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.
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.
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