Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
___________________________________________________
Just now Immanuel Can has, let us say, used the threat of Hell as a tool within his obvious and continuing apologetic project in which he attempts (I gather) to influence specific people to 'repent' as the classic Christian recommends.
His methods are crude, I admit this, and he achieves the opposite result he pretends to seek, but simultaneously I also notice that
the hearers are also rather crude in their misconceptions. So curiously what one is left with, what one sees and notices, is a situation in which meaning, some core meanings, are not ever actually brought out into the light, and all participants therefore involve themselves in wasteful, obscuring bickering.
Everyone is
holed-up in their smallish, private, adamantly defended redoubts and, par for the course, avoiding (as it seems to me) facing the 'core questions'. The furious negation of the *Christian perspective* which is, I admit, a rather simple story on the surface but which yet obscures many parabolic existential truths, is only matched by a similar interpretive recalcitrance in which extremely real existential truths are reduced to argumentative threats. "In just a short while you will face your Maker and it is more than likely, given your present attitude, that you will know Hell, not Heaven".
But here is the problem: no one understands what any of this means. Hell? Heaven? These are terms that have no meaning. Simply because they can only be conceived in earth-terms. They are rhetorical tropes that have to be broken into and broken down. So my perspective -- once again -- is to be forced to *linger* over the core elements that so easily get passed over with glib (and
ignoring) dismissiveness.
Now, today, we are witnessing the super-strange completion of super-weird historical circles, are we not? There is a backdrop to the present conversation and it is the Crisis that certainly appears to be upon us. It is the same thing (though perhaps a different octave) but in a new time signature in a circular pattern.
You people had better eat some leprechaun's mushrooms under truly sacred & ritual conditions (as Dubious recommends) and get some danged clarity!
A coupe of notes. I owe to Dubious a further exposition on Nietzsche's core anti-Semitism. Again, I do not mean that Nietzsche was a Jew-hater (
Judenhasser) in any personal sense. And I do mean that everything that he said, thought, proposed, struggled with, intensely revolved around 'throwing off the Jewish yoke". (Which is why people so adamantly wish to *throw off the yoke* that IC
imposes on them).
And the Jewish yoke, as everyone knows, is Christianity.
We will have to go into this more but trust me
it is not an easy conversation to have. It has direct implication in the events of the day (and if you-plural do not see this I wonder what bloody planet you are living on!)
Secondly, I owe Immanuel Can some comments on his (seeming) superficial understanding of *the core meaning* in Hamlet.
Meantime, as our *clever hopes expire* and the *dishonest decade* raises itself up with violent teeth in the same habitual room where *Eros and of dust / beleaguered by negation and despair* rule, consider this poem:
September 1, 1939
WH Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
of intellect into these question and they will seem to self-illuminate. 