Wandering Star

God and a woman who is loved are parallel.  Bataille

It is the love for a woman that causes doubt in us.  Nietzsche

Of late, given the tumultuous state of affairs in my (ex-)love life, I am emale - being Muli’s alter-ecko -  came back to this post, on the “pedestal.”

The object I have in mind is the love object on a pedestal.  Plato dances around this pedestal in a type of madness - a good, divine madness as an aspect of the divine is discovered in the mortal being of the beloved. A memory of the divine flight of the soul up to the heavens beyond the stars in the cycle of a Platonic year.

This idea denies freedom and reflexivity in the subjectification of the beloved - a deeply ego-centric love and perhaps one born from the mirror stages of our infantile development in modern psychoanalytical terms.

I always liked Zarathustra’s appraisal of “soul”:
Every soul is a world unto its own; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld.

Even though the end of my relationship with my beloved has occupied my thoughts for the better part of my recent history, I am emale has remained resolutely silent upon the matter, closing all dialogue upon the matter.  The bad conscience (and the acts born out of this con-science, the unhappy consciousness) is the internalisation of forces.  Alone and abjective, I am being e(x)male, serving a Fn(x), unable to make the movement, overcome by gravity of internalised matter.

So the knight makes the movement, but what movement?  Does he want to forget the whole thing?  No… Only lower natures forget themselves and become something new…  There was a person who also believed he had made the movement, but time went by, the princess did something else, she married, say, a prince, and his soul lost the resilience of resignation.  He knew then that he had not made the movement correctly; for one who has infinitely resigned is enough unto himself… What the princess does cannot disturb him, it is only lower natures who have the law for their actions in someone else, the premises for their actions outside themselves.  (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling)

Kierkegaard is speaking of his broken-off marraige to Regina.  I can’t directly compare my situation to Kierkegaard - he broke off his relationship with Regina, I was broken off. But I can still follow the movements, the traces he left under the pseudonym of John the Silent One, of a faith (in this world - every soul being a world unto its own) he never had but could only admire in Abraham (who did not speak to his beloved Sarah of his intention/command to sacrifice Isaac).

One cannot help but make the sacrifice.  In economic terms, its called the opportunity cost.  I am emale. In the spiritual world - an afterworld - all things are possible.  Desire flows. Closed systems die. Socrates was a decadent type.

How to make the sacrifice is what counts.  The art of love as ekstasis (to be thrown outside one’s self or state of being) necessarily involves the rituals of sacrifice. But to avoid the barbarous acts of humankind in its infacy, attempting to mirror the gods power over life and death, playacting, fictions, become our modern means of causing pain.  But the actor never shows the pain.  He suffers to perform.  Nijinsky’s bleeding feet…

As Muli noted, the knight of faith is an actor and in the double sense of the word and in keeping the double sense of the Word open (but this is painful, this lack of unity, of wholeness), we can begin to interpret ourselves. Alone in our sufferring, what does this tragic artist communicate of himself?

Currently we take pride in this - that nothing can be understood till first of all deformed, emptied of content, by one of two mechanisms - propaganda and writing!
Like a woman, possibility makes demands, makes a person go all the way.
Strolling with art lovers through the galleries and across the polished wooden floors in the museum of possibilities, inside of us we eventually kill off whatever isn’t grossly political, confining it to sumptuous dated and labelled illusions.
Only when shame brings this home to us do we realise it.
To live out possibility to the utmost means many will have to change - taking it on as something outside of them, no longer depending on any one of them.
Nietzsche never doubted that if the possibility he recommended was going to exist, it would require community.
Desire for community was constantly on his mind.  (Bataille, On Nietzsche)

Alone, Kierkegaard sufferred. He even wrote in his diaries noone will ever know the truth of his feelings for Regina by reading these pages. He wrote Fear and Trembling in silence, under a pseudonym, leaving the tracks of his love for her in history and a testament to a new faith that every generation must renew (”faith has never existed because it has always existed”) in the interpretation of the story (”what is left out of the story of Abraham is the anguish”): the collective (un)conscious must be created (Durkheim’s functionalism is aimed at the big picture, the large object, society - but then there is the individual and somewhere in between - community).  It does not pre-exist us in the Idea or Form of Love, to be put upon a pedestal.

Spontaneous self-organisation is an ideal process in chaos theory.  But still we must make a choice - there is still sacrifice.  Otherwise we would never act.  Kierkegaard chose to let go.  Desire flows. It irrigates the wings of our souls.  Flying in dreams, rather than wading in the melancholy of loss.

Having said that, the memory of her still burns in my mind.  I’m even fanning the flames of sacrifice, acting impulsively.  I am e(x)male - I cannot let go for fear of falling (desire is not to be confused with truth).  I recognise the impulse to reach out for my beloved upon a pedestal as decline - it requires a tremendous effort, it takes a lot of work, this speculative act -  let the fear persuade before I act:

I am not sovereign being but the site of experimentation.  My body is a temple to the Law’d. The object lives in my mind, impossible to possess and grasp. Mind breathes. To grasp the love object with both hands and let go - the “I” was not made for seeing.

The world is a cell for citters to cit in.   (Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake)

I have found it necessary to speak, to open up to another or be crushed by the reality of my solitude (which is where the Real lies?).  When the two is reduced to the one, when I only see one possibility for action, then I know I haven’t made the movement.  The princess is the barre by which I have measured my movement, keeping the emptiness inside mirrored without.  My wings are clipped.  I come back to earth, imprisoned in my quantum shell, eggsistential self fallen off the wall and crushed upon the ground of reality by the forces of law and order: thus reminded of my finitude, I am writing off my losses and letting go.  If the love is true, the beloved will return in letting go though I cannot count on it.

Faith in performance requires passion, spontaneous and true.  That is the chance one takes in elevation, the lifting of the spirit, dancing with the feet of a wandering star; the individual (and God’s love) is incommensurable with reality/presence/being.