Wittgenstein

The most sophisticated philosophical notion I know is still, after all this time, what we cannot understand we must pass by in silence. And thank you Mr. Wittgenstein!

I gift-wrapped the notion and gave it to myself when I first read it thirty years or so ago. I'm almost sure it was in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I tried to read at the time then when Wittgenstein was being tried to be read by people like me who tried to read Wittgenstein and soon gave up, taking from him at least one or two ideas they could use the rest of their lives. 

I remember talking about Wittgenstein then with other people who'd had similar experience to mine in reading him--that a better translation of what we cannot understand we must pass by in silence is, what we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence--and there is a real difference between the two. Nevertheless, it is the former translation and not the latter that continues to inform me, and is trying to serve me now in this time of crisis.

That I don't understand this time, the presentness of it, political and cultural, confounds me to the degree that I press harder and harder on it for some sort of understanding, and can only come up with the sort of answer that my laughter provides; that this, The USA, is not a Banana Republic, as so many claim, but is instead a plutocratic system in crisis currently led by a Mom and Pop Presidency; that the President himself is to be pitied, an extremely sad man (for how could he possibly be happy?) best considered as a comic figure, Buster Keaton for instance, or W.C. Fields, not really a man at all but a parody of a real man playing at something he has no real aptitude for, deserving of some human sympathy even from an audience that deplores his actions, the audience seeing something in both Him and Her that's also in ourselves...