Notes on B. Galli & Rosenzweig

Plundering through the commentary on the cultural writings of Rosenzweig, I am startled to find more information that one would have desires; firstly the comparison between Rosenzweig hermeneutics and Gadamer seems to me of very little value to the issue, simultaneously I read the book of Allen Scult "Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An ontological encounter" which deals mainly with the early lectures on Aristotle and that often turns back to Gadamer for information and inspirtation.

Yet Barbara's writing "constructs" and "trusts" once again a bridge of impossibilities, that which connects the Anglo-Saxon thought with the German, and those of us who are entangled in the German even when writing in the English language seem out of touch with these realities. Her use of Steiner brings me to the fore of a rather Biblical question of hermeneutics. And Bible is precisely what one of the many channels of the New Thinking is concerned with. Let me turn for a second to the biblicist Aviva Gottlieb-Zornberg and Steiner, in order to return with a fresh light (paradoxically somebody explained to me last night how much there's to do with light in the idea of "Erloesung" in German) to Barbara and Rosenzweig.

Dr. Gottlieb-Zornberg speaks a few words on her methodology in one of the opening chapters of her book ("The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis) discussing Rashi:

"It seems to me that Rashi usually writes in such a multivalent way, transforming the reader's comprehension of the biblical text, even in his most -apparently- fantastic citations from the midrash. His commentary works as a dreamtext, suggesting many alternative -but not exclusive- facets of reality. In both the cases I have discussed, the feedback loop radiates a field of energy that includes both the reader, with his/her life situation, and the text. For to understand Isaac, Sarah and Rebecca through a Freudian reading of Rashi is, of course, to reunderstand ourselves.

This field, or circle of understanding, yields endless illumination. If at first the text seems familiar, while life is strange, needy of privileged guidance, at a later stage of reading the situation may be reversed: life acquires a new familiarity, a new intelligibility, in the light of Rashi's deployment of midrashic sources, while the original text suddenly seems alien, uncanny , needy of reinterpretation.

This dialectic of strangeness and familiarity is the gift of art; in t his sense, I would regard Rashi and his midrashic precursors as poets. George Steiner alerts us to this paradoxical effect of art: on the one hand "all representations, even the most abstract, infer a rendezvous with intelligibility or, at least, with a strangeness attenuated"; or on the other, "much of poetry, music and the arts aims to.... make strangeness in certain respects stranger". It is the tension between these two readings that underlies my readings of Genesis [Firstly she used hermeneutic dialectics, the quotation is from "Real Presences" of G. Steiner].

This cycle of desire, which is generated, paradoxically, by the experience of "not to have":

the priest desires. The philosopher desires
And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
It is desire at the end of winter, when
It observes the effortless weather turning blue
.....
It knows that what it has is what not
And throws it away like a thing of another time
As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.
-Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"


Now my familiarity with this reference is what helps to enter from the backside in a transparent and heavy gown the world of Galli, who herself plunders violently into Rosenzweig's intimacy by her attenuated but steel-like use of Steiner. She speaks about "translation" and it seems to me her direction to regard "translating" is not unlike that of Itamar Gruenwald (biblicist) when he defines "Midrash" as a of cognition, just as is philosophy, science and literature. In her opinion Rosenzweig's quest for "interaction" from within the possibilities of language itself, is shared by Steiner (who was born the year Rosenzweig died) as a rare voice in the intellectual world. She speaks through Steiner of a "breakdown between the correspondence of word and world".

"It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes of the very few genuine revolutions of the spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself" (Real Presences, G. Steiner)

Galli speaks about the commonality in both Rosenzweig and Steiner in that poets and music are the medium to the unprovable metaphysical. This idea is also close to Hannah Arendt from the well-known passage from the Denktagbuch, "Nur von den Dichtern erwarten wir Wahrheit (nicht von den Philosophen, von denen wir Gedachtes erwarten" and obviously doesn't distance itself very much from the distancing God of Kafka, like in that story he writes upon returning from the Yom Kippur services, in which a son received a sentence from his father to drown in water and performs it allegedly. The text used during the liturgy reads: "On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted". The precise choice of water seems to be an struggle against ontological freedom, idea that came to me after I read a part of Aviva's book, point at which one could say that Rosenzweig wasn't the only one who felt that Kafka wrote in the style of the same person who composed the Bible. But I won't be the one to expound upon this point, I think the idea of "the mighty waters" (from Aviva Zornberh) and "Aufstand der Wasser" (from Eveline Goodman-Thau) have more than sufficiently clarified the issue at stake.

In regard to music I'm not at all knowledgeable on Kafka but I can simply infere from what we know about him, in the case of Arendt the quest for music toward truth reminds of that story mentioned in her biography when she discussed views on illness with her students shortly before her death and she spoke about Nietzsche soothing beneath his sister playing the piano.

Galli claims that the relation among God, man, world (tantamout to Heidegger's "Divinities, Mortals, Earth, Heavens in "Building, Dwelling, Thinking", the triada is called "elements" by Rosenzweig and "freedoms" by Steiner, I believe Dr. Gottlieb-Zornberg is more comfortable with the latter because it adds a certain deliverance from hierarchies) is a requisite through time, "in order to arrive at truths", I'm in complete agreement with this idea, which calls for "encounters" that I believe aren't possible unless one's recovered the language that lost itself among "the crowds and groups" (Canetti) with the sounds of trains and artillery in between the two World Wars. Perhaps I might agree by detour with Steiner, on what truely defines modernity. I heard once T. Meyer speak about Simmel and say that the typically modern concept of "crisis" is what has given us modernity, in negative dialectics understood as that which is opposed to a philosophy of culture or a philosophy of human culture (this later phrasing is as old as Cassirer). But from within "thinking spaces" is perhaps this encounter not possible? One is forced to look into Buber and Rosenstock, the first I don't like and the second unfortunately I haven't "encountered" enough, but it's clear somehow from Rosenzweig attempts as a philosophy of speech in the Star.

In my opinion Galli sees Rosenzweig quest for translation as a transformation of the world, and for Steiner I believe it is a "becoming essentially", this of course reminds me too of Harvey Cox and the definition of humanity in terms of urbanization. Rosenzweig believes that all speech is a translation of reality. How is one then meant to translate when the reality has almost blurred away behind thick walls of time behind which our pasts and traditions hide? In answering this question I think one has to follow Galli's path toward Finkielkraut, Rose and Steiner; needless to mention despite of how removed they are from our traditions, at least for those of us with roots in Idealism and Existentialism.

I think I'll stop here for today, anyway I think that as long as I'm not intending to present a paper I could type these notes out in series with numbers, and I'm going to try to work on this only while I'm at the library because there's so much reading I owe to make, but nevertheless tonight I hope to write something about D., whom I've been missing for about a week. At least now I have the reference to W. Stevens. Perhaps tomorrow after the storming that awaits at CY I shall devote some more time to the cultural writings of R., it's truely amazing. The last week I've realized that most of those German-Jewish thinkers come in one only group, they can be inspected as though one were dissecting frogs, with the same prism but they all run in altogether different directions. They must be read in groups and never spoken about alone.

Kafka's Suffering (in process)

"Man has no nature -no simple homogeneous being. He's a strange mixture of being and nonbeing. His place is between those two opposite poles".

"For nature is such, that it everywhere indicates a God lost, both in man and out of man".

-E. Cassirer

The question of the colours is an old aesthetical struggle, since both Goethe and Kant [the discovery of the judgement faculty through "autonomy", Kant's being "eternal" -following Aristotle, and Goethe's being developmental, in tune with Biblical humanism, Kaufmann].... The idea of black and white, that can be gained and retained only from within the experience. Problematic enough is nevertheless out fascination with twilights and in-betweens that remain at the core of our creative force, the power of description. "Die Frage der sprache ist wieder da", thus starts Eveline's book on the Critique of Reason, I could even dare say the question is once again "darin"; and perhaps Cassirer more than others help me to understand why Rosenzweig wouldn't "take pleasure" in the reading of Kafka, claiming his novels were written in the same style that the author of the Bible had in mind when writing that book, a writing on the wall.

The days waft in the uneasiness of hueing beneath the tremble of the abyss, and choosing to swim therein has shown me that there's no possible philosophy within, therefore as Heidegger has shown the province of being is manifested through mani-fold channels, "Das Seiend-Sein kommt vielfaeltig zum Scheinen", translating the following passage from Aristotle (I might be actually wrong, because this sounds a lot more akin to Parmenides): τὀ ὂν λἐγεται πολλαχῶς. Accordingly Kafka might be a lot truer to the spirit of thinking than Heidegger, as in the two-fold nature of man reflected in the Midrash -the one and the many; Simmel only adds up with "Kultur ist der Weg von der geschlossenen Einheit durch die enfaltete Vielheit zur entfaltete Einheit". Then Barbara Hahn presents the idea of plurality from Hannah Arendt to us: "Die Eins - ist kein Anfang; sie ist immer schon gegeben, insofern eine Zwei existiert. Erst die Zwei macht die Eins zur Eins.

