Saturday, August 25, 2007

Fragments

One of the most important questions of the Romantic movement was whether is it possible for man to be at home in the world, this questionable search has lost all relevance for me. It belongs in the plurality of Mehrwuerdigkeiten typical of our age and this possibility of homeliness isn't an ontological situating, meaning that it isn't inherent to the fundamental horizon of humanity in this same world (understood as a totality of facts, the sum total of experiences in time); it doesn't belong in the totality of facts of the world and its limits, the limits of historical men theretofore. The question does have a solipsistic value that undeniably demands an horizontal withdrawal and consequently the loss of experience, which is the most fundamental conditio for historicity after the demise of epistemological prismas which rely on a possible view of the totality that is enabled only in an entirely trascendental universe, namely, that with a telos of futurity. Modernity has denied this possibility, least it were to deny itself. Nonetheless the total loss of experience, replaced by mood and representation, is also one of the political facts of our age. For this reason, this home in the world is primary a question of politics, theo-politics and onto-theology.

Daydreaming

The anger of the night-dawn always overtakes me, in moments when looking back presents a Janus face that embodies the past as it looks toward the future through an empty cube. Interlocutors of times past dwell in the most remote silence and the hours of the day are all vested in such angry and unorderly despair; we no longer enter the churches, taking infinite pleasure in the politics of oblivion as though religion would be more a matter of loosening one's memory to an unfinished thread, thence all experience blurs into conspiracies, into theologoumena that represent merely syntactic paradigms of finite completion, utterances in the void of time, that clash in between the tenses that the present causes to all those who attempt so vanely to get hold of its arms.

Day-dreaming of a future so transparent that it might never possibly come without the amount of contigency necessary to disappear into the fragments of the present, the Messianology is always an unattainable aim, reason for which it remains so clearly the greatest source of consciousness; the myth starts in the future and then cuts through the past in order to land in the bitter thirst of the present. Remembering is an act of aggression, the politics of that having a place in the world. This such worldliness is always finding a place to stand, the safe ground that is always taken away by any possibility of absolute freedom. Absolute freedom never means to overturn the Will, but rather the mere experience of limitlessness, both conceptual and structural. In the flux of constant change, of human existence itself as this motion (and not time hereby) in its variegating opposition to human essence; for weren't we created "once" and "all the same"? Day-dreaming isn't imagining, it is the making of history itself insofar as history fulfills an unhistorical function in the sense that it remains a human artifact every so often perfect for self-knowledge; for the preposterous capability to trace one's origins through the delimitation of one's end whenever a trascendental project is given up. Daydreamin is memory, awakening is distinction and representation, aesthetics and axiologies of time; sleep is reification of consciousness, burgeoise instrumentalization of reality and dreaming itself is history.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Letter to Ivan

Dear Ivan,

I write you this letter from Tel Aviv, in the most distant of all exiles from all possible truth that there be in this world but at times it seems to me as though this isn't so bad after all, truth is a murderous alphabet that fills the space with so much anger, with so much Angst - the Angst of having lived so to speak. It is very strange to be far from Jerusalem after those long months that counted more than a thousand days and that, even when insignificant in the count of a person's life seems to be enough to realize how how much not at home man is in this world and perhaps that's his ideal position; from religion one at best learns that man is in practice very much alone in a very large world, a little peg in the largesse of the universe yet very much on his own.

Miracles never happen in Tel Aviv, except for the new large buildings that extent their arms into heavens like a Tower of Babel, perhaps hoping that one day we'll manage to reach far enough and then we'll crown ourselves into kings of the universe. The beauty in the spaces reflects everything so untruthfully, at best faint representations of something already old and uninteresting. One can be really that alone in Tel Aviv among very large crowds, without speaking to anybody and not wanting to in any case. What one misses the most is the true friends, those that would help one wander through the days of the apocalypse, that shared their bread with the stranger and that drank together the bitter waters of life, until they became entirely drunk as to be able to escape the terrible facts of truth : that there're no facts and history is but a word. That we're all in boat leading specifically nowhere and that the awareness of being such Noah, with all the fragility and insecurity that it implicates, is all what can be called faith in an age like ours when every possible concept has been turned into its radical opposite, or into its negation or into a joke.

The faith of Tel Aviv is otherwise, for people truly believe in the Tower of Babel and as though it were our taks to bring the eschaton with our hands, they make strenous efforts to embrace life all the most, as though one had the option in this world as it is to embrace anything but his own death and that of the others. As though one had a chance to accept the conditions of this world as it is, yet without negating them or wanting a better one not in the far-away Redemption but in the absolute present of our life today. I find this faith admirable, but certainly not mine. I walked into the church today, not for too long... and it made me very happy that those who can't believe in anything still can flee from this overdose of "knowing everything" into a cold space where one knows that there's little up there to pray for, and that is the only reason why one should pray in any case. To leave the chair empty not for the Messiah, because every Messiah that will come and occupy the chair is a false one... simply leaving the chairs empty for all those tired from the intensity of living, to rest from life if just a little... that's all what my Messianic feeling is about.

Warmest regard, friend of the true places
Miss you

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

At "The Little Prince": Emigration Journals

Yet sooner than expected one would find himself at home in certain places, or as Eveline's son would put it... not at home in more than one place. A cafe-bookstore and a tavern, both imported from the heavenly Jerusalem, the most dreadful and deadening of all places on earth... "The Litte Prince", that's the name of that such place... Unreadable and old Hebrew books furnish the walls and all the students chatter with each other on books and matters of the day, and how I wished to be part of those conversations! The urgency took over me again, proving that the outside is always troubled with me, but perhaps it's no willy-nilly, it isn't the catastrophic finances even, but more like that enormous fear of arriving in Jerusalem tonight, to close a deal with that awful place, to grant her a divorce. Bringing all my books and papers to the great misery ("t'aluva") that composes the landscape here. Most often I don't wish to leave the house, as of usual fearing accidents and more troubled environments, entanglements with new people that might just make matters worse than they've been until now. Emigrating to this new city is like changing one's name, everything suddenly turns so comfortable and familiar yet only because of that priceless gift of anonimity.

