Third Man

Jonah once taught me that even in the darkest of days, the blackest of suns, innocence survives. And that that innocence was pure life itself, the green waters: hope, faith in the unseen. Just as a whale lives on in the vast oceans of a cold, infinite universe, so too in the heart of hearts of a man something survives.

On this day more than any other I want to be alone. To be alone is to be complete she said. But sometimes one finds things, like a flower growing in the cracks of the abstract city, or a mushroom slumbering in the tall grass, lazily, aimlessly dreaming away, running down time and one is amazed that all that is incomplete is so fragile, tender, and precious. At Mile End thirty small children scramble aboard, the crackling of their laughter disturbing the serious world of the adults. They are herded in, though they don't seem to mind this. In other times,on other trains, in other places, there would be no such laughter.

"This or that.There is no third way. And that is our path. " A path and not a place. A direction..like zeno's arrow that never arrives; fate is a direction, not an achievement. But to choose the third way is one thing-what the Allama calls 'higher fatality'-and there is a desperate fatalism that is imposed on us. If the question arises: believer or unbeliever I can say , with the Hindus, "not this, not that."Perhaps being just human, not a just human, but someone with just one foot in eden. Which is to resist perfection, being a finished product. The third man slips through categories but is not a negation of them. Not a refusal to answer, but just a Li Po smile that floats downstream.

Schrodinger's cat is neither alive nor dead, neither this nor that; but alive and dead-as long as one doesn't look at him.

In cricket, the third man is a boundary-man. Close to being absorbed in the crowd and equally close to the centre of action. He never sees clearly though. Most of the time he just waits until there's a pointing finger, or until he's shouted at. Engulfed by the shadows, his job is only to save, to negate.

In the camps, via the trains, are brought all those who are third-rate, third class..inferior products. Most have been separated from their names and are now just numbers. But in the heart of this darkness is the Muselmann. He lives in the third place in the Third Reich that is the true hell. Here , in limbo, the cross where the norm meets the exception, one does not hope for a salvation that one cannot attain; one is absorbed in indifference, unaware of the absence of God's gaze. In this no-place like home the individual ceases to belong to himself or a community: two's company but three is...the third person is an automaton, a walking ghost. The un-holy ghost. The fear, as Freud saw, of ordinariness, of being an emperor with no clothes. He is on the verge of becoming an object, a "what", not a "who".

The 'third order' continue to live an ordinary life and this makes us question what is ordinary, what does belonging to humanity mean at the limit?The Muselmann is a mystic of nothingness. An "anonymous mass", someone who is beaten by time, always the same, identical. He is too empty to suffer and "not a trace of thought is to be found in his eyes". The fixed gaze, the mechanical, sad , expressions. For him the world has become nothing, he has followed the commandment to die before one dies and now lives in the inner world only..in a slumber from which he can never awake.

On the third day it is said that a being was created that was the same, "season after season", one whose very being was "in itself".

The camps: the intersection of perfect order with perfect chaos. One hesitates to use the word 'perfect'.

No-one can gaze at the Muselmann without being turned to stone, that is: without becomming inhuman, no-one in particular. One must mimic him and become indifferent to life if one is to live. A rat, a 'queer sardonic rat'. But why is this? One can look at death, there is a pornography of it, but no-one can withstand the indeterminate, the void. Instead, we cover our nothingness and this is another name for humanity.

How can one look at the despised face-so eagerly blanked out because we cannot forget that he reminds us of ourselves? The Muselmann is the only one who sees the Gorgon, face-on. The Gorgon is always without profile (just as the lumpenproletariat are without a silhouette): a flat face, without a third dimension. But no-one can see the Gorgon. Therein lies the mystery: only he sees the impossibility of seeing; the one thing he knows is not that he knows nothing but the sheer impossibility of knowing. The Muselmann himself becomes the Gorgon.

When the law has been internalised then one has been 'annhilated'. Finitude is the awareness of distinction. It is the space, the absence of God where time and desire are born. The inner circle of the Muselmann is the mirror of the la makan.

The Muselmann is the denial of the limits of ethics, of what establishes good and bad. He is the negation of negation.

(This is lifted from Agamben's book, Remnants).