Everything that is, from the beginning, is caught up in order. The blossom only appears through the support of the stalk and leaves - a coherent, functional system that supports - and yet somehow is unlike - the unexpected burst of beauty it produces. Words too, of writers, of poets, flower with layers of meaning unfolding to infinity, yet are supported in their weight and order by the syntax underneath. Yet the external is always the flesh, the surface we touch with our hands and eyes; the syntax is buried underneath, as the skeletons hidden beneath our flesh. A humble job, to synthesize and support with no acknowledgment or recognition. Indeed, a skeleton we touch, that acts as a surface frightens us - it is death, torture, mortality. Syntax by itself, and the rigid methodology of the philosophers, is death when touched by and for itself. Not all death is permanent, of course - sometimes to analyze a poem can later help it to come rise again to new and deeper life. Still, sometimes it merely crumbles to ashes. Many a good syntactician has lost the ability to enjoy a novel. Regardless, the philosophers and linguists touch these skeletons all day, some with the caress of love, many with the cold detachment of a surgeon about to operate on yet another object to take apart.
What does it mean, to caress death, structure, abstraction, to ignore the flesh? Cloaked with these words it sounds like a perversion of thought (must we then strip off this flesh to reveal and judge its truth on the naked ribs?). Certainly it will be morbid perversion if fills the whole of one's activity. And yet these skeletons have an important role that cannot be neglected. They make up an intrinsic part of bodies, the literal human body, the spiritual body of Christ, or the intellectual body of a text. Form and content, Balthsar says, are two poles, not two opposites - for the skeleton supports the flesh and the flesh keeps the skeleton alive. Bones are alive - it is funny to think of, for they are alive precisely when we do not think of them, when we do not see them, when they are properly hidden beneath the flesh. We osteologers, logicians and academics, do a valuable service in studying the skeletal systems, and indeed, knowing the skeleton guides one's ability to bring health to the body, one's own or those of others. Yet we must be careful not to make the living body into a corpse through careless extraction.