Then Arendt writes in her Denktagbuch: "Experimental Notebook of a Political Scientist: To establish a science of politics one needs to reconsider all philosophical statements on Man under the assumption that men, and not Man, inhabit the earth. The establishment of political science demands a philosophy for which men exist only in the plural. Its field is human plurality. Its religious source is the second creationmyth - not Adam and rib, but: Male and female he crated them".

This is followed by a long footnote in "The Human Condition" (on whose relationship to the text there's indisputable agreement between Hahn and me); this speaks of the first chapter when she introduces the notion of plurality from the Biblical source.

"In the analysis of postclassical political thought, it is often quite illuminating to find out which of the two biblical versions of the creation story is cited. Thus it is highly characteristic of the difference between the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and of Paul that Jesus, discussing the relationship between man and wife, refers to Genesis 1:27: "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female" (Matt. 19:4), whereas Paul on a similar occasion insists that the woman was created "of the man" and hence "for the man", even though he then somewhat attenuates the dependence: "neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man" (I Cor. 11:8-12). The difference indicates much more than a different attitude to the role of woman. For Jesus faith was closely related to action; for Paul, faith was primarily related to salvation [I know from somewhere this is an insight of Rudolf Bultmann]. Especially interesting in this respect in Augustine, who not only ignores ignores Genesis 1:27 altogether but sees the difference between man and animal in that man was created unum ac singulum, whereas all animals were ordered "to come into being several at once". To Augustine, the creation story offers a welcome opportunity to stress the species character of animal life as distinguished from the singularity of human existence.

B. Hahn mentions morever, the particular choice of Arendt to quote from the Rosenzweig-Buber Bible, and not from the King James or any other edition available in English or German. Particular enough is to notice that apparently this reading of the Bible in general was the only thing Arendt had to do with Rosenzweig. He appears quoted in p.333 of the Human Condition as a footnote; the note is motivated by the following paragraph:

"The reward of toil and trouble lies in nature's fertility, in the quiet confidence that he who in "toil and trouble" has done his part, remains a part of nature in the future of his children and his children's children. The Old Testament, which unlike classical antiquity, held life to be sacred and therefore neither death nor labor to be an evil (and least of all an argument against life), shows in the stories of the patriarchs how unconcernd their lives they were, how they needed neither an individual, earthly immortality nor an assurance of the eternity of their souls, how death came to them in the familiar shape of night and quiet and eternal rest "in a good old age and full of years". -The Human Condition, chapter 3, Labor

Followed by the footnote abovementioned:

"Nowhere in the Old Testament is death "the wage of sin." Nor did the curse by which man was expelled from paradise punish him with labor and birth; it only made labor harsh and birth full of sorrow. According to Genesis, man (adam) had been created to take care and watch over the soil (adamah), as his name, the masculine form of "soil", indicates (v. Gen. 2:5, 15). And "Adam was not to till adamah and He God created Adam of the dust of adamah.... He, God, took Adam and put him into the Garden of Eden to till and watch it" (I follow the translation of Martin Buber & Franz Rosenzweig).....

That was seemly the only connection of Arendt to Rosenzweig, in anycase most of his writings other than the Star remained unpublished by the time of Arendt's death. Nevertheless she maintained a correspondence with both Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, but did not seem to have known Emil Fackenheim or A.J. Heschel. The case of Kafka was very different, as she often speaks of him in her writings and devoted a very important essay to the novel "The Palace" as the philosophical foundation of what Anti-semitism caused to European Jewry.
Two particularly important references to Kafka in the Arendtian corpus:

The chapter VI of "The Human Condition" starts with a sub-heading paragraph by Kafka: "He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to find it only under this condition". This stands right before section 35., that speaks of "World Alienation".

The idea of the Archimedean point appears several times through the book, in the following instances:

"On the other hand, the conditions of human existence -life itself, natality and mortality, wordliness, plurality, and the earth-can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences -anthropology, psychology, biology, etc.-which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth's conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural sciences owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth" (p. 13). It follows the prologue from "The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition"; it is interesting to notice how Arendt does not say world instead of earth, for world is included under the rubric of "The Human Condition of work is worldliness. Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and trascend them all". (p.9). She is attaching to the world a meaning of being "humanly created", therefore not related to the earth, the heavens, the waters. Heidegger himself speaks about "deities, mortals, heavens, earth" in his essay "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" and he presents the earth as the dwelling place for mortals; the world isn't mentioned but whenever he refers to "Dasein" which necessitates a temporal and spatial location, namely a world.

Another instance brings us closer to the pained world of Kafka, that shall be extensively discussed thereafter; "The Cartesian removal of the Archimedean point into the mind of man, while it enabled man to carry it, as it were, within himself wherever he went and this freed him from given reality altogether-that is, from the human condition of being an inhabitant of the earth-has perhaps been as convincing as the universal doubt from which it sprang and which it was supposed to dispel. Today at any rate, we find in the perplexities confronting natural scientists in the midst of their greatest triumphs the same nightmares which have haunted the philosophers from the beginning of modern age".

Slowly Arendt penetrates the inner world of Revelation, as though trying to get a grasp of the world from the universe outside the earth, not only dwelling on the old exiles but adding up to it the exile from the earthliness and the human condition itself; which is mesmerizing in being distinctive of Kafka's ambiguous pesimism. Arendt is looking for answers that are nowhere to be found in the Western tradition and through the Rosenzweig-Buber translations (and perhaps the correspondence with Gershom Scholem as well) she unwittingly creates for herself an orifice inside a vacuum; but unlike Nietzsche she's not doing philosophy with a hammer and disturbing the peaceful co-existence of the inhabitants of the philosophical worlds. Her rather innocent criticism develops into an insight that might just as well come in the disguise of nihilism or amorality; but without touching upon it she's entering the world of Kafka, that to my opinion is not necessarily a world inhabited neither by Kafka himself nor by the whole of German Jewry. It is a pariah world, that resembles the "memory" of Lessing's world, which was no longer available to them. Nor Kafka or Arendt and much less Rosenzweig are parvenus in the Western tradition; the weight of Judaism is beared almost with pride but is mimetized into Greek and Christian myths that permit the thinker to un-obliterate the thinking spaces necessary to still remain "beholding a world"; It seems the three of them live in a multi-layered world not unlike that un-paradisiac one portrayed in the Midrash.

The closing pages of "The Human Condition" return to Kafka once again, (section 45, "The Victory of the Animal Laborans"): "If, in concluding, we return once more to the discovery of the Archimedean point and apply it, as Kafka warned us not to do, to man himself and to what he is doing on this earth, it at once becomes manifest that all his activities, watched from a sufficiently removed vantage point in the universe, would appear not as activites of any kind but as processes, so that, as a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel. For the watcher from the universe, this mutation would be no more or less mysterious than the mutation that goes on before our eyes in those small living organisms which we fought with antibiotics and which mysteriously have developed new strains to resist us. How deep-rooted this usage of the Archimedean point against ourselves can be seen in the very metaphors which dominate scientific thought today".

Notes

9th of June, 2006

Kafka to Felizia: "Had you not been lying on the ground among the animals, you would have been unable to see the sky and the stars and then wouldn't have set free. Perhaps you wouldn't have survived the terror of standing upright. I feel much the same; it is a dream you have dreamt for us both".

14th of June 2006

Aviva Gottlieb-Zornberg on Kafka: "...And man, in the Midrashic view, is the meeting point of the two kinds of dust, of the one and the many. Man in chained to imcompatible universes of being; and yet within his chains he feels unaccountably that all possibilities are his. There's no error; yet he cannot live comfortably in either heaven or earth, while he's a free and secure citizen of both".

Her source [Kafka]: "He's a free and secure citizen of the world, for he's fettered to a chain which is long enough to give him the freedom of all earthly space, and only so long as nothing can drag him past the frontiers of the world. But simultaneously he's a free and secure citizen of heaven as well, for he's also fettered by a similarly designed heavenly chain. so that if he heads, say, for earth, his heavenly collar throttles him, and if he heads for Heaven, his earthly one does the same. And yet all the possibilities are his, and he feels it; more, he actually refuses to account for the deadlock by an error in the original fettering".

16th of June 2006

From Aviva Gottlieb-Zornberg: "Human beings are driven to dominate external space, to act out their vertiginous freedoms. But vertigo then drives them inwards again, to construct prison houses of safety from the mighty waters. These do not cure the vertigo; they merely exclude it".

"... The worse thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she can't reconstitute herself. You can thereby "unmake her world" by making it impossible for her to use language to describe what she has been".

25th of June 2006

Hannah Arendt: "Nur von den Dichtern erwarten wir wahrheit (nicht von den Philosophen, von denen wir Gedachtes erwarten)".

4th of July 2006

Kafka [I think I read this in connection to S. Zweig]: "Yesterday it occured to me that I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no "Mutter", and to call her "Mutter" makes her a little comic.... "Mutter" is particularly German for the Jew, it unconsciously contains, together with Christian splendor, Christian coldness".

15th of August 2006

Hannah Arendt "We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they're crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretriveable shut off the past."

