Friday, February 20, 2009

day 98

As the days turn their back and as soon as we begin to perform the back of clocks,
there is one concept that I learn from such a retrograde step backward.

Love others. As much as you love yourself.

I don't remember how much I love myself. Or if there is such a need.

To love yourself, as I shall explicate, is to ultimately be violent to yourself;

To begin with, we don't love ourselves.
This somewhat sounds paradoxical, for surely the cliché is that we often love ourselves too much.
Whether that is true, I do not have an answer for it. For this excessive love for oneself is not somewhat clear to us, for we are often too busy to know if we exercise the will and the desire to please ourselves, or to be more precise, to be charitable to ourselves. In other words, there is always something going on within us that completely escapes our comprehension and thematization. Surely then, the desire to please or to (love) is not motivated by a strong belief built up from a deep-rooted and rigorous sense of faith in which we drive ourselves to the salvation, or a salvation, that once and for all would unleash ourselves from our mortal coils. But that this egoism has ultimately the painful reality of an entrapment - we trap ourselves even further with the egoistical reversal of the love principle, ultimately, as if ad libitum we could return to the paradise within us, as if there is one whole and solid substance within us to begin with. It is a comforting habit or ritual of doing what is obviously not an answer. But it is still an answer. One who receives the worlds in their veiled presences. One receives, and not to give.

If I do not make sense now, I shall make some sense by disclaiming that: It is often hard to express what is really an economy that is only capable of looking at a mirror. The gaze returns, and therein is the self-confession that no one is truly loved, except one self; Narcissus. In other words, how does one truly thematize what goes on in that mirror stage of ours, if the metaphors continue to revolve around the inside and the outside? The moment of confession, or even pre-confession of love, is a suspended moment in which the Self remains largely intact. It can go back and fro, up and down, and still the existent atom or Being is thrown back to his or her mirror stage without asking what constitutes the mirror and how does one break the mirror.

- BUT to ultimately, be violent to yourself.

This solo economy is not quite violent (to oneself). For the perpetual self-destruction and self-love are always at work within a restricted human psyche - the closed wholeness of the self ,who is safe in the knowledge that he or she has only to love, egoistically. Thereupon one then ventures out of the shell, in a retrograde manner, only to return back into the shell. Perhaps, there is not even an exteriority to begin with, for the mirror materialised outside remains really redundant. The reflections are all already done within us; within the impregnable repository of signs and desires that break out in performances and appearances. So this violence is accepted, tacitly. The performer, in keeping up with appearances, really does nothing insofar as to only hide behind the persona, that may be that face that receives all the violence from the outside, leaving, really, the inside intact - utterly wholistic and unshakeable. There is, really a bitch or bastard outside that can be blamed for all the misgivings and mistakes one does. One breaks and destroys the external profile or face whereas the very elusive internal dialogue remains unloved, thus stablised, even if in a chaotic and fractal manner (which is itself a problematic solution). When one knows there is a profile outside that can be broken into pieces, the trick then is to create the illusion of having divisible pieces of a bigger whole. This really means, that one can always rebuild the whole; or wholly outside.

But this is my speculation:
The economy of the other-to-love then is really the actual violence
that is capable of breaking this economy of self.

We are extremely linear. Maybe there is no such thing as a 'here and now' as theatre practitioners like to say. As much as we acknowledge the ephemerality of performance, we also care too much for the discontinuous effects and affects that performance gives. Surely, there is a linear continuity, or the possibility or potential of an irrevocable presence as it disappears, that makes the actual human trajectory a highly linear one. It is so linear and so inexorable, that we are merely trying to master this linearity by receding into notions of fractality or the discontinuous concept in a kind of post-Hume skepticism. This linearity is material. It is material because the potential energy of our beings to be, in being, in becoming, ultimately creates the presences even as they disappear. But it is not just merely potential energy. Well...I am not being too Newtonian here but one cannot misunderstand our corporeality as something intangible, immaterial and disappearing. It is precisely our eventual death (the accidental linearity or I-who-must-run-the-race) that makes us so linear even if I should fade, age and disappear as a trace. It is this linearity that breaks us.

