Labyrinths and 'Gothic'

Labyrinth? Ok, so this may be the first in a series of densely-crenalated passages, all encircling the idea of the Gothic like a mandalaic Wheel of Time - the gothic, as expounded by William Morris and other early British socialists, and applying it to the concept of experiential knowledge as brought forth in the work of William Carlos Williams (The Embodiment of Knowledge) and Theodore Roszak (Where the Wasteland Ends).

Gothic in Architecture

What does all that name-dropping mean? I understand 'the gothic' to be a conceptual approach modeled after the architectural form of the same name: a process of mutually-reinforcing inclusion of a broad swath of the community in the elaboration of 'space' (literal and figurative) that serves the highest and lowest of the society. Particularly important is the practical 'decision' to permit continual elaboration through time - practical, because the effort to make a house for God, a cathedral, necessitates a continuity: we are in time, God outside.

Techno Elitism in the Building Industry

Entrenched knowlege-form favors technocracy, also as a matter of practicality, because it has defined for itself a province that excludes such mystery as how to build a place for spirit that is beyond time or formularized knowing, a place that can only be tasted at the limits of the senses, circled but never grasped. In techno-elitism, the elite class of experts have the exclusive authority to work toward the perfection of outlines laid down previously, by other experts. Access to the work may therefore be restricted - both institutionally/intentionally and in the sense that such specialization is not the luxury or the choice of everyone in the community; not everyone can live by it.

Positive Credos of the Gothic Approach

The gothic approach involves maximizing the freedom of 'the future' to expand or re-configuring the work of the past, and resists elevating technical aspects of work out of the common person's or the community/folk's ken. In an apparent paradox, Morris originally conceived the gothic in relation to architecture as a theoretical basis from which to defend historically important structures from a contemporary craze of 'restoration': his idea being that these 'restorations' expressed the limited desire of only a narrow swath of the British class spectrum (what we now call the bourgeois), a narrow desire/aesthetic blind to the central role of process in the essence of the buildings, and one that sought to freeze them into a classical mold that would be at odds with their most important aspect.

Extension of the Gothic to Describe Concepts and Intellectual Traditions

Theodore Roszak and William Carlos Williams participate in a related tradition of criticizing entrenched 'knowledge' in favor of an approach that emphasizes the primacy of experience - and therefore personal and local experience, experience-truth that is true because it still remains connected to its origin in place and time. As in architecture, the forms of the past provide a context and even a grounding for ongoing experience-truth; but Williams and Roszak cry out for a break from an excessive timidity, a tendency to distrust one's own place, in the face of knowledge-forms' massive presence.

To quote the latter:

Suppose we ask how the truth becomes true to us. What is the decisive, veridical experience that persudes us to accept any framework of discourse as meaningful and knowledge-yielding? For persuasion is the heart of the matter. What is true to me is what I am persuaded is true. Mind that I say "persuaded" - not brainwashed, intimidated, tricked, or duped … but freely won over, while in full possession of my own mind and critical faculties. Is there, then, a psychology of persuasion which would account for our society's collective decision to become a science-based culture?

If we would discover that psychology, we must be prepared to see the truth as a multidimensional experience, an experience which resonates through the whole personality. Obviously, what people have considered true - the items we can package up into a propositional inventory - has altered from age to age, from culture to culture. But what of that? Trace the experience deeper and the relativism of the matter is dispelled. We are, after all, more than the articulate intellect and its logical apparatus; that is perhaps the last part of us to go to work on the truth, applying it here and there, elaborating its implications once a context of meaning has already been endorsed. What we are persuaded to call the truth is that which engages us at many and more secret levels, until we feel that the whole of our being has been warmed to life and is now burningly there, alert, and animated. It is this experience of truth - this bright response to a reality we sense pressing in upon us along the many avenues of our awareness - which is universal. Perhaps, then, if we could do justice within ourselves to the reality others have been touched by, we might even find their trutht larger and more liberating than our own, and so be persuaded to see things anew.

But once this transforming, veridical experience has entered the lives of men and women, it is ironic what often follows. The personality which received the truth whole now reshapes itself, even delimits itself, striving for an identity that will best and most specially manifest its witness. Such a taking on of rolesis, it would seem, our innately human way of celbrating the realization of truth. We adorn ourselves with a new self, usually one that seeks to emphasize aspects of reality previously slighted. This may be the project of generations, each successive generation sharpening the identity pioneered by its forebears. So a culture works out its peculiar destiny, achieving style, if often at the expense of wholeness. Until, at last, it may lose touch entirely with dimensions of reality which initially inspired its distinctive identiy. Then what a people call true will no longer be true as it was once experienced to be true. It will be the mere surface of the primordial experience: a collection of propositions, data, credos, dogmas, customs … at last institutionalized and enforced by authority. This is a diminishment of the personality; but it is important to realize that, initially, the whole person acted to create this half person - even as the whole and healthy actor might undertake to make himself over on the stage into a monomaniac, and then lose himself in the role.

In our personal lives, neurosis is such a playacting, the whole psyche seeking satisfaction by forcing itself into a lesser identity. Pico della Mirandola once called human beings, by their very nature, chamelions who are forever taking up one disguise after another. Perhaps there is no alternative to this human masquerade. But once any of our cultural roles becomes tyrannical and heavy with despare -- once it forces us toward self-belittlement - it is time to excavate our inherited identity to find there the buried lineaments of the whole personality.