aphorismsfromtheapologoumenein LeontoPeonto The revelation of the human predicament, which is one and the same as the catastrophe of history; its meaning, deciphered, is precisely what Cephalus calls 'the hopefulness of the passing away of things.' No worldly reformation can do justice to the dead, nor in the least touch upon the wrong of death and name its ugliness. The transfigured body is only an empty gesture and, just as the girl's gesture in honoring her virginity is devoid of any real sexual understanding, the transfigured body is devoid of any understanding of death. Holderlin writes of the emptiness of this transfiguration: 'And yet with holy night the father will veil our eyes, that still we may not perish. Power expands but cannot suborn heaven.' In vain do I conceal my heart deep inside myself. My courage knows death, but does not feel life! My heart! Do you not walk upon truth to yourself as men upon doormats? But what wouldest thou keep clean? Untruth to thy self. My heart! Keep clean untruth to thyself, that the year of my soul may one day begin again! My heart gazeth into the night and in untruth to itself, enjoys it. To the mad and the dead the night is sacred yet herself she remains the freest of all the demons. Free she is to us in her turn, so that in the wavering of life, in the heart-breaking last hours, deep in the dark there shall be at least something of memory that endures. To live--that is to bestrew, that is to thrash corn stalk; to live- -that is to burn oneself and yet to dwell in ashes, and freeze in time of winter seasons. I will try the temper of my heart upon my memories until it is as steel; I will exercise myself upon them until I am invincible. I hold my hand in those freezing waters until I am assured that I might bear fire. If in this sudden bereavement, in the matter of Antheia the flower-goddess, is talked of as a real Revelations and Dissolution in Nature, in which light doubtless is appeared to the Poet in but part, his own nature is nowise extinguished thereby, but rather is compressed closer. We are withheld, as by Anathema Maran-atha, by the God-given mandate Work thou in Well-doing, which lies written in Delphic characters upon our hearts, and urges us ever to, under persons, seek God without rest. Not so easily can the Old Adam, haunting us ante Vulcanum since our births, be dispossessed in sub Prometheo. Whilst the God-given mandate leaves us without rest, til it's Gospel be deciphered and obeyed, it must have competition with the living kerugma of our clay, namely, to eat and be filled. The moral sensibility, as the body, is attuned to experience of such an order that it bears some relation to itself; as the body bears relation to itself by virtue of the intuition of physical pain, so the moral sensibility has its own intuition which is of the order of terror. If the object of this experience grows out of proportion to the individual, he no longer really experiences it at all, but registers it directly, in concepts divorced from the intuition of ethical terror, as something incommensurable and extrinsic, for which he has the same indifference as this moral catastrophe has for him. Man then, erring, must, like spirits, continue to live - and what remains after life seems senseless to him. Evil is derived not from the principle of finitude in itself, but from the dark and selfish principle that has been brought into intimacy with it as the Heraclitean ' pride without measure;' and this intimation is furthermore possible only insofar as one has been divorced from the intuition of ethical terror. Although the consciousness of defilement seems to be a memory inaccessible to any re-enactment in the imagination or sympathy, a moment that has been abolished by the progress of moral consciousness itself, it nevertheless contains in germ all possible moments of the life and future of the moral consciousness, even as 'the heart has its own order,' because it conceals within itself the secret of its own passing, which is of the 'order of intellect.' Through our corporeality, indeed through our own lived body and the course which our existence has conferred upon us, we are in the most immediate way imbricated in the world of perception. Nevertheless, we are blind and for the most part incapable of separating the lived body through habituation as a function of time and in sin from our moral being, according to the measure of the consciousness of defilement, by which this sin can only be conceived of in terms of a temporary retardation of the lived body. For another matter is it, if your symbol has intrinsic meaning rather than merely extrinsic; the Greek Herkules had no peremptory Duty, but a choice - and for the Greeks he was no balance of pleasures and pains, but a needs betraying weaknesses - but if thou wilst conceive of how far the human mind has carried a Symbol, then look upon Jesus of Nazareth. In short, the world of ethical terror holds in germ an entire repressive history which makes moral sensibility incomprehensible. The consternation at Golgotha is not just an emblem for the desolation of human existence, it is the ethical vision of the world. God touches only for a moment the dwellings of men. Therefor at certain moments, the founders of the abyss must be consumed by the fire of what is deeply sheltered, and perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear in the light of redemption. The only morality which can be responsibly practiced in the face of this terror is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. The destructive character of this morality knows only one watchword: tamen genio illius gratias enatavi. It knows only one activity: clearing away. Its need for fresh air is stronger than any hatred, more severe than any aims towards retribution and vengeance. