Date: Sun, 01 Feb 1998 22:51:20 +0100
From: Henk van Tuijl <Henk.van.Tuijl-AT-net.HCC.nl>
Subject: Re: ME's new article (3)


Michael Eldred wrote:
>Such quietness is associated with the awe before God, because the Judean-Christian God is awe-ful. It has struck me repeatedly in Buddhist and Taoist temples I have visited that these are not awe-ful places; that the indigenous visitors to these temples have a relaxed, but nonetheless serious, relationship with the divine.

Coming back to Buber:
"Alle Menschen kommen Gott irgendwo [...] nah [...]. Aber der Jude wagt
es, weltverhaftet, welteingebannt zu Gott in der Unmittelbarkeit des Ich
und Du zu stehen [...]" (_Reden ueber das Judentum_).
Roughly: All people approach God in one way or another. Only the Jew
dares, emprisoned and in exile in the world, to stand in the immediacy
of the I-and-Thou relation to God. 

Michael: 
>The quiet naming of the gods or the other seems to have to do with sheltering that to which we are closest, as if in the very closeness the other necessarily remains veiled. The abyss cannot have a spotlight shone upon it.

Besides, as you make very clear in your article, there is - in the end -
always the metaphysical isolation. The difference with the other modes
of being is the awarenes of this isolation - as the whispering and
complaining shows.  

Michael:
>Celan:
>>>"Du hoersts regnen
>>>und meinst, auch diesmal
>>>sei's Gott."
>>
>>>"You hear it raining
>>>and think that this time too
>>>it is God."
>The first half of the above-quoted poem runs as follows:
> 
>"Die Entsprungenen
>Graupapageien
>lesen die Messe
>in deinem Mund."
> 
>"The escaped
>grey parrots
>read mass
>in your mouth."

>So, you parrot mass and think that God is everywhere. 


If God is Time, as Heidegger says, there is no reason to suppose that He
is not - potentially - everywhere. 

Michael: 
>This image of relgious ritual that has worn itself out in mindless repetition is far from the godly dimension of time into which the poets reach up from their lonely summits. Time is the dimension of history, and the "creative ones" persist and endure in their loneliness in opening an other historical timespace in which time constellates an other historical world. Is god then the personification of the dimension from which history comes towards us?

I have the impression that there a new historical world is discovered
when one hears it raining and thinks that this time too it is Time. It
is like Kurtag's Opus 27, just a simple scale going downwards - on and
on -, and yet...

It is as you say, Michael:
>The creative ones [e.g. Celan] have the job ("Auftrag", GA39:58) of opening up this historical time through word, music, painting, sculpting, acting... History arrives from the gaping chaos of time and needs the creative ones to give it definition.

Kindest regards,
Henk


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