Idols

What lies at the heart of idolatory? The desire to kill all that is alive and to assume life where there is none....

The concept of life in the West results from a perversion of the Christian belief according to which God, who is Life, became man. From this promise, this offer of a gift, this mysterious opening to what lies beyond, a this-worldly entity was derived. Life became an immanent idol, an all-purpose polemical label, a conceptual justification for boundless acquisition in this world. Indeed, life permits the formation of a foundational category, separate from the cosmos, for possessive individualism. From there it is easy to see the leaps to the struggle for life against nature, other individuals and society. In this construction, life cannot be understood apart from the"death of nature." In a continuous thread that runs back to Anaxagoras(500 - 480 BC) and up through the sixteenth century, an organic, whole conception of nature was a constant theme in the West. With varying nuances and emphases, nature was seen as alive, sensitive, at times animistic, correlated with human action. With the Scientific Revolution, a mechanistic model came to dominate thinking - nature was then seen as dead. This death of nature, I would argue, was the most far-reaching effect of the radical change in man's vision of the universe. But an insistent question then presented itself: How do we explain the notion of living forms in a dead cosmos?The modern substantive concept of life thus appears as a kind of mindless movement to fill the void.

----Ivan Illich

To kill all that lives is to set oneself up at the centre of the universe, the only point at which there is life and intelligence; it is to say that Man is the measure of all things..in short, it is the desire to see with the eye of God, to assume that one has power over nature (which is recognized as nothing but "extension", a lesser power or "force" ).

Idolatory is a form of substitution; it is to substitute the relative for the absolute, the temporary for the permanent; Man, the "image" of God, becomes the sole intelligence, alone in a cold universe. To do so, he must first "kill" God.

Idolatory mirrors the fall; it is the desire to see things contingently, to see them in isolation from the divine; it is to draw a circle around a centre that we make and thereby place ourselves at the centre of the dance of time.

The cogito: to say "i think" is already to assume too much; it is to place oneself as the originator of thought, as if one were totally self-subsisting. The medievals would have said that we can think points to an existence and essence that is given to us.

Idolatory is to see only onself in a circle of reason that starts with the turn to subjectivity and ends up with oneself; but there are other circles that start with love and end with love...for isn't love the acceptance of the 'other'?

A concept of God becomes an idol.

-----Gregory of Nyssa

God is a percept, the world is a concept.

-----Ibn Arabi

Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.

Idolatory is to hold on to immanence without the sense of transcendence.

Wonder,
a garden among the flames!

My heart can take on
any form:
a meadow for gazelles,
a cloister for monks.

For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka'ba for the circling pilgrims,
the tables of the Torah,
the scrolls of the Qur'an

My creed is love;
wherever the caravan turns along the way
that is my belief,
my faith.

-----Ibn Arabi

The Death of Christ

The following is taken from Kristeva's 'Black Sun' and 'In Our Time', Radio 4)

"Some may lose their faith":

How to realistically depict, to 'faithfully' represent what is always eluding presence, namely:death. But this is not just a question or artistic style ; is death just a natural phenomenon amongst other phenomena, and, more importantly, what of the death of him whose meaning lies in the supernatural, in the overcoming of death, the world, and time?

In this picture there is no sense of transcendence, no hand that stretches out to us, just an accepting of the power of death to silence life with equananmity.

In most depictions Christ is surrounded by others and in this way is related to the world again through grief and hope, expectation. Here beauty "negates pain" and this is pre-figured in the Redeemer's prior intuition of the suffering to come...but one must not think of "knowledge" as being fundamentally different from "love" at this level. But here he is utterly alone, a stranger in the world. Is this too our ultimate reality?

Beauty, art, as a form of consolation. But compared to the lived experience of the consolation of religion isn't art a "dead letter"?

Holbein's Christ is " inaccessible, distant, without a beyond", a closed space, without any "height", 'verticality'. To show death in all of its starkness, as a human fact amongst others leads us to ask whether we accept all of life as essentially finite, a play of forms, haunted by its own impermanence, or do we make a "leap of faith" . Death is the boundary that clearly delineates these options; it is as if there is an absolute severance between the two realms, the sun is infinitely distant and its withdrawl leaves the world utterly cold, dead. Does the painting mark the beginning of the gnostic age?

