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A Question of Being Human (11)

Hidden Terrors (Eternity/Other/Sublime)

(And) then there are the things that are hidden. That knowledge can not pierce; always finding itself deflected away from the heart it seeks, until we suspect that our reliance on symbols is absolute, foundational, ‘after all’, and will never permit access to that which we feel lies Beyond. Beyond the wall of the Eternal Present and our means of communicating it (even to ourselves); language. ‘Beyond our ken’. The wall of the Eternal Present, always arriving; in this sense we are always indeed ‘facing’ the future, and the projections we cast forwards, piercing this wall, allow us to plan, so finding for us a way of facing the future.

What is invisible, unknown, either temporally, the future as yet unknown, but ‘to come’; or extra-temporally, eternity, variously describable (in an act of non-description) as the Outside, Beyond, Other…

An Absolute Outside (Absolute Other…). Namable, if unimaginable…

Eternity.

The other shore.

The ‘I’ moves on one shore of the lake, what moves on the other? As all that is perceived is the I, so one answer to the question of what lies on the other side, is… our echo. That which returns… Our sonar sounding sent back to us, rebounding… tracing a shape. The shape of what it is that is beyond our horizon. (And what is it then that moves beyond the horizon… our echo too. That which we are afraid of is our own shadow…).

(That witch we are afraid of is our own shadow.) Which when gendered, personified, is often gendered as feminine… (Maternal maw of the shark of the ocean of night; Poe’ s cry of ‘never more’, whence we hear ‘never ma’, ‘Not Ma’, negative evocation of the mother, evocation of the Not-Mother, negative or bad mother of childhood memory, that which occurs when that which is closest becomes the most inimical, putative source of nurture and warmth, now the feared absence of love, of a cold uncaring Nature).

Beyond darkness, outside nothing (which we imagine as darkness)… outside nothing, beyond nothing even; ’not nothing’ after all, is something; the realm of fantasy, imagination… and science. Depending on our degree of common sense or susceptibility to terror. (Otherwise: one root of sublime enchantment – equal parts Otherness and Fear, whether taking the form of popular superstition, ‘the Gothic’, or offering us the Face of the Infinite, the Sublime, together constituting another set of ‘torn halves’).

Or just different social strata (or differently accentuated organs of the self) and their ‘take’ on what lies beyond.

Eternity.

Mirror image of the eternal present.

Offspring of this sense we then nominate the parent…

Extrapolation we quickly call source…

Placing in our foundations there (our most sacred… most ultimate foundations, be they religious, or axioms of thought, or rights and values). For where else would we put them?

Greatest achievement of human creativity…

Most unavoidable of our necessary fictions.

One of which being the notion of ‘projection’, as in the case of the future… a fantasy we have now, which is supposed to come after what is incoming, the next phase of the Eternal Present… the future, a fiction produced, wholly by the past, by past experience, then imagined ‘forward’. ‘In front’, as if the future might not just creep up ‘behind’ us…

For we do not project; rather we are entered (or better, what has entered us is, ‘becomes’, us… as witness the mood shifts that result from a change in our major sensory inputs, sound and image; music and place). And what is in there, not a ‘little’ person (ego, self, ‘ghost in the machine’ etc) awaiting the arrival of sensory material; rather the material (including the past) occupying an empty space which is, we feel, inhabited, somehow, by the ‘ghost in the machine’, a ghost that is that of ourselves…but a ghost which is form only… the content is given, a gift of, the occupying forces, the tidal on-rush of our senses - the place of its assembly appears as our place, ‘behind the eyes’… with the body’s surface as our extended place. Invisible inhabitant; spirit of the place. Empty cockpit. Haunted house.

So we can not but be constituted by what there is; as we perceive it (and store it) so are we. There is no other. World and Others are always already in us, part of us, so there can be no ‘authentic’ self (in the sense of a self independent of context, of culture, a ‘natural’ self). Such an illusion would in practice turn out to be yet another artificial ego (‘Marlboro Man’), product of the cult of individualism (or selfish action), none really an indicator of ‘independence’ - rather an index of insensitivity (as in the case of the euphemism we use when we designate someone as a ‘character’) or the fundamentalist intolerance that results from the belief in being ‘chosen’. The search for ‘authenticity’ is above all the search for this restriction, this exclusivity - in which ‘we’, the survivors of the differentiation, the excision, of course always find ourselves to be on the ‘right’ side…

No ‘projection’ taking us ‘out’ - no prow - jutting out ‘into the world’ (no ‘project’), but rather world jutting into us; we are subject to ‘incoming’ on all fronts, from ‘inside’ as from ‘outside’… from past as from future… Our projects in the world, then, are rather akin to the process of the making of a pearl, as intruding perceptions are coated by our desires, are customized into something palatable.