The conclusion is that one can't live with any situation and that's why they're so bearable even at the point when one's lost all courage. Changing the city or the country doesn't alter anything, it's like taking up citizenship in a foreign country, you can't care that much. One just can't survive in any city, because the bags don't differ between geographical loci, the language doesn't change and in this loneliness I only wish I were among those old friends, complaining about our miser situation with all possible virtuoso performance, as though on a stage. Only the songs save one from losing the language so entirely, when all the languages one writes in are foreign and untouchable. You might have fled leaving others on their own, without exit visas, betraying a little so to speak and this, despite the totality of the experience, doesn't contain any moral worth; yet one's attempting to overcome the curiosity of Lot's wife and by tour de force, becoming one another Noah in his boat, turning the waters upside down. The appalling distance from all living material that one gains in exile is nauseating at times, so that you run and hide in yourself, only in order to become so frightened as to eliminate all desire to survive again. Years passed by since I spent those awful hungry nights in the north of Tel Aviv writing those ridiculous musings and little stories that would save me from collapsing. By then, I had almost forgotten all Greek, except for the parts strictly necessary to remain alive yet one day more... in the hometown there were always friends to help and conversations, free hot meals and warm beds, counsels and a lot of empathy... Here it all seems so far, and you embrace your security as though it were at all, but those of us who have spent years in the abyss know this to be otherwise. Only the little pasts with those moments of truth can help one not to collapse at every juncture of the hour. It's about time to unlive the truth for a while, to work on oneself and to be rehabilitated for life, we'll live again, she said to me... and I hope for those days only because I want to believe they're distant from the here and now that has already fallen into a black hole where only remembering can provide any solace, can erase the towers and dry the sea, to reveal the Judean desert again, only that can hush the parties to let those angry godless prayers be heard, only that can dissipate the securities in order to show how much we fear. In exiles language is always turned around, it's never lost... simply translated, and that's what causes a little pain sometimes. With a little Greek I arrived home, and with that same little Greek I left.

Emigration - Meinwärts

Passing the mark of a thousand nights, I emigrate again... Not into a place unknown before but yet so uncommonly strange and so well separated from language and foe, so terribly not gemütlich but altogether possible to be lived; in the great distance from all the truth in the world one wanders through the street without experiencing anything as his eyes are always busy with something else, trying to cope with the amazement in its most un-Greek form. The music plays from the most varied locales, but you know it's all a permanent silent inertia as though eternity could be in one place - history is destroyed afresh with the impressive towers that aim to reach the sky one day, so that the poor-spirited can dwell there, to relieve themselves... But sometimes in the streets there're accordeonists like those we used to know back home, they beg for money just like we begged for death, for an irretriveable divorce from every word of truth, for a distance... And those beggars, it's their laughter what impresses me so deeply, a laughter that overcomes all sadness and that becomes a flag in the paviment for the passer-by's to identify themselves with, as though it were an embassy issueing temporary passports for refugees, for those fleeing the estrangement.

There's yet something poetic but harmless about those warm nights, the eventless noise and the lax smell of a very thin light. You can sit and write, but then that isn't really telling your story and therefore you walk down the street with those heavy bags, from city to city, from person to person, throwing books sometimes and picking up rags... You just can't leave them anywhere, and even the children seem so burdened carrying those heavy bags from their own history; only in the early evening, at those very small cafeterias, one can open his bags and organize a garage sale every night, with accordeonists around playing so kindly as to sooth the thickness of one's own skin as not to seem hairsplit. But there're no customers, except for other emigrees... with so little money to buy anything from your heavy bag, so that they only exchange one item for another, tell their own stories, add a piece from somebody else or delete a chapter in their own and trade it for a cup of coffee with a stranger. No dreams of return harvest in you, while you don't plan on staying either and the cafes become stations, train stations, with temporary lockers for your bags, they rent the lockers for hours only and at the end of the day you must bring your suitcase back to your room, in the dampness of the air and the stillness of the hours.

You feel divorced from the pain you felt every morning, the anger, the anguish... your hands become a little spoiled as there's no need to look for the bread of life, Jesus is nowhere to be found around here, except in a Filipino church around the corner and there he's no friend or conversator, he remembers not his way back into the Street of the Prophets... he takes the buses all day long asking for directions, and in the end he winds up in the same garage sales. Looking for a tourist, for a foreigner... who will speak another language and listen to the story with delight and in his mind he will imagine Jerusalem as the palace of a King so full of empty chairs, and he will not notice the graves that always welcome you in. It's strange to tell people that nights are so silent here, so quiet... because it isn't factually true, but the emigrees know it well. There's so much we have forgotten, debts we didn't pay and friends that will no longer call. In the late afternoon you despair in your table, drink the bitter coffee with the slowest depth of your body and look into the abyss... It isn't deep enough, you know it well. But emigrating is a way to live, to continue living and not drunken from glasses of water, from letters and from the burden of the stones, you yourself having become one of them. You prefer not to leave your room, there's just such lack of desire! But remember this is just a train station, and like all stations it leads nowhere while at the same time it never leads back.