(Edvard Munch's "Madonna" ... )
A new post. A post in time, stands up the flow of language. Who do I write to? There is only writing to no-one now. Niemand's Rose: Rose de Person. What speaks the writing of Paul Celan?
"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all." (Wikipedia on Paul Celan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Celan)
Celan writes after Auschwitz, after the unspeakable. Against Adorno saying there is no poetry after auschwitz ("we must").
But what is this real language that remains secure against loss? Surely it is not simply a system of signification--- not merely the signification and transfer of one meaning to another, from literal to metaphor and back again.
Surely what remains is something more solid and transcendental: for instance the gratitude we feel at living bare life, at being at all. "In gratitude we receive.... everything... including death." Or maybe like "love," now there love is a fine Christian thing, only please through some obfuscation not call this love pure love, call it "charity," "giving to the poor"-- is this not the meaning of "charity?" (I Corinthians: 13). Love was never satisfied at merely being charity: it is the example of Job at the beginning of his trial where he gave only out of charity, and pity and every other condescending and entitled gesture one could think of. Job LOVES at the end of his travail. He loves with the whole deformity of his abject body.... whether the lover in caustic erection thrown himself into the world... or through the open sores on Job's body, Job nears the grace of G-d through the ecstasy of his body.
It is not clear who I write to. I write to the amorphous absence of the future, which varies from the crumble and decay of the past. I do not write for the past but for the absence and vacuum of the future
"Nature abhors a vacuum."
And so we try to bring all of it to fill up our boredom, to avoid the sameness of our utterly prosaic lives: for the Das Man: itself becomes a vacuum of meaning. This much Heidegger did not consider: for the nature of being for him was to fall into forgetfulness:
Seinsvergessenheit.
This was the same as the Greek: Nature loves to hide. The corrolary of the two phrases: Nature abhors the vacuum because nature is a vacuum.
The Taoist sages wrote it this way: the way that can be spoken of is not the true way.
[What then of Celan's phrase when he speaks of the "remaining" or (derridean "reste") "remainders" of language?]
[Maybe Celan was just an idealist, a structuralist who posited and believed in the impersonal absolutivity of language-- a transcendental eidetic form (Husserl's Origins of Geometry), this posited that the law itself and at least the Jews as the people of the law had the law, which was irreducible goodness in the face of such annihilation: "ah but what dreams we had!"
The law obfuscates Being, but the people of the law committed the law and therefore their language to their hearts (Kaballa)
But in doing this hiding in the ordinary and the everyday
.... I write because though there is no one to write to there is still beauty in my heart and that that beauty must be written, in some way exclaimed:
"What I do is me for this I came!"
"Fair enough" she says, though she has always been somewhat of a judge, "though the line from 'Kingfishers catch fire' is a little overdone."
It is not for her, this ideal of beauty that "I must write" because there is nothing else and it is to no one else. A broad engorged elaboration of eros across the page. Eros without recipient? Eros without receipt? Receipts are for the dead. They belong to the land of the dead, of writs and accounts. To write in this manner, at least pre-figured in this "now" (which when read becomes an eternal "then" held in the decaying fullness of the past, full even because of the very decay or patina through which it is writ) is to write as an act of desire alone into void or abyss, and thereby designating and offering it to curious inspection. To write to the abyss is not the abyss itself, but the abyss is foreshadowed in the presence of writing, after all true unselfconscious emptiness escapes the hermeneutic touch of form.
Wherever Hermes goes there he exists. One may suggest that the task then is to get Hermes to shut down: thereby in emptiness meditation to quell the god of interpretation, negativity (in the Hegelian sense of "the negative" as the restlessness of the negative).
There are philosphers who rightly speak: "whereof one cannot speak one should remain silent" (Wittgenstein). Or maybe there is Bertrand Russell's "why I am an athiest." But they all seem "a peevish bunch, these athiests, with pinched noses" (the previous phrase makes sense when spoken with the accent of a "decaying Brit" as my friend calls me: such a form of understatement is our primary weapon against the intolerable bullshit of it all): from my personal experience of the disciple of Ashley Montagu the Anthropologist, Rod Gorney the psychiatrist.
