Broken-ness

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We're proud of ourselves, in a way. But our enthusiasm is a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos – we want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the cosmos. We are only seeking Man. We don't want Other Worlds. We want mirrors. "--------from Solaris

In these days nothing fascinates us as much as authoritative voices: barbarians, terrorists, Boston Brahmins, style gurus, Mandarins, experts, lifestyle managers ; nothing dazzles us free spirits as much as the spectacle of order, the mystique of totalitarianism and terror.

We are broken and love to imagine ourselves as thus: the Romantic longing for fragmentation, the Dionysian killing, eternal becoming, is the hidden affiliation of capitalism and the restless soul. Statelessness, liminality, exile, uprootedness, madness: nothing is more comforting than our lack of domestication, our being an end without an end. And yet, is this broken-ness of the body or the spirit, external or internal? This homelessness is but , perhaps, a mirror of the constant turning of the heart, "fading, soaring" (Goethe).

And from this broken-ness it follows that we can only be held spellbound by infernal order.
"There is no going back to the cosmos" Kelvin is told, only the pushing forward into the unknown, the infinite universe. The light drains from the world, and so begin the gnostic days.

Hannah Arendt: the great paradox: just when we understand ourselves as nothing but earthly creatures we desire nothing more than to escape the earth. But even on reaching the extreme limits of outer space we only have Gagarin's "there's no god here" (which Levinas interprets as: the end of transcendence). There is no Being, no order, only man and his thoughts. Which is why all modern horrors are a variation of the theme of the labyrinth, Piranesi's prisons, the gulag within the gulag.

Today I realised that I've never seen a stray dog here. A news report: a dog inCornwall refuses to turn right. Nothing sinister. He just can't turn right. So now the psychiatrists are working on him! I kid you not. And he screams, "the barking of the dog, a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God's sake, open the universe a little more!)".