We get to see, through modern writers, various ways of dealing with the sensitivity of memory to circumstance and propriety. For me, I from time to time am able to pull far enough away from my own dysfunctions to get a higher level perspective.
It seems to me it is true, as depth psychologists argue, that some foundational processes in our psyches endure through sundry external life permutations. We grow in some ways, and remain exactly the same in other, more subtle ways.
Does it not seem at times it would be a species of wealth to merely repeat what came before? To have an identified and clearly articulated set of values, traditions, habits, and ways of thinking that simply exist, as it were, OUT THERE, and never need to be revisited? To feel unwilling to adapt because it is UNNECESSARY, crass, and even WRONG?
Oh, is much of the world not already in this state? Is this not a terse definition of the underpinnings of Islamic extremism? Extreme, because their acts are not contained in the Koran, and seem rather to be locally individuated elements of what I have called Nechaeveism? To be expressions of the death of circumstance, and the elevation of the eternal through pernicious acts of horror?
I cannot call the so-called Humanities useless in principle. What I can call them is useless in PRACTICE.
I pulled from my shelf today a book I have never read, but carried with me somehow wherever I have gone: Walter Mehring’s “Algier oder Die 13 Oasenwunder Westnordwest-viertelwest”. This is a Dadaist text, one with scribblings from George Grosz on the cover.
What it symbolizes for me is a different way of living, of acting, of being. Greeks, for their part, are under the thrall of not so very different fantasies. Can we not approach our modern society from a standpoint of consilience, of wondering how something much better, much more HUMAN, however we define the term, cannot emerge?
This is the faith of those who are bankrupting the EU, in my view. They are irresponsible, plainly. They spend too much. But at root their hope is that something much better, some respite, is possible.
How do we reconcile the magical with the possible? It does not do to exile the magical, but we cannot live there in this world either.
For me, I walk the line, that between hysteria and emotionlessness; between abject conformity and insanity; between hope for the future and pragmatic planning; between passion and intellect; between Jewishness and that modern illness that rejects all that smacks of eternal law.
Where, indeed, is the middle? Should we even pursue the middle? In the battle between extremism and the status quo, surely the middle still includes change of some sort?
What do you do when none of the boxes offered you fit? You must create your own, and remain unnoticed, or convince others that yours is a way forward.
Few mumblings of a man who feels both old and unformed. Do with them what you will.