I always thought of religion to be as Edvard Munch's "Madonna," This points to the promiscuous and degenerate part of my anima (Entartete) after all it is much more clean and definitely superior to remain a clinician wearing a white smock, denying the messyness of God to explain the messyness of life. Life for the athiest is still exceedingly messy, I will give them that much. But they seem to be more like the men with mops coming in and really giving things a good clean: "remove that false belief or inflated expectation! It was probably caused by childhood abuse!" "Well," she seems to say, "fuck that!" this portrait of Edvard Munch's "Madonna," acknowledges that life is messier because it is confused: nature loves to hide.
It is said that the anima is superior to all these men "struggling with their shadows" (another phrase threatening to fall into cliche), trying to get everything clean and transparent. Men with microscopes try to split the world apart with laser like analysis. Men with microphones try to record them, to get it all down with the highest fidelity. Whereas nature merely stands up and shrugs her shoulders: she will have another gig where she will try to complete the assignation of her beauty to the moment of her dance or song.
I could of course simply be another man beating upon his drum, calling it louder and far more superior than any of the others. Again, she says "what nonsense." The anima calls us to sit down to the feast and eat together, "In the presence of mine enemies;" David got that right.
But I have said I do not write but for this ideal, or belief that there is beauty in my soul that seeks merely to spill out into form.
The sages speak as the sages always speak: that the act of writing is a covenant, and it presupposes from the first the one who was written. Without this "writing to" there can be no real writing. But could I write for no one? Could I write because there is no one I could write to... and still there was the need to speak?
Still there is the need to speak. It is the same as "still there is the need to listen," but I leave that up to you! Even though this text was written for no one (analyze Samuel Becket's "Stories and Texts for nothing," still there may be the need to read it. And I intend to write it for no one because I do not have it in my heart to designate who or what my reader should be. This then is the flower or the text offered for nothing.
Such intention is not without the possibility that it is doomed to failure, yet it breathes brief life in the interum, "for the time being" as my friend is off to say (come to think of it this is also a phrase of Dogen:
An ancient buddha said:
For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.
For the time being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean.
For the time being three heads and eight arms.
For the time being an eight- or sixteen-foot body.
For the time being a staff or whisk.
For the time being a pillar or lantern.
For the time being the sons of Zhang and Li.
For the time being the earth and sky.
"For the time being" here means time itself is being, and all being istime. A golden sixteen-foot body is time; because it is time, there is theradiant illumination of time. Study it as the twelve hours of the present."Three heads and eight arms" is time; because it is time, it is not separatefrom the twelve hours of the present.
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Uji_Welch.htm
I am not prepared to go into Zen this evening, let this then be my za-zen, this:
I am not prepared
Clay feet on side of mountain
The fool is awake!
We have Zen (a thousand times better that one is unprepared!) which gets into the hands of useless woodcutters and athiests:
Being prepared for it is like writing a thousand good words on any decent topic: they are fine, but can they replace the taste of milk?
Knowing the taste of milk is knowing the taste of the food one needs to survive. When mother and milk are gone, one needs to re-negotiate. Even in the absence of all the tasty milk in the universe, one still has gratitude that "once indeed I remember there was milk." -even though one should not be too sentimental. The universe forces us from every act of entitlement: the taste of milk is not yours just yet! ... And then we may be writing for nothing. Perhaps in this writing one becomes the milk in a certain sense. One hastens to think that we should not poison our mother's milk, nor should be drink too much of it, lest we become timid "momma's boys" after the age of thirty.
Ok, back to woodcutters and athiests: Once again the clean-up crew arrives with its white garments and they come and clean and scrub and provide their disinfectant sprays to the whole area: "Hygea," they cry, "let us rid ourselves of all this unsightly anima attachment, all this messyness! Let us rid ourselves of this humbuggery you call 'alchemy' or 'mystical thought!'" All these clean-up crews may have come for various reasons. They always come. They keep coming. Generally one winds up in trouble with the Anima... maybe down some black hole of addiction and suicidal paranoia: then the clinicians come in to wrap things up. But if one doesn't get into trouble. The problem is that the clean up crew is always prepared and on call, and therefore always already a million miles away from the soul, writing some stupid report for a psychiatric clinic.
