Where have the Butterflies gone.

Bark

 Back when De Quincy was a Romantic young junkie the word resonance wasn't commonly used. It's from Latin for echo or resound and more recently its meaning as a vibration has reached the marketers and propagandists where it's called a virus. Through physics this echo or resound has found a home in the world of electronics, specifically radio waves where it was baptized as frequency and there it slowly pushed aside harmony. 

And whether you like it or not, as we return to Jorge Luis Borges' essay on the Nothingness of Personality you might notice a vibration stirring the spirit, a harmony soothing the soul, a resonance rhyming with balance because I at least am going to argue that the last Golden Age of our species was destroyed by the written word.

Borges was a young man when he wrote The Nothingness of Personality. He claimed Personality was a "mirage maintained by conceit, it was without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He also suggested that a reader absorbed very little of what was written, rarely was the reader ever in a position to challenge or debate what was written, and altogether, in my view, Borges insinuated the relationship between writer and reader was a sterile relationship where the writer, in the interest of his own success, was attempting to impress the reader either with the equivalent of tablets from on high or a ripping yarn which as a best seller could mean a second home in the Cairngorms, or somewhere. 

The meanings in resonance that incline toward balance allows for the concept of what Zarathustra called Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, the Master of Balance if you prefer. An imbalance betrays itself as a disharmony, a frequency that produces only static on the wireless as you search for Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station out there on the North Sea that's touched your imagination and into which you want to fall.

Go ahead, ask Socrates, he'll tell you the written word creates the illusion of understanding, fosters a pretense of knowledge, destroys memory. If you don't believe me then tramp homeless, friendless, handheld deviceless and hungry across the land, and there you may ask where the hedgerows have gone, you might wander after Hedgehog, and try to remember when you last saw a Butterfly. Or not.