Cassandra Voices

Tag: Peter O’Neill Cassandra Voices

  • Homer

    He who fights with monsters should look to it
    that he himself does not become a monster…
    when you look into the abyss the abyss also
    gazes into you.
    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Day 1.

    On the question of the one against the many, as opposed to the many against the one, White was decidedly with the former after having proven, to himself at least, that his poor father was a lost one without any direction having given himself to the latter and now, after spending his life among his own, was fundamentally on his own more than ever, isolated more so than White himself was, for whereas White had taken the conscious decision to oppose the many by choice, thus accepting to lead a life of solitude, whereas his poor father by accepting to choose a life among the many, sharing their so called ‘core values’, White’s father, all his life, would go on and on about shared values; now, at the end of the day, nearing his end, ironically he was perhaps more alone now than he ever was! This was something that White, to a certain degree, could take satisfaction in. The fact that no matter what way you decided to lead your life, in the end, you always ended up on your own. Solitude was, in this sense, always the end result. Of course, this is something that White had always taken into consideration. It is, you could say, the reason why he chose to accept a life of solitude in the first place. If the truth were known, White was always intensely anti-political, which is why he hated groups. He always had. So, the idea of any kind of group consensus was anathema to him. Family being the first! The first group. He had always hated being apart of it, at least since he started to see through it. That is to say when he first started to question it when he was a very young man.

    Even White’s friends, some of whom were considered to be quite wild, were shocked by White’s initial coldness. White would refer to certain animals who would leave the family to fend for themselves. Why did humans insist on remaining in contact with their parents? Out of all the animals on the earth, only humans, as far as he could see, remained in such close proximity to their parents, and at what cost?

    Of course, White’s whole vision of the world had been profoundly altered or shaped by the tragic death of his brother. His brother had committed suicide when White was still a very young man, and this act had such an incredible knock-on effect on everything that White would do. This act had fundamentally altered White. Utterly, you could say. It wasn’t the only act to have had such a powerful effect on him, there was another, but it was the first event rather which was to have such a radical impact on his whole worldview, if one could say that White did have such a thing, a view of the world, as it were. I should probably say what the second event was now after having already alluded to it and in this way setting out the trajectory of the present tale. Building up the horizon, as it were.

    The second great event to influence White, after his brother’s suicide, was when he eventually was to separate from his wife, whom he was to eventually divorce. This was the second great event in his life. The second of the great Ds. So, first Death and secondly Divorce. Life was made up of a series of Ds, White had noticed. The 3 Ds, he called them. White being Irish, alcohol, or Drink, was the 3rd. It was a so- called coping mechanism. The results, of course, were disastrous as a man who has already been struck by two of Life’s greatest events, Death and Divorce, to then resort to Drink to get over them is simply asking for even more trouble, and of course this is what this story is all about. Stories all involve trouble, the interesting ones at least.

    I’d like to get back to White’s father now, after having presented you, the Reader, with an overview of the overall substance of the narrative of the following tale, having thus fulfilled, to a certain degree, the duties of the Author – ha, dead me arse!

    If there was one person in the world who was to have such a singular effect on White, apart from his late brother and former wife that is, it was the old pater familias. God, what an absolute cunt! A curse on his kind, indeed, as that is in fact what he was, White had surmised. The Patriarch! The cunt! The superlative arsehole of the Universe! The sum total of all his woes! As when it came to the Patriarch, the many were truly the One. They all conformed to the same depths of depravity. Hitler being the superlative. You had to nail your colours to the mast.

    Because of the dire nature of White’s relationship with his father, to a large degree White’s relations with men in general were pretty shitty. Indeed, it was rare that he actually liked one. Though not an impossibility too, having said that. He had had great friendships with some men, over the years. But, in general, White was more a Woman’s man than he was a Man’s man and this was primarily to do with the whole very complex relationship that he had had with his parents. White’s poor mother, for example, had been a martyr to all women as she had come from that very particular generation of women in Ireland who simply stood by their men, come hell or any amount of assorted high water! High water indeed, the expression was literally true now, now that they were all expecting a biblical like deluge to submerge them all due to global warming. Patriarchy and Fossil Fuels, now how many academic papers were headed in such a way in Humanity Departments in progressive universities all around the world?

