Aaron Asphar

Amanda Silbernagel and I have been in very regular communication and are really struck by these profound associative philosophical intimations that we’ve been trying to extend in our own ways, and really bare deep structural affinities, so we thought we’d think toward developing the terrain, filling in differences and so forth. It really does feel like the ‘profane real’ to me – the noumenal world or world beneath the world that is actually our repressed and negated experience or subjectivity, and personally I think this kind of thinking is a return to the concrete-real, the direction of thinking that we are all heading for in any social-historical emancipation from heteronomy, but these are only “glimpses”. In this post I look at Silbernagel’s paper The Glimpse of Recognition [1] in relation to mine, and first I look at Silbernagel’s sense of Western angst as a moment of great significance in the process of civilization, one which I suggest intensifies as an anticipation of two things – death and love, which is one thing from the estranged antimonies of our primordial and terminal wholeness. I look at her idea of recognition and the “glimpse”, which I relate to my work and other writers such as Eagleton and Carpenter….

Within this paper is a glimpse of the whole Western historical dialectic for me, one captured with subtlety in poetic, mimetic precision. The first words that appear in this paper are those of Lucie Brock-Broido: “How much will I be changed, before I am changed?” The first change is the death phase of civilization: development of quantity. At a certain point, as Hegel recognised, there is through this quantitative growth, finally, a radical alteration of quality: death becomes life without losing its original content. We catch a glimpse of the whole life/death, ying/yang thing. “Death alienates long before it happens”, writes Silbernagel. Adorno and Horkheimer described words as emerging as “petrified cries”, and the dialectic of civilization the “tautology of terror itself”, and Heraclitus, somewhere on some mountains in some kind of inspiration, grasped this dialectic in its pre-estranged moment: “”The name of the Bow is ‘life’ but its work is death”, and this bow is our bodies, that which experiences itself (emotion) and what it produces (sensation, i.e. our world). We create the world out of ourselves by creating sensuous experience out of ourselves, out of our body, and from it we extend ourselves through this sensation as force, and the result is indissolubly force and form, but then is “thrown off like a husk” (Carpenter) and leaves behind its own dead history, the “dead labour” of Marx, the “instituted” of Castoriadis, and we have civilization – our dialectic of death – but we still have our subaltern bodies, our wordless force, the force of our lives, “scrawled beneath the hundredth coat of gold” (Huggy Bear).

The bow and lyre are emotion and sensation, the radically antagonistic moments of all coming-to-be, but through sensation we punch through with force and create that which accumulates through history and subjects life to itself, mediating life and sensation, and now all that movement seems ominous and other, and we are fascinated with it, but we are fascinated moreover with death – our great fear is our species curiosity. “That’s to say, all through life humans dream and philosophize, have nightmares and conversations, write macabre poems and serious essays about human frailty, the end days, death” – the poetics of ossification, petrification, mortification define the non-identical voice of soma throughout social history. Angst is a poetics of the body that speaks through everything: most directly in emotional expression, less directly through art, poetry, philosophy: it is the body on the world and it anticipates the world-poem, the grand plan, the human dialectic. Soma is estranged: negative, and it seeks to reconstitute itself as whole (world/soul), to reconstitute the womb outside, to remake the “world-poem” (Silbernagel).

Curiosity/fascination implies the negativity of its own overcoming, the desire is life: its work is death. This fascination we must grasp from her. In his The Vehement Passions, Forester talks of “wonder in scientific thought, both in the moment of attention that leads to a first discovery and in the final ordered knowledge that we call science” – it is the species curiosity at the forefront of knowledge and civilization alike. There is also here a dissolving, magmarizing process: drawing on Castoriadis, we realize ourselves through an emotional and sensuous and emotional memory the radical imagination, and this is precisely what we find in Silbernagel’s writing: she uses it to capture a glimpse of the whole, an achievement that is poorly understood today.

