Clouded Thinking
February 8th, 2007, search relatedRelated posts :: Clouded Thinking :: Clouded Thinking :: Clouded Thinking :: Clouded Thinking
Ari
I think I know what you mean, but not sure. I think you are referring to
amanesis, the recollection of destiny, a head butting episode.
http://anab-whitehouse.blogspot.com/
Yes, that’s funny could have serious consequences though. I have also been
thinking about what Anab refers to as an “unknown saint” which as the
“hidden imam” is more important to Shias than Sunnis. This eschatological
figure emerged out of what appears to be the historical trauma of the
twelver Imam who was probably assasinated by the Abbbasid Caliph. There is a
painful work of mourning at issue here but we have in our own traditions of
a sort of will to obscurity, to withdraw into the desert and live in a cave,
to separate ourselves in order like Jesus in the desert to develop what
Kierkegaard calls a God-relationship. The “hood” is a symbol of this sort of
modesty much like the “veil” of Muslim culture. Kierkeggard says some
interesting things regarding the institutionalization of the medieval
cloister of monks and nuns. He says it was too much of a public display
feeding vain pride. He doesn’t have much good to say about the visible
churches and their pastors. He describe like some protestant with his
inclination what could be an “invisible church”. He believes in a process of
occultation where one carries on the faith in secret and honors it as a
secret as a mystery. Kierkegaard describes a tension of such a hidden life
with whatever roles one may have in one’s community. For him they separate
and not to be confused. Holding on to his tension he calls a “task” or an
exercise. In Concluding Unscientific Proscript he writes about this in a
section called the “initial expression: “The task is therefore to exercise
myself in the relationship to the absolute telos so as always to have it
with me, while remaining in the relativities of life…” The difficulty is
always trying to remember to stay in touch because without it how much of a
genuine relationship is there? Then there is the recognition that since the
telos is absolute it is not a looking forward to a finite advantage or
profit. There is no reward to expect just a future of suffering. Kierkegard
goes through great lenghts to make faith as unappealing as posible. He
didn’t like caculating speculation on the future of faith so he writes,
“When men became weary of the relationship to the eternal, became
calculating as a higgling Jew, tender-skinned as an effiminate clergyman,
sleepy as a foolish virgin; when they could no longer endure to understand
existence (existing) in its turn as a period of courtship, an enthusiastic
venture in uncertainty — then came mediation”. For him it was about living
with the immediacy of what he refers to as the “pathos of a great moment”.
The archetype of the God-relationship is very much that of a courtship
between the soul and her Lord. The examples he mention inludes Petrarch and
Laura. Today we would think of Kierkegaard and Regina to add to all the
classical examples that Kierkegaard knew and maybe we would think also of
Layla and Majnun: “
I pass by these walls, the walls of Layla
And I kiss this wall and that wall
It’s not Love of the houses that has taken my heart
But of the One who dwells in those houses.”
One is always working through the grief of great loss while trying to
organize fragments, remains, traces of life. The fragments are the obscurity
of a lost life, clouds of thought that somehow we follow not knowing where
we are going. The thing to understand is that the uprooting is the uprooting
of ego-consciousness, of narcissistic self-love as much as it is a
withdrawing separation from relative goods and the national interest for
eschatological waiting, for a promise.
John: A sufi mystic is banged up by a fall down stairs. He states later
that he wished there were more stairs to fall from.
http://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2006/11/…
John: I recollect that Jung considered amanesis to be significant, but
cannot remember why, other than I think he refered to Proust, in his “a la
recherche du temp perdu”, no?
TYmpan: can’t remember I’ll have to keep this question in mind while I
continue to read him.
John: _remembrance of things past_ The only why that a person can remember
things past is by recollecting images of past occurences, or life. There is
no script to remember, since the script has not “date”, ie., a recollection
of words cannot be ‘date stamped’ and therefore only way to date it
is to refer to the ‘condition’ or ‘circumstance’ of the imager or dreamer at
the time the even took place, no?
Tympan: To some extent the way I think of remembrance is as simple clearing
away of everything so that one then is attached to this desert in order to
just move on and forget whatever was ailing and enjoy the secure base that
this support offers. Not that much is being said certainly not what
Kierkeggard would call “prattle” or “chatter” of the they-self but there is
expression of an emerging language held on the threshold of meaning which
makes it absolute or a fomal indication, a non-verbal gesture that points
because it cannot speak. The soul as it were is a waiting heart and that is
what Lord answers to with the gifts of the holy spirit, with the ability to
speak the foreign tongue of a foreign agency. Remembering then is staying
awake, a type of attention, the guarding of the emptiness of the screen.
Proust is interesting I read his book when I was too young to get the most
out of it. It ends with the beginning because at the end he is tasting this
sweet pastry with his tea and that is what sets off his remembrance of the
past that was the novel that we just read.
John: which essentially leads to a proof regarding remembrances and
recollections, of a ‘divine’ or extraordinary nature, in the sense of an
_aion_ but not of an _epoch_ which is different in that an _epoch_ is
mediated symbolically and via symbolic intuition.
Tympan: I see more of how you mean symbolic intuition. Doesn’t Jung talk
about aions? You seems to be saying that the aion refers to the “condition”
of the dreamer is this an affect? Why not just say that aion is eternity,
the expansion of the moment backwards and forwards which is what happens
through the exercise of holding onto it until it becomes a habit or ethos?
Maybe there is such a thing as eternalization?
That may be why it is very difficult to ‘grasp’ geologic time, and
geologic time scales due to lack of images, or imagery. There
are many types of images: sound, sight, smell, touch, et cetera….We cannot
know the past “mediately”
Tympan: We can forget the past by immediately holding onto to the “pathos of
the moment” as an exercise that is continously renewed *that* is something
but not the fullfilment of an intention of thinking. It is existence whether
painful or not.
Thanks for the link to the blog looks like a good one.
Who is Ari?
Tympan
chao
John
