Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Musings

It seems as though some of my undercurrents have been laid to waste, preposterously even. A lot of time to be devoted to writing, perhaps the only way in which I can truely speak, most often I write only for myself, yet not so much about myself... topic I just as often avoid in writing or speaking. It does not mean to uphold a self-righteous claim of any kind, because there's a difference between speaking about your Angst not interested at all in that "zweigespraech" and some kind of relaxed chatting about your life; the latter is reserved for one's maturity and without having reached mine, I do find the redemptive power I lust for, in the writing itself once again and for ever upholding Schlegel with all the pathos necessary but along the way in slightly modified version sophisticated by Kierkegaard and the sadness of Modernity.

The story of my years (3 to be exact) at the Eudist School can be told only in many installments but perhaps I'll knock on the door and woo myself for the sake of temporary clarity; it is not easy to remember all those names in a foreign language and in so little reference to your current position as though the vantage point of one's life had been totally replaced in the most deconstructed and worldless manner. At the same time everything remains a feature of speech, a mode, sometimes antiquated and sometimes too poignant or recalcitrant. Those days in fact carry a lot less suffering and hatred than my childhood did, they sweat in irresponsibility and carelessness, even banality; more banality than one could express in simple words. They also held in store unsurmountable amounts of happiness and a sort of criminally chosen innocence that has remained with me to this very day, their yellowing motions nonwithstanding.

But I wouldn't like to speak about it yet. There's a general feeling in me since last night that demands other recollections, some generalizations as to make the picture fit into the mold of earthliness in broken clay. It troubles me philosophically that those days held so much meaning and inner clarity because they were almost unreflected, whenever I adopted the philosopher's withdrawing I experienced a form of loneliness that was seemly empty and quiet, boredom, frustration, an event of eventlessness. I can't quite remember my body at the time but somehow I laugh at the pangs of desire that I hosted during those days.

This is what my generalizations would like to point to right now: Last year upon having read Bloch (because of a little article by Harvey Cox) his language interested me, almost concerned me, quite natural and lyrical. Yesterday it occured to me remembering Heller's dictum that "Revolution is like Young Love, it remains forever beautiful". Arendt thought at some point that Revolution and the question of Civil Courage had become a political tools paramount to warfare that could determine the "Telos" of the 20th century, the entirely human ability to create beginnings anew from within the cradles of history, yet there's a very problematic point to be made here: An ideological revolution comes undeniably tied to a redemption of some sort even when this might not be exclusively dualistic or religiously oriented, it comes in hand with the idea of Utopia. I don't want altogether discard hope as a powerful human source of imagination, nor I want to do away with memory. While for me the memory remains the most pivotal element I want to leave hope and memory (or technology and history in the language of modernity's theoreticians) in an eternal state of tension, enjoying each other's vertical "agrandement" and horizontals diminishment. I want a Modernity that can easily dwell on a crossroad of history and technology without wanting to exclusively apply either bind to elaborate meaningful world-pictures.

I'm not sure if at this I'm being Hegelian even though a couple of months ago it seemed to me that I wasn't, it is a troubling fact when reading the Bible actually because the philosophical interpretations of our day might have been not too distant from the spell of the prophets and even "philosophers" like King Solomon; but the speechlessness of Modernity makes me think how it is possible to glimpse at that but hermeneutically? This is obviously what the Sages did as well but yet they "spoke" the language of the "Sages" and narrowly limited their interpretive scope in a way not too different from that of the early Biblical exegetes in the Christian world. I can only deal with this language after extreme and burdensome toils and soon it disappears again into irrational and mythological musings that I don't understand yet I know it is very important to understand; not without facing the limitation imposed upon me by my Christian concepts, for example the philosophy of love and that typically Catholic moral hipocrisy that I've thought to be distinctive of the avant-garde of 19th century Germany, while this remains a very sound attitude in the whole of the Western tradition.

I've found only one way to solve this problem. Bonhoeffer and Rosenzweig (drawing on Schelling) spoke about a totally irreligious and secular "Gospel" that would proclaim the "good tidings" in a language so powerful and yet irreligious that it would be exactly like the language of Jesus, this is called the "Johannine Age"; My solution partly draws from Midrashic sources (the form of imagination I believe to be best fit to describe the modern mind) and from our traditional philosophical readings, such being that a world like this (like the Talmud says) should never be redeemed, for how could one? At the same time for me this is in itself the redeemed world and the reason for which the sphere of everyday life remains an impossibility for philosophy and a hair-splitting challenge for moral theories is that this everyday life is UTOPIA itself. I can't provide the whole rationalization on this point nor I want to be a rationalist, however I prefer the language of the Enlightenment to speak about these phenomena and that language is not that of our form of Modernity or that of the Biblical heroes.

Sometimes when I listen to music and ride on the bus I experience this kind of anomality that philosophers describe arbitrarily as the "everyday life", this remains outside the scope of my existential choices because it can't be chosen as it is imposed on me. I can make choices on how I deal with it, I might swingle in between solitude to write and reflect and loneliness to embrace the toil. At the same time this everyday life grows tender in inequalities and miseries, people do not often look happy and even more, they seldom do. But that is where I think the utopian nature of this world is, because a world of eternal happiness would be unbearable for any modern men and women in the age of contingency. I shall stop here as this hasn't been very organized, but I'll keep returning to this point soon.

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