A Box of Explanations
I have an extensive education, about twenty years worth of college. I have been trained in logic, in rhetoric, in the arts and writing, in statistics, in experimentation and various iterations of the scientific method. I have training in physics, astronomy, calculus and topics in math, computer science, psychology, and sociology. I also took some very interesting coursework in brain anatomy and physiology, which is a topics course for neuroscientists of varying types and a premed course for future neurologists.
If you’re guessing my student loans are terrifying, you are correct. I did, however, get a stipend for teaching and I took anything they’d let me in the doors of while gleefully confusing first year students.
This preface has a purpose. The absolute second you leave the specialized language of those topics and start trying to explain yourself to anyone, you very quickly start discarding meaning. To put it another way, explaining yourself is a really quick way to stop meaning anything. The second you start explaining, you start boxing the concept. The longer you explain, the emptier the box gets as you discard detail. Explain long enough, and there’s no detail left in the box at all: a nice, null concept.
Those can be explained.
When I taught, no matter how careful I was, I simply could not teach everyone. To teach a concept at all, I had to rob it of most of its meaning, watering the concept down until it was unrecognizable. Ever so often, someone would get it without explanations, but that was rare. Mostly people wanted just enough grounding to pass a test, and often as not their definition on tests had nothing to do with the concept and everything to do with their own misunderstandings.
When I am asked to explain what I’m doing as a vodou priest, I have the same problem. It is impossible to explain to someone that isn’t there and does not have that capacity to understand—and I can never be sure how much of a successful explanation under those conditions is the spirit explaining more directly than my voice ever could.
Explanations are almost always a waste of time and give people the illusion that they know what’s happening, which tends to be part of their control issues. They want to know so that they can feel like they're in control of what happens and their responses to what happens.
I am not here to feed your control issues.
It is, quite honestly, a relief to be in a religious tradition which does not have any requirement to explain itself.
