Unspoken, Unheard

I'm on a bit of a TS Eliot trip at the moment, and this is verse 5 from 'Ash Wednesday':


V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.






Here's the thing. It's wickedly interesting to mess around with separating out the feminine from the matriarchy and the masculine from the patriarchy, and to ponder for a little while what a masculine version of matriarchy and a feminine version of patriarchy might look like. It's satisfying to get all het up about the subordination of feminine power to masculine domination, and it's justified when we construct the social history as evidence of our cultural shadows.




Can I offer, in a very small voice, that this might completely miss the point? Turn around and look for a second at Eliot's verse. It would seem to me that this is what we're missing, culturally, this profound recognition of the unknown. A veneration of the silence that births it. A championing of the way into it. A blessing and a love that speaks directly of and to it. That illimitable thing that sits at the end of the sideways eight signs that you've been writing since you were in the eighth grade. An inquiry, an action that cannot be bound by words, a silence that resounds......




So, that I see at this level, we're well beyond a concept so earth-bound as gender. But, because we're earth bound humans, to relate to the notion, we might need to choose out a culminating character, a kind of archetypal patterning that fits the dossier of the notion.




That 'silence' seems to me to be somewhat captured in the Blessed Virgin Mary, the one about whom most of the post New-Testament story is a cultural artifact. The people have owned her, yet she owns so little in verbiage.




Although, it doesn't feel right to pick just one person as a representative. Which reminds me, I must post a bit about the glorious virtues of the Tridentine Mass, a Mass never said/led by just one person, a Mass where the priest has to confess and be absolved by the people before the people begin their own confession.




Never a oneness.