I do not need any hope or any promise to believe that God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience; I have touched it. What I know of it through actual contact is so far beyond my capacity of understanding and gratitude that even the promise of future bliss could add nothing to it for me; since for human intelligence the addition of two infinites is not an addition.
— Weil, letter, 1942 (tr. Craufurd)
Comments Off on I do not need any hope
Posted in Simone Weil
I guess there are just two things I wanted to talk about besides language. One is the emphasis on being. Let’s just start with this: here we are, you and I, together. What brought us here now? The most fundamental preconditions for each of us to be here now are, first, that anything is at all, second, that such beings as human beings exist, and third, that each of us here actually exists and is in this room right here now. These ontological miracles are required for you and I to be here together. Existential thought and practice counsels us to remember and hold near the awareness that it need not be so, and that that it is so is the wonder of all wonders. I consider this one of the greatest strengths of existential psychotherapy in general, and Daseinsanalysis in particular, namely their steady gaze at the miracle of being at all.
Comments Off on These ontological miracles
Posted in Heidegger
I wonder whether we will recognize it once more?
Hölderlin’s poetry is a destiny for us. It is waiting for the moment when the mortals will respond to it.
What does Hölderlin’s poetry say? Its crucial word is: the holy.
This word speaks about the flight of the gods. It says that the gods, who have fled, are saving us until we are inclined and able to dwell near them. This site is the proper place of being at home. Therefore, it remains necessary to prepare for the sojourn in this nearness. Thus we take the first step on the path that leads us there, where we respond properly to the destiny that is Hölderlin’s poetry. In this way we arrive only at the place of the poetic word [Wortort] in which ‘the god of gods’ perhaps appears.
For on its own, no human calculation and design [Machen] can bring forth a turning [Wende] in the world’s present condition. Especially not because human design is already formed by this very condition of the world and has fallen prey to it. How then could it still gain control over it?
Hölderlin’s poetry holds a destiny for us. It is waiting for the moment when we mortals will respond to it. The response leads the way towards a coming near the place of the gods, who have fled; that means into the place of light, which saves us.
Yet, how should we recognize and remember all this? By listening to Hölderlin’s poetry.
[…]
The first guiding word reads:
‘Everything is intimately interrelated [innig].’
This means: One is intimately appropriated [vereignet] to the other, but in such a way that each thereby remains in its own proper domain: gods and men, earth and heaven. Intimate interrelatedness [Innigkeit] does not mean a merging and effacing of differences. Intimate interrelatedness means the belonging together of the unfamiliar, the sway of strangeness, and the claim of reserve [Scheu].
The second guiding word is a question:
‘How do I render thanks?’
Thanking is the awe-inspiring, reverential, accepting remembrance [Andenken] of what was granted, and it is only a sign pointing towards the vicinity of the fleeing gods, who are saving us.
The third guiding word is:
‘It can be perceived by a deep testing.’
The testing must have been performed ‘on one’s knees’. Wilfulness has to humble itself and disappear. Only one thing is incumbent on thought and meditation: to think ahead of poetry in order to give way to it. By listening repeatedly, we become better at listening. […]
It is one of the clichés of our time that we all have our stories to tell. But Kafka tells us here that such stories are always self-serving, created by us to protect ourselves from reality and out of the desire to “shine” […] In “The Judgment” he tells a story about the nature of stories and dramatizes a ritual of exorcism. […] By so doing he saves both himself and storytelling. Instead of seeing the excessive gestures of his youth as ridiculous and shameful, he builds a drama out of excessive gestures: “For everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again.” (Recall the fire he felt he had to find within himself because it would never be provided by the world, not even by his family.) He has discovered that while words are far more recalcitrant than drawing, it is only in the art of words that narrative can be produced and can then turn against itself and uncover its corrupt origins and motivations. By so doing it reveals its beneficent and healing power: the power to speak the truth about our desires and the world of others. By writing stories that dramatize writing and the fantasies of the imagination and then dramatizing their destruction, he escapes the realm of fantasy, of solipsism, and finds at last that “description in which every word would be linked to my life, which I would draw to my heart and which would transport me out of myself” for which the early diaries show him so feverishly searching. Of course the healing lasts only as long as the moment of writing, and so has to be fought for and found afresh every day. But that is the path that has opened itself up to him.
— Josipovici (via here)
Comments Off on Perish and rise up again
Posted in Gabriel Josipovici, Kafka
Comments Off on Ballade vom preussischen Ikarus
Posted in Wolf Biermann
Katharina is waiting for Hans in the Cafe Arkade. Strange, she thinks, that time, which is invisible, becomes indirectly visible in the guise of unhappiness. As though unhappiness were the costume of time. But at the same time, this unhappiness isn’t just a wrapping, it has its own interior, a creature that, once it’s born, follows its own roads and has its own time.
— Erpenbeck, Kairos (tr. Hofmann)
Comments Off on The costume of time
Posted in Erpenbeck
‘In 1966, a political development took place that all of us had sensed was in the air, namely the Grand Coalition. The Grand Coalition meant that Kiesinger, a former Nazi, became chancellor, and Willy Brandt, a former anti-Nazi, became Minister of Foreign Affairs. Everyone who didn’t fit into this spectrum, everyone who could no longer find a political home thanks to this unholy alliance between Nazis and anti-Nazis, tried, if not to get organised, to get together and talk elsewhere. Ulrike moved into this circle. On the one hand, she moved in elite circles, and on the other, she was an active social critic, interested in homes for children in care, interviewing women who worked on production lines, above all digging into the most disadvantaged layers of society. This was a basic contradiction that kept arising. It shaped her life to a great extent, and in the end, it tore her life apart.’
Comments Off on To talk elsewhere
Posted in Ulrike Meinhof
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there
A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden
hair Margarete
he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he
whistles his dogs up
he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in
the earth
he commands us strike up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you in the morning at noon we drink you at
nightfall
drink you and drink you
A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden
hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the
sky it is
ample to lie there
He shouts stab deeper in earth you there and you others
you sing and you play
he grabs at the iron in his belt and swings it and blue are
his eyes
stab deeper your spades you there and you others play on
for the dancing
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at nightfall
we drink you at noon in the mornings we drink you at
nightfall
drink you and drink you
a man in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He shouts play sweeter death’s music death comes as a
master from Germany
he shouts stroke darker the strings and as smoke you
shall climb to the sky
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds it is ample to lie
there
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death comes as a master from
Germany
we drink you at nightfall and morning we drink you and
drink you
a master from Germany death comes with eyes that are
blue
with a bullet of lead he will hit in the mark he will hit
you
a man in the house your golden hair Margarete
he hunts us down with his dogs in the sky he gives us a
grave
he plays with the serpents and dreams death comes as a
master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith.
— Paul Celan, ‘Death Fugue’ (tr. Middleton)
Comments Off on Death Fugue
Posted in Celan
For not in our fashion does He look forward to what is future, nor at what is present, nor back upon what is past; but in a manner quite different and far and profoundly remote from our way of thinking. For He does not pass from this to that by transition of thought, but beholds all things with absolute unchangeableness; so that of those things which emerge in time, the future, indeed, are not yet, and the present are now, and the past no longer are; but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable and eternal presence. Neither does He see in one fashion by the eye, in another by the mind, for He is not composed of mind and body; nor does His present knowledge differ from that which it ever was or shall be, for those variations of time, past, present, and future, though they alter our knowledge, do not affect His, ‘with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning’ (James, 1:17).
Comments Off on Eternal presence
Posted in Augustine
Notes from a Room 