When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?
---W.H. Auden
Time is the great healer.
What if it is time that inflicts the wounds?
----from Wings of Desire
From Octavio Paz's 'Double Flame':
Alienation: we are absent from our true selves, other beings, phantoms, inhabit our shells. Are we what we imagine ourselves to be? Sometimes we 'catch ourselves', and other times we are 'besides ourselves,' or we convince ourselves by saying 'I was not quite myself' . Who were we in those times?"
The Judeo-christian concept devalued nature and transformed it into an object..At the same time it broke the organic relation between man and the polis. Lastly, modern reason generated excision."
Excision: "having placed spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and understanding, freedom and necessity in opposition, excision finally encompassed all oppositions within one: absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. "
Given alienation can one look to the state as a way of resolving the tensions? "Excision is not healed by time but by something or someone representing non time."
A human being is what he seeks, what he desires. Even when we finally catch up with ourselves we move on, separating himself again, desiring some new future. We are created restless. Man is the child of time. Will love, then, be an object out of time or someone that time itself brings forth?
Cracks: there are moments, but only moments, when the dichotomies melt away: subject/object, I/you, now /forever. Some have called this Revelation, others love...
"The beloved is then both terra incognita and the house we were born in." We are strangers, we have never left this land. All is new, all is old.
Hegel: ' In love life discovers itself in itself. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.' Living is continual separation, a series of deaths, of falls. Gravity and grace.
Breton: The intersection of two series-chance (or fate) and our own subjectivity or desire. 'Objective chance,' a 'necessary accident', is a form of outer necessity that opens a path into the unconscious'. We are determined by what is outside our will (and knowledge) and are magnetically drawn to that space where the beloved will appear. What, then , of free will? The most random of events is then invested with the most significance. As if the whole meaning of our existence would have been something else had there been a slight displacement of events or their timing. And if this is so, might it not be that the most trivial of events can lead to an unraveling of the thread as well?
We seek the completion of a pattern that we are dimly aware of. But in another sense what we desire above all is an open space that we could not possibly have imagined or foreseen. Love is blind.
'Objective chance' creates a literally magnetized space: the lovers, like sleepwalkers possessed of second sight, wander about, meet each other.' We stumble, are at a loss for words. Some things are written in the stars, but they require our complicity as well, for there can be no compulsion in such matters...we are bound and free, and that means you, and that means me.
Drift, Autumn, drift;
fall, colours, where you will
4 comments:
It's important to know when to cut, when to paste...
the black sun is really black here. I hope everything is well (and that the old cinemmon rolls regain their magic power :-).
take care,
R.
oh you shouldn't have taken off the text, it was dark but beautiful, as always. anyway you are right, I don't know where and when to cut, except for my photographs, and sometimes not even there :-)
and this is another post I feel the urge to quote on my blog... do you like Breton's Nadja then? so you must like Cortazar too, I mean Rayuela, it is all about "le hasard objectif" and also - paradoxically - our attempts at challenging it, making it happen. here are the famous beginning lines: "Would I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont des Arts, or leaned over the iron rail looking at the water. It was quite natural for me to climb the steps to the bridge, go into its narrowness and over to where La Maga stood. She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste. [...] We did not go around looking for each other, but we knew that we would meet just the same. Oh, Maga, whenever I saw a woman who looked like you a clear, sharp pause would close in like a deafening silence, collapsing like a wet umbrella being closed."
and the feeling that we are always strangers here, yes, I know what you mean. One of my favourite poems of all time contains this fabulous line (Heidegger has a very beautiful comment on this): Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden, which would be "the soul is something foreign (alien) on earth". Trakl.
hello, roxana.
no, haven't read the stuff you mention.
this was from paz's book, and so i'm only quoting from it..well, by and large, that is.
orr?
salaams,
b.
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