    One could dream of Noah and his drunkenness. White saw again Uccello’s depiction, all cascading in glorious Rouge, or Reds….

    The fact of the matter was, no matter how you wished to look at it the situation was truly awful. The man had been the worst possible fucking cunt of his kind. There were no redeemable qualities, the more he looked the more shit was uncovered. How many could say the same? These shits, shits of their kind, this kind, this kind of shit kind, the shitty fucking shit kind, the kind of shitty fucking shit that you wouldn’t want to shit next to nor sit beside mind, that kind, mind your backside! The fucking shitty shitters and their fucking shitty shitting shits! Those kind of shitty fucking shitters… That Kind!

    End of Day One!

    Day 2

    Now White hadn’t always been an aggressive son of a gun. He had become one. His nature then was historic, you could say. Informed as it had been by the unending deluge of experience that had gone on over his time in the world. Planet Earth. What they had done to it! It was nothing short of disastrous. The so-called strong men. What a bunch of dipshits. Strong men my ass. Show me a man and I’ll show you an ass, that is what White would say. As he had lived with one. Oh yeah, he had survived him too. Mister Universe spinning around in his tight leopard skin briefs. Bikini briefs! God forbid. It was infectious. The briefs that is. “Be brief!” Puts a whole new context on it…

    When he thought about his childhood, which was rare, White remembered particularly the long torturous dinners which went on in the depths of winter. The family, all six of them, surrounded the table upon which the food had been placed. Every Patriarch worthy of the name has his place at the table and mealtimes are a particular pleasure for control freaks of this nature as these events allow for a certain element of theatricality and ceremony. Placing people at the table involves a whole network of categorisation. Hierarchy within families, for example. Directors on Boards. They all involve systems of power, and so invoke a little ceremony.

    White, for example, used to sit at the head of the table directly opposite his older brother who eventually committed suicide. White was the second in command, following the patriarchal hierarchy. His sister sat beside his mother on the left side, important detail, as you came in the door and then on the right- hand side sat the Father and on his right side his youngest son whom neither White’s older brother nor sister could stand. He was the porte parole while the eldest brother was the weakest link. White could see it all, how he had been set up to fail. As he was not a natural leader, White’s eldest brother. This had been his great tragedy and which was to kill him, literally, in the end. It would have been better, in many respects, if White had been the eldest as he had leadership qualities but then they had been acquired by White from a sustained practice of observation. This is how White seemed to have learned everything, from the point of observation. Seeing how Not to do something, typically then in everything in later life also the very point of departure.

    White could remember the hours spent at the kitchen table listening to the voice of God drone on endlessly about some subject matter. Omnipotence. This was a key idea in the pater familias. The all seeing all knowing One, like the Sun. The King without a throne. The King looking down at his subjects, all knowing, all condescending! And oh God how he would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on…in a monotone.

    Of course, the atmosphere around the table would be unbearable. I have read accounts of Hitler at the dinner table, apparently he gave these endless monologues talking for hours and hours and hours and hours. Omnipotent. All knowing, addressing all kinds of subjects. Not really knowing all of the subjects at all, and so talking absolute horse shite half of the time. Can you imagine it? One of the World’s Most Important Figures Talking Absolute Horse Shit. And for hours!

    Yes. In retrospect, White had been well prepared. All his life. For his Life. LIFE. In screaming capitals. He could take great pleasure in that fact. That it had all, all the horror, all the boredom, all the manic pain and apparently pointless suffering. It all had some kind of purpose, in the end! It was preposterous, really. And for what? By what grand design had it all been arranged for?

