Today I sent more letters… Despite my stubbornness it seems that it will take a lot more than nice letters to get out of this imprisonment; my hunch is that I might have to do some otherworldly kind of physical word. I sent a letter to Harvard Divinity School which is supposed to recruit the most outstanding minds in so far as the Kingdom of God, or the lack thereof, is concerned. I am all for a kingdom of God, a bit anarchist both in the political sense and in the sense of what it could mean to be without “founding principle” in philosophy; the kingdom of God would be certainly universal but without that modern universality, without theology, without philosophical assumptions, certainly without church. How to think about God without theology? It is like thinking about truth without philosophy; it is certainly possibly but it is steadily risky… You may be completely right, so you might be then also completely wrong. If you are right, it might just be a very difficult movement to make, and if you´re wrong, then it´s hell and it smells of Auschwitz. If I were an atheist or a humanist, I don´t know of what kind I would be because even if my faith is not wrong, it is still dialectically powerful and undialectically harsh. The other difficult point is that I certainly have too little faith in mankind and my imprecations about the stature of man are more humorous than they´re serious preoccupations; so humorous that my preoccupations are just too important to care about saying them out loud, to care about turning them into political mantras, to care about selling them as truths. I share Jesus point of view – morally pessimistic and culturally optimistic at the same time. No matter what I do, whom I write about or what the object of my grumpiness or else bad feeling is, I am always oriented toward the Kingdom of God. But I don´t think I want a simple kingdom… My idea of the kingdom is at once bloody, physical, religious and technologically secular. It could be that I will have to agree with Kierkegaard that there are no Christians yet, no Christians of Jesus; there´re only Christians of imperial Christianity. I am not sure whether I am able to utter a similar statement for the truths of Jews that I´ve so blatantly decried with avowed intensity over the course of my adult life; I´ve certainly lived up to the prophetic and rather apocalyptic idea of living in the world without a world at all but yet profiting sensually from the world in so far it has been possible.
My idea of the world is fully charged with apocalyptic images bereft of saintliness, so that my whole experience of the world is an eschatological conundrum; with much deference to historical events but completely unconcerned with the results as if viewed from the ultimate perspective of an unredeemed and yet final momentum of history. This eschatological image is not only a historical situatedness but also a full-fledged spiritual fuel with an ultimately future orientation. What I thought yesterday when in the company of Mario is that my ideal of beauty in human beings is not only riddled by morbid physical and aesthetic beauty but also irreversibly coupled with a demonic intelligence that in practice is very, very unhappy. The unhappiness of the infinite that endlessly aims at finding a home in a legitimate present that the spiritual attitude itself is so bent on destroying, qualifying it as untrue and overtly complacent. Kierkegaard said that the most pure form of love is to love the person who made you unhappy. I want to turn myself to love the world with an attachment so passionate that it borders on burdensome deflection; as if one were to love only the world that has been ultimately destroyed to begin with, as if the whole purpose of bourgeois beauty were precisely to be shattered when confronted with the facts of this ever so future orientation. The practical implications of this spiritual attitude are very obvious: the mere wait, deprived of anything to hand on to the next generation as if it were the very last. It seems to be an impractical spiritual exercise pursued only in order to prove beyond rationale that this same world to which we attach ourselves in the praxis of love is none to be attached to, a dearth of place and a dearth of silence even, over which one is to claim only the power of abandonment. I want to aim at the concretion of philosophy and theology, of thought in general, to define the concrete objects of reality, to deprive discourse from intellectual exercises but yet so completely trapped and defined by traditions of speculation and of imagination written over centuries of constant relentless and powerless aesthetic contemplation. I want to walk out on abstraction all the time, but the safe shelter of if not metaphysics, then of speculation, seems to be the only safe alternative to remain lucid in sight of the crushing madness of a reality on which one has drawn himself as an actor, even if fulfilling the role of an agent provocateur, of an inciter, of a witch hunter. This lucidity is supposed to mean at last to encounter the world without sorceries and ultimately the spiritual fuel of this enterprise is completely burnt when the actor finds it by himself completely impossible to live with the map of navigation through reality without consolations that he has himself drawn. To speak for a godless secular world driven by science and progress seems an alternative yet too easy, an alternative sober sorcery in which the thrust is thrown back at the actor as if he himself were to play the good God again and thus, ride the horses of the apocalypse with the flag of perpetual peace and social consensus – it is but another shelter from unmediated being in the world “as it is”; as if there were ever a world “as it is” for anyone or at any given point in history.
