The University Club

Herr Professor Doctor Father Yi-Fu Tuan took me to lunch today at the University Club on library mall. It was a delicious meal during which the flesh of many a being moistened and eventually yielded to the persistent mastication of two mouths and two minds.

Yi-Fu (as I address him, appropriately or not) commented on containers. He mentioned that in our professional, nay academic, sphere we speak of frames, framing, and reframing when we want to think of containers. Our ideas must be framed, they must be shaped in order to provide some kind of linearity to the argumentation, discussion, or story. Without a frame we could not be understood by our readers. Without a frame, he said, our thinking would shoot out into the world in a disorganized shower.

This is exactly how I have been feeling in my spiritual and intellectual lives.

Can I really tell the two lives apart?

So, containers are still going on in my mind and conversation. The containment seems to be something of a trap. It is an encoding of raw thought, feeling, and experience into disciplined, legible work. The container and the frame enslave the beauty of primary experience to serve the needs of communication. While some claim that language shapes experience, I cannot help but object that experience is often inexpressible. Such an objection does not prove, but seems to indicate, that language is not fully determining of experience. Language, then, is one of the containers I confront these days. How do I write about an idea? How shall I express this thought?

I must contain them in language. The container of language encodes the thought in such a way that it can be decoded by others in the name of understanding, sympathy, and society.

Beyond language, containment of ideas, especially in academic work, must incorporate into its walls the bricks of other ideas. It is not enough to simply write the ideas into words and sentences. I must also write them into the wall. I must sweeten the edges (perhaps only the edges) of my brick-idea with a framing complementary to its adjacent bricks. Beyond that, the idea must also reference a discipline, or in my case, several disciplines. Thus the edges of the idea must not only align with adjacent thinking, but must also weave in the threads dominant in that neighborhood of intellectual life.

The container thickens beyond the thin world of grammar and meaning: it must engage with pre-existing knowledge sets.

The container thickens. If you begin to feel claustrophobic, look out the window at the fluffy clouds.