The other-to-love is the ultimate violence that one can take up in a linear project that is simulteanously charitable and violent. It is the I love myself, But - that Paul introduces at every quick succesion of praises and then chatisements in 1 Corinthians. Perhaps, the elusive (and still is in many ways) 1 Corinthians 13:12, next cited out of context, can be understood in the context of my speculation:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I can't see myself, ultimately, if we continue to pretend to find a mirror within you, that does nothing but to obscure our vision. For the face-to-face (my emphasis) is a violent profit that in every negation of myself, I confront the infinite other that makes me speechless, clueless even fearful and trembling in that short moment of indecisiveness before the acknowledgement, the front, the show, the performance, the speech that makes first contact. These moments of violence, prior to the selfish introspective projections, calls for our immediate attention. And these violences, or painful thorns that make us question who we are, and what we are to do in relation to the other who is simultaneously in question as much as he or she is in relation. For it is not accidental that in chapter 12, a discussion of the anatomy of body is discussed, which immediately paints a picture of physical violence, almost in an imagery that evokes the lamb slaughtered at the altar. It is as if we should be unclear of the notion that if I should have a wound on my body, I implicate every part of my body; my distress is for all of me to be shared.

To be more precise in my speculation: the bodily discharges one finds - the saliva of your childish speech - should in some way find an exteriority or one aspect of exteriority, that does a positive venture that kills you (as a human) as much as it saves you (as a child). For what the Other (Christ as the Other atheist/saviour) and the others who alike you in obscurity and fecundity, potentially does to you is that they make you less, as much as it makes you part of greater group; a member. And it is precisely, love or charity, the altruistical gesture of caring for the other actually makes you less yourself; you become impossible, incomprehensiveable, insofar as who you are to yourself as well as to others. Your alterity, for the first time, in a love-relationship, is the focus and the single thrust unto faith, the perfect asymetry (you are but one member of many) that must only be conceived with faith; absolutely blind and absurb faith. So I "know in part", myself as part of a whole that is not within me, but in a differentiated economy - "I know even as also I am known".

The projection then is dualistic - a return and a forward movement. It is not enough that one just loves oneself. The project (of love) is two-fold - love your neighbour as you love yourself. But, it is also crucial to add that one can also reject this dualistic linearity and confrontation with the radical alterity and exteriority posited in the face-to-face with an Other. What is easy, then is to respond and react with excess, or compensatory movements that oblivate the inner stage of de Anima, and build more walls (like the Berlin walls) around our own individual faces. (Or what Paul would describe as speaking in tongues, healing, interpretations and prophesising, all of which are external manifestations that do more to manifest the personal faces than our identities as members of the body, e.g. face of communism, Stalin, Hitler, faces of tyrants.) This excess, then, is the safe passage that forced confinement brings, with its categories, brackets and symmetries, that return deep into the mirror stage and remain them, darkly, as demons within and external performances.

As a ending note, linearly speaking, is my take on "to follow after love" in chapter 14. To follow after, as if it is always in front of us as much as we are behind love, is to give me the motif and motive necessary to discuss once again the linearity (of this charitable violence). To move forward, and to follow, is really to be less yourself as you perpetually become; or in being, you reduce and you give to the other, as you also receive from the other. In your numerous manifestations, appearances and disappearances, with the thorn in the flesh constantly giving you a rooted understanding of your materiality, which is not possible to think inwardly, except to consider the organs and flesh of your body, the inexorable end (made up of plenty of commas and sentence-breaks) will eventually be a guided venture led what is really the immanent Friend ,or the immaterial Spirit who then becomes the ultimate other who confronts you vis-a-vis invisibly. That is true interdependence in a violent way. For it is a mirror that cannot reflect materially. And the mirror, at this juncture is redundant, as it cannot reflect the spirit. What we are left then is wind, the wind that blows us, as much as we reveal the wind's presence, by trembling, shaking, moving, reacting and in some cases, shaken and uprooted by the immense invisible force that blows at us and amongst us, Who is? are? entirely capable of doing the most extreme of violences, in perpetual differentiation and simulitude of identities:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen
2 Corinthians 13:14

To love, really, is to suffer oneself; to make less of oneself, as you come to a relation with wholly other that escapes you as much as the other confronts you, such that the other can come in the same Spirit.

How is that not violent to the Self?


a lesson from the 13 chapter of 1 Corinthians from the 13th Apostle; But in need of further proof-reading and editing.


take time, to love, and pause for the But-s.
in short, don't believe my crap.

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