One of the German philosophers (though I don’t remember which one) wrote that the world"worlds". Taken broadly this means that our planet and all we know will unfold and move in accordance with what things are, as opposed to what we think they are. The Iowa folk singer Greg Brown puts it this way: "The world ain’t what you think it is, it’s just what it is."
This is true of all experience. The Middle East will never be what the neocons want it to be. The EPA can’t turn a wild salmon into a domesticated one just by saying so. A poem is not a self-help book; kudzu isn’t Spanish moss.
Last night I heard a college student ask a question of my friend, the poet and nonfiction writer Kenny Fries. The student wanted to know how disability fit into "identity politics" and Kenny said: "I don’t believe in identity."
Does this mean that Kenny Fries, who happens to have a disability "rejects" his condition? Not at all. But he knows that Spanish moss and kudzu are wildly different "sui generic" and what’s more, they’re different from what any of us might suppose. Put another way: disability is a fractional part of experience.
Some days I fear that in our theory driven age we’ve forgotten the Enlightenment. We can categorize the things of this world. We can even transform our experience. But just so, we shouldn’t see the life of the mind as a subset of worlding.
I think it was Heidegger who made "world" into a verb. It’s early. There’s still some hope for my memory.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 