Friday, March 27, 2009

Rivulet

“Rivulet”

“Die Krise ist Permanent geworden” –Jacob Taubes

I

The bard stands at the opening of a new door, it is the gate and it is not even open, it lays shattered and giving way to a thorough-passage into motion –the place is still hidden, there only lays bare the movement of an action and a certain petty passion; there’s always a story being told here... The story isn’t, it doesn’t exist in itself (it ain’t yet), the raw indeterminate reality of existence determines something ripped off from its staves:

“ex” – out of itself

“is” – a non-relationship, intransitive expression, belatedness of the function in relation to the thing, purely phenomenal appearance of non-whatness

“tense”- geography of time, false hope, twilight

Let us turn to categories of speculative thinking: the dualistic map of a thought-out idea to match the thinking-in world doesn’t satisfy our instincts, we’re building upon a tree whose sin is not knowledge, but the fact that experience can shatter knowledge and that pure thought that arises from experience alone is a trigger, its only aim it so vanquish the world with rage –that deceitful world of contradiction and dearth of coincidence between the appearing and the inner constitution of the self that is always withdrawing into itself.

A story can’t just be – it is only being told… As to vanish later into the spider web of human associations, it is but these associations that are ciphered into the everyday foul play of colours and pairs and shaped objects what construes the soft tissue of human knowledge. Each story (and not every story, for “every” denotes a membership in an aggregate of generic objects –stories are both objects and subjects) contains the pegs of the linguistic map, they predate not the spoken word, but fully developed speech –the transit from Adam’s ability to name things in so far as they exist (exist as torn off from the generic world of possible and potential orientation into the actuality of their earthly passing, the Christ can’t save trees or dogs pissing by the trees –he can only save unearthly creatures, creatures come from another world so to say) to the first human song –the Song of the Sea sung by Moses as they crossed the Reed Sea and then the grand finale: Israel’s unison at the fulfilment of the first historical dream, the giving of the Holy Torah.

The pre-storical experience is both biological and linguistic, but it is not a commonplace, it is an affair of prophets and scribes… From story to story a Tower of Babel of right and wrong is erected, but the truth is not at the top leading us into heaven, it is but winding in both directions all the time, often running counter to the experience of the everyman, and so far no scriptural passage says hell is devoid of truth altogether. The Tower of Babel is the first memory –a memory that we don’t know where we come from any longer, and this is the most basic assumption of a story being told all the time, the assumption of memory and of Babel’s distant geography, unreachable, almost imaginary.

The originality demanded here is not epistemological –philosophy has forsaken insurance policies, nor is it teleological. Storical man is not all that willing to arrive home, his journey runs into the infinite future much more than into the commonplaces of his own lifetime –into the general future of absolute things such as life and the world rather than into the present-future of the present-present, thus the originality resides more in the citability of the structural experience of the story into the body of practical wisdom than in its uniqueness as content –too unique stories are unlikely to be commonplaces and therefore hardly stand the test of adding up to the hay of general knowledge –this is the greatest charm about the Bible. The citability is the ability of any storical association to stand for a historical question –historical not as scientific-historiographical or a station in the course of mankind’s appearance on earth, what is meant here by historical is bound and coeval with the human condition.

The story teller is disenchanted, he’s meant not to avoid or circumvent (which is impossible) the Final Judgment, but rather to delay it for as long as the morphology of this world can be kept. Whoever stands of his own will at the thread of the Judgment, such as Kafka and Kraus, they have melted themselves with and chosen to terminate the unrest in the pathic way –throwing themselves upon experience alone, so here there’s this recognition that every written word that follows from the ocular anxiety of Archimedes over our diminished size in the post-Paradise world, has made a failure of its author; one can as well choose the ontic way, but bare being, existence alone without the orientation of prophecy, is alive but mute. Whoever denies the Judgment as in the case of Sartre and De Beauvoir, he has lost the claim to the future and in so far as he is only looking toward the past, the future will be always desperate, inflexible, mechanistic… Their story can’t be told, they have made sure to lock up all the doors before the speech act is set into motion. This is the difference between the story-teller and the mythological; an association into time through genetics, for what could be more tautological than thinking out genetics in terms of eternity!

