ELSEWHERE

If I write, it’s only to take revenge on myself and upon every “truth” I’ve happened upon, every position I’ve taken in my life. If I write, it’s to reaffirm that the truth lies elsewhere.

I’ll write to admit the insurmountable inanity of any search for the truth, to attest to my vagabond hopelessness. I’ve tried out the systems, climbed the heights, seen it all at its flaring point of incandescence and logic and inspiration time and time again– only to “decline”, only to descend back into the chaos my optimistic climb and communication feigned to absolve. To attest to my root heart– cynical and human– to fall into chaos yet again: there’s my folly, my life, my destiny.

Indeed, what evidence could I give to the void in me whose plenitude is rich enough to annihilate me and the whole of history along with it– in order that I myself might be alive? If redemption be tied to a sense of this void, to the fleeting passage of some nothing, some passion outstripping all temporal existence from within it, then the only way to accede to its remarkableness is to concede that everything having to do with it, everything that would articulate it, ends in disappointment, embarrassment, and deceit. There is only the active passage, coming from elsewhere, that suspends us.

A whole methodology and pathos of anticipation runs aground here: our errors no less than our successes might open upon this vast night where our ego, achieving the fullness of TIME, resolutely falls out of any material richness, runs headlong into its own principle dis-appearance. If I try to write about it without disappearing myself, I’m still myself and miss the experience totally; when I experience it, I myself go missing and have nothing to write.  But even if I can give no material evidence of this “redeeming experience,” I can submit this inert bank of words that proves by its bankruptcy that the experience spoken of lies elsewhere. And so while the words do not come near it, perhaps we do, we who are no more here than a man in his corpse.

A freedom-from… whose essence lies inexorable, whose contours can only be traced negatively by the words, events, and monuments of our life: such a freedom, pure as our suffering, is never ours, never subsists as such but is recaptured somehow, by surprising and dispossessing. A redemption that burns up being itself; not death, but life itself: an essential ahistoricality I cannot properly pursue that yet brings me into contact most authentically with myself— principle of decay and beauty, principle of TIME.

It is this upsurge of vital resources disabused of every procreative and progressive ethos that dawns upon us in a comprehensive way when we are disarmed by our own volatile becoming in the singular, which calls to us from elsewhere: “become– yes be— who you are…”