Watery

At time it all seems watery and whitening from appearances into a more intensive form of representation, like when I touch D.'s skin and it suddenly burns with the hate of cupiditas, burns with litanies of far-sightedness. These waters of tearing colours often remind me of Kafka's God, particularly today being New Year. Kafka wrote a certain story the night of Yom Kippur after having attended a Kol Nidre service, and in the story there was this young man who was condemned by his father to die by drowning, who perfunctorily performs by himself the sentence dictated by his progenitor. It was interesting to see how it is universally accepted in the Jewish tradition that the pious are written in the Book of Life since the New Year and the wicked in the Book of Death; whereas most of us are being awaited with our prayers for the days in between the New Year and the Day of the Atonement, day in which our fate will be finally sealed. The prayerbook tells us about who will die by fire and who will die by water, who will be beheaded and who will be thrown from a cliff into the abyss.

Then on serious thinking it doesn't surprise me Kafka chose the metaphor of the water to portray an alleged suicide by divine orders, as though writing a tragedy into the mouth of the artist God. The whole idea makes me feel very close to him, because my idea is that the world must be recovered from God first of all in order to make it thinkable, therefore I deliberately choose the distance of the Lord of Hosts, as though my guilt had become too weary to await judgement. As though God owed me a world. Without drowning in the waters of the father, I set God on fire only by daring to pray intensely with the purpose in mind to reject his forgiveance when it will come. In that home-world, I no longer believe in.

Grittli [When all the bridges have been broken]

The explanations of philosophical books always not only pose a challenge but usually wind up in tantra of the most diverse sort, because the idea of expounding philosophical thought in itself wears a rather thin skin and can only remind me of Biblical criticism, with those statically fix modes of exegesis that distance themselves from the purpose of hermeneutic questions. History of Ideas and its accomplices often fail on us, because as Gilson said, if a person has lived seventy years for sure he's got a lot to tell about himself, but if he's lived as a philosopher for his whole life with terror he soon realized that he's got no past. An statement politically dangerous in itself, well could have been used by Heidegger himself or to anybody who hasn't exceeded in arriving from hermeneutics to the ethos of Levinas for whom this is apparently inherent to the metaphysical entity. Heidegger most certainly couldn't have agreed with this idea, nor Nietzsche or even the Hegelians, all for whom claimed that the spirit of both secular and religious morals were entirely outdated as a set of cultural bias better described as "customs", using the Roman word "mores" which eventually gifted us with moral thought, one of the greatest achievements of Christian philosophy, if anything such can be called philosophy prior to Existentialism.

I couldn't apply myself to the ethos of Levinas either, not from my bottles of red glue or from the "pasts" which I share with world history and memor; incidentally my debut into philosophy wasn't a voluntary one, nor my escapes. The moral tragedy of my generation and of my own dramatis persona forced me almost by gun-pointing to philosophize since the earliest years of my teens, when all I had heard about philosophy were Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Plato. Then again because of the Zeitgeist I might incur in being postmodern in which the whole discourse might have as well lost any possible meaning to be eventually acquired or even better, inherited. The imperative necessity to survive in the world of the early 21st century among casualities of exaggerate weight brought me to philosophy. That of course in a particularly strange way because what I had conceived as philosophy back then was rather different than what my peers nowadays consider it to be, and to my own dismise I find that I had been an hermeneuticist since days of old. The problem of translation, or even the obsession have accompanied me for a very long time. To philozophize from within Classical philology and Christian theology seemed to me rather obvious, but not so much in tune with the discourse of my contemporaries.

At present I feel that I don't really want to do any sort of philosophy, but rather engage myself in the activity of thinking which has been replaced by a very nihilistic form of ontology as a natural product of having lost the ground for judgement. No books can explain philosophical discourse, not even philosophical discourse; because those of us concerned with the new thinking have realized that only experience, beyond the conjunctive and the semantic entreaties can realize thinking to its maximum potential; a way of thinking that has to do a lot more with journeys and travails than it has with thinking itself. At this point one is already entangled in a criticism of dialectic and rhaetorics, and consequently of logic itself. In a world represented by the noise of machines and screws it is impossible to engage in thinking without an anticipated overcoming, that significantly enough calls for the dismise of all philosophy. But reading carefully into our own mute language unearthens an unheard-of vessel that contains endless question marks; for we seem not have comprehended what these ends and dismises really mean, just like when we discuss absurdities like the death-of-God and the end of history. These ends are to be meet with conceptual ends themselves that must be obligatorily accompanied by the ability to begin anew, not from scratch but from within the invisible sources available to us from our exiles, namely from the memory. Which is the only tool that might enhance the channels that make the throughways accesibles, meaning that hope as a quintessential human pre-condition for existence is flying accross a thick and dense sly of unmotion unless it is accompanied by the memory withal.

Trying to do philosophy from scratch as in logic positivism, means in practice the obliteration of that allegoric and pre-literary element inherent to the pre-rational man. The only connection left to us to the worlds of truth and rootedness. Looking into the exiles by the hand of Bonhoeffer and Hannah Arendt only awakens us to a terrible multi-layered truth: That exiles are as old as Odysseus and Abraham. This idea should have undoubtedly mortified Rosenzweig. The human desire to overcome "homesickness" is not a particularly new insight of German Idealism, it is rooted in the human condition itself! As the British poet writes "Not to have is the beginning of desire". Not to have by all possible means is the hermeneutic argument of man against God, not simply with God. It's a pre-rational and allegoric dialectical struggle, in which man must oppose forcefully the condition of not having in order to find himself striving and hoping for not having! This insight isn't particularly obvious, because since the first moment knowledge turned into falsehood by the wisdom of the serpent; moment during which man gained his humanity by un-becoming his horizontal perspective in which he occupied a place among Gods.

The impossibility of knowledge is at the core of what it means to be human, the impossibility to be complete. Lev Shestov teaches us: "We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life".

Of particular importance to me in the level of discourse is his overriding necessity to speak always in the plural, i.e. sources and beginnings in the same way that Lessing would speak about truths. It is necessary to journey with philosophy in order to think, and that can't be accomplished unless you have the company of the philosopher.... which lies somewhere beyond the academic discourse. For example through the reflection on works of art or an alleged poetization of all philosophical ways of thinking, not necessarily only in writing. In this sense I'm even divorcing myself from one of the traditions I am seemly rooted in; phenomenology. The uttermost need of the phenomenologist to perform descriptions that can help him recover the pure-I is in itself nothing but acknowledging we've all been defeated under Descartes. In the moment one says "cogito ergo sum" one is separating being from the essence of thinking; which had been clear to Brentano and Heidegger very early on. This separation isn't like the one between the soil and the heavens, for the heavens are many and only in the abyss of the waters is one able to swim into the "in-betweens" that redefine humanity from a uniquely base perspective; the perspective of the ancient for whom life in itself was art and philosophy. Thereby is where the memory finds itself at unease with undercurrents.

Since Diotima we well know that only discourse can be-come things human, but not necessarily real. Therefore I'm convinced that only in the correspondence of the philosophers can one find the accessible throughway. Only in spoken language over endless glasses and half-empty ashtreys. Only discourse entirely humanized can bring us to the fore of our experiences in order to dissolve the task of contemplation and reflection upon unmovable essentialities, so that they can be replaced by the vertigo of an unstupefied beingness not there-beingness, but one within time. Travelling in the line of time; that's where Rosenzweig is going all the time unknowingly. Within our thinking spaces containing our exiles we're unable to journey time-ly. Deconstruction will not help us; and until the day we shall arrive to the understanding of the structural dialectic of the "ends" we might actually be in the simplest of all tautological modes of thought. Our quest for translation often shows only how detached are we from both our earthly and heavenly homes, the quest for translation renders itself as a yearning, as a homesickness. "Hour-ly am I..." says Goethe.

The direction: "Perhaps because I'm not homesick enough, in any event because I do not believe in a world, be it a past world or a future world, in which man's mind, equipped for withdrawing from the world of appearances, could or should be ever comfortably at home". (H. Arendt).

It is necessary to recover the world in order to think, to recover the public spaces even from God! "A battle of Titans concerning being".

"Hence Aharon said: Had not Korach risen up against me, would the Lord have covenanted with me that only my seed shall burn incense before the Lord? For it is said "A reminder unto the children of Israel that no common man, that is not of the seed of Aharon, draw near to burn the incense before the Lord" (Num. 17.5). Here we have a further illustration: "In my behalf, I own, my heifer broke her leg bone". The Holy one provides substantial compensation for the affliction that befalls me".
- Tanna Debe Eliyahu (Late Midrash).

It makes me wonder whether Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy knew Korach?

"Do you think the Jews would have known that they were going into the Babylonian Exile if Jeremiah would not have sat down on the ruins and lamented? And that they would not have come back if they would not have known from the very beginning: now we're going into the Babylonian Exile?"
-F. Rosenzweig to Eugen and Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, 1918)

Reading for the Ninth of Av:
"Go, and cry in the
Ears of Jerusalem, saying: Thus
saith the Lord:
I remember for thee the affection
Of thy youth,
The love of thine espousals,
How thou wentest after Me in the
wilderness,
In a land that was not sown.
Isael is the Lord's hallowed portion,
His first fruits of the increase;
All that devour him shall be held
Guilty,
Evil shall come upon them,
Saith the Lord"
-Jeremiah II, 2-3

I can't continue, I can only write this philosophy in poetry.

"Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, or it will have no more knowledge" -E. Bloch. (Is this knowledge perhaps only available in the future at all? If so then why should one feel at home in the world at all? Why do we necessitate a redeemed world? Are you Korach or Moses?)