I can´t deny that there´s a lot of laziness and who not accept it, mental illness, in my whole project of thinking and of a life; but there´s also this component of contempt, this lustful drive to astray from the whole idea of representation, from the production of symbolic thought as an hierarchical array of representations. As if to refrain from reading and writing at all could mean something like an spiritual attitude in which remaining silent would be constituted into a more masterful and accurate discourse than what “words” about “things” could reflect. But how important things are! Everyday objects stand as a masterfully-handcrafted icon against the illusions of mourning and trauma, of illness and disappointment, because in so far as they stand within the most elementary correlations of the world proper, they are meant to avoid any possible way to circumvent the radical indeterminate nature of human experience. The everyday objects of fine arts and of literature stand against the very course of human life and as works they represent a step forward from cosmogonies and delve already into the life of the present as temporalities inside which there is already contained the mortal wish to not let biology follow its course unmolested. Abandoning the production of objects and the settings of representation is an unlawful Rimbaudean movement – we go to Abyssinia or else we enter the cloisters or choose to spend our lifetime days without any deference to world time, serving as advocates in a notary or as nurses in the war. Intellectual life however, does everything in order to avoid these movements or silence and when silence is appropriated by a creator, this silence is not absolute; it is not the cosmic silence of the universe where the lack of oxygen precludes any physical interaction in between particles of sound, but rather the mortified silence of patience. The silence of Rimbaud is not indifferent to life or the world but it is rather so consumed by it that it can no longer utter a word, it is suffocated by everything that needed to be said at once and the world of representation in its figurate speech of sequences and orderly thoughts or symbolic associations, precludes the authoring from. This silence is too desperate, in need of ailments and a proper burial that in being so much alive for itself, can never demand from the spectators that have also been blinded and deafened from the experience of the spectacle so that they prefer to witness in the same fashion of silence the slow and painful death of the artist, than lend him a hand to dig a proper grave. He has to be conformed with being watched digging down his own grave while his nails fall off from the flesh and as he loses the sensibility in his fingertips; the earth and the mud and the life and the death and the stone and the art and the world and the sound and the sight become one: perpetual silence. The world ah! This ultimately invisible arena of performing arts!
Hugo was thrown out of home by his father because of his homosexuality; to some extent I wish that the same would have happened to me, but after my own likings, I´ve been punished only with silence and in my obvious spiritual mediocrity I´ve offered him sound advice on how to properly deal with adult life. I very hope he won´t take one single opinion from me. Today I´ve seen the face of Fridirik, and I think his countenance has unparalleled beauty, so much as his soul showcases a complete lack thereof and I´m rather elated at the prospect of turning my loyalties over to his morbid beauty and life sense of unwholesomeness, to his complete lack of virtue. Love appears to me (dokei moi) as a distant island perfectly fit for an eventual shipwreck and then followed by the rescue efforts of teams from all over the world that stand in awe before the captive´s reluctance to be saved. They would rather burn their own books instead of letting go. It is not only that they would rather; they have already burnt their own books. I can´t make up my mind about the country where I want to live when I “grow up”; the only internal consensus is that I won´t live in mine, even if that can only mean to have my ashes transferred and spread over the Judean desert. That will be good enough. Just not here! I remember Agnes Heller now: the place we choose is free; the place not chosen is not free. But don´t we always get to the point in which we get the impression that we don´t choose our destinies or their geographies? It seems a natural state of affairs that I should be deprived of sexual gratification. Just a blank statement.
לקיארטן, בני
מותר לי לכתוב זמרת
בשפתיי הנוזלות
בדם תחושתי
שיסלח לי אבל
הבדתי את העט
עת שחלמתי בשפות רחוקות
מחוץ מכנען
במהלך מסע
בלתי נבחר
לארץ תואה
החוסרת גוף מגע
קיארטן, אחיו הליינור
גיבור קטן ורזה
עניים של זכוכית
עובד אלילים
בני, הערל
בית יפת, אוהל שינר
בגופו צלב
חזה רחב שרוף
מתחת חושך האיי
אל תוך בית נייר
בלי גדר
סביב אויביו
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