Europe

There are only two important things in life: to remember.

And the second?

I forget.


Some people find 'the West'-if such a thing (still) exists-rather superficial. Perhaps this is because having reached a level of material development her concerns and problems appear to be to relatively trivial ones. There is surely some truth to this. Not having to face the constant pressures of life or overt political co-ercion, are all problems then reduced to a question of the value of existence itself, to a lack of coherence between the inward and the outward? Not just the de-centering of the self but the very questioning of the self and its relation to the world? (and that we use the word 'self' rather than 'being' is indicative, perhaps, of our inability to derive pleasure from living-in-the-world). Hedonists, like fundamentalists, don't look at the world in the right way, at the right angle.

Roll up, roll up.

Choose your villains. Capitalism and the market with its undue emphasis on negative liberty, on alienation and its unnecessarily 'thin concept' of man as a fundamentally deliberative and purposive being, abstracted from any political role, from any social context, from any place? The market is a principle, not a place. A principle of dealing with the needs of strangers. 'Needs' is misleading..desires. Like a mirror, bourgeoisie man can, it is argued, take on any form. What is identity but a temporary congealing of the flow of images. An 'undetermined animal'. There is no role for a conception of nature or essence or a teleological end. Instead: all is process. And if that is so what is life but a series of fragmentary moments, a series of atomistic impressions? From this has followed the most terrible pessimism: what binds man, then? Who is my brother? If there is only self-interest, a war of all against all, if 'pushpin is as good as poetry' then can there be a serious answer to this or is the answer: the State, fear, Power. Blood and Soil.

Can power be exercised only on those who are made 'subjects'? No, it is not just the inscribing of our lives in the mechanisms of state power and its calculus that holds us. To say that we must be uprooted first is, no doubt true. But there is aslo the more extreme form that exerts power by creating an image of the stranger, the out-law (here by image one must include what we conceive with our hands and minds). The Enemy must remain as different from 'us' as is imaginable, as is possible. Do not look into his eyes; the orthodox must seem him as radically distinct, without profile even. More than that: he is staged as such. Cavafy: how we need those barbarians!

But to see things in such a light is to tell only half the story. For this quest for distant horizons, the wild blue yonder, is not merely the expression of a desire to escape from bourgeois conformity. Nor is the shedding of the past, of worn-out forms, this self-willed amnesia, necessarily a sign of hatred for all that is 'given'; it can also be thought of as a grand attempt to achieve lightness. One must not seek out patterns too keenly. In a supreme act of lovingkindness, one must learn how to forget.