At the limit of humanity one is forced to question all that is not-human; and this can only be the horror of the abyss (' formadibilis abysis') or the beatific vision. Holbein's depiction of this caesura that is death, his equating it with the most ordinary of events, draws us into thinking about the extra-ordinary. As if redemption were only possible if were to become aware of our own 'brokenness', our alienation from the world and from others..for Augustine the true horror would be that we gloss over this gap with false illusions and satisfactions...we simply do not know what we lack, that we lack; we are full of ourselves and imagine ourselves as self-sufficient.

Is Holbein's message a spiritual one? By imagining death is he saying that we should incorporate it in our daily life? Although we live in its shadow, by forcing our attention, our gaze, to it, are we not thus learning to "die before one dies"?

Sign of the times:

The cold winds of the Protestant Reformation touch even the most sanguine of minds. Those stern implacable faces signal a return to the solid world of reality, nature, and simple truths far removed from theological speculation, to sobriety and restraint; a pragmatic spirit that will busy itself in ordering, organizing, and classifying the world in its minutiae. All truth resides in the here-below, in the history that we make; we cannot know anything of the beyond....this is quickly followed by the devaluing of anything that suggests transcendence: for modern man death is the ultimate problem.

From this emerges a humanistic response-not the affirmation of another "good" but the serene acceptance of death "not as a condition for glory or the consequence of a sinful nature" but as our essential desacralized reality-a reality which is the foundation of a new stoical, human dignity. The dignity of a life without Redemption, one that is not structured by what it "is not", a civilisation that gives up on seeing life as a waiting for the right time, and one that reverses the whole assigning of value to an 'elsewhere'.

This is not , perhaps, an iconoclasm or a 'demythologization' that wants to come face to face with a truth that is not clothed by myth, history, time and one that is, therefore, in the service of religion; this is, rather, the beginning of the horizontal leveling of the times, of Time, of the Spirit.

There is a dignity in the very attempt to represent the ending of desire (for religion, values, everlasting life). Is this the moment when the modern soul recognizes that it is only a body and how does one re-present that which is on the verge of disappearing from sight: death?

But is not the message of Christ also the ending of, the death of desire?

Mors ultima linea rerum

To paint the bare minimum is to be on the verge of indifference to the world; the Puritan retreats to his inner world; the melancholic stands "aloof...a devotee of disenchanted non-pressure [de-pression]...a technician's amoralism" . For the painter of modern life the question becomes how to paint disenchantment?

In the face of a loss of meaning, values, a symbolic order, separation, and emptiness one can turn to despair or one can attempt to mirror the indifference of the cosmos. But the history of mankind shows that such stoicism is not possible and that the intoxication of our sensations and passions usually go hand in hand with an utter indifference to the world; infact, this insatiable desire derives from boredom, just as the pangs of escapism are more acutely felt in a world that has been leveled down. Restlessness and uniformity are inextricably linked. Modern man is caught in a flux between the desire for the most severe order and the most unrestrained spontaneity (and this tension is part of the legacy of the Protestant ethic and perhaps the northern soul: to be all or nothing...perfect humility or the superman).

Technology merely prolongs and extends what has already become a possibility at the level of ideas: the materialistic monism that holds that we are and the universe are essentially matter. This leads to the most terrible claustrohopbia (was colonialism, space travel, the attempt to find an open space, a primal arcadian alterity that transcends the familiar, an escape from bourgeois dullness?). Demonic restlessness since the will is all that there is, the only sign of life, if not intelligence, against the sign of death. The craving for endless sensation, experience. forgetfulness...is this not a sign of our desperation?

If the universe will not be transformed, redeemed, if death is inevitable then indifference to it rapidly shifts from a balanced and calm detachment to existential angst and back again. If there is only death then why act at all? Joy in contingency or nihilism seem to be the only logical conclusions. One must make oneself an artist...the aesthticization of life the only way of enduring sovereign becoming.