II

Geometrical forms such as shaped objects, lines, successions and points do point in the direction of something remarkable: the indeterminateness of story-telling; in this kind of thinking so much unlike in the case of metaphysics, the unities of the monad cannot be broken down piecemeal to the original parts unless one of two choices is made: one is to believe, that is, to take the basic concepts in the Cartesian plane as truisms, another is not to believe, that is, to understand the universe as infinite, and the person who chooses not to believe is but a theologian, he is working under the assumption that this isotropy is possible only within the greatest contingency –if the universe be infinite, it must necessarily have two measures: infinitely small to one end and infinitely big to the other end and perchance both ends meet and are but one. This is informing us only of one thing; that the idea of the infinite is but a tautology unless we hold on to it as a paradox –the paradox that infinity is only possible in space, that is, as long as we are not thinking in terms of measures. The schism within the spatial is that pure thought in contrast to the storical man, has encountered the space-place relationship as a network of functions and when there’re only functions, things can’t exist. Greek mathematicians knew this very well, that is why they were so troubled with reality, with suffering, not with everyday suffering but with the cosmic nothingness that paralyzed the Renaissance men, back in the day they only laughed, laughed once, like Socrates, but it was the laugh of shudder what they had.

The bard tells the story again, from Adam to our days, the same story, even in front of the numb eyes of the astronomer; now they all pray to keep the gates locked, they yearn for quiet and still of the dwelling place, they crave for the Romantic view of man, the appraisement of mental illness and the secret salons, the interesting mankind, the idle chat and romance. Perhaps only because it can’t be had anymore, even the naïve bard knows this too well. The salon is a discreet manner to keep the gates locked. No unleashing of human forces, let us leave everything up to God. The story isn’t, it doesn’t exist in itself (it ain’t yet), it is not an existence, it is an extension of life itself:

“ex” – out of itself

“tension” – space of time, true hope, looking at the time without a watch

“Extension” – Duration of time, in the Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophies extension is a fundamental attribute of substance/matter that makes it possible to divide into smaller parts. The other attributes refer to extension as the immediate subject of the substance, whereas the extension is referred back to the thing in itself. Geometrically speaking it is a property of bodies in general to occupy a certain measure of space but in Logic it is a grouping of objects to which it is applied a common knowledge element.

The story is an extension of life itself in that experience is only reflected as a past of the present thrown upon an absolute future; for we are always losing hold of the sentiment in the present tense, and a unique personal non-verbal past doesn’t reflect individuality but cosmic loneliness. If Aristotle had any idea about time and therefore about space, he would agree to the fact that the extension contains all the logical possibilities of the geometrical surface, except one –that of its own reality, and this is definable only negatively not as a syllogism that cancels logical fallacy whenever possible, but as the knowledge that the origin of man is unknown and this is precisely the reason why the law in whichever form predates any form of history, religion and culture. The bard holds the key to the Messianic charade, he keeps the gates locked. Giants walk in through a rivulet trespassing the bard’s prohibition and later return, breaking into tears.

We’re building upon a tree, branching out, into singled-out objects realizable only in their association, growing roots but decaying and growing again, thrown into life, and just as violently taken out, always relying on a previous image of ourselves, but the tree is safer than the Tower of Babel. It is earth-bound, like us. Had we but the freedom of monads!

“You’re walking up the ladder, heading always downwards”

III

A is logical, B is necessary (without the world or the work)

A ≠ B

A wills B, so that A ≥ B

However, A does not contain B, so that (A) is not (B)

Invalid propositions are A+B, A ≤ B, A+A, xⁿ A = A ∙ n

Valid propositions are A ≈ ∞, ∑A ≡ xⁿ B but ∑ B ≠ A

General Propositions are Bⁿ = a + b + c ∫ B, A = A

Relationship of A to B in terms of x:

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Variations of Hell (in progress)

“Überhaupt die Religion - ich denke, wir müssen aufpassen, dass die "dark ages" nicht zurückkehren. Andererseits sind die "westlichen Gesellschaften" auch nur Variationen der Hölle"- Sandra Lehmann, 2009

