Against the relentlessness of creation the human mind proudly, inanely, exerts itself in organization of subjective experience. Mortifyingly, whenever it seeks to digest experience that is shared with others, the individual mind within a group must inevitably confront the problem of “it”—”it” being whatever thesis is understood to govern that shared reality, its first principles, frame, whatever one might term it, to which one might then attach and unfurl one’s own subjective morality, ethic, internal rules, and so forth. One must suss out “it” for oneself. But, once one has “it,” then there is the broader problem of the “getting” of it— that is, testing that another member of the group shares one understanding of that thesis. Does one “get it”? Who “gets it” and who does not? What indeed is “it,” and what does the “getting” of “it” imply?
Group strata are distinct but often commingled across role, and the “getting it” of each stratum is likewise blended. What one set of people “gets” might be radically, tectonically at odds with what another, perhaps more influential, set of people “gets,” though the respective “it”s may be articulated using precisely the same language. Great fractures occur this way, small faults that break massively at the utterance of colliding words.
Another analogy: a group of people might function much like planets in a system, in the astrological sense.1 Each system being self-contained, the influences of each entity within are confined to circumscribed paths, yet exercise exponentially complex influences upon one another. The approaching-infinite nuance of these influences can be represented by a series of abstract signifiers that, in combining and recombining and jostling against one another, generate forces that distort, exert, and exhort. In this somewhat painful analogy, “getting it” is a function in continual flux, and those who do not update their “getting” or their “it” will be steamrolled into space slag.
Centuries ago, a writer might be thinking of a small circle, a salon, a specific group of people with specific tastes, idiom, and “it” for whom the words are being set down. One has no such understanding today, where words are hurled out into territory so indifferent as to be hostile. One might proceed by conjuring one or two or seven people in one’s head, who one then pretends to write for, whether or not they ever read it; likewise, one might find one or two or seven people in a group who might all “get it.” Yet sometimes one collides, inevitably, with those who “get it” in opposition to oneself, who perhaps have a more ruthless and impersonal operation of “it” that lends them edge in the chronic and suppressed competition that is the corporate and American way of life; who, though expressing compassion and solidarity, in essence wield an “it” that, like a star, contains the eventuality of its own destruction.
With C. S. Lewis’s “Inner Ring” in mind.