He’d whinged most of his life until he realised there was a difference between whingeing and suffering, Kierkegaard’s passive and active suffering — but what was ‘active suffering’? It sounded so old-fashioned, didn’t it? Medieval gloom, they’d call it. Romantic kitsch. Christian nonsense. Maybe the difference lay in the degree of sincerity with which you suffered. Maybe it was like the Samurai’s ability to prepare for death. Already he was way out of his depth, of course. To prepare for death properly, to see death in life and death as part of life. Like the Samurai? The Samurai who was undefeatable even in defeat, who stared Death in the face? Embarrassing in this day and age, wasn’t it? Absurdly anachronistic. Laughable. Ripe for comedy. In this age of Jung’s dissociation and inexorable opposites, this age with Jung’s problems but without his solutions, which would have disgusted the Samurai, if they ever existed, would have disgusted Kierkegaard even more violently than he was disgusted with his own time. He himself couldn’t judge either way, with his kitsch and his stupidity. What difference did active or passive suffering make to him, happily stuffing his face and watching sitcoms? Where was the bronze serpent of life, Moses’ fiery snake that healed the snakebites in the desert? Nowhere to be seen unless it was invisible, working unseen like they once said of God’s finger. But mostly it felt like the end of whatever Great Cycle the world was in — the Iron Age, wasn’t it, Kali yuga? — a degenerate age whingeing and backsliding into the End Times, out of control, until the Great Clock would click over and by some immense natural law begin a new Golden Age of Truth and Calm. Would ‘active suffering’ help usher in the Golden Age? Would it make any difference?
-
Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
-
Kafka
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Categories
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it’s lonely here,
there’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that’s an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
You don’t know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I’m the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
but love’s the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It’s over, it ain’t going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder
Things are going to slide …
There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You’ll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin’
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby:
it is murder
Things are going to slide …
When they said REPENT REPENT …
– Leonard Cohen, ‘The Future’
Give me back my broken night
my mirrored room, my secret life
it’s lonely here,
there’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
that’s an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
and stuff it up the hole
in your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
give me Stalin and St Paul
I’ve seen the future, brother:
it is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant
You don’t know me from the wind
you never will, you never did
I’m the little jew
who wrote the Bible
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
but love’s the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It’s over, it ain’t going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder
Things are going to slide …
There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You’ll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson
and the white man dancin’
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St Paul
Give me Christ
or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby:
it is murder
Things are going to slide …
When they said REPENT REPENT …
– Leonard Cohen, ‘The Future’