- The end of Religion is not the end of the Religious; it will linger about for a long time under the rubric of “religious”, wearing masks falser than those it wore before. Back in time, it at least made use of authority or conviction in order to carry out the divine plan. The new “religious” discovered by philosophers like Habermas, misusing the tortured theology of Adorno and Benjamin, is nothing but the last desperate moan of a comatose metaphysics –here I am not speaking of self-secure Thomistic and Aristotelian metaphysics that still hold their world together for themselves, even if at the price of an alienated existence, rather what I am referring to is the so-called philosophies of “(political) freedom” engaged in “practical concerns” of everyday life, that in their self-avowed rejection of spirituality have mistaken Plato’s world of forms with the world from above. In this confusion it is not only that it has not been possible to give a framework to this such eminently practical philosophy but also that its lack of metaphysics under all its names, reputable or not, has evidently torn into pieces its possibility to reach any philosophical climax and therefore any claim for truth, they have instead devoted themselves to criticize the rationality behind the processes of public and justice administration and governability; this comatose religion does not even have a theology or a scripture or even a God, it is sated with a mourner that claims that those theologies, scriptures or gods have never been such, and therefore denies the claim to all possible past, and it is not like there is a future that looms with the splendor of a renaissance.
- Everyday Life as an unchallenged structural concept is not the equivalent of everyday wisdom but neither is it a philosophy of life –Lebensphilosophie and the philosophical biologies could not be any further removed from the concerns of everyday life. In its long career as a hidden pathway from St. Augustine to Heidegger, Everyday Life is but a concern with personal salvation. Salvation and religion are not the same, because it would be an oxymoron to say one is to keep religion in its actual form as a liturgical or social practice once he has reached into the world or state where he is meant to be saved… Religion is ought to belong to the morphology of the world in its actual form –as a lower form if we were to adopt Platonic philosophy… Isn’t what we learn from Jesus that salvation comes from faith and not from religion? Religion and Culture have their origin in Roman life; however in the age of alienation they have become a bridge between people, even a channel of inter-subjectivity if that’s how we want to call them.

Outta Home

“Outta Home”

Days of unbearable pain, but I am in full awareness that this statement means nothing at all… I have outgrown the Romantic ideal of always speaking of one’s suffering in terms of interesting, as if to suffer were anything interesting… That is a voyeuristic attitude which is not so bad after all except when it is the sufferer who is placing himself in the position of the spectator, as if the vanity of being possibly observed could sate anybody, but then thinking about it a second time, the sufferer knows not the metaphysics of suffering. They are meant to be disturbing to the good God, but stand on the way of salvation.

Physical pain is an empty space in a lifetime; it is like a white dot, or that corner that has to be cut off from the canvas in order to frame it. It doesn’t teach moral lessons in itself; it is but in the care of physical pain that we learn, self-learn… Extreme physical pain can, and no less than fear, lead us to a clinical death, the pain can cause our brain and heart to break their feedback and let us fall into unconscious suffering, of whose consequences we are not aware in any way. In Victorian love diseases as in “pneumatic” tuberculosis we are thought of as gifted, with a Pandora’s Box, but gifted… Making a superhuman effort to overcome the natural tendency to avoid pain, for the Greeks after all work and pain and sorrow had the same word-root, thus what a tragedy it was to be enslaved.

I am not sure what part of the anxiety is worse, if the uncertainty of an amateurish self-diagnose of the worst possible illnesses or the certainty of something having gone definitely awry and the medical care being out of reach. It is a world of practical things and shopping, something aches, you see a doctor, tell a story, receive in lieu of passionate footnotes to your story a detailed prognosis and a prescription, you walk into the pharmacy, swallow pills, trust that God is dead and get better. I am ready to accept that it has been a choice to live without doctors, at least it was while the insurance could be afforded, then it became an existential necessity, a state of affairs. I strongly believe even now that they greatly contribute to our deaths, or to the impoverishment of our lives. At any rate, I would feel so much more in peace if one of those murderers of the healthy people would tell me that I am going to die. Certainty has such a high price in this world, usually the price of acquitting the devil for great crimes in the name of some little good we derived from them. Certainty in religion comes at the price of leaving the world as it is, poor Leibniz, the best of all possible worlds?

