Two birds in the dream. One assisted the other. One crawled pulling the other along with his beak. These were two friends. One a crow and one a black eagle. One steps into the flame: the black crow is burned blacker. And in the midst of the flame the crow becomes momentarily the phoenix, the source of all healing. The other is healed by virtue of the flame burning and turning blacker.
When I mentioned this to a teacher he recalled the story of the salamander in Benvenuto Cellini: when the young man was called by his father to see the brilliant beautiful salamander dancing in the flames. Suddenly his father slaps him brutally across the face saying: "this is so you will never forget this!"
What I can say is that it seems that the very act of writing: web log or otherwise: involves stepping into the fire. We could say that it is going to hell, possibly that it is a matter of paying one's dues: but there is another place where stepping into the line of writing is "placing oneself on the line." It is on the line, not the plummeting line of Deleuzian descent, but something like that, only not involving auto-defenestration unless absolutely necessary. On it goes. Yet beyond the technological nihilism of writing a web log at all is this stepping into the fire which was the great promise of writing from the first place: as a medicament its results remain dubious to say the very least.
When I look out at my life, and I look out at the life of my friends: the act of writing still holds within it the finest thread: the thread of the psyche itself, upon which the fate of our "earthly civilization," our humanity, holds: that is that we have the choice to bring consciousness into the world, or to despair. Optimism does not hold the ultimate human value because it winds up being deluded, sold a bag of goods, upstream without a paddle. Pessimism does not hold because it ends only in despair, and a despair of writing itself, nothing does any good at all. But looking upon this, were I even to be dead, I would say that I would want an opportunity to live in this world a moment longer, to be here in order to find the affirmative, impossibly, in the situation, no matter how bright or dim the ostensible light seems to be. I would want to participate, to affirm that it is possible to affect the world to some fragment of a degree toward the good, toward consciousness, bearing in mind that each act bears a terrible burden of its own shadow, of what it does not include, that it included only itself as just one small thing. It was not only the best I or anyone could do with this "opportunity" this "being alive in the world" ...this dancing salamander, at times writhing sinews, threads, sutures of pain and opportunity at the same time, the dash of the father's hand that says "don't go back to sleep! -Not at this moment, this brief wakefulness is yours insofar as with the world it is shared."
When I look out at my life, and I look out at the life of my friends: the act of writing still holds within it the finest thread: the thread of the psyche itself, upon which the fate of our "earthly civilization," our humanity, holds: that is that we have the choice to bring consciousness into the world, or to despair. Optimism does not hold the ultimate human value because it winds up being deluded, sold a bag of goods, upstream without a paddle. Pessimism does not hold because it ends only in despair, and a despair of writing itself, nothing does any good at all. But looking upon this, were I even to be dead, I would say that I would want an opportunity to live in this world a moment longer, to be here in order to find the affirmative, impossibly, in the situation, no matter how bright or dim the ostensible light seems to be. I would want to participate, to affirm that it is possible to affect the world to some fragment of a degree toward the good, toward consciousness, bearing in mind that each act bears a terrible burden of its own shadow, of what it does not include, that it included only itself as just one small thing. It was not only the best I or anyone could do with this "opportunity" this "being alive in the world" ...this dancing salamander, at times writhing sinews, threads, sutures of pain and opportunity at the same time, the dash of the father's hand that says "don't go back to sleep! -Not at this moment, this brief wakefulness is yours insofar as with the world it is shared."
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