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness by destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. What, in fact, is man before his God? He is incapable of judging the nothingness from which he was born towards the infinite in Nature. This 'Holy Hypochondria,' this anxiety of the creation belongs however to a fundamentally different world from the nothingness, from the mataiotes which it apprehends. The question of whether it comprehends that which it apprehends, cannot be regarded as a criterion of its value. Just as a mother is seen to begin to live in the fullness of her life only when the circle of her children, inspired by the feeling of her proximity, closes round her, so is the nothingness of the creation seen to be truly a concern for the living, only when the triumphs of the anxiety which it incites are gathered in spite of it. When the God that the saint receives and suffers, liberates the mystic world from the world of Ideas, he then again and again finds himself subjected to the ‘victorious powers of life’ and falls prey to that world, whenever he calls out in search of his God 'non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo'. Art arose in the course of liberation from terrible nature, yet through art the utter subjugation of nature is impossible. Song, so to speak, is Tereus' revenge. This is to say that art, called upon to legitimate itself before the world of nature, art - a thing negating that very world - appears, from the outset, helpless. All the same, art cannot simply shy away from the responsibility of legitimating itself in the eyes of this world for no poetry, no song is innocent, insofar as it permits one's own lived experience to become an object of unnecessary conviction, for it is in this moment a mere sentiment or personal taste can become something more dangerous. The poet Giacomo Leopardi says, "It is not good for the innocent to search into nature's secrets; and random suffering cancels all such unripened knowledge." Lingua serpentina unto ashes, and the sower soweth the word, just as Nestia cryeth and the tear is scattered. But if the seed die it bringeth forth great fruit. Verily, it [the will] destroyeth and destroyeth in shame; and unto shame recollecteth thou destruction. Verily, the Will knoweth well of the ways of its torment: the Will depriveth us of dying. Verily, a deep memory and deepest of memories dwells in our will; and it hath become a curse for all that is human that this memory hath acquired to dreams and a spirit. 'The Spirit of Shame;' that hath been up to now humanity's most hopeful dream: for where there is shame there was supposed to be suspicion, and where there is suspicion there was supposed to be a healthy conscience and a course for action. For a person comes best to understanding himself and his destiny, only when he has become untrue to himself and transgressed against his destiny through sin. One must have valedictions and brass within one's self to give birth to a destiny. For 'Suspicion' is what 'Shame' calleth itself: with a hypocritical tongue shame dresseth itself in a good conscience. Verily, the Soul is a barren mother; and the Will is praise unto the womb that is without child. The Will deprivest me of perishing in my creations; and the lot of my creations fall short of the glory of my greatest work, life. No eye is truly acquainted with beauty, without being accompanied by the timber of indifference, and well-nigh contempt for everything to which the woman, as the Phorkyad, bears no significance. And it is solely through infatuation, the unjust closure of the eye vis-a-vis the antagonism raised by 'everything which exists, that justice is done to what exists.' The eye which loses itself in something which is beautiful, is one of Eleusis. 'It rescues in the object something of the peacefulness of its day of creation,' which until this moment is hidden within the hatred raised against it by the universal. 'However if this one-sidedness is sublated by a consciousness of the universal imposed from outside, if the particular is harried, substituted and weighed up, then the just view of the whole makes the universal injustice, which lies in exchangeablity and substitution, its own.' Such justice turns into the guarantor of Olympia upon Helena. Is not the tendency of philosophy to raise certain common place notions, as goodness or truth, above the practical into objects of unnecessary conviction also evident in, for example, literary theory or religious disputation? Verily, Linnaeus might dawn the name of Homer in Ceos. Yet this, the raising of the commonplace into objects of unnecessary conviction, -- this is precisely what ethics is not. Nothing is true in ethics save the trifling. Hymen is perpetually above the sexual; just as pain is perpetually above the moral. The sibyl may know everything, only not the Good. The nature of that to which we ascribe beauty, which may be disclosed only by recourse to the universal, to the daily and lived experience, in all of its triviality, in which antagonism is wrought towards it, plays the role which one would like to ascribe to the continuity of feelings designated by the word 'infatuation.' A Cleopatra with the soul of Isis lives and works in the world. 