Chain of Sighs

All truth is on the boundaries.
--Tillich.

I don't know why, but I sometimes feel there's something extreme in modern western sensibilites, always this outreaching, this desire to "find oneself," to cross frontiers and seek exhaustion, to never be still in an empty room (Bacon!), to colonize and name the 'exotic'. I think Levinas was right here: Escape!

There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human:the human of the living humus. About the real blue-eyed person there is something abstract, elemental. Brown-eyed people are, as it were, like the earth, which is tissue of bygone life, organic, compound. In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice , air , space, but not humanity. Brown-eyed people are people of the old world: 'Allzu menschlich'. Blue-eyed people tend to be too keen and abstract...like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. He cannot belong to humanity. Cannot.

Of course, there are fanatics everywhere, always have been. But is there something peculiar (perhaps a heightened intensity) in this desire to destroy the past, all that is solid (George Steiner writes, to my mind persuasively, about how the destruction of the Jewish people was an attempt to obliterate those who could remember God). Modern Man, the great alchemist, wanted to control time and has ended up being devoured by it: Time is everything, Man is nothing (Marx). This 'fanatic of disaster' wants the heart to break, loves to pick up the pieces, add our moments to time's. From now on, Isaiah Berlin writes, all truth is in history, is of our own making.

What is this fanaticism of the Right and the Left, this shrill voice that cannot abide imperfections, impurity..that must make the world over, 'do people in'? A thought-tormented age, a tortured soul. And they want to convince us that this is deep! Insomina, lament, suffering, the heritage of despair, hysteria (Luther, Durer's eyes), boundless energy, restlessness, melancholic brooding, the heirs of torments, a chain of sighs, anarchical souls, a consciousness of ourselves that is incarnate: Blut und Boden. History is Biology.

But what can become of all this searching? If there is 'no there, there', nothing 'north of the future', then what is one left with: an endless and emaningless process, a 'bare forked animal', with it's spasmodic reflexes:The nervous system is everything.

To revolt against all that is 'given', the hegemony of essence, contemplation, the static 'East' with its naivete, its childlike 'wisdom'. Our disease: centuries of attention to time (and appearances..the fever of the visible). Fashion, surfaces,the four seasons, not universality or eternity. And the neurotic, the obsessive, acrobats straining at the extreme limits of themselves, the mad are taken as the only really interesting people. We can only understand ourselves at the extremites of ourselves. But at that extremity there is no understanding. There are only 'brute facts'. And this mirrors, in a strange way, the bewilderment of the Sufis just as the subconscious can mimic the supraconscious...

Time will heal everything.
Time is the wound.

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves.

But there are no things-in-themselves, only surface illusions, only a rebellion, a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it. A rebel without a cause. And this, we are told, is our crowning glory, our very freedom! Doubt everything, analyse everything. The diabolical is another word for division, for time. Every subject is a break with the quietude of Unity. Well, yes, but do you only see things from the perspective of discontinuity!

To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence.

~~~~~

Now, all this is very exciting I guess, if you're a teenager, but I find it so predictable, so lacking in innocence, charm and good humour, good manners! I guess you have to go through Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud nowadays to be considered intelligent, to see the obvious falseness of religion, that "life is meaningless". Yes, all very well Bacon old chap, but pass the tea whilst you're at it.

As Marley sings,

Don't let them fool you
Or even try to school you, Oh! No
We've got a mind of our own
So go to hell if what you're thinkin' isn't right
Love would never leave us alone
In the darkness there must come out to light