An interesting observation, this. My first reaction is to recall the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, and with them a poetry lousy/scintillant with angels-- lexicological angels and supercomputing angels, voyeur angels, all of course puppeted by the tragic figure of Benjamin's angel. If the troupe of angelic tropes had to do with the dawning of the information age, with an awareness of our increasingly media-ted lives, and the need for some hyperquick poetic figure which could thread and braid and create a space for us there, what then might the more condensed, and more removed, transcendent figure of God suggest? Perhaps, as Jane suggests, I can't really do without ethical thinking right now (or SSRI's!) and after I hit a certain bandwidth of "news," I'm hankering for some kind of human or inhuman force that tells me going on just might make sense. And then, of course, there's the qualitative change in fundamentalist Christianity here in Gringolandia, not more of it but more of it visible, met as it is with fundamentalisms Muslim and Jewish behind the painted screens of which the corporations could, like, give a fuck. If I grew up with a Christian framework, I would want to hollow out that rhetoric from the inside, rub Kierkegaard in Bush's face, and show him how far he is from anything like real faith, incapable of doubt or indecision as he is. Even Jesus doubted, right? Some days I'm completely nauseated with it, and the word "christian" is a synonym for fascist. Then I read someone like Fanny Howe, or Kierk., or even Augustine and think, wait, wait, that's right, this is what it's about.
A few years ago, I probably would have gotten existentialist on the quiz, too, but I got creative constructionist . The SSRI's only work, really, in a pinch, only give me enough time to start cooking up some of the stuff in my own brainpan: "It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. / We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground / Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure of the ground." Like Ange, I worry that anything more than a daytrip to the punk-rock mentality might freak out the kid, as much as he, too, likes to listen to X or Bad Brains. 3 days out of 5, I'd rather be a reasonably happy sophist than a miserable debunker of illusions. But wait, I'm reading Bataille today; I'm in Williamsburg of the Piercings where the people around me are so cool they can barely stand each other, and I just helped Daniel move the contents of his apartment while sweating a veritable Mississippi's worth of overpriced bottled water. . .
No comments:
Post a Comment