'The foolishness of a youthful enthusiasm, by which a beautiful girl is made inaccessible, is not based upon any inhibition whatsoever, nor in too much coldness or in the cynicism of an overly repressed warmth, but because a relationship already exists between him and her, which excludes a new one, which excludes a relationship which embraces the lived experiences with the beloved as the very essence of her beauty.' And it is for this reason that the youthful enthusiasm just mentioned is no other enthusiasm than infatuation proper. The imminent awakening of the lover 'is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in his Troy of dreams.' Happiness, and the lover knows this, laments the time which it can never escape. The lowliest of botanical sciences studies the lily amongst lilies, the formation of the very flower,' just as common politics studies man amongst men, in short, the formation of a state.' 'How can we be fair, kindly, and humane towards others, let our dictums be as praiseworthy as they may be,' if we can not extinguish measureless pride as we would a raging fire, and 'lack the capacity to make strange natures genuinely and truly a part of ourselves, to appropriate strange situations, to make strange feelings our own?' Perhaps redemption has already begun the moment we begin to take kindness for others as the fitting measure of our deeds. From a patrimonium generis humani and a fiction of neutralized upbringing we are touched by the pantheon of classicism, by 'strange old lusts for deed,' by echoes of a metaphysics of the ethical that we long ago relinquished to dream: ta phainomen suzein. 3 The admonition of dreams has always been mediated by word or image, thus its greater strength has already ebbed away, the strength with which it strikes us at the heart and compels us, 'though we scarcely know how, to act in accord with it.' This moment is the Geramantian plow, beneath which fate is to be turned. The greatest consolation in human nature is therefore, paradoxically, the smallest guarantee and Empedoclean tear. What would righteousness be that was not measured by the immeasurable terror at what it is? Atalante's peril is become a wedding. To change a threatening future into a fulfilled now, - this is the work of a bodily presence of mind, a Prometheus Vinctus and labor omnia vicit, even as 'he to whom destiny speaks loudly has the right to speak yet more loudly to destiny. ' In boredom human life becomes am instant, not by sublating duration, but by decaying to nothing, awakening to its futility in face of what Nietzsche calls the 'crooked eternity' of time, - and this is the threshold to great deeds. Hence free time, this is the dialectical antithesis to boredom. Free time, as a complement to alienated labor, and whether this free time is supposed merely to reproduce energy that has already been expended, or whether it is burdened by the extraction of alien labor as a mortgage, remains, as regards production itself, merely reflexive, and imposed heteronomously, not as a threshold, but an individuum of production, a principle of its individuation. Labor, as it does not occur in free time, can only be concentrated on survival, on physical necessity - it is in free time that labor is individuated, that is to say, is first concentrated upon affairs outside of survival and physical need. Between horror vacui and the opiate of plenty, the ruling condition of the appetite permits no third choice. Thus there is great wealth and much wisdom in the fact that great shamefulness and much addling is there in hope: Pride itself createth wings, and findeth out that obscurity with fountain-divining powers! For Hope is the greatest cunning, cunning that createth; for in every hope is there valediction and brass. It is my favorite wickedness and art that my virtue cometh upon a crane's wings, and my hopes hath learned not to betray themselves through the children of my hopefulnesses, - loss and failure, shamefulness and addling! If my virtue is even the virtue of a barren mother; if my virtue toucheth my deepest shame and my most insolent beauty; if my wickedness is a hopeful wickedness, at home in nests of beetles and under the branches of fig-trees; - rather hath my pride taken these children of my hopefullnesses under its wing, and cared after them; nurtured and fed them even. Thrax erat, hic Thracum domitor - this is my virtue. Ethos anthropou daimon- this is my virtue. I see as much addling as hope. As much pride as justice. Verily, even as hope is the fame of thy pride, and even the wisest of thy men did not unto me appear very wise, so hath I found men's pride to be much less than the fame of it. Thus thou leapest repeatedly at hope, but beware of flying! for prohibited to thee is flight unto hope, lest pride discovereth the sourest grapes that hath not been tasted by man! and the bitterest apples too! Internae propter facinora commissa. -- What awful wisdom is this, my well-loved Horace? Pride, that is weight; but at once weightmaster and scale. Courageous teeth hath I as well, that I might ventureth my teeth unto the sourest grapes and bitterest apples; that I might fly unto my remotest hope, -- courage! 4 Into more remote hopes flyeth I with new wings, thither where Gods art ashamed of palladium! 090101 what's it to you? who go blather from