Personal Note

Flicking another cigarette, trying to effectuate a change. One of those days when you can't bring yourself to leave home as though too many exiles would await you at the door, unless you're pressed by the imperative need to inject some booze down your blood system. Thinking about some sleepful fascinations.... I've come to understand that no one reads my blog, so eventually some of my posts have been rendered useless... because they were written in the spirit of the most Kunderian form of love - that which requires among all possible characters a writer that chooses to oppose Kafka, that doesn't want to hold himself from all possible suffering and therefore jumps into the abyss of the water as though embracing an old memory that bleeds in its own pleasure until it soaks in dread. It also requires a lonely spectator, only one... and most often the spectators I've had in mind never really understand my language or take an interest. Someone said that the tragedy of modern man is that he thinks alone, and hadn't I read the Bible I'd think all alone myself, but then it couldn't be that neat, because I still write in utmost solitude.

Or rather hold myself from writing, instead of avoiding the suffering. Because everything I write is quite an obnoxious anti-statement of what I'm thinking, I'm seemly busy in obscuring my thoughts as to make them indistinguishable from otherness. The title of this blog is even a mistake; simply because I never write any philosophy here.... unlike most people I write philosophy in my hand-written journals and cheap verses for the public, perhaps an analyst could make a fortune expounding those issues. I don't see myself too much poetizing the world as to make it a dwelling place because I realized early in my youth we all live in "in-between's" that are as inescapable as the distance of God. Perhaps I'm just trying to experience the language... just like when I write my letters and then re-read the sent copies over and over, it's funny.... my most common mistake is the omission of pronouns, which seems to me an absurd deconstruction. I can't write in my mother tongue because it's subject at the moment to many a exile, or in the language of my intellect because I feel unable to take up to the challenge of being unwordly enough; therefore I'm condemned already for eight years to write in the most foreign of languages, in the one that has never produced any philosophy, at least for what I think philosophy is.

Perhaps I deliberate choose to remain in unexperienced forms of poetics to find my way out of dialectics, to remind myself that language has failed us and that insofar as this is true, in the Biblical sense, one might not dare to write philosophy. But perhaps one day the abyss will seem so close that I'll be forced to scream in the mother tongue or to realize that all possibilities have been exhausted, and like Dror being lingually impaired I will agree to live in the plainest of realities, one that doesn't know of human languages, being replaced by the petty obsessions of everyday's informed minds in the sounds of trains and tramlines. Language is the only way I can love. That's why all my loves have been able to become pasts, they're all exiles. And thus publicly I refuse to philosophize. I refuse.

Incesantly I read the philosophers and neglect the poets, they've all failed on us. They've joined the orchestras of trains and tramlines, and in the silence of the world one can neither hate or love, he's only permitted to listen. To listen in the uttermost contempt of intimacy and bodily embraces that shift one another like lingerie. It's interesting, that despite everything no one has influenced my thinking more than the Bible and the musicians, the philosophers only kill my discourse. And when I'll be able to write philosophy it won't be called philosophy anymore. I know I'll do it one day, because my life is meant to be short. But long enough yet to experience her ark once more, as one experiences salvation.

My correspondence if an epiphany of cigarettes and unanswered letters, lines without recipients.

Betrayed

To Dror

("Art can bring us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless against reality". Romain Rolland to Stefan Zweig)

We sold our childhood
For the sweetest smell of glue
And a punch in the face
That could last longer
For an stage
That would resemble
A wall of quotations

Except your questions
That you wish I had asked
Before it all went underground
Before you stole away my mornings
And traded them for a skin
That would be easier to wear
A skin for loan

At times when I see you
It reminds me of an oak
With that humid sweat of hate
That I had framed in a wall
In a street whereby death visited me
More than oftentimes
Sometimes as a man of the cloth

But the oak one day
Was chopped down
As they wedded the poison
From the Garden of Eden
And they set Eve free
With the serpent
And deceive
I didn't mourn
Not followed the traces
In Templar cemeteries
When I lived in Mt. Zion

My oak used to wail sometimes
Whenever we laughed
It was the laughter of the pagan
That the prophet scorned
While he traded my skin
For a screen
Just like you did
Just like you do

You lived in that world
That Anje bequeathed me
While passing Breslau
In a thirsty silence
Wherever did prayer go?
In a world like that
There was no place for God
You live in that word
You barely know

Always a stranger at my door
Not unline my oak
Wailing from your beauty
Wailing for a Song of Ascents
David's murmur
That in a smile vanished
Into that small bottle
That made us adults
Only in the contempt
Only in the inability to repair
To mend

And the gateways to heaven
Remained also open
"It denotes an accessible or inaccessible throughway"
Thus read her lines
That fell upon your skin
Like thwarting iron
Melting with that inner desire
To create
To start anew
Which astrayed
With too much hope

And not just the mornings
But the twilights even
I lost
In Abendland
With the mornings thereafter
On those eyes of acute read
That survived the flesh
Embracing foreign bodies
Vivaciously foreseeing the day
When you'll tire
From this travail
And create a world
Of your own making

A world that will save you
Like Lessing's
And right there
Slightly puzzles
A bit in love, a bit in dread
You contemplated my sights
Through the smoke
Trying to knock on my door
Only to discover
That in language even
You were born in exile
Unlike Anje
Who once upon a time
Spoke in words

How your eyes
Do not cease to beseech me
In that cold blue
That falls out of your skin
As though your warmth
Were to repel them
And we exchange silent sights
That contain enough covetousness
For the generations of Noah

And there you remain
Driving northwards
Changing your fate
With every turn and every light
A man your age
Overtly childish
For wailing sights

Another betrayed world
You would say at ease
And merely going adrift
In mani-fold waters
That bemoan your nakedness
That beseech your childhood
That same old furniture
You left in my room
Inside an ashtrey
That seemly smelled to your skin
With its burning voices
That demand words
Those same words you didn't know
You lacked
Your writing on the wall
That your skin sores from
That world was lost with Anje
On the way to Theresienstadt

It's a sorry condition
That not even a God
We can assassinate
Is available these days
You only speak the language
Of reality
But it hurts you too much
And a screen
Will not turn in back those words
That separated us from the cattle
That separated
The earth from the world
Because once we've lost the philosophers
So went on strike the poets
Writing silent protests
And no one dared speak anymore
You stole my nights
And my twilights
And didn't replace them with words
You still asked me the same refined questions
Of the outsider
That can't penetrate the thinker's thick blood
You're still living in Anje's world
In a train-like mode

"The Sky is the Limit
And the Limit is just the first step"
Reads a Hebrew poem
But in a foreign language

Barbara's Ark

I saw you last in New York
Down that tiny passage inside an electronics shop
Right next to the gentleman carved out of advertisements
But at the time I didn't feel up to odes of any kind
And you were too seemly entangled with the smoke
As to heed the commanding God of the writer
To diminish yourself from
"Le plus haute tour"
Of your guilt
And land on your face to the world
Bleeding those little comments
One often makes blissfully
When staring into a hungry painter
Who refuses to draw the beautiful woman
And strives to glimpse the bad smells in her hair
Growing as a rich well of epiphanies
Planted in a Bohemian street
Right outside Agnes' window
Inside an empty can

That was of course before the creation story
Before that sickly perversion with language
That deceived both Adam and Eve
And no less than Lilith
The Midrash answers
To a question no one asked
Since the earliest beginning
Turning all possible knowledge
Into falsehood
Cueing to enter a church
Whose walls are papered with fingerprints
Of unsaintly book-covers and grass
To feed nocturnal lights
From Valle-Inclan's tortures
And at the time
I already learnt the Talmud
With Helen of Troy
Who abhorred the wisdom of the serpent
So that she translated herself into a woman

But today I still cling onto that yearning
For those printed days
Before my mani-fold exiles
Like when we finished the milk
In Jerusalem
Thinking of more innocent questions
That wouldn't ransack the imagination
From a comatose world
Whereby sanity turned into a commodity
And newspapers into the real life
Of a nihilistic sort
Nourishing our speech
With marzipan fingers
Cut out from an ocean of silences
And even then
Beneath the olive tree
Having forgotten my rosaries
On some coin-machine
I thought about Mephiboshet
Whose murderous screams
Didn't revert everything to a void-and-chaos
Whose silence didn't hasten the night
Bespeaking the treaty at Sinai
Poor Mephiboshet
That finished his days in a traffic jam
From Staten Island to your house
Awaiting a new world
That would be more just
With flitting eyes
Sipping ambar
From the comfort of an earthly home

And I remember having waited
While you were in the kitchen
Until Michal told Helen
Somewhere in the Talmud
That Jonathan had died
And we were then joyful
That this world might never be redeemed
"Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us,
But unto Thy name give glory,
For Thy mercy, and for Thy
truth's sake"
Which expounded my most intimate doubt
Whether isn't it so that the truth
Is important only for God?
That to us he's bequeathed only one world?
And poor Helen was so disappointed
That she journeyed to seek an answer
From Rabbi Elisha
And when he informed her it was no longer important
Because we had exhausted the questions in Auschwitz
She had herself christened
But from her immaculate silences
I know she still loves Mephiboshet
Like the three sisters from the legend
Even that one who fled to Palestine

But it isn't too simple
And both Franz knew it
That we couldn't be too much at home down here
And it's all Helen's fault
And not the serpent's
Who shouldn't have been loathed
We would drown here down
And choke there up
For when I quit reading the Bible
Just like I didn't quit nicotine
I understood the tragedy of the philosopher
Which is tragic only insofar as
It is a parody
An awful joke
In that by accepting God
We've obliterated everything else
Even the world
The only home we had
And like Bergmann
All we can do
Is to gather details
Just in case

We've lost the firm ground of the soil
And we can only build houses of safety
From the Aufstand der Wasser
That will not eliminate our fears
But simply exclude them
Until that day
When we'll be swimming
Into life
Like we do in our earthly exiles
Among traditions and spaces
We'll be swimming into time
But for the time being
We can't know
We can't know
Just like with the revolution
We can't speculate too much about it
We need to experience the abyss
Right from the top of the cliff
Not just from the Polis
But from within the wombs of the earths
That lie beyond the apparent worlds
And the fictitious ones
And when we will
This will be no longer philosophy
Or language
Or anything we've known.