There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.
(Czeslaw Milosz: "Ars Poetica")
How does one avoid getting into trouble? Maybe trouble is the price agreed upon when you begin to play (Edmond Jabes writes "defeat is the price agreed upon," in his "Book of Questions." Bob Dylan iterates "There aint no limit to the ammount of trouble women bring." And I say this only to get one thing clear: I am trying to get as far as possible from the anima as the "Ewig Weibliche," which Goethe idealized as some kind of salvation or cure. And it is not because I hate women (not at least consciously at this moment), but rather because I love women (Oh my God, what a completely stupid thing to say if you are an intellectual!) and want to get close to them (this is pathetic!), and gladly work to laugh at my own ideal.
Laughing anyway (somewhat pathetic)
Writing anyway (more assuredly pathetic)
More proof that I have no qualms about being totally pathetic:
Dare I write "loving?" or does this risk just too much anima attachment? Sacrifice of the ideal is the means to obtain the immortal soul, and I am thinking of Jung's pages on "Sacrifice" in "Symbols of Transformation." Nominally such a text does not appear to be too clinical. It is messy. Life is messy. Love life anyway. But the "anyway" is the strongest part of the last sentence.
The story is the same the world over for human beings (in this case "men"): you take on your anima, and it is simply too exhaustive to project on your spouse/ mate/ domestic partner/ whatever. This runs the risk of being a cliche, but I would not be afraid of my own banal, prosaic cliche-dom. I must remember the comment Thomas Mann makes of Hans Castorp in "The Magic Mountain": a paraphrase to be certain: "He would have not stayed up here a moment longer than his two week visit were it not for the lack of meaning in Castorp's utterly prosaic young man life." We go places and get waylaid because it is our meaning to do so. My meaningless cliche, like Castorp's gets waylaid because it still seeks for some sort of meaning. It is true--it is the vacuum of prosaic life, the vacuum of meaninglessness.... and nature avaoids a vacuum... by filling it, obliterating it as much as possible. I wouldn't say that because there is extra erotic energy left that I am just writing with my "big" (forgive any misrepresentations here) erection with no place to put it, but what if I am? Doesn't art come from our moments of respite from the literal world around us?
Conversely we may point to two laws of physics: that of the equal distribution of energy, the attempt of all energetic regions to reach homeostasis.... and that of the force of gravity, which attracts and pulls these objects back in. To abhor a vacuum would be akin to solution or sublimation: one goes to a higher place where the blank is in balance with presence. Conversely the principal of gravity attracts all things - from infinite distance (!) toward itself. If it is irrefutable that gravity will contract all things... then will the entire sum of the universe be (0)-Zero? (Written between Alestair Crowley's theory of Ain Soph Aur and Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs" "the sum of whose intensity = zero... and the Chaos myth of Hun-Tun: who's body had no orifice.)
Chaos is Hun Tun, Emperor of the Center. One day the South Sea, Emperor Shu, & the North Sea, Emperor Hu (shu hu = lightning) paid a visit to Hun Tun, who always treated them well. Wishing to repay his kindness they said, "All beings have seven orifices for seeing, hearing, eating, shitting, etc.--but poor old Hun Tun has none! Let's drill some into him!" So they did--one orifice a day--till on the seventh day, Chaos died. (Hakim Bey paraphrasing Chuang Tzu, I believe) http://isp2.projects.v2.nl/freezone/ZoneText/Diversions/Broadsheets/ChaosMythsBS.html
We can try to act as a "clean up crew," but we wind up botching the whole body-without organs thing. We can clean up the text to make it make sense: a kind of Habermasian effort, or worse, we can become some some sort of Rawls or Davidsonian desperately trying to make sense. But we make sense only at the expense of our marvelous and somewhat savage wisdom: as Blake writes "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."
My only advice is: Never mind your instruction! Come unprepared!
