Suburban Blues

I only have to look up and the world 'is'.
I look up and I am.

-----from Wings of Desire

I have only to formulate a 'clear and distinct' idea of something and it is; this is the immanence of the world, there are no gaps between thought and world and, therefore, between time and space. Everything is a sign of something else and nothing I say has not been thought before. The world is a moment and a series of events.

Suburbia is the perfectly enclosed world that was once a dream. Like a multi-faceted crystal it is always one with itself. All the lives that are lived there are interchangeable..there are only a number of basic storylines which a mysterious card shifter shuffles with. It is a world of finite possibilities that are played out again and again, ad nauseam, a home in which one can finally lose oneself, submerge oneself into indistinctness and live a life entirely on the surface: home is where the heart is, but where is the heart?

We thought of a heaven of equality and have arrived there. Through infinite repetition and sameness we have canceled out chance, sheltered ourselves from the horror of contingency. Matisse painted the same picture fifteen times, searching for some subtle gradation of meaning, and a ritual is repeated for a thousand years-is there any difference?; the warm glow of the crowd, creature comforts, the ceremonial animal re-affirms that he lives in the same endless circles as the rest of nature. Except that we are condemned to be aware of this fact, to have imagined otherwise. But even then, we remain unconvinced that this might not just be another case of deja vu.

The sudden blotting out of a life can be imagined, pictured..war would be unthinkable if this were not true. But whereas the meaning of the void can be a subject of 'art', the quiet desperation that is the lack of meaning cannot; the slow fading away into insignificance, the running down of a life, the closing of the doors of potentiality and possibilities can only be conceived of as a happy, bourgeois suburban life.

The prisoners of chance
have built their home
In a field below the wood
And are at peace

Somewhere there is an afterlife
of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfillment.

But to "look up" at the world is not to think it in a geometric spirit; to see the world is to be distanced from it, at the very same time as one feels its presence, as on the very first day; to see is the very affirmation of our freedom to imagine a past and an open future, to be aware of transcendence and immanence. "To look" is neither an action nor a timeless thought. And reality is neither objectively given nor a world created by subjective desires.

One must sing with Goethe:

Now one may hear it still
even from afar
Words reach their goal
though sound and music fade
Is it still not the tent of scattered stars
the light transfigured world,
that love has made?

(quotes from the East-West Diwan and Derek Mahon)