"Death will take the spectacular difference
Between fire and water
And cast it to the abyss" (Zelda)

D.

The bus stop makes me claustrophobic, and yes I know it stands outside next to a pretty supermarket. But there I share the dream of Thereza, that in which you never came. I know she was talking about a grave that contained an apartment in the bunker, like those you find in modern hospitals. It is pretty near, but why couldn't you anyway come home? We could drink some tea and I could show my latest poems, casually inexpensive as it's been my usual style. Perhaps you're better off not coming, I feel slightly exhausted tonight, exhausted from tomorrow, a temporal anarchy. I know I shouldn't talk too much, it makes me no healthier. I wanted to tell you I was listening to those songs of five years ago, when I more or less had a seemly interesting conversation with her, which was replaced by the electronic furies you expose me to unfailingly every weekend, when I take it for a task defiling the Bible. Yet on Mondays I'm as vertical as God, but most often have a very dim judgement. I'm slightly sleepy from the long cues in my room, awaiting for those moments of pleasure and unrest to relief my blood from the burgeois comfort of being immoral middle-class. The sky keeps changing all the time, I wonder... maybe the Phoebus is having another awry day, which often happens when you do politics and don't have the pleasure of dying beneath oceans of misspellings. Perhaps you fancy waiting for a little while? I want to finish my cigarette. Perhaps I also fancy awaiting a little more. Till that day when you'll fall into oblivion. That day you can phone me, I'll be waiting at the bus stop, a stone's throw from my house, and I won't remember all the songs. I feel fashionably tired, would you fancy coming another day? One in which I weren't to feel like talking. I'll hold those threads in my hands, to make sure that getting older will not damage your carelessness. I'll wrap them in hot desire, and then freeze them with betrayals. You can just as easily thwart them with the stupidity inherent to the middle class. Those who vote for nationalism, oh sorry... I thought for a moment I was talking to somebody else. I've bought myself new window so that my life can stare into the TV antennas and speak to them when you'll be around, so that a few glasses won't matter to much. Just like death convided Anja for breakfast, when both of us were hidden in my room where we no longer heard the sea-waves. She didn't have your charm, nor did I have the pneumonia typical of the jerking writer. I wouldn't write if you'd come anyway, I'd try to smile for pictures. I shouldn't tell you more about my beliefs, you might swell and burn, like the river beneath the tiny urban bridge. Five years ago, when I heard Kafka speaking for the last time. Since then, we only glimpse each other from a far, from a cliff paramount to being God. Would you fancy waiting till I finish my last cigarette? I bet you won't be late. For sure I can wait a little more, just enough as to treat myself to a new sight, just enough as to make you fit in my lighter. It's no problem, I understand... you warned me about rush hour. If you find my bodily hair somewhere next to the window, wrap it in desire, and worry not... for no person in utmost sanity would jump out of a window leaving an unfinished cigarette. I've grown the windows in my pane and wallpapers watering them everyday anew. The thrill disappears too, I might be waiting for you at the bus stop some other day, calm down, you can lie.

Cliff

A cliff of desire
Awrily wrapped in a northern voice
Like stationary
Irresistible and sweet
For sale
Like our dead
In foreign-language press
Deeply entrenched
Crouching before shrines
Of supermarket chains
And bodily pain
That ameliorates
Only with lust
With heroism

A cliff of desire
In a city grown out of a pane
Where I kept conversations
Embalsamed in sweating phrasings
Exhausted mornings
Sleeping away in cafes
Sickly embroidered
On threads of hunger
For the raving street
For visual starvation
For contamination
Your publisher
His advertisements
On fusion food magazines
Political statements
Borrowed from Auden
About screeching sounds
That rip off the flesh
From a marketing survey
That turns you
Into grains of sand
As the progeny
Of a Biblical man
That bore no name
That beared no thing
He wore a tie
Adulterous hinges
Watched him sleep
He resembled that smell
Seemly of machinery
He resembled a type-writer
His plain clothes
Weary from statements

L. Waits

An old alley
Cunning beneath glasses
That could remind you of any place
But one
The long waiting lines
A tax-returns' cue
But inside your room
Faltering in what you need
As though it would really matter
In a day
To grab the world in one hand
To understand
To breath in

Conspicuous hours
Of conversations
Lacking in tar and nicotine
Lacking in caffeine
Exceedingly fearful
From that authenticity
Of the Gospels' author

Tired
From your own freedom
From those small choices
That lead to the wardrobe
With old wooden boxes
Containing unanswered prayers
Letters from a previous life
Even thoughts on Aristotle
Unsophisticated
Raw as your adolescence
Furious
Decadent in their abscence
Of wordliness
Of worldliness
Empty of recklessness
Items from the shopping channel
Containing oblivion
Empty chairs
And unwashed sights

It's rush hour inside here
But you couldn't be any less bothered
In your Angst
In your greed
In your unsound faith
Peering into a vacuum
Containing modern quotations
From interwoven stories
As though you yourself
Like Miriam
Could write your own legends
Like a grown-up Zelda
In anarchic language
Of saints and warriors
Of Christian mythos

He seems to run out of time
You tell yourself
Without being sure at all
For how long you've awaited
For how longer you will
Not at all taking pride
In your ability to hang
From threads of conceitedness
Of yearning
Embracing little artificial bodies
Like ties
Like lies
Daying anew
As though it were a rendez-vous
Of that warm day
When you saw the city springing forth
From within the aether
And turn firstly into light
Then into buildings
Brothels
And so on

And he never rang again
After you shaked his hand
Wasting away
Two long years of whimsies
As though you were unprepared
To defy Gods and others
For the sake of a little sly
Of your own personal convenience
To keep you safe from betrayals
From adulthood
From satisfaction

Ransacking your own spaces
In the wilderness
Growing your windows
In a pane
Watering them anew
Every morning you awake
To the same oblivion
Of the blurry sight
That estrangement gifted you
Your problem with language
Unable to see
Limited
As though it were a piece of china
Useless for the posterity
But valuable
For a day like this
So flatly happy
Irrationally kind
Filled with tantrum
Divorced from the air
Spring-like

Befitting
But unimportant
Calm down
Inside a hole
Curdle up inside
For it might hurt
It might end up in scotch
In a world

Ubi Est Germania Urbis?

That used to be part of the everyday Salerno cliche in those days, when Christina found me one day idly sitting in a poorly heated reading room. Then the most urban of all Italian styles charged with the strongest espresso and all types of biscuit assortments in a feigned company. It makes me slightly concerned that I can well think my pasts five years back with the clarity of a morning hue. It's been almost five years since that blissful evening under the bridge almost swelling with the brook that sprang forth from the hills and mountains that used to hide me as a child. We no longer correspond... not with Christina or Fernando. The death of Oriana Fallaci suddenly reminded me of Cecilia, that friend betrayed so many times, in whimsies of manifold colours tantamount to those found in the ageing walls down that narrow alley where the Poetry Institute used to be, just a few meters away from the old Russian cinema. Whereby I all alone discovered Magnolia one day, the same theatre where I dreamt about taking Oscar, even though we did go to the movies once but in the larger theatre close to Salerno... One of those movies one shall never really forget, "Ar-Men".

In hindered dreams I would see myself today with him watching some old movie in the Russian theatre, something subtitled and stranged, one of those movies for subtitled imaginations. Five years that disappeared into the sea in Tel Aviv and sailed away with Odysseus into the night; even my home in Tel Aviv sailed away. So did the letters from that period except for a very few awrily written journal fragments. Like the one I wrote after I left home in the cold of that hotel room, not long before I met Oscar and only a couple of months before I locked my childhood in a quarantine room and took the next plane to Frankfurt without turning back to look at my father. Five years ago I used to listen to that song, at a time when I didn't own a computer or even a small stereo. If somebody would have told me that five years later I would be sitting in Jerusalem in the late summer writing this epiphany I would have never believed it, lest had I met Aviva earlier on. A man's toil and travail not unlike Abraham's. A saturday morning that wouldn't be a memento of darkness. From a cold hotel room to the burgeoise of Ashkenazi Jerusalem. One in which fear would seemly be a thing for another day, just like people drink pastis on Tuesdays and martini on Fridays. Those were days when I didn't think about death; because I was too young to philosophize with others, to think about beauty or death, about politics or metaphysics, about mortality or natality. Even after my arrival in Tel Aviv I thought still only about a couple of short poems no one knew. Too unconcerned with the humanity of God, with worldly pain.