I try to write and I know eventually I will, write a master piece that I will loath one day thereafter, but it is all part of a big whole I see only in parts. I am writing basically about myself as if it were something that could save me, as if leaving a word behind me constituted the only thing I can do not to lose the right too heaven so completely… In writing about myself it is all likely that I am getting to know myself, and perhaps it is in this knowing that I can choose myself for what I am, and only then be saved. The pain comes often during the day but the mornings are particularly bad, there’s too much noise in the environment, the air is too heavy and the people, to just see them, it is an open wound in me. It starts at the height of the teeth in the right side and slowly envelops the ear coming all the way up into the middle lateral head and all the way down to the neck. At the tact my neck is steel stiff, enlarged lymph nodes and that desecrating pain, screeching, emptying everything…

Strangely enough after some time it stops, but the minutes are eternal to me, more than the pain I dread a moment of un-heroic weakling’s death, brain stroke in the middle of a headache, and then no more essays and martinis and lovers and paintings… How strange, this is what really troubles me, not to enjoy the goods of this world I have been so committed to dread, it troubles to go to heaven without having exhausted with enough radicalism all the good in this world. When it stops I feel such calm around me, the silence of litanies, some calm as I had never experienced before, in a similar manner, no pain I experienced before equals this. In thinking and even in mourning about this world and its life, one is not that alone, one keeps himself company and he has a lot of imaginary interlocutors –friends of old, teachers, the great masters of thought, people he fancies and with whom he imagines himself in interesting conversations even in spite of not having ever crossed a word. It is only in physical pain that one is really alone.

This doesn’t take me by surprise, in my lack of tranquility I had expected this, after all leaving the world of peace and tranquility, to let them be stolen piecemeal, this is not only about courage, it does require so much talent. To suffer-only does not achieve anything but increasing the lust for tranquility, this requires an attitude. But then there’s the world of the home with foster mothers and parents, half-brothers and a dozen of other well-known but borrowed relatives… Their eyes are mirrors; they reveal the accuracy of one’s own contempt, the end of biology I suppose. The organic ties one set himself to tear have not been glued yet, they even seem now not just broken but shattered… Time seems not to have passed, neither disdain, at times we get used to an everyday comfort that doesn’t save, it just gives you the shattered illusion of an eternal tense, of the repetition of sequences without any temporal index, because any index whatsoever when temporal is charged with the ailing feel that it must end.

We become attached to parents we didn’t have, or to siblings we didn’t know, and tell ourselves little lies, in order to escape, to choose some piece of mind that had been broken already in olden times, when they still recognized you, when the gap was still something you desired, not an actuality of experience. The silence of love in the un-distance is something that I will always bear, the lack of a creative language like that of God –it is but this dearth what makes a requisite for being a denizen of this world, but the despair settles in when the language of un-love dawns on closeness between people, their living-together is only one another contingency like that of fish being thrown into a tank, in order to be fished and eaten and belched and defecated, mere dead biology. Biology and love, it is like death and cosmic order, related but one cannot know the other.

So many days elapse and I find my mattress at night an eternal purgatory, if at least we were Christians then this purgatory would have all the advantages of lewdness and Philistinism, it is as if my hiding place had to replace the world, how much meaning can there be in living in a place that can’t see, a place without windows to the external world –the most precious sight through a glass pane stained with animal fat from years of cooking sifts the outside with detour at a kitchen of bitter meals, and then you remember that kitchen, the beatings, the repetitive twenty years of the same plates and the great joy of drunkenness and oblivion. Perhaps one is to prefer the emptiness of the radical headache. Beneath the stairway, the mattress eats my health away, like fat being consumed by swine… And it is paradoxical then to think that there’s been really never any other inspiration but my very own life, under the stairway even… It seems hermetic as a glass house but one’s quick to realize the deceitful treat; the noises penetrate each and every cubic millimeter of air inside the little cave-room, the wooden panes even seem to cause the effect of maximizing the noise, making every desire or every intimate thought into the most reckless depravation, everything is turned into prohibition, privation.

Oftentimes I prefer when father doesn’t speak, then I am not so forced to lie with such blatancy, I must confess I do it only for the money… I don’t do it willy-nilly; I feel he owes me for so many years of abandonment, of spurious and abject abandonment, for the years of spiritual mediocrity and for the beatings too. The silence is tense but not like the silence of lovers, it is a silence in which all partners know that they really don’t want to break the silence, that things are cool as they are. I could die in the cave from a midnight headache, and perhaps days would elapse, they would think I am just pissed drunk or depressed, it wouldn’t be until the settlement of the smells and fungi that any alarm would be raised. This, this is my greatest fear. Whoever will say that I’ve spent my whole life running away from my fate, I will say he is absolutely right, but this possibility is my only faith.

