03 04 2024 evening
So much of human trust is invested – presupposed – by the very idea of sleep that there is little left over for waking life.
In bed, thinking of X. No memory, only memorials. It would become a full-scale ritual if only I could get someone else involved…
A kind of acupuncture of the amygdala –
Sign of age: the feeling that I have to put it all in order, this then this then this.
I saw it with my father: growing tendency to focus on sequence. Order is a consolation, not a prize; this is clear in Stevens, even in Eliot.
Conservativism: preference for sequence over spirit. Leftism: vice-versa.
Messianic time refers to (i) a sufficiently sharp curve (so the line can cross itself) and (ii) an event, to solder the intersection. A revolution without a messiah always fails, only curves the line into vertigo.
Only Proust or Jesus could do it; the second coming of either. Can’t bring myself to care which.
Forgot about Easter.
Show up to Halloween dressed as someone who just happened to be passing through. Carrying a lunchbox, a thick picnic rug. They looked at Jesus on the cross and thought: should I sit down for this? Is this a good spot?
You have to sit a picnic away, then it becomes a scene, a manger, a theology.
Kafka: the moment the messiah leaves and the circle snaps back into a line. Kafka writes at the moment the tension is released, at the moment an absolutely perfect conception of time – Jewish time – is undone, reverts to mechanism. Imperfection is instantaneous, hence its universal appeal, hence the longing of the will to become subject to gravity.
Kafka: Nietzsche’s psychotic objectivity but without needing the future as insurance.
04 04 2024 evening
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