"Not knowing or able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves....taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge their, exploring them like large unknown territories."
(Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet')

But the death gives life and is not discontinuity pure and simple; it is a death but only the death of death itself. Death,mortality, which is the essential definiton of our humanity, would in this sense only signify a temprary break in the bond between Christ and the Father (and therefore between us and God); it is precisely at the point of perfect horizontality, the limit of humanity, that the divine appears. Is that not the meaning of the cross?

The great danger seems in extending this point, this moment, to all instants. for what can follow from this is a devaluing of the world...one must be dead to it...the world is only so much dead matter; in such a radical picture the world is either everything or it is nothing: positivism and blind faith are distant cousins...what would it mean to prolong such an attitude or orientation? Is this the 'la' of the muslims?

But such splittings, 'deaths' are, it is argued, part of our necessary make up; the continuation and individation of our lives as well as our growth and advancement rest on the ability to separate ourselves from former lives: birth, childhood, objects we are attracted to. If the religious spirit is, like art, whole-making, consoling, a re-presentation of what is lost, is it not also iconoclastic? Religion as a broken circle? We must learn to give up what we deisre...desire for objects (life) or our attachment to them (it)?

Redemption Songs

Ga'al: Redemption: to free by purchasing back people that have become alien property...to bring out of slavery. Repurchase. To pay back a bond.

Religio: a debt.
yawm-a-din: the Day of Judgement..or when the debts are paid back.

Life is a gift which has to be paid back.


Redemption is the end of a story, when the whole world, nature itself, is redeemed and harmony re-established...a static vision of perfection.

The very structue of life is one of mimetic desire;our very subjectivity is constituted by it; we copy eachother, repeat ourselves. But this necessarily leads to conflict, competition, and anxiety as we desire the same object. Whence the need for a scapegoat (escape goat)...a way of transferring, arbitrarily projecting guilt. A form of catharsis enuses from this ritual cleansing; the establishing of a new beginning and a return to innocence are deeply embedded in our lives. The origin is always the centre of perfection from which we fall.

Christianity is a self-willing sacrifice that ends the chain of sacrifices and victimization; by doing so he reveals the old order of relations and by doing so destroys them. The world, nature, which is alienated, "wounded" is reconciled. We are alientated from God and the very ground of our being. Augustine: is freedom possible, is there a "natural" way out or do we need grace to realise the gravity of our situation? The earliest art-Daniel and the Lion-in the catacombs, cut off from the world of light and public rituals suggests such a transformation, a moral experience that is the starting anew, a wiping away of the slate.

For Redemption to mean anything we, and the world, must be in a fallen state. The ray of hope that is Redemption can only shine if the world is sunk in darkness, if at the very core of our lives -and not contingently-there is a deep pessimism. Faith is destroyed by indifference. By banishing evil have we laso eliminated the possibility of salvation? If we chose to forget death what value can eternal life have? Holbein's picture points to such an indifference, neutrality, horizontality.

The Enlightenment will also try and return to innocence but it has a diffciulty: if man is essentially good, where did evil come from?

But we cannot live with such a lukewarm view of things; neutrality generates or degenerates into all sorts of secular redemption narratives.

At the heart of them is the existential picture: man faced with is own nothingness, always ready to heroically re-create himself, to re-fashion himself. A radical awareness of nothingness, that nothing is given and that nothing persists..when Redemption comes to ful-fill....

Secular redemptions also come to end the story or offer some sort of consolation; they aim to resolve or nullify conflicts and tensions.

Darwinism: the pessimistic acceptance of what "is"; conflict and striving are inherent in the human condition and if so many of the weaker fall by the wayside then that should not trouble us since it is only part of the larger scheme of things. This narrows the distance betwen what"is" and what"ought" to be. Redemption in this sense is an acceptance of radical contingency..a story that ends all other stories.

Marxism/Socialism: a move beyond the curse of labour and wants. Utopia is a re-linking , a re-establishing of 'plenty'..a return to the promised land and freedom from slavery. Revolutionary hope: escape from strife and move to the end of history (and politics); the proletariat is the redeemer of the whole of mankind.