I am frightened of the street nowadays while I hadn’t in younger years, but in Tel Aviv the nights showered with warm rays of invisible heat and the sea always offered some ideas about the endlessness of things, even when I had little patience to seize over these thoughts and preferred to wander in the lewdness of free alcohol, small talk and casual sex. I guess there were some ideas about “ends” anyways, especially in the mornings, just right before the noise blew back into the earth… It reminds me of that thing I wrote about Asaf, I think I dreamt about him the other day. In the middle of everything I never ceased to honor my people, the story goes that Rabbi Akiva couldn’t afford to learn so that he would climb up to the roof and watch the Talmudic discussions from there under the cold winter nights. In hungry days I never quit writing, I think it was precisely that what kept me alive through those years, no matter what I wrote, the letters to Katharina especially, in them I opened a savings account of my whole life, so whole that in them I included the futures that could not be, that would never be and perhaps even without knowing those that were to be.

In the end one could always study the Talmud and sing an ancient melody, grab some cookies and hide them in the pockets, roam the streets of the market at night as to pick up leftovers from whole bread loaves, gummies, some potatoes, tomatoes, a cucumber even, ah how happy were those nights! How regrettably impossible to speak on. Then when one had the money, a whole lunch from the nearby restaurant, delicious to the fucking bone… The entire day spent watching the pale clumsiness of the Protestant church and taking delight in thinking one could just be there somewhat at home, on a boat sailing right through a sea of burning fires and sins on the high-speed highway to the end of the world. To be at the church loomed easier, for it was easier to believe in Plato than to study Talmud and you would get free lunches instead of cookies, but at the price of salvation, at the price of communion, at the price of destroying the present. Then Talmud represented the uncanny reality, the exhaustion of logical possibility that leads the man of vision into the aporias of passion and therefore to action. The knowledge that man isn’t fallen, but yet he can’t be trusted… His sin was not the apple, but the idol worship, so that the damnation is not existentially applicable to the whole of universal history.

In the end, just like in those days, what I feared the most was not illness or the pain even, but to let myself be convinced that the world was emptied from love, no matter how strong my perception of reality had informed me of such being the case. Information is not a decision, then in that order of ideas I make sure to hold on, not to lose the temporal index, the fact of one’s own mortality. All my dreams are of royalties, expensive watches and designer’s clothes, not because they’re expensive but because they mean to represent universal ideas in the earthly and coward disguise of power… I am not so contemptuous of poverty as I am of living part-time, of intellectual “jobs” and “experts” in this philosopher or the other. There’s here a belittled idea of greatness, belittled only because we have cleaned it from theology and have thrown the weight of the victory and of defeat’s argument not into the wide universe, but right inside the body of the monad.

Last time I went into exile from the privileges of the home had been exactly six years and five months ago –enough time to catch a mortal disease and write a book, also enough time to have achieved quite a lot of happiness in earthly affairs. This should include an unplanned hotel booking that lasted already sixteen months; I had booked for a home-stay and was received with a cave-room, that after a few months of landing dead drunk on the cushions set upon the cold floor tiles. The janitor felt compassion for my Christian vale of tears and replaced it with a sanatorium without daylight, well; it seems like a place where I would be wont to be found. The payment policy at the hotel is crystal clear, you receive a mattress, some food and endless aggravation, and in return you pay with indifference, irresponsibility, unaccountability and disdain. No more could be asked from charitable institutions based on fundamental rights of denizens in every country such as those that entitle him to a name, a nationality, a family and so on. Institutions that of course have never collapsed and had withstood all tests of history, war and man’s lust for power. Right on.

