peter nesteruk (home page:
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Closing Time.
Narrowing
time… by bringing together the doors of time, restricting the dividing motion
of the compasses - so better to measure the range of our options… pulling back on our horizons, redrawing the map of our
room - so better to realise our room for manoeuvre…
Narrowing
time…
By limiting the impasse of the immutability of the past.
But not
forgetting it, nor rewriting it so as to forget past ills, nor remembering for the
wrong reasons, as when current expediency overshadows the memorial (whose only proper appropriation is the desire never to
repeat a past wrong). And by not forgetting to forgive, as memory without
forgiveness is like a stone stuck forever in the gullet.
By
not allowing the ideal future (the ‘future perfect’), the utopian impulse to
which we are all, all to often, prey, to destroy the very real options of the
present…
But
retaining a position from which to judge… and from which to aim.
And by revealing the rhetoric of eternity even as it stands
behind systems secular as well as sacred.
But
comprehending its necessity, the gift it brings to our lives, underpinning our
time (the justification of our heading in past, present and future) and our
sense of value (antidote to the reign of the commodity and quantitative measure
- our guide to what is not exchangeable).
…and
by refusing to become lost in the eternal present of present pleasure.
The
past begins here. Our attitude towards the past, our appropriation of its
‘facts’, our ‘propriation of its continuing force,
payment of our debt, and our admission of its present existence as prey to our
whims of interpretation…
The
future stops here. Putting an end to the further continuance of a past and present
condition; holding out the possibility of a break in continuity…
…but it also starts here (anti-utopian
in its realism, but still active…critical and reforming, exchanging the old
snare of human perfectibility for a guiding ideal at one remove, or better, a
list of abuses which where better removed, a decrease of suffering with all the
difficult debates on perspective that this involves…whose betterment, and at
whose cost… ).
Closing
time…
Closing
time by making a choice regarding which poison it is one will water down until
it can be used… to ward off the greater evil (the metaphysics of the lesser
evil). So partaking of the concerned scepticism of a ‘post modern bourgeois
liberal’, joining in the battle between transcendental and immanent or
pragmatic strategies, whether to found anew (the fundamentalist option), or
operate critically on received institutions, parties, and ideas - including religious systems…
This latter the choice of most ‘intellectual’ as well as ‘commonsense’
strategies; from ‘immanent’ to ‘pragmatic’ to ‘deconstructive’… (these all working through a kind of compromise, a
hermeneutic doubling-back -or ‘synthesis’- of the two poles).
Received belief is submitted to
critical operations; but at the behest of which new (concealed) god… what new
horizon, what ideals, motivate these critical operations? For
to operate critically required a further position, an apposition, from which
the agon of critique may be triggered. Behind
the death of God, daggers dripping, await the new gods (of whose presence we
are as yet only dimly aware).
Closing
time by leaving the present utopian zone of the drinker, drug-taker and
‘shopaholic’ consumer to breathe the hot polluted air of the problems of the
present… For if the machine of wealth creation requires the stimulus of
personal desire, then a little strategic asceticism can make a difference on
the grounds of personal well-being, the environment, energy-saving, and other
forms of waste and domination (say good bye to your fellow lotus eaters…).
Consumer
continence as global intervention.
Closing time. Time to leave the comfort zone,
wave farewell to the fond delusions fed by subjunctive temporal displacement -
and step outside…only to find we are back where we started… where we are now.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2008.