I was simply an observer, like the invited country boy glimpsing the courts and the yellowing light of modernity. I wasn't a modern man in the sense that the questions didn't trouble so much as comfort did. It was unimportant to think existentially, and rather strayed on thinking beautifully, but at the time I didn't write, I didn't need it, it didn't murder me over and over through the daylight hours in wanderings of unread books. I didn't know love too well, even though I suspected he must have smelled to Fernando. And love in the masculine unlike in the German language, because before being an Ashkenazi burgeois I was a Greek. I wish nowadays I could make pictures of my room and my democratic bookshelves. I didn't know Hannah Arendt at the time, but I did know Heidegger and I loved him as a father, worshipped him as a God. It was the right thing to do for any Christian thinker, for anybody who sat at Giorgia's feet to devour each and every Greek word that would shed light on our tragedies, on our questions, on our cigarettes. I owe particularly most of my mind to her. As a mind I was born at age 15, firstly with Maria Jesus and then with Giorgia. As a person I am still experiencing my mother's birth pangs, not unlike Rhea. At age 22.

It no longer bothers me whether my father can answer my questions or not, it's no longer relevant. I've stared into the sun myself and it certainly burns like caustic waters sweeping your veins in the rush hours. I couldn't wait for those private hours, I chose my exile. From the language and the people, from the imagination and the mind, from the tiny houses and the schoolmates, except for Mario who I most fondly remember, and in four years I have to start looking for him in Madrid to follow that childhood promise. The only one I ever made. Perhaps Julia will make things collide, I don't know. I learnt to love my body and to fear death, to fear death more than the taxman, more than romantic defeat. I learnt to love the questions and to remain quite unhindered by progress. I learnt to forget about them all, reason for which I need to write, to write as I need water and air. I need to find the public eye and be drawn to the public world, to the agora. A need to walk up-straight.

I learnt to wait. It might happen one day. Exactly what, is a matter of discussion for a less blissful day.

Adam

Unwittingly I had looked forward to this day, from all days under sun not unlike Salomon's prophetic dream, but I wanted to spend it with Mephiboshet under the shade of that more innocent friendship past the mill in Yemin Moshe and the orange fish, from a little scrap of paper containing one of Zelda's most beloved poems.

Mephiboshet (1.977)

Your flitting eyes-
Small birds sipping nectar.

When you wept
The King did not hear.

When you fell,
The world didn't revert
To void-and-chaos.

Mephiboshet, you dreamt
Of a more innocent friendship.

You abhorred the wisdom
Of the ancient serpent.

O son of Jonathan.

When I wrote down that poem from a new volume at HUC into my journal, altogether with letters from Marcuse to Heidegger I still lived in a fragmented world, in one of manifold exiles. The exile from the language and the places, from the people that I had known in such days that flourished green down a valley extending itself all the way through the Nordau Alley in Tel Aviv reaching my cage window with its bars, at a time when I no longer heard the sea-waves and withal I only cheerished breakfasts in Ashtori beneath a glowing oak that light up for himself a Marlboro light every couple of words and seemed puzzled at my never finishing my breakfast. But I had been right at the time, if at all only in not finishing the breakfast. That cup of coffee would feed me in the dark all throughout the trodden path to Jerusalem.

The exiles always made me think of Bonhoeffer, on that conversation about being an exilee and being a refuge, because usually a refugee is one forced to flee to a foreign country seeking protection. An exilee is the one who perhaps even among his own peers and language and fatherland, has been by necessity set aside. Just like the adulterous woman is set aside and forced to drink the bitter waters that will either leave her unaffected and swell in her belly until causing her the most painful of all deaths. And in some exiles not even the bitter waters are provided, only the condition in which one's temptatively forced to drink them, even from a empty glass.

At the time when I dreamt of Mephiboshet the world seemed an acquous pervertion, and only in the churches I found a seemly comfort, that palace in time that apparently had been built-in, but I semed unable to operate it. I wondered in the ancient quarters all the way up to Mt. Olives desperately lusting after passion, even in Gethsemani my hands and my journals found me slightly immaculate as to hurt. I learnt to crave for silence and for those screaming dark voices that pollute the noise until it becomes a deadly silence. I learnt often not to speak to myself. I lost weight, became interested in politics and even vowed before the Lord of the Cross. As though carrying crosses were some sort of Christian hobby for displaced impotent pilgrims.

And recognizing myself as a part of the local landscape I dreamt of Mephiboshet almost at every hue of a corner that was seemly greener or livelier. I also learnt that I'm not a screen. Needlessly obsessed with the recovery of the public world, that world I had myself obliterated and whose cunnings were nowhere to be found in a Roman misal. I aspired to be less declasse aristocrat and more burgueois, full with those petty everydaily obsessions. The hours did visit me, and so did the houses even though I did make the pilgrimage to Emmaus.

It is difficult to unlive an exile, in the capital of all possible worlds. I started to read less, because I've been often entangled with the hours. It didn't all end here, I just found once at all the train station, and those little choices that make one into a number more in a marketing survey list. This day truely means nothing, nothing at all. But from my own bed I can peep into the ugly towers that seemly flavoured my pages from Gadi's window, and even when I cannot help talking over with the TV antennas no oaks pacify my view, gloom my view. I can only stare at the sun, but my mother preached me strongly against that. It's a designer's toil. They wrote on my whiteboard that dinner was great. I did encounter Mephiboshet this time, his name is Dor.

11:17

It feels as though one were racing with God withal
In a bachelor's party
So that everyone could hearken to our pleads
And accounts of different follk-tales
Of well too-known people
In a family portrait
That makes our talking believeable
And in those alleys
Marked everywhere by quotations
The days sleep inside a curdle of confort
That wasn't either gratuitous or fortuitous
But a mere sketch of a sculpture
That one didn't mean to complete
Speaking with a solid voice
As to resemble one stone next to the other
In a conversation of Titans
Tasting some authenticity
That in its truthfulness summons death
For another party in an undisclosed location
Seemly vain for pilgrims
And recondit for us
Retelling stories that make us very unproud
Very unnatural
And even sore
From unempty glasses
Framed in white pages
That no one dares to read
Fearing translating himself just too intimately
As to drift away in a tiny tea-pot
That is unlike others
With that holder of silver imitation
Sailing away into the unnight
Coming into light from a vacuum in the stage-set
Hairdressing pens
Sharpening
Sharpening ourselves with time
Beneath the music of Nietzsche's sister
Beneath an arp
Dying slowly unto our coffee
Craving for a view of the day
Of the day
When I lied
When I held
When I set unfree
Because it was easier back then
To be somebody else
Than it is today
To be somebody like you
Less an anonymous figure
With a face
That hearkens to the smells of the eye's glimpse
Radically new
With Heidegger
Toiling for some light

Hungry for Sincerity

Less than twenty-four hours make the difference between life and death, between choices and spades, between fate and strike. The post-mortem of a strife, longer than the life of a book being written and perhaps just as much pained. I cannot help the feeling of looking at those pasts as though they were lost forever, as though no repair or atonement was possible. But just as shamelessly I could say that I do not have regrets, because the choices were not as simple or as blackened but rather hued in between angry morning and tar-coloured nights. Days during which every sort of possible pleasure made the difference between being me and somebody else, between losing my sanity and recovering it for a couple of hours, or for a day even sometimes.

Two years endlessly trying to recover my pasts and my persona, and by detour committing more betrayals than one could count with the hands of a hundred people, so many of them as fall into oblivion. It hurts, I will never deny it. It is a stone in your shoe for as long as one has lived, it is a lack of repair and a restless nightmare. Those faces all pass in front of me today, this very morning as I feel myself shiver before the end of this chapter. Before being into the world again. I would have never missed these two years, had I had the choice to do so. Sooner or later I might come to regret it, even this afternoon as well. I might have strived so long for nothing, I might have committed all possible mistakes on earth only in order to see this day dawn on me, but I cannot think about that anymore. I cannot think about that world whereby I shall be so comfortable at home. I prefer the striving. The journeys. The lack of wisdom and excess in witty.

Those journeys in which I created worlds of my own, as a Semitic God only in order to destroy them all over again. Most of those worldly buildings were not even of my own liking, and they succeeded in displeasing me all the more, in destroying my speech, my manifold forms to translate myself into spaces and times. They blurred my history. But I carry no shame to this very day, I do not feel sorry for myself or anybody else. I only did what I had to do, in order to remain alive and to wear this caffeine-tanted smile that deliberately surrounds me. Perhaps I will never stop feeling guilty and feeding my disappointment in small bits of glowing anxiety. But I remained alive. I lived through the most intense years struggling with God, but above all with myself. Struggling to find out whether my limits had any working powers no more, whether I could bring myself to make the right decisions. Small everydaily choices in between potatoes and beans that helped me keep unwounded. The roads wound before me. I became mute and unable to move invisible spaces, unable to make real choices.