I’m strong, I always said… But there’s so much I forgot along the way, and now in order to retrieve it, my only option is to do exactly what I did years ago, to take as much as I can from then and swiftly walk away without the sin of Lot’s wife. I might regret this so much later, in when it dawns on me that the nighttime of life has settled in, but this is my only option, lest I want to give up on all the claims I have made for myself in life. A strong drink now, then some tears and excruciating pain, but decisions made. I must be stronger even, to be able to carry out at least a few of the things I’ve been lucky enough to see in this life. An understanding is not a conclusion and a theory is not a hypothesis. It seems as if I will say something out of order bearing in mind the advantages of my position, but I will do my very best to stay alive until I can land in the far-away ports, this seems an overrated statement but it is so far the only practical truth I’ve dwelled on in the whole week of headaches and blurred visions. It didn’t hurt me to leave friendships behind at that time, and it shouldn’t now, however I am a little bit of a lot older, and I draw back over and over, but once the decision is made, fates will be up to world history.

I fear my sleep too, I don’t look properly after my cave, piles of clothes in the reduced space make it difficult to move, even to go in, but it is a pronouncement from my part, I pronounce my verdict: I am indifferent to this. This proves beyond rationale that my antinomian argument about loving the world as it is is but the greatest philosophical aporia in the moment you break it into separate congruent thoughts applicable to individual questions. I fear it because I awake from my sleep right at the same place, I fear the physical pain again, and I fear the fatherlessness so coldly striking me in the mornings when I feel like a beggar trying to make ends meet in front of a leper asylum. But I am free at night, so free… So free that I mind not the long hours walking home from drinking bouts, I fear not the long tireless day exerting its pressure over my eyelids with a surplus of daylight unnecessary for life, the nights are mine, so mine that they are like the body of a man, and because I have loved men, I know what their bodies are like, they are like this, treacherous but inevitable, and so inevitable is then the day when I will go and face the street again, less wise than when younger, but less tranquil, less persuaded, less deceived about happiness. I don’t know how I could have lived through the stations of my own life without writing, without thought, without the spirit of hell. Only those will know heaven, for the rest there’s Disneyland still. A home is always a destination, a psychological orientation, only in so far as you’re driving there, but past the entrance all newcomers are more than often disappointed, this is what happens when one goes on sojourns! World-Tourism is how one philosopher called this whole thing. I am outta home, hitting some free hotels where one prays for meals instead of lying, it is not yet practical freedom, but is rational, it is a half ticket back into the world of hotel rooms and hotel people. After salvation comes the everyday lover, that is my eschatological hope.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Radical Will
Fragments


“There’s a gap in between,
There’s a gap where we meet…”

