Writing Love's Midrash: Augustine, Arendt, Kundera, Rose

What was so impressive about Hannah Arendt as a person?

Her immense vitality and curiosity. She used to say you had to think with body and soul or better not at all. She was distinguished by this complete engagement of her person for that which she thought and that which she did. -Joachim Fest.

... At times one has to ponder for long enough if he really wants to write, because writing contrasted to living contains the desire of not having, the striving of not-being-as-yet; one usually doesn't write out of pleasure but rather of sheer necessity. Some might exercise a very dumbfounded criticism of this enterprise, but for some of us gaining a voice anew outside the entanglements of our lively encounters with others is a compelling task, that most likely is never achieved. That's how one never talk about Love with the Bible, because it's all written in such a way that it becomes written anew in every motion of one's body, and therefore one turns aside and finds the Midrash not merely for inspiration, but more in order to find that thick concrete of words that are bodily in the conversation between God and man, men.

Some other times you hear a story from a friend, particularly one that has to do with love and because you know it is certainly not a dream - it lacks a certain amount of realism, you discover yourself hearing a Midrash, Love's Midrash. In the quest of Modernity this particular tale has a two-fold meaning, one in which the Beloved (what is being told) escapes the writing as a Phoebus while the Beloved experiences the loss and desires, his words desire him with the contempt of impossibility. Modernity is a Midrash about love, in which the Beloved can't hear and the Lover can't write.... It's a recurrent human story in which the divorce between words and worlds can only be mended by the mystic, not by that who can explain the world with its intricacies but by the one that can add some meaning to the moment being experienced as though it were unique in its kind and irreparably solemn. Man experiences the solitude of God in mute pangs of despair, yet when he jumps into the Ocean he's unable to swim finding himself anew chained to both his heavenly home and his earthly soil; he's only free to desire.

And because the Rabbis can't be trusted in the age of doubt, since stories no longer mend the world... one turns to the philosopher and discovers himself by means of wisdom his life thought, but his mind never did. He discovers that thinking is in itself loving, but it isn't love at work. He laughs, because that's what God would do in his place. The laughter of embarrassment, of the ageing man who can no longer laugh about death, he can only laugh with her. She experiences anger too, because of mistrust... how could you, philosopher, distrust your older sister? And you who read Pirkei D'Rabbi Nathan and prayed for a winged-world, you can't trust her, it's not about doing philosophy anymore. It's all about speaking, about wilderness; dont you remember that Midrash on the Song of Songs? It's a book about two lovers, about creatureliness, yet lovers that can't speak. The desert itself is your language, your uniqueness. We can't trust death as philosophers because it no longer holds true to hope, from our unearthly homes the world seems less dense, less sore. "It is memory and not expectation (for instance the expectation of death in Heidegger) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence" (H. Arendt, "Love & Augustine").

But the effect is inevitable, mortality is the only driving force to poetize a world; that's why the divine haute-societe of the Pantheon resembled Auschwitz much more than Auschwitz resembled itself; the Gods also remind me of Thereza's mother, for whom life was nothing but a sequence of farts and sweat... That brilliant woman, who didn't think like Eve, who didn't know the serpent and never loved Mephiboshet. She might as well have been a Greek goddess, not unlike those pre-enlightened beautiful men in the shores of Tel Aviv, who always remind me of death, not of any death but that of Stalin's son, who died out of the mere inability to clean his own shit in the most literal sense of the word; he experienced a metaphysical death; not unlike that of the lawyer in my story, who jumped from that tall building in New York, I felt very sorry for having assassinated my best friend in literature, but once I discovered Virginia Wolff would have done the same about herself and then comit suicide, I started to think it wouldn't be fair to myself or to the world, therefore I decide to replace my errings with a sin; being a good Christian instilled on me the conviction to take upon my brother's sin.