responsibilities descend
Growth betrays itself as age surrenders into responsibility.
I began my taphonomy of worlding series with the word tradition. That post is a rant, probably my most ranty piece. On re-reading it I saw I had not covered the word’s usages with reference to surrender. I.E. with a focus etymological as wide as it might have been.
For about a decade I have had in my head a phrase I occasional say aloud to no response, “responsibilities descend”. I said it in acknowledgement or acceptance. So it goes. People have never said anything in reply. I spoke it into the air. Explain yourself the air said.
So besides the use of tradition as it is most commonly used to day, and it’s related terms we may not immediately notice as its kin (to trade, hand-over, deliver, hand-down knowledge, passing on doctrine) there is also ‘surrender’/‘betray’. Can you stay true to these traditional usages?
This Judas quality hints at every word’s Janus qualities. Every word can easily be a contronym or more (Januswörter auf Deutsch) because when spoken they can be heard, and this positional framing that a language assumes (the POV of speak/hear) is sometimes smoodged (see blur). This why pronouns can be important, even if you do not care who you truly are. Pronouns’ first job was to position speech and its interlocutors. Pronouns are a type of preposition… —meta-preposition? Identify with them at your peril.
Language is traded, yes, each speaker may seek and give attention in return, but it is also stored by the trading en masse. We can call that trade in words a lek (an zoological term describing an agreed place to co-operatively compete) but anthropologists call it social learning. They focus on the outcome not the brand-name, it’s the economy stupid. A lek of a tradition is the community of speakers, but is not completely identical with a language, for dialects may or may not split it up, and iso-glossal communities of multiple languages are common.
Tradition in the sense of handing down doctrine/ways/routines/kulcha refers to that local instant of social learning. The lek is the polis, the market, the cultic site, the performance of songs on one’s country, or anothers’. The wider term for the lek of leks of social learning is the world. Not all leks are aware of the world. Some are shy of it and some are downright hostile. Leks are not necessarily imperial in overreach.
Universal history buffs should not sand the world’s variety all away into a special shine. Parochial essentialists should not exaggerate the local specialness into specious narcissism nor into some parochial time in the sun (like Spengler-ists).
The world is what it is. The world does not care, even if you do, even if your lek does. Even if you care who you truly are, however, as I mentioned above, “responsibilities descend”. The context I can now see tradition also in respect of surrender or betray, as Janus whispers it.
When I said “responsibilities descend” I was surrendering to them, which in Taphonomy of worlding’s part 1 tradition, I felt could be a betrayal of youth. It was the same moment.
Growth betrays itself as age surrenders into responsibility.
Other entries in the taphonomy of worlding. As inspired by Raymond Williams ‘Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society’ Croom Helm, 1978, [London].
Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com