Life will take its share due of time, but as long as I can be eternal enough as to build my own worlds it no longer matters. I have different tools to look at myself. To loath myself. But it is not important. The worlds were at stake, when the chips were down.

18:00

Into the world again
As though the fringes would cover me up
When the hinges uncovet my recklessness
Sailing away in a urban boat
That contains more fear than love
That contains an unknown form of comfort

The city is seemly overtly illuminated
And tirelessly I shiver into the motions of machines
In plastic-wrapped dreams
That resemble being childish
And sometimes even queer
Living in a phone-boot

The summer rains frentically on me
With smiles packed in vertigo
The pleasure of regret
The surrounding voices
That cut through the flesh not unlike leaves
Falling from within a signal of no-life

Too many things run in front of me
My pasts, my sorrows, my shame
The days of old, always fresh anew
In the darkest alleys of a book
Whose author feared, whose author murdered himself unto
A certain morning, over the dread of cold paper

I let myself go loosen
As though all this had no repair
Had no substantial condition
Untrodden paths marked by empty glasses
By highways stricken with silences
That spring from within a sore wall

I no longer suffer from his ailments
Which once meant life a whole
Then turned into dust
And awoke to a forest three weeks ago
But it isn't important
After all, he's no longer an oak.

Ofer's Table & The Hours

Officed-in

I thought about this note ever since Friday, day in which I contemplated the possibility of devoting sometime to this stream but the heat, the smells of Shabbos and the contemptuous glittering eye of Tel Aviv made it impossible. One should not write this kind of postings as though one is writing memories from a long-forgotten childhood among nuns and strict grammar teachers but rather as a journal diary, very different from the impressions you get when entering St. Stephen's and more in the spirit of Bergson, it's difficult to shape styles intentionally though unless one's writing satire, and because of an underlying discussion over a poem of Vater Goethe (as Rahel called him) that's very far from possible.

Journeys always take unexpected turns, as though one were to turn asides and inspect ants alongs the way just for long enough as to miss the last bus; turning aside like Moses, "for whose works are praiseworthy?"; the sentence in itself has a very Christian flavour which challenges the limitations of the English language, the only language I claim fit for my writing. There are journeys through the most diverse natural phenomena; journeys through Italian churches, through Orthodoxy, through self-discovery, through philosophy, and perhaps above them all is Plato's, the journey of the "good". The latter takes for me a rather different form than the bi-partite worldness of the Athenian and I feel much closer to Abraham, as though it were all a travailing with God's designs and desires, particularly with desire... as though the world were created at every moment of the day.

I've journeyed through two different cities and even as many wonderful men in the course of my life as an adult, one that remains as a pistol-shot in the middle of mass and the second as a thief that abducts you at night and disappears with the waving of the skies, all camouflaged beneath the tallith of the Eternal wafting in manifold blues down a flu-striken highway. It all must have started in a church I suppose, perhaps the Liturgy of the Hours after the Easter somewhere in Emmanuel.

I remember Ofer's table then too, with a little bit of regret and a very very saddled happiness that always intoxicated me to the point of physical pain yet sparkling with circles of vicious tenderness and the most whimsical of all possible moments. Almost lifeless enough as to become a dogma for a new creed. Those weren't happy days, I saw myself obliged to lie too often, to covet my father's nakedness and my own as though the gravest of all possible sins had been committed. Days in which the world trembled underneath with each posession, each achievement and each day of life. A punishment that could only be ameliorated by iridiscent cups of coffee in a cafe that no longer exists, whereby you could see a very long street of Tel Aviv and yet hide from within tall well-brushed plants.

I used to write some rhymes there, all of them truely bad. Plus it was worse than that, Ofer couldn't understand the language. We seemed to have been educated in different worlds and I felt envious with rage. I for one in the Classics, the Victorian literature next to Goethe and Heine, the New Testament and Existentialism. He in the other hand in things I had never uttered before out of shame - utility, leisure, amusement, credulity, security, trust, restlessness, reckless. My education all seemed to have been decided upon only in order not to provide absolutely any skills for life, an education that could have been useful only had I been born in a different social class, either very low or very high. And since I am a Jew I remained chained to the burgeoisie. All what my education could provide was a possibility to write.

That of course in a very narrow view, for even when I no longer yearn for a home with the Lord of the Cross and the whimsies of virgins and mythologies that was the only possibility for my mind to have been born as a thinker. It was in the Gospels, the Mysteries, the Hymns and the Saints that my curiosity sparked one day during my early adolescence never to let its voice down. At the time it seemed as though he was just trying to humiliate me about every single detail, and accordingly I couldn't help the necessity for hurting cynical answers to the least troubling and most everydaily of questions. He was one of my first journeys to adulthood, and by that I do not mean the people whose nakedness I uncoveted, but those with whom I uncoveted an own nakedness that can be frentically and morbidly observed ever at the table.

I would lie by saying that I didn't miss him, but truth is he had fallen into the most absolute oblivion. He's still in oblivion, and I know it because the blistering thorns became entirely painless... at most very exciting and sweetening to the extreme, but certainly painless. But he's not been the only journey, which makes me rather happy. It makes me even more so that he hadn't been around as to see me, because then I could have felt I loved him just like Franz loved Sabina and the disappointment before the nihilism inherent to the enterprise would have poisoned me. He didn't meet Vitaly, in whom he would find very little pleasure other than the plastic one through which he takes delight in being Greek. He doesn't know Vitaly also made me tremble, so hard that I was willing to atone him for the silence, because somebody wrote me letters that were harder to read than Aquinas. Not because they were overtly wordly and complicated for the language was rather cheap and almost systematically excerpted from a couple of novels.

But somehow those were the letters of a man who wrote honest things, who truely hated me with uttermost respect and who never took pride in silence, but rather self-shame. That makes it quite yellowed when weighed against somebody who never wrote a simple word. But that was the design of the Providence, perhaps a single word or touch about 6 months ago would have killed me in the fashion of Theseus, not because I hurted at him but because I hurted at hyself exceedingly. He just decided to rain one day when I had wanted nobody. That's Norrine's... A man who calls you only when he's by no means needed. And for a change, I never wrote to him honest things, only perhaps I discovered literature isn't quite like rhaetorics only very late in life. Late in my adolescence I mean. Perhaps in every line I wrote him even the "and" or "," were some sort of disguise, a lie, a meant-to-be metaphor for an immediately necessary form of Angst.

It has taken me more than a year to forget those days, except that one when we went out for breakfast after which I wrote that poem I threw away and that happened to have come true to the detail in the last week. I wasn't thirsty to flee but in little circles I defined Zeno and tip-toed all the way to Jerusalem in the most timid of all fashions. It took me a lot of ennui, and not enough alcohol. But I stopped feeling guilty for a change, because I simply saw the contigency in the idea of survival to such an extent that I wasn't even open to any discussion about it. After that day shortly following our dismise when I found myself at Adam's table for a whole day... after that morning suicide attempt and that letter I wrote him pasted on a postcard of the Swiss landscape, quotations from the prophets and a passport-size picture of Anne Frank. I lost mostly everything I had but my books, even my old faces and my old eyes and my old mouth. But I have no regrets, and were I to be in such state of despair, I would do it again. Again would I journey so far down the mind to places so dark that not even Ofer can look at.

And even when for some death would be a preferable option, I couldn't make that choice. More than anything I wanted to live and couldn't care less about the price. If this price was unhappiness, then I was willing to pay. The thought of life and death, specially death. It doesn't escape me anyway, that very same thought, but I'm no longer swollen by the fear. I thought I just had to live to remember the world; to remember Tel Aviv and my father, my little tiny apartment with the old Polish cushions and the dinners I made out when my salon guests would be around. The past would crouch before me and ask for a time out in some holiday resort, in the fashion of Etienne Gilson.

I thought the struggle would end one day, until I stopped struggling. It lost worth, I gained life. And I kept waiting and waiting on and on and praying... I prayed for happiness, for freedom, for joy. As my struggle halted I saw happiness coming from somewhere and I began to think that was perhaps the beginning of happiness. But I deceived myself, perhaps because the waiting had taken too long. I didn't want answers any longer, for they were too simple as to attain the meaningfulness of the questions and my world became Lessing's; at least thus said my friends during my birthday dinner which was rather lame.

One day I just woke up slightly older, thinking that it wasn't the beginning of happiness or of anything. That this life itself was happiness and that for nothing in the world I would have traded Ofer or Vitaly, my days in yeshiva and my nightly escapades, James's gloom and Stephan's varsities. How could I trade on the hills of Beit Jamal and the nightly views of the ancient towns? Perhaps the Vesper and Lent? No. Even the Liturgy of the Hours so much not. The fact that I have received a past not as a willy-nilly but as a testament tells me only the examination of it can be contraceptive to the future suffering, not to prevent it but only in order to be able to live with it as though you were living with an old maid that betrays you from time to time but always lovingly turns to you.

It was in the weeks, the days and the hours. It was in them that my happiness was, everyday in simple living. In the life that I gained by splitting my thinking space into being a person and being a thinker. Happiness can never mean completion or fulfillment, at least for the Biblical man. I returned to the table and found it not unlike the day before, because I had been there that day too. The walls belong to my past as much as the dust and the untidiness and the man. I could sit at the table and tell the truth, I could even show anger.