The fear of death is one side of an incommensurable whole: indissolubly and antagonistically, it is the love of life, a love we call desire. “In proportion with the intensity of our earthly desires, any Elsewhere seems intolerable, and is in any case incomprehensible“. But desire too has another side: hope, a transcendent openness to the desired, one that the desire itself posited as the as-yet-unreached: so we have life, desire, death and fear, and this culminates in our estranged souls as an erotics of death or of wonder: “how will I know where I am (and that I am) without my sense organs? How will I love or be loved in the absence of a ticking clock, and the romantic sense of urgency it invokes? How will I tolerate an eternity without human affection? Will I spend my last, my everlasting day, weeping—trying to weep without tear ducts—to some stoic God? Will I die a second death, of heartbreak? And a third, of boredom?” The estranged soul is straining to imagine, to wonder – it thinks the answer is there: it doesn’t know that it is answering the question by creating the answer. I wrote recently: “Desire is soma realizing itself through experience or its memory but in its realization soma is detached from desire and this is emotion becoming motion toward desire. If emotion realizes itself, it becomes objectivity, as we call it”. I can add with Amanda’s insight that this motion is our stage of wonder than angst: “anxiety is prophetic”, I wrote. The angst is getting harder, the desire stronger, the historically repressed suffering pressing forth to erupt out of itself and concretize the real. The tortured were those who have glimpsed to early I think: is she too early? Are we? A while ago I wrote:

“I see through the emotional-sense dialectic a river of somatosocial-historical-emotional-material coming to be, like flesh causing down the valley, dissolving all blankness of flesh into an oceanic world through the world, our Heraclitian freedom the river we become: no fear or contradiction can exist within the force of this human torrent as it rolls towards this redemption: its strength is magnified by its proximity and it becomes unstoppable….I something like this before that lead to the insights about the skin not being blank but oceanic – the flesh of the other is my flesh through empathy: they flow into each other like a river – everything will flow into everything else; being floods through nothing in becoming; essence floods through appearance; self into other; in the same way the knife in the hand of the other draws the world behind you and points you to it, so there is only it, or in a moment of sublime freedom at some party or dancing drunk with friends, this is the…world without self-other, appearance-essence – the black nihilo and unbearable intensity of light which are one and the same thing, experienced in different ways, the ying and yang of heteronomy, ‘the two halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’ (Adorno): yet.”

Love and death are absolutely one: they are us. However, elsewhere I wrote “we anxire toward desire”, but one must be appreciated with its indissoluble and presently incommensurable other. We “glimpse” (Silbernagel) their unity in moments of transcendent freedom: we rehearse their primordial union in each orgasm, each ‘petty death’, and art is its natural religion. It defines the most intimate features of our social and self experience: and it even constitutes the boundary lines of identity:

“The ambiguous heaviness of heart one experiences in advance of a breakup, before moving away from home, preparing for the death of a loved one and so on—is the psychical anticipation of one’s own death: an isolated event she’ll undergo in utter isolation. Because it implies transformation and hence loss, every major (as well as every minor) rite of passage—marriage, recovery from an illness, revelation, labor—evokes and affirms our ultimate alienation. But our association of alienation with ‘death proper’ is, however logical, specula…Can we psychically experience it the way animals physiologically ‘detect’ a coming storm?”

Love and death are the contours of the self. When mediation is overcome the two flow into each other like a river and this is the sublime, this is the glimpse, this is the absolute knowing. Yet its pathway is first anger, fear, angst and wonder, the dissolving edge of human civilization. “Where fear of dying has an object—soma—’fear’ of non-existence is by definition object-less, pure abstraction.” Pure negativity: soma has estranged the existent, the desire, for its realization. This is Hegelian dialectics of being (soma) and nothing (consciousness, the self-positing of the idea). “Thus, let us call the psychosomatic counterpart—the ‘ambiguous heaviness’ that goes along with our mere conceptualization of death as irremediable alienation—’angst.’” Angst is species work as yet undone. Life is not suffering or punishment but its own great work, anxiously through the world of pain toward that of desire, and it is the body can looses faith, that withdraws itself from soul and becomes mere body and its negativity or sin: “God, why have you forsaken me?”

It is in negation of the body through which a rupture and a glimpse seem to spring: it is the nothing or nihilo left behind, that out of nothing we reach deep down and touch our own source:

“The experience of angst, the ‘ambiguous heaviness’ of alienation that we synchronously project on the universal, ‘death’—gets lost in the particularity of the former. In other words: when I’m lying awake late at night and imagining my own death, trying to grasp (or trying not to) the ‘alienation’ of non-existence, I draw from my experience as a misunderstood poet, whereas previously I drew from my experience as an anorexic qua abnormal psyche/social deviant, whereas before that I drew from…etc. etc.—while my friend draws from his experience as a Christian homosexual qua outcast, whereas before that he drew from his experience as a homophobe qua closeted homosexual, whereas before that he drew from…etc. etc. It’s these particularities that our perspective gets caught in, preventing us from glimpsing the common nature of our experience as alienated beings-toward-death: as to glimpse this nature for ourselves through the vicissitudes of becoming is hard enough—to recognize it in another, through all their transmutations, which appear so foreign to us, seems utterly impossible. For there’s a difference between knowing conceptually and understanding, knowing immanently: between thinking ‘you are like me because we share X’ —and being struck by just how stunningly fragile, how strangely beautiful, i.e., how like myself, that lone soul.”

