that could soothe my soul, it was her. “

And eventually they find her:

George, will you go up and say that KR’s looking for her? I was determined to make the full circle with GP dying. And George goes up and knocks on her door, and out she struts, just to the window, and goes, who are you Why? I don’t know why, a friend of mine’s just died, and I’m pretty fucked up. I just want to say hello. You were the target, and we found you. We’ll leave it at that. Then she came down and gave me a kiss and went back upstairs. But hey, we actually pulled it off! Mission accomplished.

In this more radical example, the arbitrariness of his target makes the tracing of a path, a methodology, the essence itself of his action. After all, to be alive, to be human, is to be in movement. There is no sentence without a verb. From the moment we are born our heart keeps on beating, and we never cease breathing, thinking, stretching our minds towards something. To be alive is to engage with the world in constant movement, armed with a rather faulty compass, always walking with a keen mind, ready to take turns along the way because we realise they are better. We connect with others, we build things with them, every once in a whiles stealing a glance at our elusive star.

I suspect that the methodologies that we witness and make ours are the itineraries that, as they layer upon each other in our inner subjective cartography, slowly carve the essence of our individuality. They are our ways of doing thing, of choosing paths in life, that emerge from our whole being, the intellectual, the emotional, the sensorial, the full exprience.
1. It is rooted in the ancient Greek word μέθοδος, or méthodos in latin script. This word translates to the ‘transcending path’. That is, it is a roadmap, an itinerary to get somewhere that can exist statically, suspended somewhere in the realm of ideas. Read more ↩︎
2. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. ↩︎
3. That is, using the app Shazam to identify a song. ↩︎

Stories are templates for a more meaningful shared existence

Table of Contents

Introduction

Stories represent Platonic ideals

Archetypes mould the world. Platonic ideals uncover it.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Platonic ideals beyond the antagonist archetype

The bottomline

Will you stay in our lover’s story? Bowie’s art of making life a worthy story

Scavenging the word “bourgeois”

Table of Contents

What the idea of “bourgeois” evokes: more than necessary?

The risks of using big fat abstractions

The bourgeois idea of compartmentalising life as a default state

Successfully communicating some of a word’s ideas without letting the word get in the way

Lexico-utopia: a Borgesian experiment on the language of light and knowledge

Table of Contents

Introduction

The imagery of education

A Borgesian experiment of a lexico-utopia.

Light and fire

Lexicon

Illuminating others (by shining upon them):

Making others glow:

Being like a sun:

Being like a candle, or the wisdom found in darkness:

Being like moonlight:

Being like electric light:

Blazing:

Being like a reflective shine:

Conclusion: the perpetual renovation of the notions of meaning-making and knowledge-acquisition through different metaphorical domains.

Coda: the plausibility of magical realism

Revisiting Fellini’s 8 1/2

Post-utterance Clarity

The difference between the essential and the accessory in our activities

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