Another outcry

When the mood wafts from a long week of Edith Piaf's to Pulp's 'This is Hardcore' , one cannot fool himself into thinking there's no remarkability in the weightful decission, and here we turn to Beethoven's 'Muss es sein? Ja, es muss sein! Der schwer gefaßte Entschluss' (Must it be? Ja! The decission of difficult resolution); for Beethoven is only a clarification of the Pre-Socratics before us - Parmenides insisted that light is positive and weight is negative. Beethoven lent a few pennies to a friend, and when asked whether this had to be in fact returned by the agreed date he summed it up in a sonnata 'Ja, Es must sein!'. This of course coming from me, the eternal financial debtor and emotional creditor. My whole life is a bank of love notes, distributedly freely with the poorest marketing techniques so as to convey generally the idea that it is an act of charity but this is too Christian-sounding and on the same day when a Catholic priest turned to me 'as a Jew' to enquire whether 'we' (Israelis) consider the different Christian denominations as sects instead of different denominations of Christianity.

Taking it one step further I'm receiving all of my previously non-existing moral and psychological education from the Hebrew bible so that I shall no longer indulge myself with Hegel's cunning remarks about the Lutheran church. So the creditor distributing freely love notes might not end up so badly, because as long as there's no heaven or hell no one could hold me accountable for the lousy quality of my notes, except in remarkable cases which for the most part do return my notes, of course never of my own accord. This philosophical maturity is of course of no lasting value, because after 'long years' of 'experience' out-there in the world one finds himself exasperated at a phone call not timely returned or an unanswered e-mail message, and in this spirit one might as well confine himself to the delicious provinciality in the agenda for most of the world; furthermore the most cosmopolitan and worldly of all people I know have come a long way to terms with their world-class education as to find the philosophical 'alitheia' in watching porn the whole idle afternoon or deciding that the world is divided between oppressors and oppressed; poor Diotima! She must be ill with disappointment at philosophy's higher education for the European peoples.

My disenchantments with affairs of the world are manifold and endless, but not unlike a certain character in Kundera's 'Life is Elsewhere' the source of my constant and freely offered anger toward people is not quite the people but myself and a little tad of erotic frustration; and most of my fellow denizens either are not frustrated in this sense or else need not to, I don't know. However, this isn't entirely true for all cases, mysteriously I find myself vexed with anger toward some people even after one can no longer complain of erotic disappointment, not necessarily frustrated from the desire but from the lack of it even. And so the days proceeds, someone comitted suicide today throwing himself out of the window in Landstraße in Vienna, apparently contradicting the old theory that no person would comit suicide in the middle of smoking a cigarette, and he did so... even while chewing gum. Those are the Austrian leisure pass-times for the enchanting Holy Monday even after the joys of the Resurrection, that's what one calls an absolute present, while the rest of us remain quite lost in between the no longer and not yet of past and future, falling back upon the 'stans aeternitatis' of every single philosopher from Plato to Hamlet. Perhaps next week a day or two in Greece, even three... but not sure about it at all... I'll go only if I feel sufficiently consumed by the urgency of life down here, otherwise I might hope that the next on-the-fall-of-the-window smoker will jump in Vienna as to convince myself that after all in Zion no one needs indulge in such extreme sports; here one is condemned since day one. Like one of my nemesis would say to me yesterday: 'There's this unrest, that falls upon each and every thing... I think it does furnish one's life with a lot of urgency, but should one fail to tend it properly, it also kills'.

Then again I was also disappointed with Diotima myself after reading the 'Symposium', because no matter how beautiful it's too extremely conventional for my kind of theology; and the unconventional love of the prophets is perhaps the only solution available (like in the poems of Susman, Arendt, Celan, Lasker-Schüler, etc.) but it is such an impossible way to live that I can only want nothing else but dying when confronted with those solutions because after all letters lie more than faces, if not ask Rahel Varnhagen and only the distancing beloved, like the distancing God, can be sources of almost Messianic intimacy. Begging by the wayside, obtaining little more than mendacity from life and eternally punished on account of the letters. Punished by an imaginary crime, one of those we only wanted to comit, but were never allowed and the same gentleman who kept us from comitting the crime has also condemned us to death and at that in the middle of the most festive party. I left Plato and started to engage in a comparison between Arendt's 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' and Voegelin's 'The New Science of Politics' - all in the vein of my newfound divinity in the field of political science, too extremely disappointed with philosophy in general, either you conform to the rules and go hear the peripathetic musings of the scholars, of course taking more than one draw back in his own thing or you go your own way, with all the failings it involves, with no teacher, no recognition, only studying life and correcting his own non-sense in cafes and parties.

Both options seem to me extremely unrealible to live with and in leaving behind the old crowd of unbelievers and turning to the affairs of the world I might be able to find some philosophical consolation which life can't provide as it is. Too drunk in my sobermost state from reality in the most unconventional possible way, a mental nunc stans; and yet while drunk from nectars turning all too conventionally crazy that it turns boring after a while and only laughter ensues. I might as well stop studying altogether, but then how else could I convince myself that the poetry is worthwhile reading? Even when all epistemological childhood has been lost in the hermeneutic pits of the street, there's just as much to hope for, and this hope is only available to the man engrained in his security of being not only at his wits end but at the end of his whats. Philosophy doesn't have any poetic innocence anymore and the ugliness of the whole enterprise is too corrosive for one to be entirely content with it, so that unless there be this eternity professed to love by Diotima, Agathon and Phaedrus no less than by prophets of all sorts, the enterprise is entirely worthless and we're then really stuck in this world as our last destination and it is just too charged with sadness for me to be able to make compromises with it, so that I might as well start to feel a little happy about my obsession with death. Philosophy is not my only current distaste and disappointment, but perhaps is the only one that can speak for the whole cake, as my prayers don't want to leave my belly anymore. But then if one can aspire as a nihilist to be so entirely consumed by the end of his life then I might be on the right path, but I do believe to have some moral responsibilities for the world and for people... but with the days it seems more of a concern to fulfill their egos with longing than anything else, the problem of the self, one could call it, when speaking to an Oriental traveler. Not only prayers go unanswered in this world.