We can relate this to Hegel’s stage of ultimate mutual recognition or Marx’s distinction between use and exchange value which is to be overcome: she offers us a philosophical glimpse of the concrete-real, the total emotional life that is to come. Everything flows into everything else: but beside the sensuous contours of these impressions are in themselves, I can say absolutely nothing.

Here are some things I wrote recently which tie in different elements of this. First, the point made about use/exchange value:

“Experience transcends self-hood, i.e. self sublates with the world: self is somatic estrangement from experience which now becomes thing/things which are identified. This is fundamentally the character of the use and exchange value. In use value subject/object or other are recognised as two ends of one thing – our body. The body inheres in the sensuous object/other, the object/other in the sensuous body, hence they are one.”

I feel this is the shift in subjectivity that is to follow, and I feel this will bring about the end of Western angst. This recognition stage: the empty, ossified forms of social self-organization are crumbling around us: political and ideological consensus on the one hand, the breaking down of class structures, the specularization of culture and the dissolution of social identity. It is desire realizing itself and we are like water, always breaking down and surging forth: this is a great surge toward desire, through angst and with the force of our social and historical suffering.

For me, there is something we can call truth: it gives itself directly in the language of itself to anyone who is absolutely open. This openness does not transcend experience, as the consciousness of death does, and this Amanda picks up on:

“So regardless of the alienating (or un-alienating) nature of death/dying/non-existence, our sharing in the common-denominator of death is not the key to understanding and non-alienation, or freedom. If I’m conscious, I can see that you’re dying; but if I have a pulse, this knowledge doesn’t liberate me…We’re all dying—and? It’s this existence—which indeed presupposes and is conditioned by impending destruction—it’s this existence that we seek to understand each other ‘in terms of,’ and to free ourselves within. Death enters into the equation only qua object of consciousness: only in terms of how we think and feel about it, how our unique and ever-changing minds and bodies anticipate its coming.”

 I think we a dimension of the answer in an argument Terry Eagleton put: to recover the eternity of the present, its endless otherness, requires absolute openness toward death:

“To accept death would be to live more abundantly. By acknowledging that our lives are provisional, we can slacken our neurotic grip on them and thus come to relish them all the more. Embracing death is…the opposite of taking a morbid fancy to it…If we live permanently at the point of death, it would presumably be easier to forgive our enemies, repair our relationships, abandon as not worth the trouble our latest campaigns…It is partly the illusion that we will live forever which prevents us from doing these things… Immortality and immorality are closely allied.”

To accept death is redemption:

“Death is both alien and intimate to us, neither wholly strange nor purely one’s own. To this extent, one’s relationship to it resembles one’s relationship to other people, who are likewise both fellows and strangers. Death may not be exactly a friend, but neither is it entirely an enemy. Like a friend, it can enlighten me about myself, though like an enemy it does so in ways I would on the whole rather not hear. It can reminded me of my creatureliness and finitude, of the fragile, ephemeral nature of my existence, of my own neediness and the vulnerability of others. By learning from this, we can turn facts into values. By being woven into our lives in this way, death can become less daunting…It is indeed out to tear us apart; but in the process it can intimate to us something of how to live. And this is the kind of behaviour appropriate to a friend. But it is not just that death can give us some friendly advice. It is also that friends can rescue us from death.”

I have definitely been getting intimations of this nature, in close proximity to another dimension: primordial sexuality, the original unity of birth and death. I feel we overcome the concept of death through absolute openness to life and death in the imminent, but first on this principle I cite some aphorisms I did which grasp the connection between truth, death, and life as absolute openness:

The truth is in two directions from us: the death we run away from, and the life that has replaced itself with running.

No truth exist that cannot see everything, but to really see anything is to see everything. Truth is absolute openness.

Truth is absolute openness and until we reach it, when openness opens it eyes it sees horror -angst

Calmness is grasping the experience of life which cannot be thought of or said, and this is why all gods have sleepy eyes – redemption

Love is absolute openness, that which we rehearse in sex for our real life and death (freedom)

All fear is over the one: we fear this life/death thing, this ying/yang (freedom)

All truth annihilates its bearer” (identity/the concept)

We have always known truth: and it numbers only one. It is one and the same contradiction (freedom) – life and death

Time is the journey from the act to the conception – redemption is birth and death

It is only at the mature point when language is dying and breaking up does it yield its true content – truth is borne out of death

The orgasm reconciles the antimonies of our forgotten whole – life and death

It is only when you go through death, negativity or pain that you realize it curves back around through birth and into life

The secret to the aspects of sexual behaviour that are oral, is that it rehearses being hunted and killed. This is the essence of the symbolism: death is the act, birth is the conception

Freedom and orgasm are precisely the same: absolute openness toward and effacement before the experience

As soon as the animal gives up struggling against pain this pain becomes pleasure, for example in tears of sadness, which feels like tragic beauty

 An orgasm and pain are precisely the same somatic phenomenon: the radical differentiator is our desire or aversion to this phenomenon, and in the orgasm we have the secret of the whole. It is only our struggle against death that causes us pain (i.e. civilization)

The truth of human existence is this: it is heading not for its culmination but its birth

Both of us are thinking in sensuous mimesis, and this we can all do: its thinking in the semiotic, or in the flow moment in language and thought: its wordless movement, its going. This is what I have said about it:

“We don’t need mind/imagination/language/material social history/emotion/sensation distinctions when we think of them as experience: emotion and sensation is experience in-itself, while the others are experiential memory running from soma into social history through sedimentation, ossification, entrenchment, then back into soma through ideas, concepts, codes, behaviours, and then out once again into the social. Everything is experience: sensuous mimesis is the most subtle, nimble and radical thought that can flow through everything here. It sees experience sedimented into the world around us – in cars, clothes, peoples, language, habits – even facial expressions and body postures.”

I understand this as a lost species power we re-acquire through our historical self-emancipation, and this is how I am relating to Amanda’s notion of the “god-head”. I think I’m grasping this from the primordial antimony (the negative or ‘unconscious’) and she’s grasping it from her liberated subjectivity, through which negativity is realizing itself as prophetic philosophical-poetics.

However, what I have said here is an emergent polarity in subjectivity: the ordinary heteronomous psyche is the experience that needs to be understood in any broader social and historical self-emancipation, and we note again how identity is the straight jacket of death, the “tautology of terror itself”, the self-estrangement of the human as-such, bound in angst which is death:

“For the socialized psyche, i.e., the average American: immanent experience of alienation, and so of angst, stems from a belief in the social construct known as identity: a self made to endure change, but which may also get ‘lost’ in that change—like a sheep that escapes the fold and gets devoured by a wolf, or distracted by another sheep and led further astray—or so we’re led to believe. Thus identity…cause angst….Identity, like time, is a social construct: imaginary. Can a cause be imaginary? Or does the imaginary ‘object’ of our angst simply obfuscate, redirect us from, the actual cause? My suggestion is that the cause of angst is, as stated, not identity as such: not the fact (nor the illusion) that we have hidden in our innermost mechanisms, our sheep skins and wolf costumes, our butch or femme haircuts—an immutable kernel of truth or soul or essence that’s uniquely our own and that cannot be communicated; but rather it’s our attempt to shove into identitary straightjackets and pour into imaginary molds the enumerable feelings, thoughts, beliefs, habits, tastes, fears, and dreams that we are constantly evolving in and out of, trying on and tailoring and wearing out and giving up, that alienates us and produces the angst that we then project
on death. Stumbling up the stairs with your addiction hat on, flowing around the city in a trance of almost unnoticeable anguish.… (1) Angst is a symptom of the imaginary, but no less alienating molds we strut, or rather stumble, around in: like the Emperor in his new clothes”

Each poem is polemical and prophetic. The poetics of ossification and negativity, the latter in utopian poetics and the poetics of pain (the pitch black sublime) are the language of soma, poetry, the repressed god-head. Silbernagel identifies the lost object behind identity: it is the lost object she has found within herself in her refusal to negate her suffering with the forms of social-historical human self-confinement. The lost object, as Kristeva notes, is that which gives rise to the poetics of liberation, and this we see in the work of Silbernagel, but the poetic here is being used self-consciously to penetrate the world, and this is our next transformation of thought: the liberation of our capacity to possess our world, to really know our hold world, to think and speak through anything.

Fundamental to absolute openness is also that of emotional-social openness: a transcendence of alienation through empathy, the dissolver of identity, of you/me:

“What alienates me, and is by proxy both the same thing and not the same thing that alienates you, what gives me angst, is that I cannot express myself in full—but only in moments, which themselves seem senseless when (mis)taken for fragments and so (mis)taken in isolation. I for instance cannot explain why today I am not afraid of heights, whereas I was terrified of them five years ago. Or better yet: it’s that words cannot describe by what miracle I now enjoy food, and am no longer afraid to “take up space” with my body, whereas three years ago I’d been dangerously thin and dangerously in love with starvation for almost a decade. It’s hard to “make sense” of the fact that I both practice yoga and smoke cigarettes; that I both pray and don’t believe in a higher power. All these facts and anomalies, even the seemingly contradictory ones, make perfect sense to me immanently: I experienced it all: I’m the witness, I lived it: I’m the proof—but so much of that experience was wordless, and hence a-logical—to you. It isn’t that I was anorexic and you never were, or that you are, and have no plans to recover, or that my mind is too deep, or too shallow, or too flighty, my ‘nature’ too eccentric or piecemeal for you to ‘penetrate’—rather, it’s that I move too fast for you to grasp me in my self-identical entirety; and I move far too fast to grasp you in yours.”

This is freedom to early: it is a freedom we will all be glad to suffer as the pain of it becomes socialized hence becomes emotionality, the cohesive reconciliation of emotional social history, the melting of the divides.

“This is not to say that I don’t want to understand you, or that I’m just too busy, too wrapped up in my own transformations to be mindful of yours: it’s just that I, like you, undergo so many changes at such rapid speeds that it’s impossible for me to figure myself out once and for all, or even just once—let alone to delineate you and your endless viscissitudes. What—have I offended you? Pardon me, who are you to ask to be delineated?”

When the stasis of temporality and identity are overcome, when the social order becomes a “totally unshackled” reality (Adorno), when self becomes indissolubly the “endless, boundless, fathomless Self…reached by infinite… differentiations, fusions, and concatenations of the primitive elements of consciousness” (Edward Carpenter). Amanda offers us her glimpse of it:

“We know understanding is possible—hence why you’re reading this essay, and why I keep writing. I have seen you see your soul in me. I swear to god, I’ve seen my soul in your poem: my god in your soul. This is Recognition’s glimpse: the momentary experience of unity in difference, freedom in infinite otherness. When I see you recognize your truth in mine, your tears in my eyes, your voice in my soul-poem: not my identity, but my immanent experience of this moment, of the world-poem here and now: not the labels or costumes or histories or vocabularies I’ve amassed through the course of my (socialized) life, but the force and the form I right now embody: not in spite of my past, nor as its product, but as an organic part, a glimpse, of the world-poem: the becoming self-identical Whole.”

This is just how I see: she shines a steady light on my fleeting glimpses and brings them into clarity. It is an infinite imminence, that kind of infinite, like the Kantian sublime, and each glimpse speaks of this redemption. Nietzsche grasps this, noting the melting away of ego (identity):

“And so nature at last needs the saint, in whom the ego is completely melted away and whose life of suffering is no longer felt as his own life – or is hardly felt so – but as a profound feeling of oneness and identity with all living things; the saint in whom there appears that miracle of transformation which the game of becoming never hits upon that final and supreme becoming-human after which all nature presses and urges for its redemption from itself.”

These are glimpses: and here’s some of Edward Carpenters – bearing in mind he is not giving us ontological facts but the radically embodied, emotionalist experience of reality in subjectivity where emotionality and consciousness are an associative elastic autonomy…

“learn that these lines of the sea and sunset sky, these forms and colours of the trees and the flowers, are the expression of ideas waiting perhaps through the ages for their interpreters.”

“Creation is a stupendous and perpetually renewed work of Art, an everlasting evolution and expression of inner meanings into outer form,^ not only in the great whole, but in every tiniest part; Nature is a great vehicle, an innumerable network and channel of intelligence and emotion ; and this whole domain of the universe the theatre of an immense interchange of conscious life. Countless hosts of living beings, of every grade of organisation and consciousness, are giving utterance to themselves, expressing and unfolding that which is within them—even as every child of man from birth to death is constantly endeavouring to express and unfold and give utterance to what lies within him. With incredible speed the messages of these intelligences flash through space; ‘the Morning Stars sing together’; the messages of light and sound and electricity and attraction penetrate everywhere ; and as modern science shows us that the air, the sea, and the solid frame of the earth itself may be the vehicle of waves which without wire or definite channel may yet convey our thoughts safely to one another through intervening leagues of distance, so surely we must believe that the countless vibrations ever going on around, and ever radiating from and impinging on every known object, are messengers too of endless meaning and feeling. The intelligences which constitute the universe arc doubtless of infinite variety and of infinite gradation in development. Some may find expression in a mere point of space, others may enclose a planet or a solar system. Some are harmonious and accordant together ; others may be—as we well know—in violent mutual hostility or warfare. Yet in the end they are included. To regard the world as simply an arena of separate warring beings and personalities is impossible, because (as all Science, Philosophy, and Experience convince us) there is inevitably a vast unity underlying all ; and all these beings and personalities must root down in one ultimate Life and Intelligence ; all of them in the end and deep down must have a common purpose and object of existence—and in that thought there is liberation, in that thought there is rest.”

Amanda evinces in what follows the secret language of this knowing: conviction, force:

“If there is any meaning in this life it must be this one: this wordless recognition, my catching your glimpse through the flames, the burning glare-gaze of society, the nihilo and misunderstanding, subjectivity’s apocalypse—when hands and tongue are tied and our eyes, for all we know, are the last sight we’ll see of the real World of Difference—a glimpse into the infinitely other, eternity if you like—but why go there? We’ll be going there so soon already. —”

“—Stay with me. Lay beside me, for just another moment, just until we die, here, on the mountainside, here, among the trees all ablaze with dry lightning, no—one ablaze with lightening, the rest with its contagious flame of death. Tell me your name. Why do you keep your distance? “

“—What’s in a name? I’m singed like you, am I not? Shepherdless, bleating….You’re afraid that I’ll give us away? You want me to lie down and die with you, is that it? A biblical a Shakespearian death—our bodies welded together in the shape of desire, fair Verona in an uproar casting lots for our last tufts of wool? I’m leaving—why don’t you come with me? It’s not safe here—I’ve never heard thunder like this before you should’ve seen your eyes. Why aren’t you afraid? Why do you look at me like that, my Lord, my Romeo why don’t you look at me? .…You need me to free you? From what? I see no bindings, you’re not bound—now come quickly, before the flame consumes us.….You won’t go?….Bite through your bindings? I’ve told you already, there are none….”

*   *   *

“If you expect to “grasp” her in her totality, you won’t—and if you approach her this way, you do so at the expense of both of your freedoms. Hence I approach the Other with a single desire: to glimpse in her, in all her particularity, the world-poem of which I too am part. As to the rest, all the small talk, all the non-sense, all the bullshitting: what past? What identity? What bindings? What blindfold? What burning building? What burning bush? You
are a god,
and these, your mere hallucinations. Shall I wake you from them? How shall I, if you’re dreaming me as well? Can a hallucination correct its creator? Can a dream-character wake the Sleeping? Touch me—I am real. Shake off these invisible, these imaginary chains of which you speak—what identity? What past? What name? Do you not see me? Am I, too, bound in shackles? So I am—in your mind I am. You’re still dreaming. When you wake, if you wake, come to my house and look again.”

“The glimpse is based not on the common denominator of death—but on the common denominator of subjectivity: of being/giving self-identical expression, or rather countless self-identical expressions, to the world-poem, the godhead. But the result of being-incommunicable is still alienation, the necessary by-product of which
is angst. Alienation is however only “necessary” to the extent that it’s impossible for us to transcend difference—no, not to transcend it: to recognize ourselves in it, by recognizing the world-poem, the god, in our own otherness, and by proxy recognizing the god in the alienated Other, and how both of our soul-poems, wildly different as they are, represent a moment, a glimpse, of the Whole. It is this glimpse of recognition whereby difference is preserved and alienation transcended, whereby the particulars and the universal sustain each other, whereby everyone and every poem can be understood-as-belonging to the whole, and therefore, to each Other.”

“Because “glimpse” as we’re using it denotes not the length but the mode of understanding: analogous to the peripheral, depth, color, and distance modes of vision assumed by the eye—it can be ongoing: you and I can continue to delimit one another by seeing/reading one another as moments and so as the free, irreducible beings we always already are. For us, every moment spawns two new individuals, two new poems, or rather readings of the world; hence it is by adopting (reclaiming) a prehistoric view of self and other—which I call the glimpse—that we see through the social constructs (e.g., history and identity) that otherwise obliterate our ability to understand the moment as enduring through change— as a melody through key change, as a skeleton key through all doors. It is this understanding that the glimpse restores, and which emancipates us from our soul-prisons.”

 [1] The Glimpse of Recognition (click for full post)

[2] Lucie Brock-Broido, When the Gods Go, Half-Gods Arrive