Consumerism: the satiation of desire. A type of fulmilment, gratifiation(but of which self?) If we are defined by what we are not, then might this not be a way out (especially if the distinction betwen reality and apperance, "lower" and "higher" pleasures is now less distinct?)

The problem with desire was that it was laways closely aligned with imagination and, therefore, with infinity. By objectifying desire in tangible goods one could thereby delimit the boundaries of desire. But is this not just a substituition of an endles stream of goods for a boundless, ever-expanding desire? Might not the secret allure of consumerism be that it doesn't , infact, offer, a final redemption?

Freud: the unlocking of tensions/conflict. Redemption must start out with a dark picture of humanity: perversion. But the resolution is only an awareness of this intractable part of our nature and the desire for perfect resolution is itself a symptom of the problem.

So, secular redemptions all (except Marxism) seem to point to a false infinity; our redemption rests in understanding that there is no redemption...that we must give up the curse of looking for meaning; all seem to be tainted by the idea that nothing lasts, by death, precisely. Only the marxists with their utopias really believe that time can be redeemed...and they're all dead.

Religious redemption, in contrast, is rooted in hope, it identifies itself with it. Ours is an age that lives without the sense of transcendence and is truly nailed to the cross where there is only death and discontinuity or dissolution.

For us, like Holbein, is art the only refuge? If so, " Redemption would simply be the discipline of a rigorous technique."

Making Nothing Happen

How to represent that which cannot be represented (a black square: Malevich, an empty space?)?

The visible must always point to the invisible, just as music holds on to silence in its very heart....

How does the word become life? Is Revelation, a 'sending down' , not also a ladder back up? Creation, an image, is a separation and will, therefore, always point to transcendence, to what "is not", but it is also, at the very same time, not nothing, but precisely an image of that reality.

The modern is a search for a space that could contest, oppose, stand in complete alterity to bourgeois hegemony. But it is, itself, enmeshed in it via representation. ....a "preparing the ground for the ruthless incorporation of marginal and underdeveloped states." [the irrational, the rebel, become commoditised].

This is a colonisation of the marginal, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled...a way of disciplining fluidity, rage, of immobolizing energy; to domesticate the 'other', to bring all understanding back to one's own system of self-understanding.

The contradiction of capitalism: capitalism requires an open space, a frontier, one that can supply raw materials and buy its goods; the modern is nothing but this setting up of heirarchies and distinctions.this is the first stage of colonialism, of 'solid modernity', of Protestant 'sobriety' and discipline...modernity as the control of space. But this gives way to the other dimension of capitalism: the need to transform labour into a proletariat and with this will come the most decisive changes: the incorporation of the 'other' into one's midst, the eradication of all boundaries (cultural, political, economic); late modernity is about transgression, equality, a constant making and re-making of oneself, 'liquid modernity'...the 'divine recklessness' of Protestantism.

The world in the image of New York: when time has conquered space then only a singular undifferentiated space remains, a grid , a set of relations; power is diffuse, the centre does not hold and "periphery" and "centre" are interchangeable (this is an image of a religious concept: God is a centre that is everywhere and whose perimeter is nowhere..the modern world could only come on the back of a number of theological insurrections and inversions); the very concept of "limit" loses much of its meaning. In the Empire every man is 'King' and pushpin is as good as poetry...it is the empire of signs and universal equivalence.

More than anything: labour, life, process, are introduced into the public realm (where they will eventually devour it); all that is solid melts into air; from now on it will be time, and those who control her, that hold the power..."time is everything, Man is nothing" (Marx). Art must, in this sense, aspire to transience, to its own wilful destruction for how can art which is 'space' , flatness, the 'timeless', 'presence' , depict movement, life itself? How can it re-present that which eludes it? Is not all pictorial art a "freezing of the music"?

Klee:

The organizing powers have come to need a more convincing account of the bodily, the sensual, the liberated, in order to extend-maybe to perfect-thier colonization of everyday life..."

