Ich weiss

ICH WEISS

Ich weiß, daß ich bald sterben muß
Es leuchten doch alle Bäume
Nach langersehntem Julikuß –
Fahl werden meine Träume –
Nie dichtete ich eine trüberen Schluß
In den Büchern meiner Reime,
Eine Blume brichst du mir zum Gruß –
Ich liebte sie schon im Keime.
Doch ich weiß, daß ich bald sterben muß.
Mein Odem schwebt über Gottes Fluß –
Ich setze leise meinen Fuß
Auf den Pfad zum ewigen Heime

-Else Lasker-Schueler

I don't know when this poem was written and I'm tempted to try and find out, with the only hope it wasn't in Jerusalem a few months before the end of the war, the poem is actually a rather beautiful musing and an embracement of something I cannot describe, that most often is related to childish imagination and cold memories; like escaping into a forest next to that enormous cold lake and breathe in the venomous clean air on a certain day when my cousin ran after me. The poem has a little modernist vagueness which I like, especially because it's charged with humour. I shall not write too much in the forthcoming months, fearing to lose sight of myself.

I just know with some vague certainty that the obssessive imagination of death, perhaps not of your own, but of death in general is the founding principle of any possible philosophical reflection; just like the painter imagines his death on the canvas, the philosopher cannot but return to this idea as though he knew the exact moment of his departure. It is pointless to escape the Platonic reflection that teaches one that the only possible aim of philosophy is to teach man the wisdom of death, namely to learn how to die. This is only under the assumption one would believe there's anything to be learnt at all and whether this has a connection at all to our worldly experiences.

Not sure if this discussion is entirely relevant in the secular philosophies, that have for long lost sight of their own objects of description, and the subjects themselves are everything but dead. We take a slight distance from the pivoting point of our thoughts in order to create worldly spaces and as Bloch said, to establish the unparadoxicality of philosophizing namely in intimately tying our critical philosophy to the political action of the everyman. It is my opinion that it is only possible in critical philosophy and deconstruction, as to build the bridges destroyed by the decline of the Greek world and the deadly blow set on the forehead of dialectic philosophy.

Here I return to my communist painter in that "you've become the eternal motif of all my paintings", shifting my attention towards the poor sad Morgenland. It's a life of eternal moral conflict, in which everything you can ever teach or learn in the Socratic way can only tear you to pieces. But that's what you've chosen for yourself, the paradox of being a modern man... The ethical murderer, and the ethical dyer.

Philosophy needs an addressant, like you have in letters, it needs a thorough humanization and personification that can distance us a little bit from Kant's sad world. It doesn't occur to me at all how this can become possible other than re-poetization. Ofer insists that my thoughts on freedom remain extremely Protestant and Puritan, because a certain portion of everyday life can in fact be chosen - which is true, nevertheless there is no rationale for it in the traditions of philosophical discourse except in that you can actually choose to end your life, both knowingly and unknowingly and this could actually prove not rationally but hermeneutically that Agnes Heller got it right when she spoke about the spiritual center of modern life, specially when addressing the question on how something so fragile and with so little spirituality can survive; that more than often becomes a theoretical question because this is in fact the only strength that modern life really has, even though this has to be refined and de-Hegelianised in order to become a value, in that it can only be relativized.