At long last I feel philosophically powerful and free, or at least that´s what I wrote to Katherina tonight. I feel capable of conjuring up powers in the form of little thoughts that flee away from me, only in order to fall back again into my nowhere domain. I am certain to enjoy some of the things that I myself wrote, and those moments of lifelessness have proven to be the most orthodox test to the faithfulness of my concerns. I have no other concerns as far as living is concerned; I am thinking about my own thoughts all the time, everything else seems to be only perfunctory interruptions in the course of disjointed thoughts. My dreams complete the anxiety of my daytime life that seems always only a prelude to the night – at no other time it is really possible to un-dream the moments of non-being and transform them into one´s own liturgy of the hours: time is deadly for life and the life moments of geography anoint us with the waters of fire in order to deliver us from the task of writing down the times. At night you write and dream, read and awake, place yourself at a distance from the mad rushing steams of unrepeatable sequences, mellowing the flowery colors on the way to the grave. Gillian Rose begins to appear as a central character in the life of the mind - the tortured rose with thorns! If anything I think this is something that has to do with conversation much more than with books, that´s just a hunch I have. How could you name that kind of conversation? The price of the law? I guess the silence around the Works (not work but Works) of G.R. is less suspicious than it is by all means desirable. Susan Sontag says: “Rimbaud goes to Abyssinia”. Quotations that people seldom forget. The temptation of silence is overburdening because it signals not the absence of an idea but the fact that it occupies just too much space, it expands beyond the confines of the Lebensraum, and it is a suicidal alphabet. At times I enjoy the life of home, pampering and educating children into appropriate manners for life and the circular effects of domestication for life: The smells of the clean home, as if they alone sufficed to steer away the intricate and sophisticated loathsomeness that the most beloved of all people can hold against each other. This is really non-being.
The fact that I´m settled down in this mild calm can only mean that either I am just about to soar above my present condition or that I´m going to sink deeper than ever; destroying the present forever while trying to trace a thin line to the turbulent past and a thick umbilical cord to feed all this urgency into an incessantly sterile future. I wondered always about the meaning of irony and whether this sad bitterness could somehow turn into the embellishment of a prosaic world. Words have to be chosen so carefully, “fahr, fahr doch… du darfst nicht vergessen” (Dan Pagis); they do not only need to stand in lieu of ideas but in place of things as well, to constitute themselves as worldly objects unavailable to and unassailable by infinitude, always fleeting and mutable, subject to passions and movements, just like the pettiness of human interests. Since I´ve abandoned the common usage of “interesting”, I might as well have adopted by proxy the notion of “talent”, I spend too many good and bad thoughts on it and therefore, remain imprisoned in the Romanticism that everything I think or write, pretends to have avoided and fully overcome. Writing is a great risk, so that I swindle myself with restless silences in between words; they grow great as a hunchback of my own. I wasn´t struck by what Steiner wrote on Benjamin´s life; I had already read it from Scholem and had my own intuition of it, it can be broken down to “unrealistic plans”: I always aim to conquer the world in everything I endeavor, can´t hold myself from putting to paper entire wealth of academic posts and book plans; as if the erratic nature of thinking without consolations could be made up for with fame, with self-awareness, with statements. There´s nothing I´m more afraid of than my own capabilities because they implicate far more than what I can temporarily grasp while alive; I have to rescind from writing this much, I am ought to walk so much slower because my risk at downfall is more than imminent, it is actually explicit in all of my enterprises.
Guilel: Unfinished radically individual beauty that I am precluded from possessing. Katherina said it in utmost certitude: He is not like all the other versions of Cain, because he is real and alive, he couldn´t be put to paper; desire had to be mediated by something other than a physical body. Guilel insisted to me forcefully that there´s no such a thing as metaphysics in relationships, while his entire life contradicted the principle. The contradiction is so strong that he even walked unknowingly into each and every part of my Work: Contradictions are the only way we can understand life. I remember that day when I officially delivered my first public lecture and yet dressed for the occasion as a yeshiva bocher – differentiated only by silver cufflinks. The genesis of the lecture began with an appreciation of Karl Haushofer about whom I learnt by reading Stefan Zweig´s memoirs, suicidal memoirs. Guilel definitely didn´t love me the way I wanted him since I desired him with might even though I never thought he was actually beautiful… His head was too large for his neck and body and that body was a little too fragile and feeble for a passionate encounter. Every time he was near me (and I think I am now more or less the age he was when we met) I was sexually aroused and I think Katherina knew this fully. How can I forget that beautiful summer night as she slept in the couch of my Jerusalem palace´s master bedroom and in the roaring darkness of the night we laughed bitterly and intensely about the troubles of love.
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