Collective actions, ritual gestures, shared images of authority, a common symbolic order, jostle uneasily with the needs of individual spontaneity, freedom. How to abstract from the world-this world, any world? How to rekindle that divine spark in this cold universe? The modern turns inwards, the Kingdom lies within...the letter killeth...

But this "second turning inwards" that starts with Descartes is riddled with problems; can there be meaning or understanding that is not social? Can there be a private language?

The disruption of the collective world, 'the given', will allow the world to flow again. Modernity is nothing but the re-discovery of the infinite, of Nature not as 'essence' but as becoming; it is a turning away from the cosmos, a search for 'outer' space....modernity must construct itself as an endless series of images and who is to say if one image in the spectacle is any more real than another? All that matters is the process, the constant breaking up of images (this is the 'nomadic' element in late capitalism); velocity: to leave the social world behind...when one wants process AND judgement.

Modernity, by losing 'the other,' loses the creative tension that has sustained it; appearance ceases to be appearance once the reality behind it is overthrown.

The Unhappy Consciousness.

modernity: the tagic confrontation of self-sameness, the absolute, the unchangeable, the timeless, and the undivided self, order, light, harmony, proportion, "sight", the static with contingency, the fragmentary, music, transience, the dynamic, dissonance, aporia, the endless whirl of difference.One wants to see the stars and feel them, to discover a pattern to life, but also to disrupt uniformities, sameness. ....hide and seek, lost and found. We need mortal thoughts, a timely way of knowing, truth that is incarnated in the body and not just the mind...the word must become flesh....

The "unhappy consciousness" is unable to accept this two-foldedness is its unity; we strive for purity and eternity and detachment or for to be a thing amongst other things that come and pass (essence vs existence, realism vs nominalism); to be or no to be when to be and not to be is closer. Man is suspended between being and nothingness, a donkey with angel's wings; we can never reach nothingness or the divine. Man, the barzakh, is this great amphibious being.

Because of this radical undecidedness he sides with, identifies himself, with the changeable consciousness but he cannot follow negation to its logical end; contingency only derives meaning against the background of an essential nature, difference against sameness, distinction against unity; time against the timeless; that we are finite, that we can think of ourselves as so, only has meaning if there is the infinite..it is the infinite that is placed in us that allows us to think in the first place (Descartes)..I am, therefore I think.

Jackson Pollock: the line doesn't represent objects or delimit a space, not the "binding" of reality or structure but "pure, disembodied energy." This is modernism's worldlessness. Endless difference, American unbound, improvisation as the quintessential american art, Bergson's "pure duration", endless sensation and desire. This is not, perhaps, unrelated to teh growth of capitalism: man defined as having finite resources but infinite wants, happiness as the search for an end that has no end, that is always just out of reach: non-satiation.

Marks, traces that are not to be read as making a subject, but rather as texture of interrruptions, gaps, zig-zags, a-rhythms, and incorrectnesses...the absence of a contiunous psyche from start to finish.

Pollock: " a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion"...a way of divesting oneself of the "I", a form of escape, renunciation, to show something that has a likeness to nothing...a way of being "in" the world so that one does not know one is in it; to be musical, precisely: one is immersed in feeling and there is no confronting 'other' ...Malevich again: the desert.

The attempt, the paradoxical striving to realise the un-formed; to be unfounded, un-found...the desire for openness and a wilderness that is not constrained by forms but in the paintings, is not openness to like emptiness, and might not freedom be too much like confinement, a compulsion?

"something which cannot be recognized as part of the universe is made to represent the universe." Interlacement and interminling negates "belonging of things in the picture to any one conceptual space- to any one part of the world or imagining of Nature.

Everything is connected to everything else.

But once we make a mark can we ever escape metaphor?

Discontinuity, aimlessness, abrupt reversals, dissonance,...do not lead to endlessness or their own dissolution; instead, dissonance is the truth of Harmony. Harmony is unattainable.

To cancel Totality by the criss-cross of meanings.