I smoked a cigarette, and it was the same old little plate. He looks much older - not the plate, but that's an irrelevant thought. Before I left I was no longer afraid it would be the last time I saw him, because if it were even so he's one the treasures of my past and that unlike Sylvia I'm not any willing to bury with untimely memoirs, trying to build new layers of concrete and paviment for a new season stage; I suffer from stage fright. I thought that day I loved him a little bit, I hated him a little bit. Just enough to be good to him, just enough to be good to me. Just enough to find happiness in the hours, in the hour. "I'm hourly" said Goethe, and for a change I no longer counted the hours and mourned over him in my sleep like Tereza. How inscure! but how beautiful too. I didn't read Homer this time, for perhaps I'm too one of the moderns:

"All words like Peace and Love
All sane affirmative speech
Had been soiled, profaned, debased
To a horrid mechanical screech" (W.A. Auden)

I wasn't sufficiently embarrassed as not to have my own thoughts and my fears. I stopped fearing that he would find me one day down the street and would think me unbeautiful. How venomous it was to hold my own thoughts about him, but how radically truer. I discovered the most important thing to know about Ofer, he isn't an Oak as I had thought. He's a desk-man. For I discovered late in history he's got one, just like I became acquainted with Marx. It's beautiful to think he's travailing somewhere out there, and I no longer see fit the writing of riddles and puzzles as not to let some name in or out. He's already a Writing on the Wall. He can't be an Oak, "Nature is dead, mein Kind".

Letters from Jerome Kohn to me

It's weird after all this time I've been unable to put a note about Hannah, and so it remains. But as a consolation I can publish two letters I received from Jerome.

21.02.06

Dear Ari,

Thank you very much for what you wrote. I've read your letter over morethan once, and want to say how interesting I find it, and how sensitiveand intelligent I think the writer of this letter must be. "Wohl dem,der keine Heimat hat, er sieht sie noch in Traume" -- what a wonderfulway to understand Pariahdom.

I don't know if Hannah ever felt fully athome in the world. In 1954, when she was here in America, relativelysafe, and relatively well off, she wrote this poem:

Ich lieb die Erde
so wie auf der Reise
den fremden Ort
und anders nicht.

Somehow I think you will appreciate that. Weimar-like letters--yes, the Internet has done away with that sort ofthing for the most part, yet not entirely! I don't know if there is anyway to study Hannah's ideas on judgment other than by entering into athinking dialogue with her.

When I try to do that, on the one hand,there is a lot of time spent reflecting on specific works of art; on theother hand, it sometimes seems absolutely clear to me that the thinkingego has to go through willing to come to judgment, which makes herremarks on Kant and the French Revolution so very meaningful.

With all good wishes,

Jerome

22.02.06

Dear Ari,

Thanks for writing again, and so quickly, and so late at night. I am impressed by what you say about the "banality" of goodness--bywhich, I take it, you mean good works. About that, I think Hannah wouldagree. Do you remember in THE HUMAN CONDITION how she differentiatesbetween goodness and good works? Following Jesus of Nazareth, she saysthat the goodness of good works--however useful they might be for avariety of puposes--vanishes as soon as the works appear in the world. She goes farther than Jesus when she says that the attempt to makegoodness appear in the world is not only fruitless in itself but is alsodestructive of the space of appearances.

We might discuss this a bit more, in time, and if you like.


Best,Jerome

28.02.06

Dear Ari,

Thanks for writing. I'm about to leave on a trip and don't have the time to respond to the many different things you say. I had no idea that the goodness of good works would prove so complicated. That in itself is interesting. First, the goodness of good works is not comparable in any way to evil and evil deeds.Second, it is the pure, transcendent quality or idea of goodness (thus Jesus says: Why do you call me good? God alone is good) that cannot appear in the phenomenal world. In one sense that is a tautology, but it has political implications that Machiavelli, for example, saw clearly: If you turn the other cheek to him who strikes you, you unleash evil in the world. Thus he found it necessary to "teach princes how not to be good," which doesn't mean at all that he taught them to be evil--he never did that, which is a wild misinterpretation of this most subtle of Renaissance political writers. And it is thus that Hannah says: the doing of good works is destructive of the public space in which everything appears to everyone. This is where one has to begin, I believe, in discussing these matters.

Best,


Jerome

The Philosopher & The Film-Maker

... In the world of image semiotics, which beyond mere representations brings along a heavy political burden it is quite impossible to separate the world of the philosopher from that of the film-maker. That reminds of Marcuse's remarks on the rise of analytical philosophy and the struggle of the continental schools to overwrite it; it wasn't a mere struggle of philosophical schools and tendences but rather a struggle for philosophy itself, for the making of philosophy.

Having very little to inherit from traditions in my day, I affiliated to continental philosophy not only out of existential concerns (not existentialist) but as a part of a legacy which I bestowed upon myself being a guest in continental culture; for as a Jew living in the age of postmodern criticism it was the only resource available in order to save myself from the completion of the Heideggerian prophecy of "De-struction or De-structuration, to which I've returned to and fro endless times.

Being a little bit of a modernist in the Arendtian fashion I can but ponder on whether this holds any significance for me personally and for the world. Wisely Mary McCarthy phrased the struggle of continental philosophy in America already in the 70's: The philosopher in his activity realizes that he has a common world with the rest of humanity, the common world being in itself the thinking space in which he performs experiments just like the scientist in the laboratory.

If the common world isn't all that common to the philosopher as much as it is to the beggar and to the businessman then philosophy in itself is a dead enterprise with but little to offer other than scholasticism, which we've well worn out and even off from the skin of our de-traditions as they stand today. Karl Jaspers phrased it in a tantamount paradox: Philosophy must become practical and concrete without ever forgetting its origins.

And from my experience I could as well say the European film maker does share this world of the philosopher in which the metaphysical truths even when shattered (just like kitsch and romance) must be kept alive and rather less adrift in order to make space for the world of appearances to exist bodily. Yet the philosopher can't become the film maker or viceversa and that leads us to question what's become of mimesis for both.

In a sorry world like ours at times films carry a weight of reality that has been wiped out from the world, since no possible representation carries a human message if it's not actually an outward drive of an inward need that does exist down there in the world of men's affairs. Does something exist out there in the world of men that has not even a name?- Words of Hannah Arendt. The same applies to continental philosophy, it's an historically conditioned response to human needs. In the Platonic sense (which was also Lessing's) things could only be become in Athens when they would enter human discourse. Things that couldn't be discussed undoubtedly did exist, but they did not become humanized in a sense that they could elevate themselves from the world of "Ideas" and wander somewhere in between.

Contemporary film as a part of the entertainment world isn't only a form of postmodern spirituality but also a philosophical undertaking in a way that philosophy isn't, because its mimesis doesn't find an earthly place among the laymen. Film is perhaps the form of artistic expression I want to devote the most thought to. Film is that which remains untold in between the lines of the poem and the ecstasis of the philosopher. Film isn't only about politics, it is about being slightly more human.

There're only two safe ways to achieve this which are cultural, therefore artificial (we've seen how history and nature have failed us at that): The paradox and the semblance. Philosophy being the first and Film the second.

Abenteuer, Traeume Kriegs.

Trotzdem ist es ja aber so sehr ruehig,
Denn darf ich mich nicht wenn auch in Schweige, na hoeren.
Und momentan wird es nie lange darauf ankommen
In Jedem Fall wird er nicht geboren durch Zeitungen
Und niemals meine Briefe wiederauf wuerdt angewort.

Zweifellos der Kunstler lebt noch darin
Und das Alles wissen gefaellt ihm doch
Aber zu spaet geboren, oh freunde, oh Gott!
Kindes Endymion
Nach Lessing nachgeboren, und dann lustig aber gliklos
Koennte er nicht schon mit Gott anfahren
Oder denken
Vielleicht kvetchen, na
Sein reisebegletter wird gekommen
Mit einer tiefe Tasche, doch aus Prag!
Aber ware er dahin schon glaublos
Und Deutsches Bank darft das nicht vergessen.

"Credit" sagte Heine,
Noch der Lehrer korrigiert:
"La religion, la religion"
Hauptsaechlich Problem des Menschengeschlechts
Zeitlich wir haben gerne Zweifel als Glaube
Und besoneres eben... Zeitlichkeit heisst damals
"Temporalitaet"
Der die Heiddeger klaerte auf
Wir meinten "Sorgen".

Und sogar drei Stunde in Erwartung
Wurde ich jemand ganz anders bekommt
"Gewerfenheit"
Der meister sagt.

Aber noch dann wurde ich den kleines von der Gotten
Eben so wann singt meine Tasche "Jerusalem"
In einem kleines Anschlag
Wenn auch das meint
"Schwierige Frage"
Damit wusst mann machen?
Woran? Wovon?

Nach der Zeitung:
"Bureuacracy is the new form of
Despotism - one in which no one
is to blame"

Wenig traurig, und nur noch halb wahrlos
Ich trinke Jasmintee mit Efraim
Und erinnere mich ueber Grass
Als Peter nie lange schreibt ab.
Er ist nie lange.