There is a malaise that grows in the soul after it has nursed itself for years upon diverse thought. We have cliches for this state of affairs. Ignorance is bliss. The adult is blind to what the child saw. That famous ancient quasi-nihilistic tract, Ecclesiastes, puts it like this: “Much wisdom can result in much sorrow, and those who increase their knowledge also increase their grief.”
One way to account for this is the horrifying discrepancy—witnessed not only in the world abroad but also, most cruelly, in oneself—between what knowledge teaches and what is done in practice; between what seems like it should (or could) be done and what is actually done. If you spend any time with the library of liberators and mystics, it quickly becomes obvious that the problem is not that humanity has failed to articulate its potential perfection to itself. We have the ideal (many ideals) stored in endless tomes. The trouble is that it appears impossible to realize them, save perhaps by the rare specimen with whom grace and conditioning conspired. But, by and large, instead of realizing these ideals, we go on dreaming about them. We study and analyze them. We proclaim them to others. We worship and critique them. But still we really have no idea how to live them, let alone get everyone else to. So our efforts become compensation for our own hypocrisy and progressive disillusionment. We dial it down. We settle into ordinary runs, ruts, reruns—we lose track of our death coming and the “ownmost possibility” it conceals. We experience with watery nostalgia the time when we really believed—believed this “ownmost possibility” could be realized, enacted, impactful. Unless we commit the worst crime against the ideal—to believe we are on the “right track”…—, we are left with only debt, bad conscience, lost time, fractured dreams, countless seedbeds unwatered, riveting paths left unpursued, and the existential confusion which sets in when beauty’s strength seems to have lost its ground definitively to ugliness, mediocrity, weakness and torpor.
There is another option, however. Perhaps it is not that we alone are at fault—though indeed, we will never have done a fraction of what we could have done; we will never have “loved as we ought.” But perhaps this dynamic of discrepancy is necessary to the ideal and the increase of its extension, to the breadth of the goad of total perfectibility—that the nearer one comes to it (or to the form of it one had in mind to pursue), the more it starts to haze and shimmer down, like a phantom scooting off at the edge of the visual field, or a figure on a screen whose bulb is flickering, burning out.
The richer and more perennial the ideal, the more not only its pursuit but also the ideal itself recedes from grasp and graspability. Whatever of it could be formulated dies for being merely that, a formula. And so gradually we come to feel like whatever we say or think about it is—as Aquinas remarked upon his immense theological output at the end of his life—nothing but straw.
I am ready, of course, to admit that my words here represent only a peculiar, idiosyncratic state of my own soul, path, and history. That I should not be putting it in such universalistic tones, as if this perspective is the only one to which anyone sufficiently tried and tired by thought will arrive. And I must concede (just look at me now!) that to meditate on it like this is simply yet another link in the chain: another fateful attempt at reanimation.
But that is what writing is—erasing whatever was previously written; reanimation from the translinguistic state, from matter in the incomprehensible nuance of its presence, from the onrushing awe of being-or-not, from wonder at the steadfast efflorescence of life..
Writing is: to be carried away.
Writing, for me, all my life: it has had a curiously corrosive effect on my ability to sustain a trajectory (in thought, in practical life, in a text). The nearer I came to mastering (or seeming to master) an idiom—by that I mean the way of expressing an idea or ideal, a way of phrasing a form of thinking, of connecting words to the real—the more it came to lose its power, its appeal, its ability to orient. Understanding exhausts what gets understood and makes understanding it worth less, until one feels forced to jump tracks entirely, take a wholly new tack or perhaps revive an old tack in a new way. The iterations and their failures spin a gossamer web—sleek with splendor but, in the end, flimsy as a spider’s trap.
I have—to put it romantically—risen from the ashes of that consumption far more times than I could count; I register it in the phases of a life, stages of belief, stylistic periods, affective tonalities and modes of poetic experimentation which litter the wasteland of my—romantically again—”archive.” And as my erstwhile companion on this way, Derrida, would say: the archive itself is only ashes. Works of art are the “ashes of a vital praxis,” another friend, Agamben, says. You see what little “ideal” I have left, as the concrete aspirations show their sticking points and lose their spice: keep on writing, keep the fire alive, watch over it no matter what it consumes. Even if it means arson on your own house, strike the match again and again. In reality, that’s all you ever did. You never thought. You never said. You never believed. You burned…
This is why, when I began thinking of my graduate school work, I placed it under the heading, “Disbelief in Idiom.” There is a fantastic line in John Ashbery’s work which is tied to me like a tow line, though I can’t for the life of me find its location. It says, basically: There was nothing that could come to answer what you asked. There was nothing, finally, that you could live by. For a writer this means something doubly difficult: there is no voice, no statement, no substance, no style, that will prop you up or last. Nowadays I am working on Lyotard’s concept of the “minimal soul” (anima minima): it is a soul (I have his book Postmodern Fables before me; it is his fault I’m writing all this tonight), it is a soul “without continuity, without memory, and without mind (neither images nor ideas).” This is the “pinch” of a singularity—but it is not the singularity of a subject, a body, a person, or whatever. None of those monads of memory suit what is left here. I hate that word, singularity, for all its pathos (another empty ideal, breaking its promises). That idea, “there is nothing to live by,” means you have only the material instant, without duration, without inscription, without support. The upsurge pure-impure—of the aistheton. Das Rätsel ist reinentsprungenes, says Hölderlin. It never “gets off the ground.” It never gets endowed with a sense of destiny or mission. Inside the flame of that poverty, there is only the semblance of a time slipping away too fast to stop dreaming; a delirious “push” of reanimation which feels like all it has left is a reckless abandon to intimacies with friends and the nonsense of “poetry”; and alongside this, the revival of an obscure, nameless, gnawing debt which has never stopped growing, which swells in severity to the exact proportion that one’s ideas and ideals are consumed in its ire—for underneath all this is a kind of rage for happening, skeptical if anything has or will happen, yet wanting it, something, anything, to be so: for the wrath of time to also have been its glory.
This is—I am only reporting honestly how I feel—true despite how much I do remember, and with so much gratitude. It would ruin me if these words made me sound ungrateful for the time of my life. Absolutely not. I know the inner meaning of what Adorno says, that the only link between consciousness and happiness is gratitude. And really, isn’t it better to be disillusioned and in debt than a foolish and falsely acquitted believer? My “disbelief in idiom”—cause for my malaise and for my inspiration to keep writing, when I do, when I can—it may be a sorrow and a grief, but this does not mean it takes me far away from the God (if you’ll please excuse my Greek). What disbelief makes it hard to remember is that it too is a gift. The debt that never ends, that only worsens, must lie in direct proportion to the reanimation by fire which the soul needs.
The sun which sets on destiny, and the landscape of “creaturely nothingness” which rises darkly on that horizon of abandonment—without even the space and time to experience it—these must be the necessities to which thought leads itself, to remain or become not merely thought but life. Reflection gives way to an instant of presence without any consolation, which promises nothing but an attitude for the impossible Thing to work. Grace is to fall into that work, as spontaneous and planless as the Plotinian One, yet crepit and insubstantial as formless matter. What a track that befalls there! It is too grandiose to say it is “no one’s,” even if it is clearly not mine and, moreover, means moment-to-moment expropriation. It is Lacoue-Labarthes’ “phrase”—that is all that’s left to us here, in the eternally waning day of the Occident and its ideals, where the new beginning is only ever just this: to begin yet again with the debt and its flame.
Apr 17, 2025
Atlanta
fragilekeys 