Am I My Brother's Keeper?

The Revelation has a particular way of producing meaning, which is calling upon the unique within me. It is as if a multiplicity of persons were necessary for the plenitude of 'absolute truth', as if each person, by virtue of his own uniqueness, were able to guarantee the revelation of one unique aspect of the truth, so that some of its facets would never have been revealed if certain people had been absent from mankind. ------E. Levinas

We rarely see our own specificity, let alone that of others: "he who knows himself knows..." Instead of a style of soul, their panache, we think in generalities, 'dots and dreams', Man and not this person, in all his thisness; we grasp at but an idea, a concept and, ultimately, at a phantom.

What do we owe to the stranger in our midst? Why do we owe? What obligates me to be open, to unclench my fists, to the person who stands before me if the human world is essentially one of multiplicity, diversity, and uniqueness? Must I establish a connection , an affinity, first? And what is the basis of such an identity? Blood and soil (Cain's lineage) , the biological, the needy animal , this bare forked animal that I barely recognize in the mirror. Or , perhaps, the law, the state, membership to a community, or the political realm is all that prevents us abandoning him to the wolves.

The fact that he is human, all too human: the Rights of Man; a pre-political claim that is prior to all differentiation? But rights indicate what should not be done. What compels us, if anything, to not just imagine the horrors of an exposed life but to work toward extending kindness, friendship to a particular person? Must we think of that person as an idispensable, irreplaceable 'aspect' of creation, radically 'other' and yet, at the same time, fundamentally similar to ourselves, a member of a community who merely turns his face in the same direction, whose roots are 'not of this world'? Such attentiveness is the horizontal of the cross.

But what of the absolute stranger? Does such a person even exist?

Saturday afternoon on Snake's Lane East.
What was the snake doing in Eden in the first place I wonder to myself. Amongst all the pretence of being busy, the spending and getting, the teenagers dreaming of a diminshed greatness, the low-level easiness under which a profound boredom festers, there is a vagabond, Michael, the tree-cutter.

He trudges up and down in his distinctive grey coat and chequred cap. The pipe is never lit and like Van Gogh's, does not reflect any order of being: a detached, discarded and lonely object, a thing amongst things. His bag of possessions , thrown casually over his shoulder, is shapeless. There is a looseness about it, a reluctance to attach itself, identify itself, with this man.The children run past him, trying to topple him as if he was some sort of giant. Others, though, hardly see him at all and if they do stop to stare their puzzlement only intensifies: how can one live a life like that? (but he puts the same question to them).

Most of the time though, he just stands in open doorways like a fallen angel. The emaciated look, the glare of his downcast eyes, the long drawn-out bones and a face that is brown from years on the road, under the sun give the lasting impression of an utter stranger, an ascetic. He has no complaints against god, and why should he? He does not even know himself and his soul is too tired to remonstrate.

Here is a man without bridges, resigned to the shallow life of survival without continuity, a life that knows no joy. The poor may laugh, but not the destitute. A sober figure amongst the world's drunkenness, he sees through our rituals, the arc of our ego-striving. We are "held fast" to things in boredom, capitalism depends on a happiness that is always just out of reach. We have lost all animal repose in our being, all striving to transcend our internal horizons and still we scribble furiously before the snow descends.

But all this was last summer. The last I saw of him he was standing in the shadows of the trees in a small park at the corner of the High Road, talking effortlessly in this bless-ed grove. "The trees have all the truth" he once told me. But he will pass through these parts or gradually disappear, sink back into oblivion. If I see him again I will avoid his gaze, since he sees the tramp in my soul, the reckless disdain I have for the "uniform of the times", the snake in my heart that tells me that I too must leave this place.