- The pressure of time and not the bondage of epistemologies is what blurs the line between one’s work and one’s life, I know this because art in all its forms –and this includes the writers, is so cunningly determined by the fact of our death. Knowledge as an accumulation of facts, as a recollection in the sense of Hegel is always secondary to the truths that so artfully avoid time, avoid mortality; there is no crude thinking without contradiction and without avoidance. At times it seems as if Hegel were more of the garbage man than an art collector when he speaks of recollection.
- There’s no possibility of thought as an art and creative work if one’s afraid of being wrong. All thought is always wrong, this has been the problem with the great systems, and the struggle with completeness avoids the risk of aporia. No thought could have been ever possibly complete, and this why we are divorced from philosophy as a science, only an attitude has remained… This attitude is less familiar with the laughter of Socrates at his death than is with the miraculous fact that a biological birth can produce spirit, and thus, everything human ranging from politics to poetry and that we leave in this world as soon as we leave our own bodies; that is clearly contradictory: in the moment we are able to overcome the biological world of matter, we are thence forced to abandon our pretensions at the world of thoughts, in so far as we know. The performing artist is perhaps less allowed a share of wrong in the world, because he is primarily a seer whereas the thinker is a hearer, but hold on! Who is the speaker then?
- Art and Medicine have never left their pagan ways and that is why the ultimate counterpart of aesthetics and healing is always death. Philosophy and Poetry most likely did become monotheistic, perhaps as early as St. Paul, but their theoretical stance is clear-cut: in so far as no politics is concerned, they constitute a study of death, but they cannot actually practice it like physicians and the artist that drops the last brush from the canvas, or the photographers who steals singled-out broken pieces from the world of reality. Rilke was definitely a man of strong inclination toward God and might have loathed the Gospels, because as a careful hearer he took delight in the everyday miracle and in the prophet of the so very obvious, the healing of the leper might hold no treasure for him at all.
- The statement so often heard that art and philosophy are the same is a blatant lie, for the performance of art which also takes place among the most talented philosophers when they write their work is so completely external to the constraints of the thinking activity, that is why in our days so many aphorisms, journals and autobiographical sketches of great philosophers have become so popular –it is a hindsight into a thought still unfolding today. The artist can only work from the other end of the syllogism. Art is based on the performance and philosophy in the interpretation, philosophy is never original, that is how it has survived so much original mediocrity.
- People often accuse us of not living in reality, in not taking the world for what is, and this is the greatest metaphysical fallacy of all empirical hermeneutics that have come so far as to becoming the everyday wisdom of even the lamest man, who has mistaken this for philosophy. The fallacy comes out in the open right at the moment that we use our senses to interpret life and the world, from that moment on we have left the empirical world, this is what social science can never accept, less it risk being sacrificed. Hereby with world we do not mean the biological earth but the life world of phenomenology. There’s yet another world, the human world –the network of all relationships between human beings that at the most fundamental level construe the palette of memory and give us therefore a right to a history, -the human version of photosynthesis. In order to take the biological world for what it is we are in need of some paralyzing mental condition such as schizophrenia, and not meant in the sense of the cultural sciences, as a common disease, here we speak of the loneliest of all possible conditions –one so very lonely that in its inner cluster not even thinking about oneself is a possibility. The person who might be able to take the human world for what is needs one of two things, an infinite amount of ignorance or the talent of Virginia Woolf. Both are immortal in a close relationship to non-living, albeit in different senses: the former has never lived, and the latter is already dead.
- Carl Schmitt says that we have never lived in the universe, at least not since we are so-called Christians; we are in fact living in a pluriverse. This is confirmed by the so many orders that we find in the world, not always in hierarchical manner… There’s too much empty space in the world for that, however we are running out of empty places, the lack of space causes the boredom of a hero without a loving God, and the lack of place causes death in so far as it is stealing our lifetime without any minimum regard for the laws of the universe, for the endless suffering of the actor, it is indifferent to the timeline of autobiography and story… Perhaps this is the problem, that all space in so far as it is space is always empty and all places in so far as they are places are always occupied. This might be a serious theological problem; a certain Catholic liturgical song speaks of a God everywhere but nowhere, everywhere because he fills all the space but nowhere because he might be unable to occupy specific places. We have learnt from classical physics that places have three dimensions no matter what, however modern science might teach something interesting about space: it leads only in one direction, always against eternity. Space is not a geometrical concept, had the Greeks understood this, they could have never believed in the eternal return. It is not eternity what rules the natural world but rather constant creation, as if it were a science of language this whole creation business. If the space would not run counter to eternity, we could never feel what we become older, and however immortal, the Greek gods seem to have aged at some point. A certain poet in Jerusalem said that the Jewish God was the youngest yeshiva boy and the oldest wise rabbi, both at the same time… Holding men in the two-fold pressure of the Kafkian paradox: Chained to the earth as he reaches for the skies, and chained to the skies as he reaches for the earth.
- For many days I do not sleep or search for my grave… The thoughts run in my mind as if they were desires for somebody, conversations take place that elucidate long obscure passages unlearnt long ago, and then the morning forces me in my weariness into the hefty books and the love of strangers, the endless lust for yet another conversation, the helpless desire to remain at the train station without departing toward any of the truer worlds where one is no longer avoiding this so called raw materials of reality. Perhaps there is a real desire for somebody and the engagement is theological only in so far as it is a quest for an anthropology of language: the style of this radical will is to find a language as inconclusive as that of the creation, I crave for yet one well-construed sentence, for a passage elucidated by a passer-by, but the noises are screeching, mute, and not beautiful enough to be called violent. I search for the gap in between, perhaps the only place where man could be at home: a highway, the train station, the traffic jam, but only when he is certain about his impossible destination.