Old Age

I rush by, coffee in one hand, a list of books in the other; a thousand images (people?) whirl past me and my head is heavy with thoughts...why did Odysseus refuse immortality, is this a metropolis of the ethical vacuum, would it have been beter to gamble all and lost, than to have never ventured anything in the first place....

I see an old man walking ...each step an achievement, a huge expending of energy and effort: two steps forward, one step back; the curve of his back a near-perfect semi-circle, as if he were bowing before a king, in absolute isolation, alone in the universe, alone before the Alone. To focus one's attention on a single detail of his being is obscene: I must move to the universal....

I see many such old people, stumbling, shuffling through the streets, caught in their own time, their own familiar pace of things; the world passes them by, the world has passed them by. I wonder if people think the same when they see me. Close to death, they have already disappeared, are in the process of disappearing. Only they know what it is to "die before one dies". We turn our faces, avert our gaze, we must expunge these grim reminders of our mortality from our thoughts. To "think", to approach the calm seas of the universal, is a way of doing so.

Life only seems bearable to me when one succeeds in avoiding it.

But ethics must be more than an attention to particularities and contingency and less than a timeless thought; a spontaneous gesture is neither 'thought' nor 'action'... I slow down, just enough so that he doesn't think that everyone is rushing past him....he looks up and I see the piercing blue of his eyes. He smiles like a child. If old age is the closing of the circle then it meets its origin again, and that is pure innocence. I see that goodness is fragile, like a blue flower, like old age....

Thought: to describe the world from the outside-coldly, factually, mechanically, transcendantally. Or the bare details of a life, the essentials, historical being; the "person" is the cross where these intersect, he is the space and time where "beauty" and "idea" mix...

Not soon, as late as the
Approach of my ninetieth year
I felt a door opening in me
And I entered

the clarity of early morning...

Moments from yesterday
and from centuries ago,
A sword blow, the painting of eyeleashes before a mirror
of polished metal, alethal musket shot, a caravel
Saving its hull against a reef-they dwell in us
Waiting for fulfillment.

We are not angels; this is the blessing and the burden of mortality. And perhaps we should note that it is the immortals who are always "falling" in love with the mortals ( which is to say: the desire to fall into time) while it is we who hold back our hand when the golden cup of immortality is offered to us...

Let me run, let me run, and never find
(Shah Latif)

Acceptance of the ineviability of the cards that fate has dealt one is compatible with the most terrible sense of regret for the fact that things had to be the way they are; in fact, to consider the former is to have only an outward understanding of time; the human angle, which encompasses both, is of a higher order.

pigeon

Please do not feed
the pigeons.
They are a health hazard
and a nuisance.

I saw this sign, tucked away in the corner, at Acton town station. This is one of those places that is at the end of the world, and that is still populated by people in 1950's thick coats, old- world grimaces, and one that is permanently bathed in sunshine, as if it was always a sunday afternoon there. It is better to not stop there but quickly pass through, convincing yourself that such places do not really exist...

That someone should say "please" only confirms that this is England. Note: it is not "do not"...not a command but neither a request; a thousand years of Englsih tradition are summarised in those words: the law is binding but it is a tradition, a set of customs and precedents and common sense behaviour, not a directive nor a moral imperative.

What troubles her, though, is the use of the words "they are"; this has the ring of metaphysical certainty about it. Can one be so sure that ALL pigeons are a nuisance or is it only these ones that have reached the end of the line, the retrogrades that have escaped the centre? It is as if one wanted to define the very essnce of pigeonhood in terms of this one characteristic (and let us not forget that they may have many other traits as well). surely it would have been better to say : "they may be a nuisance"?

I imagine an elderly Benthamite figure sitting there, calculating the exact costs and benefits of allowing the pigeons their freedom; one has to weigh this against the "nuisance value" they impose on us humans; the problem of making inter-personal comparisons of utility fade before the inter-species one!

My attention turns elsewhere. I see my shadow clearly outlined against the brilliant light; with my black hat and long coat the shadow comes to resemble a chess piece or a Russian priest against an infinite white landscape. Never have I seen myself so clearly as I did then....