A Genealogy of Betrayal

Once again as I wrote previously it took me the whole day to start writing, because I fear losing the oblique angle of the photograph during the entanglements and then simple astray into comtemplative thoughts. That's not what I'm looking for, I'm rather searching attentiveness - the ultimate form of prayer; not just the way in which Hannah and Franz prayed, but even Moses himself - his turning asides. The secret consists in maintaining different oblique angles of the same photograph, angles that are based on multi-sourced memory and not in hope, therefore it is much more of a re-understanding than it is hoping, the story must be told as a striving - using the narrative to postpone the present with the future, not to foresee the future in the present.

The future of the narrative I envisage isn't that of an Aristotelian kind, it isn't logical; by that I mean that the future doesn't necessarily exclude the possibilities of the present and the past as in a true-and-false syllogism, it co-exists with them sharing a thread of time, instead of sharing a space. In a sense I'm returning to Kafka through Benjamin and Adorno, because the magnificence of the tale lies on that particularly human detail-recounting that is the only story-telling that gifts you with a universal perspective, by that I mean the perspective of the dettachment from the human condition - this is possible only by looking at our earthliness either from outside the earth or from the "angle" of a redeemed life.

Because I''ve been dwelling on the question of translation and language, I'll follow Rosenzweig in that all language is a translation, in fact speech itself is a translation of a strangling, of that strangling between a word and a world that can't bear one another. Because of that I can't write the story myself, because it's too unreal to be described by the imagination, it can only be pictured by a narrative of the present. At the same time that it can't be narrated by a first person or by a third person but in a dialogical form, the story must be dialogically hermeneutic for it is the mending of a rationale that can't be provided, therefore it must be replaced with Agadah.

The story can't be told by the characters themselves, therefore the narrator needs to engage the voices of other people, of those who did have a language and interweave them withal so that the voices of the story can be heard only from the autobiographical details that can't be provided. They have been obscured by the demise of speech, they are hindered by shame and outrage, pain even. This is a way similar to that in which Arendt wrote the biography of Rahel Varnhagen, it was an account of Rahel's mind and world, therefore the identification must be so intense as to trascend time and space yet remaining chained to both, the only way in which language will have the vivifying power of mystery, in that twofold source; otherwise its function will be diminished to such an extent that it will be no longer necessary.

The resounding voices of my account are drawn from St. Augustine, Hannah Arendt, Gillian Rose and Milan Kundera; yet they only constitute the mute voices beneath the silence of the Scripture. This is meant to take advantage of a resource that the Jewish Sages have used throughout the times in a unique blend of originality and despair: To confront God against himself, rewriting God and reunderstanding themselves on the way. The voices of my account must be biblical. Must be voices headed towards death, but they shall not be dead themselves whereas the writing itself isn't about death, but about love. Here I return to Rosenzweig to say that only death is as powerful as love and viceversa, in this sense the awareness of death or the actual facing of it, the realizable fear is what makes the love mesmerizing in its truth, truth only to the extent that it becomes a narrative and a personal impossibility. One has to recognize the two sources of humanity, the mortality at the root of poetry and the arts together with the natality inherent in action and that is only negatively represented, by despairingly looking at the photograph without being able to move within, except by means of speech. A speech that is silent and in itself unable to move in invisible spaces.

My thesis with the writing should be that Modernity is that Midrash of Love that can't be told, a Midrash that resembles the face of God in that it is a distancing that brings nearness, it is a distancing that provokes sensuous and bodily unconcealment; this unconcealmente has only two forms, the from of truth and the form of love. The eternal return to the oldest philosophical question of Athens, but that nowadays can be pondered only in Jerusalem, only by the prophets and not the poets, but a poetization of the world. A poetization that is meant to make the world a little unreal as to make it a place fit to be dwelled at. That's why this poetization needs the Scripture's travelling, firstly in order to gain the sharp depth of movement, and secondly in order to become humanized. Contemplation against attentiveness.

The story isn't an account, but an actualization of life, in the same way Rosenzweig thought Kafka's concepts being thoughts in the same way the Bible was. The photograph must have several angles in colour and two angles in black and white, two angles of tears through laughter, two angles of pain and joy, of fearful struggle uphill and liberation. It must pickpocket the characters through their very bones and nude them before the Scripture, so that they can be vanquished and ransacked and raped by mute speech in order to remake themselves. It is a story about an irony that doesn't cause laughter, about a betrayed world. A world that is imaginatively being recreated in reality as it is being written in truth, but truth can only be concealed, so that the story will contradict itself in that it should never be spoken of. It's a "Rede" about silences. It's a story in which both body and soul must write, or not write at all. It isn't a story about hope, it's only about memory.

The tale can't mend the character's world, only make it liveable. It can't provide explanations or answers, it can only justify the conspicuousness and the loss at words when it comes to moral judgement, it's a tale about groundlessness. It's a tale about Shabbat, about mornings, about a dying writer who loves, about a loving husband who dies without either living or dying. It's a story about the body.

These will be companions: St. Augustine's "Confessions", H. Arendt's "Love & Augustine", M. Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", Kafka's "The Castle", E. Goodman-Thau's "Miriam", G. Rose's "Love's Work", L. Shestov's "Athens & Jerusalem" and the Bible with Rashi, the Midrash and songs of Shabbat. It's a triple dreamweaving-text to contain and constrain by chains the dreamweaving itself with possible realities and photographs.