Subject: Re: Romantic  Turn
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 08:14:48 PST


Greetings Don,

>Less a 'totality of beings' than of 'becoming' then?  See: 
>
>    http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~dilger/testimony/cydney/cheshire.jpeg
>
>Again you mention sleep.  Psychosis, neuroses; what is feared,
>repressed, censored?  Do you mean awl sublimations?  Non-conceptual 
art,
>or with Bataille: awl art, politics, and science?

A Middle English pronunciation of "awl" would give us 'owl':

     "In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original
     openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings --
     and not nothing" 
          (Heidegger, 'What is Metaphysics?' _Basic Writings_ p. 103).

And so the owl, with eyes wide open, is awake even in a time of sleep, 
and experiencing what?  The anxiety of the slipping away of beings? Or 
the anxious vigilance of a coming meeting with beings?  Is the 
penetrating "awl" any different from the luminous eyes of an owl?  Or is 
true awakening more like the "thirst for the infinite," displayed by 
ravaging hounds in the dead of night (see _Maldoror_, chant premier)?  

>What is it like not to sleep?  What's the difference between being
>asleep, becoming awake, and being awake?  

Vigilance is being attuned to the murmuring beyond nothingness, which 
is, as I said, the immediate and present symptom of the Beyond-being.

     "What is it that the call has come to communicate to men?
     Its content is determined by its aim of 'awakening' ....
     The first effect of the call is of course the awakening
     from the deep slumber of the world.  Then, however, the
     relation of the one awakened to his situation as revealed
     in the call and to the demands made upon him can be of
     different kinds ..." 
          (Hans Jonas, _The Gnostic Religion_ pp. 80, 86). 

>"I remember _badly_, more and more badly."  

The memory of the primal moment of vigilance is memory of the call.  But 
the pull of beings in the world, the lure, drives us "forward" into the 
world, and makes us neither thirst for the infinite, nor turn our eyes 
to the wisdom of the night's opening -- rather, we engage in a being 
toward death.  We remember the call and the primal moment of thrownness 
badly, but we still remember; evidence of this is to be found in 
sublimated references to resurrection in our discourse, although the 
immortality to be gained through a turning about is not one of 
resurrection, nor even of this world.  

  ..........

>Sublimation is but a 'symptom,' you say, but also an 'act' of the
>'appearance' of 'a greater Being beyond?  Shown through nada?  Or
>nothingness itself?

     "You noticed, one does not write luminously on a dark
     field; the alphabet of stars alone, is thus indicated,
     sketched out or interrupted; man pursues black on white.
     This pleat of somber lace which retains the infinite woven
     by a thousand, each according to the thread or the 
     prolongation, its secret unknown, assembles distant
     interlacings where there sleeps some luxury to take 
     account of -- a ghoul, a knot, some foliage -- and to present.

     With the indispensable nothing of mystery, which remains,
     expressed little" (Mallarme, _Quant au livre_) ....

>It would be sooo Romantic to make a turn!  Wouldn't it?

Quite, and especially a re-turn, expressed as the resurrection of what?


.... chaos, the 'canniest' of ghosts,

Edward

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