An Effort to Enter into the Conception of Silence

This essay is based on the previous discussion of the "Silences of Dr. Oppermann." However the purvey of this essay is much broader and more facing into a general and ultimately "speculative" or "Theoretical" dimension of experience. As such this essay threatens to break with the particular, and with it's capacity for singularity.

Thus silence may be said to be the first confrontation with the particular, and with singularity. And this is the first thing that may be said about silence. That in it's essence it represents non-particularity.

Is silence the terrible love of communion? The terrible love of annihilation?

This essay is also pursuant to a dream I experienced last night with Bob Dylan, a man with seemingly endless capacity to speak, and not keep silent, but with a capacity in his speaking to break one's heart endlessly.

Bob Dylan is Oppermann's and my favorite of thinkers, and above all what has ever been best in American thinking (since thinking like this is currently not possible in circles of American academia, we have at least our lone and singular bard who sings outside the institution's walls - and his singularity is his song, far beyond the common outcry of "everyday man" to be "unique," as the Americans fashion and utterly commodify "uniqueness").

Murakami is right to place Dylan's "hard rain is going to fall" at the end of his essay on the split: exemplum fictivum. Murakami writes by exampling fiction: his writing is not an actual novel, it is a representation of a novel.

But the science of Murakami: since he represents is one that represents an ontological aesthetic, an ultimate act of literature: is the conception of a Japanese man of letters: a single cut under the crescent moon: shomen-uchi.

There are two kinds of silence: there is the silence of abuse and there is the silence of meditation. The silence of abuse is the silence of evil: it is the silencing of the cries of reproach and pain and grief. The silence of meditation is the silence of hope: it is the capacity to see the face of Love in the hands and faces of those men or women who are bent into cruelty and rage at seeing their salvation in our destruction.

The silence of hope is the silence before thought: and thought goes to the differing of the originary cry of reproach or assertion. Thought is the aesthetic of art as it stands against utility (which is the blind assertion of the will to power); it is ornament and difference.

In silence we are one; in silence God and mortal beings become one; in silence.

The obvious pain of the silence of abuse lends itself to it's evidence of suffering, and to gravity. But the silence of hope must come as an equal second. It must provide awareness when our situation always shows that we are thrown into suffering and in some way have been made to keep silent. This silence is drawn from the facticity that we, out of trickery, or stupidity, or out of something unspeakable (since all explanations are ever laughable)... survive. This survival in the face of all doubt, the doubt that states that precisely if we were fully aware of the situation we would in fact kill ourselves: this is a hope that is at the limits of language, and harshly rebukes the belief in the pessimism that goes into the words of ultimate negativity: the desire to die. (Levinas comments on this most horrible thought at the beginning of "totality and infinity" as "the grim possibility of suicide.") But this essay is an effort to speak, and say why it is so important to survive, this is the effort at the root of the "beyond" of the will to power of: if thought is in words... then... words are something else. If no thought is in words, then words remain lifeless, without the touch of the soul, unanimated, words remain the same: they signify only what they are intended to, in some ultimate cry of despair the Habermasians might call "communicative action." "Communicative action" is effective philosophic lobotomy (or, equally, vasectomy, ): refusing to face the most horrible question: it is a contention that ontological thinking is a kind of sickness (Wittgenstein's contention). Any form of philosophic "therapy" to somehow re-anesthetize is precisely that: anti-art: anti-aesthesis.

Thinking knows already that every postulation is a painful travesty: but out of some care (to reach out and connect) asserts itself just the same through writing: the need to reach out and connect is pre-critical; it has to be if we validate the possibility that civilization actually is born out under the sign of hope (Constantine believed this to be the Chrismon, but this was a false literalization of "compassion").

In the dream with Dylan I wept at first, I mean what else is there to do with the poet of the broken heart? "A hard rain's a gonna fall." The man has a great deal to say. But I told him in the end that I had searched very near and very far: I had looked in so many places: I had tried to become a "doctor" as though this could somehow make a statement of some sort of greatness of search. But now I stand at the other end of any accomplishment of "doctoring" and I don't know what to do. I simply stand, bare, weeping, grief-stricken.

I told Dylan that he should read Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund; he told me that I should listen to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." At this time I cannot listen to George Gershwin, because his blue is too light, too light for me, and it has not come to a critical mass of negativity that would present an outcry of the soul (Coletrane's music for example). I cannot take the Gershwinian approach to capitalism, even if through the Bohemian elegance of New York City. By comparison Coletrane's "A Love Supreme" is a pure paean to hope.

Hesse is one of Oppermann's favorites. I have even said once, jokingly, that Oppermann wants to one day become a Hesse. (I also attempted to repair this statement with the added comment that I hope one day that Oppermann will become an image of himself: not merely the image of someone else, nor the mere emptiness of subjective "uniqueness" incipient in American capitalism).