Anam Cara

Another dimension of balance as a functional strategy is fear. If you are afraid of things, you will stay in line; this often has to do with authority. On German television, in the last six or seven weeks, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of East Germany, they have been replaying old news excerpts. It is unbelievable viewing. Two days before the whole thing started, there was Honecker, leader of East Germany, with all the leaders of the Communist world, and they were all paying tribute to one another. Ceausescu was in the middle of them. And the whole facade was within inches of collapsing, never to return. Flexibility is balance and balance is flexibility. When a thing hardens it cannot bend. It can only break. When a thing or system becomes totally atrophied, the smallest incision can cause the whole thing to vanish as if it were a false garment.

Another dimension of balance as a functional strategy, one that also keeps people in line, is the whole world of religious edict and theology. Many people in Ireland held their lives in a certain kind of balance because they were theologically terrified. We are coming out of that now. This theory of balance, which is a frame from outside, usually works with an unexamined belief in the given facts. It is very empiricist, it is one-dimensional, and it is usually ideological. It is non-cognitive in the sense that it is never worked out nor its deeper grounding ever questioned. It is given, and because it is given, it is always in the service of some elite group or some vested interest that wants the balance to hold for some ideological reason.

The opposite view of balance is that balance is a purely subjective invention—I can invent, sustain and implement my own order. This, of course, is equally false. Literary tragedy, for instance, unmasks this as illusion. Tragedy presents great passionate individuals who attempt to establish their own order and their action brings them into total conflict with the hidden order, which uncoils on top of them and completely changes the world they inhabit. Therefore, balance is neither a fixed empirical thing nor an invented, subjective thing. Rather, balance is an implicit equilibrium that emerges in the fair play of opposing forces—opposing sister forces.

Balance yields itself in the dialogue and dialectic of passionate forces. It is not monological. Much of what passes for conversation in post-modern culture is merely intercepting monologues. If you watch television programs or listen to the radio, you hear little true conversation. When you yourself are involved in a really genuine conversation with another person, you will remember it for weeks because something unexpected shifts or happens in the dynamic of conversation. It is no accident that at the infancy of Western culture we have the great models of conversation in Plato’s dialogues. In true dialogue something truly other and unexpected emerges. What I am talking about here is a theory of growth; not economic growth, but the growth of life and experience that works in this shifting balance between dialogue on the one hand and dialectic on the other hand.

It is interesting to consider balance in terms of the physical human body, in terms of anatomy. The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty has wonderful things to say about the human body. The body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium. Your body is not just an object, it is actually all the meanings that people have towards your body. It is moving towards equilibrium. The place where your balance is regulated is also the place where your hearing and listening are activated. This is in the fluid of the semicircular canals of the inner ear. The eighth nerve goes through this liquid in the inner ear. It gives the impulses to the brain and tells the brain where you are. For instance, in cases of vertigo, where there is irritation or some damage, you have the feeling that the room has actually moved, but of course it has not. People also have that experience “the morning after the night before,” when you suddenly think that the laws of causality have changed and that the room is shifting around.