What the World Needs Now: Unintegration
I’m reading or rereading a collection of books right now that fit together in
an interesting way: Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse; Mark Epstein’s Going
to Pieces Without Falling Apart; Aldo Leopold’s classic, Sand County Almanac;
and George Seferis’s (Greek poet, Nobel Prize) A Poet’s Journal 1945-51.
Utne Reader (July-August 2000, “Like Whatever,” pages 28-9.) tells us that
the typical American teenager of the 50’s had a vocabulary of 25,000 words;
the teenager of today 10,000. We are letting one of our species’ highest
technologies dissipate, weaken: our language is losing its fine edge. I see
it in the literature class I’m teaching (To The Lighthouse; ); what seem to
me to be ordinary English words have to be included in our ‘vocabulary list.’
Then there’s Leopold, who begins his book with a lyric description of felling
an old oak damaged by lightening. He counts down through successive years of
history as his handsaw bites into the concentric rings, backward in time,
naming the year of the big drought, the year there were 614 migrating geese
on the pond, the year the freeze took all the apples. He talks about the “saw
ferth” opening when the tree begins to fall. How many of us would have need
of that exquisitely uniquely concept now? Or be able to count back in our own
time with such intimate detail about our natural environment?
Cut your own firewood by hand recently?
So how do we go to pieces as a culture without falling apart? And what brave
new future is shaping itself out of the richness of the old century? Can we
keep our experiences and knowledge and memories extant as we let go of our
current confusion to find a new direction?
D. W. Winnicott felt we needed to create a word to connote the opposite of
integration that did not imply being reduced to particles and fragments but
could describe a relaxed process of letting go without having an outcome in
mind: hence, ‘unintegration.’
Perhaps this is what Seferis felt was needed too, as the world struggled to
rebuild itself after the war:
