And, it's all done "in perfromance" before the Order of the Ninety Eight. The
implied audience is eesential. Philosophy of this Catskill Comedy veriety
requires it. And the fact that said audience members are kind enough to step
out every now and again and let everyone know they're there is quite gracious
of them. Perhaps it would be nice if there were more. But as I've said
recently in a similar connection, "It's never enough."
It's true it's gracious of them. Even if one were to struggle with a problematized train of thought that dosen't quite flow and hesitates and stumbles is commendable. In fact that's all some of us have sometimes,-- this agonized wrestling with an expression that seems to tend to be withdrawn into a cocoon where something else incubates and broods and let's itself be tied down by a dynamic groundlessness where whatever is said seems accidental, a completely free expression. Sometimes in a difficult situation one just has to think fast without seeing much of anything in a cloud of thinking where everything has the markings of an unknown x. It's like writing becomes this shufling along in one's hands and knees in complete darkness. I think we are going through a lot of renunciation today which is paralyzing no doubt. In fact it's the age of doubt. I have been reading some American books lately. Books that are expressing a kind of renunciation of the way we organize reality when we think about it and then write it down. Common to them, which is not always seen consciously, is a kind of pragmatic skepticism that forces us to put emphasis on our local situation, the immediacy of a particular context, occasion of the moment. The connection is not often made but it's this current of pragmatic skepticism amongst Americans that is related to what in a more French context would be a philosophy of immanance in a Deleuze or Serres and in traditionalists like Hadot and Mafessoli who bring out a sort of pagan philosophical spirituality that is firmly situated in the here and now that is without anticipatory hope. If the end of history means that a short-memory is operative then it means a loss of consciousness, a loss of the identifications that would have made up who we could have taken ourselves to be. This precisely it seems to me makes us flexible amd more able to adapt quickly to our environment in order to work through the most difficult. All of which leads me to say that my audience doesn't have a proper identity and is somewhat of an amorphous blob constantly going through metamorphosis. This is what keeps me modern in spite of all the traditionalists tendency. If writing in my case is an orphic descent into the shadow of language where through the tragic rhetoric of melancholy we get Pluto to release Persephone because he sheds iron tears and becomes like frozen marble, like a paralyzed knot of confusion that doesn't know where to turn and which is the way in or the way out (cf. Milton's Il Pensoroso) then I think we start to work with an underground stream when half way through life as Dante says at the beginning of the Divine Comedy we find ourselves in a dark forest blind to everything but what is right before our noses and at the end of our fingertips. This shadow language is the only way possible anymore and the rite of passage is the difficult renunciation that pragmatic skepticism and the philosophy of immanence indicates. There is no synoptic view of anything anymore. Language does not hook up to any reality anymore but is haunted by untruth, error, and fleeting apparitions. It's the sad situation of Persephone becoming uncanny and being turned outdoors to wander her darkest streets and her most hidden alleys in order to find real intimacy in fiction.
tympan
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