‘Anxiety’ (a term hollowed out by fashion). Readable as uncertainty or dread, or even our recognition of ‘un-knowing’; of incoming, ‘in our face’, too close for comfort, we are always faced with it, ‘up against it’; the future… For, just like ‘the past’, it is an organ of the mind, it never goes away, nor finally arrives, but always remains poised, just there… a window permanently open – if not always clearly filled… (semi-present). And this semi-presence is one source of the problems it bears, there… and not there… both knowable and unknowable. One source of our discomfort, as the sense made of this permanent proximity, which never arrives… and more, as we have seen, with respect to its ‘presence’, is always divided. Divided once into a foreseeable (and abstract) sequence of cycles and repetitions (whence the importance of ritual in human identity) time as empty form, measured time as a grid projected forward – temporal equivalent of Descartes’ space as extension (ritual is one way of filling in the content according to, and constructing identity). The second part, the other half, of the division of the future is the realm of the unknowable, the unpredictable, the lack of certainty as to what will actually come to pass… So we are at once faced with boredom, predictability, and again up against a radical unpredictability, an uncertainty of detail in practice, our uncertainty as to concrete events – and surprises (rendering novelty in fantasy but chaos in practice…). Double-edged razor of the edge of the Eternal Present, known and unknown vying for dominance… comfort in one signals a fear from, or of, the other… a safe routine suggests fear of disruption, pleasure of novelty suggests fear of tedium… of brute repetition… Leaving us with… a repetition of unknowing; tidal return of a washing away of certainty (which should be there) repeated insistence of our blindness as to our (immediate) future… Reminder of the limits of the Eternal Present and its fading support, the past (and the fear that, at the very least, there will be no novelty…). Anxiety.

To which there a simple cure, ritual (appearing from out of our inner depths, or so it seems, to offer timely support). Cure of boredom as of anxiety, of boredom as emotional entropy, an emptying out of form, of anxiety as the content of the fear of the disillusion of that form and its place for us, of an entropy of structure that is one source of instability. So we feel (we ‘are’, are made by) the call to a repeatability, a repetition that at once goes beyond boredom and is also the source of renewal (a renewal that assuages anxiety and pushes aside boredom… at least for a while, until next time… a process, or cycle that engineers its own return, and a sense of time, one more cycle that we feel as time). So it is that a rituality acting as a form of identity and community maintenance, posits time as a cure for time’s ills; most precisely, our terror of the outside of time, as of the future, (in one sense partially outside, on another wholly outside, ‘the future’ never comes’). As also of the Absolute Outside: as in death and all that we can not know and experience; but that we feel weighs upon us, upon our prospects of our presence here, all influenced from elsewhere – a bizarre astrology, as in Walther Benjamin’s most particular use of the concept of ‘mimesis’ (in this sense only perhaps it may make sense). Zones where we are unconscious as to the cause of influence; with only a suspicion of its powers… including of the unknown and unknowable parts of our bodies themselves as movers, the parts of our selves we can not know, as prior. Whence the fondness for Manichean beliefs, Gnostic superstitions, addictive desire for the simple secret that reveals (and explains) all… and so our love of conspiracy theories…

So the Eternal Present gives itself as a present - as a gift. Using that which terrifies it most… to combat time, its outside (subjective), and its temporal (objective) terrors, we perform rituals, at the heart of which is eternity, (an inoculation, after Barthes, but also much more, as the outside becomes the foundation for internal structures - of belief and thought, reason and unreason…). The sacrifice or gift that gives ritual its force, is the special sense of an ‘outside’ of temporal time , the ‘time’ that it evokes, the access to a mythic realm, to eternity, the brute matter we send/destroy/offer/waste is sent ‘elsewhere’… to palliate the outside and whatever it is that may dwell there… (the genius loci of this unimaginable space). So we begin with terror of time’s exterior, and end with it as at the heart of a never-ending repair work, so offering hope… the return on gift; at the end of the ritual, it has been tamed. Ritual tames the future and also subdues the terrors of the outside. (By bringing it in, and pushing our certainties out). From being utterly outside and possibly inimical, we then have the intuitive generalization from the Eternal Present (as ritual encloses a place where the Eternal Present becomes ‘eternal’) which makes of eternity an ally, as the gods and immortals, universals and axioms become our friends and supports (guardian angels and patron saints, foundations and starting points) – familiar sentinels (an outside now inside… blocking the way to the outside, outside… and what might come over from there…). Whatever it is that might come over from there that we are so afraid of…

Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2012