Column | Shapes for this time

Meaning arises from the relationship between form and content. A story gains its weight by how it is told: by the tone, posture and facial expression of a person, by the precise words and the form of the sentences in a text. Our society is full of information but has little form. The media and social media reinforce this. News, for example, presents itself as a flow in which what is not equal is made equal. A photo of dead people in white bags in Gaza, including two smaller bags of a child and a baby, is followed by a photo of Caroline van der Plas in a stable with cows, which is followed by a photo of a ubiquitous man in suit for a desk.

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in The disappearance of rituals that people in contemporary Western societies lack rituals to deal with each other and major events. That leads to uprooting. Rituals allow us to live in time, they give life a rhythm and living together a form. We can lean on their silence or be free, during parties in which our ‘I’ is absorbed into a larger story. If form is missing, he writes, we lose our points of contact and commonality. There is now a lot of experience, but no framework in which it becomes meaningful.

Byung-Chul Han writes that he does not want to be nostalgic and I think that is right. Rituals and manners are often also hierarchical, confirming relationships that disadvantage groups of people and other animals. He says little about the rituals that this time requires, although silence is certainly part of it.

While I think about new rituals for this time, I read I’m not saying goodbye by Han Kang. The main character of this novel is a writer, Gyeong-ha, someone who has made it her profession to give shape to what does not yet have a shape. She wrote a book about a historic massacre, and is now confronted with death and violence again, in her personal life and in her research into a suppressed civil uprising. Han Kang opens the boundaries between death and life in the story. Spirits speak to the living in different ways, and art returns something of what has disappeared to those who are still there. It is a poetic book, in which the trees and snow are just as important as the people and their history.

Beauty seems to have no place in the face of horror. But sometimes that’s all we have to reach each other and do justice to those who are no longer here.

And to do justice to what is at stake. Flat images pollute and obscure what is important, especially if there are many of them. Words repeated too often lose their reach, and with the elections in sight, this is clearly noticeable again. Living better together is not only about content, it is also a matter of form.

“and isn’t a form also able to say ‘give me a moment’ to each other?” writes Nachoem Wijnberg How it works, a collection about art and poetry that I barely understand. But that doesn’t matter, because art needs time to work.

It is an important ability to be able to give time to the phenomena and each other. Time holds everything: attention, movement, searching for the right form. So let that be the first response to the current of everything that pulls at us: giving time to who and what counts. With our eyes, our words, our hands.

Eva Meijer is a writer and philosopher. She writes a column every other week.

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