Strange dream last night. Lots of black crows waiting aimlessly under some dark trees. Large, dark fruit-blackberries-had fallen to the ground but the floor was covered with blood and I knew immediately they were flesh, not fruit, and that this was a scene of death. Of course, this was just a remembrance of the haunting image from "strange fruit". Of course.
Mulling aimlessly around for a book to read at Borders. Zizek, who does my head in, or Agamben. Then, by chance, I come across a book, Radical Hope.
But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. "Besides", he added sorrowfully, " you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away."
What is it for history to exhaust itself, for there to be no more meaning or structure against which one's life would make any sense? The Reservations are like Frinton-on-the-sea: huge waiting grounds..waiting for death to overcome you..like a black bird....
Does history itself, happenings, come to an end or is this only a subjective feeling of the Crows: as if to say, this seems like an end for us, what else could there be? We must put questions of psychology to one side. What if the Crow Chief's statement is true, what if this is a question of ontology and what if he is not just nostalgic for a vanished past but a witness to the end of experience, to the death of a way of life? The last spokesman of a disappearing world can only give testimony to the last moments.
A necessary diversion: Cavell on Kierkegaard 'Authority and Revelation':
The concept of authority [and Revelation] has been entirely forgotten in our confused age. We are not even sure what it means to be obedient any more. How can we once again get a clarity about certain dogmatic concepts and an ability to use them.
Luther's problem was to combat a foreign institution motivated politically or economically, but Kierkegaard's problem is that the mind itself has become political and economic...Luther's problem was to combat false definitions of religious categories, but Kierkegaard has to provide definition for them from the very beginning...the problem is that no one remembers what a promise is, nor has the authority to accept one.
The question being addressed here is: have words lost their force, have we lost the very ability to understand certain concepts...whether anything any longer could conceivably count for us as a revelation?
There is a dialectical shift in our understanding of concepts depending on the contexts in which they are embedded. We can talk of a qualitative shift when we move from "immanent" to "transcendent" contexts. [This mirrors Eckhart when he says that we cannot attribute Being to God and man in the same way].
Kierkegaard describes what the life of a man will look like which calls for the description, which can only be understood in terms of-which ( he sometimes puts it) is lived in Christian categories. A man's life; not a striking experience here and there, or a pervasive mood or a particular feeling or set of feelings. As if to say: in that life, and for that life, the Christian categories have their full, mutually implicating meaning, and apart from it they may have any or none.
"This night thy soul shall be required of thee"; know what they mean not just in some sense, but know what they mean in a sense we may wish to call heightened. We may know or understand them even if we cannot explain them..that we use such words on specific occasions is itself an indication that they are understood.
"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life"---Wittgenstein.
When a form of life can no longer be imagined, its language can no longer be understood...to understand an utterance religiously you have to be able to share its perspective. (In these ways, speaking religiously is like telling a dream). There seems to be no reason not to believe that, as a given person may never occupy this stage [of life] , so a given age , and all future ages, may as a whole not occupy it-that the form will be lost from men's lives altogether.
"Most men live in relation to their own self as if they were constantly out, never at home.."out" in a foreign land..spiritually and religiously understood, perdition consists in journeying into a foreign land, in being "out". " ---Kierkegaard.
One may want to say: A human being can be a complete enigma to himself ....because he does not know why he lives as he does., what the point of his activity is; he understands his words but is foreign to his life.
Some are alienated not just from society but from the lives common to their times; which is perhaps the same as seeing their time as alienated from its past, to say that forms are broken, that time itself has come to a stop...nothing happened.
In such circumstances it is easy to fall back into silence or the absurd. Is there anything left to say and even if there was, who would understand us?
The thing we must look for,in each case, is the man who, contrary to appearance, and in spite of all, speaks....
[hans Jonas: after auschwitz;]
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