From the Courtyard

From the Courtyard

Exile

Last night I pulled myself out of the crisis of illness, of brutal merciless pain… Nowadays I understand how the cunning difference and deference between love and physical pain is but schismatic, because there is absolutely nothing metaphysical about physical pain, it is raw undisturbed nature, a lifeless biological world, body movements without coordination, flow of blood and fluids, blindness to the world, little else; this is perhaps the reason why in general memoirs and musings of desperately ill people are so discouraging –they have forgotten about the world in every possible respect; as a natural entity, a cultural space, an inter-subjective arena, even as a vale of tears the world is already too far from sight and touch.

This pull-out was an disengagement from unhappiness so miserably reversed in the morning under the auspice of yet more brutal pain –then there were no ontic instances, all the time was a frisky mess of non-thoughts blended in with sobbing, shortness of breath and a strange and cold type of theological silence –a moment when the noises from outside are irremediable sickening precisely because they are all external, from the inside out there is just this awful dearth, dearth even of silence, this being thrown into oneself so deep that he can no longer keep himself company, he wants to leave not only the earth and the body, but also that corrupted soul, withering away in the belligerent march of antibodies, blood vessels, nerves, joints and the like.

Yet the temporary haven was no less than happier. I read myself back into other times, perhaps less stable and less mature, but you see, times when the degree of accuracy in the words I used to describe the world’s indigestion from color was far greater. And it is a tardy memory thrown upon an elongated future because at the time I had nothing but dread for those unsympathetic notes; at times I wrote them with the intention of not losing my mind in the eternally accumulated hours of my life that I had before me to dive into leisure, into the wastefulness of consciousness… Some other times the pain blended in with the glory and drove me to drink too many glasses of vermouth by myself, but notwithstanding the spirit of being crudely alive had always lingered then.

Nowadays I would be right in accusing myself of lovelessness, mortal sin… The exile has been prolonged for so long so that I lost the interest in those great friendships that at a certain point of the night left wide open the gates of salvation but we did not walk in, expecting the final judgement. What had been once the dream of a heartland turned into an un-brokered deal to come through with certain things? I cannot turn a blind eye to this un-world, this little scenario of worms and fleas: brothers and aunts, stepmothers and cousins, this unimagined hell world where all the individuality is taken away from people in its wholeness, in the wholeness of their personhood, being thoroughly replaced by shameful wall portraits of wasabi-pinneapple-lime childhoods. I guess that the gift of flying butterfly-style and then abruptly landing with your face to the ground is a price given only to those who fly on their own, even at the risk of missing their own worm-hood, no longer a nobility title from Scotland or elsewhere.

It is curious I began writing about the “cunning difference”; in my un-whiskified days when I learnt not philosophy but merely human language, I had enthroned the cunning of reason as a through-way of growing into the delights of knowledge. But as soon as now, I would already realize that cunning is not without its own ironies, it can as well mean deceive more than shrewdness. I have not been into a church for as long as I have been in this surgical and hygienic exile, I feel horrible contempt for the everyday believer, and it is seemly to me a virtue to break aporetically through the simple faith. This reminds me of the last weeks right before the exile, sleeping at the Protestant church in Tel Aviv, listening to Norwegian choirs and eating Danish breakfasts, withstanding by the dull musings of pensioners and the wild Holy Land: going to the middle of the desert to enter an acclimatized pool. It was much better than the right and now, but then again, this is what everybody says about everything, it is this social vice to waste the present away as if it were something filthy, and this living something sinful, provoking, shattering, nailing but tawdry.

Writing without footnotes, how daring and stupid; again 4 in the morning, not knowing no more for how many days this diet of sleeplessness has lasted, perhaps for as long as it has been impossible to obtain any other fully private hours. The problem with the exile is not the geography or the blood vessels causing brutal headaches, it is more a problem with the fleas and worms, the source of so much evil. Tonsillitis, haemorrhoids, skin rash, kidney fever, bad sight, middle finger necrosis, migraine. Everything comes from fleas and worms, all symptoms of poverty, but above all from a natural ability to resist death without glory. Dying in lovelessness is not a decent attitude, it is too anonymous, and it is like dying at a hospital in the early morning after breakfast and check-up time. Dying is not like checking-out from cheap hostels, it should be something like escaping some runaway flashlight; it cannot be carried out in the sight of so much poverty. Earn your graveyard, fatherless or not. Not in a courtyard, but in the plain sight of other tombs, that is why one returns to Jerusalem, to own his own space, even if among glorious Christian sepulchres.