Ramage's extensive interpretation and critical response to the events of 9/11 find us considering all angles of the issue, from our own personal responses and the emotional, cultural, economic ones to the attempt at sympathy when he touches the tender wound of wondering "how could the terrorists justify such an act?" Where was their agency or motive?
We all try and schematize or adjust to a simulacra of an event that was bigger than anything we could really comprehend. Whether is is through his own response "It's like a bad movie" or Stockhausen's "the greatest work of art" response we find ourselves at the door of uncertainty, grasping with our individual and collective terministic screens to interpret the indescribable.
Uncertainty is a scary beast to encounter, especially as beings who must "overcome our powerful resistance to this acknwoledgement" and by accepting this uncertainty we must accept that our "interpretive model cannot be set in motion." After all, what is language for if it cannot in some way begin to interpret things, from the very mundane to the utterly catastrophic?
Ramage asserts that the cost of refusing to at least try to interpret things with our limited schema is too high. So in the face of not knowing, we must at least try to know, in order to not destroy ourselves with our ignorance or as the Buddhists would have it, we cannot succumb to our greed fear and delusion merely because our frame no longer fits. Because we are so enmeshed in our terminology, we have a difficult time rising above it, or perhaps we even have an impossible time with this but Ramage argues that it is an "ethical imperative" to at least attempt to do so. We do this with language by allowing it to "create a synthesis that reconnects the terms and establishes a new common ground between them."
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