    Were there reasons for it all, after all? Some universal truth? There in the great black firmament, shot through with countless stars for millennia, in the great abstraction of the night of the cosmos was there, after all, some kind cosmic arrangement where the infinitely, infinitely small and inconsequential, most insignificant of beings finds a place after all in the great scheme of things?…

    No answer. Silence. The kind of silence that could sink whole nations. A Black Hole. You are on the event horizon. Don’t fall in. Or perhaps we are already in and have come out the wrong end? That would make sense.

    Platitudes

    The people who live here will never get bored with the beautiful views…
    The truth is they do, and this kind of explains the whole god-awful mess.
    Whether it is the young man who, having finally won over his ‘beautiful
    Princess’, starts focusing now on her bad breath and tiresome habit of
    Complaining already after only two years in and who will,
    After breaking up with her one year later, dreams only about bottling that
    Same horrendous breath and keeping it as a heady perfume
    To remind him of his most cherished memories.

    Loss, that great Optician, Loss, and absence its partner,
    Are the great rose-coloured lenses that truly help us to SEE
    The many-splendored colours of the world.
    Seeing through the cracked lens offers alone true vision.

    (There’s one  for SpecSavers!)

    Day 3.

    White never actually liked his parents, if the truth were known. How could he? His mother, after all, was not very intelligent. She was smart, and quite pretty. Actually, very beautiful when she was young, but she was also extremely subservient, not very curious, she could be a real bitch and was not at all tactile, so not prone to showing any kind of affection to White nor his siblings. This was hardly surprising considering the fact that her mother before her was a horrible woman who was hysterical, fanatically religious, cunning, cruel, malicious and spiteful. In fact, whenever White did think about her, which was rare, ugly was the word he would use to describe her. Such were his memories.

    As for his father… It was even less pretty, the picture. He was a profoundly vain and ignorant man and it was this twin display of vanity and ignorance that were particularly horrendous to behold; the latter of course cancelling any reason for the former to exist, you would think! But no, the ignorance was such that it apparently clouded all judgement in the so-called thinking subject, as it had no awareness of its own faults, and what was even worse, if it did, and sometimes it seemed to show some inkling of awareness (For example, when it was eating at the dinner table, it had the habit of chewing its food with its mouth open, a truly odious habit, and then, seeing that White was actually observing it, instead of closing its mouth like any normal person would, it instead continued to masticate its food in an even more exaggerated manner like some ghoulish creature, which is why I am speaking about it as opposed to him.) but even so continued its ghoulish behaviour nonetheless. That is when White started to think of his father in terms of the mythic creature fabricated by Homer.

    The Cyclops was, at least for White, the most truly amazing poetic metaphor in all of western creation. White never ceased to be amazed by Homer’s creative genius when he did think about it, which was a lot due to his particularly horrendous relationship with his father. White wondered was he alone, in this, and, by the fact that Homer’s metaphoric beast was being re-invented time and time again for generations and generations of people down through the millennia so that they too could understand the truly epic horror show that they were dealing with which was, in a word, PATRIARCHY

    There it was. The bullet stopped here. This ten- letter word fell off of the pen or the tongue with all of the monumental obstinacy of the one-eyed monster himself. The cave dweller of old, horribly blinded by the clever and equally intelligent Odysseus himself. It is this twin pillar of cleverness And intelligence that had made Odysseus the truly remarkable hero that he is and again this is a further testament to Homer, or the Greeks, their incredibly astute insight into man’s nature. In other words, what it meant to be a Man. A Real Man, that is, as opposed to some One-Eyed King of some barren cave dwelling along the coast. You could of course say, perhaps must, here we have the two kinds of man, in the end. The Cyclopean Monster, or what we would call in modern parlance – The Narcissistic Toxic Male. TNT M. Nietzschean dynamite. All metaphors being carved specifically from the finite, as good old Friedrich knew.

    Back at the kitchen table, White could only look upon the creature before him as the Cyclops personified. There before him, that grotesque vision of the creature masticating on the meat before him. Contemptuous, almost, of him. The beastly couldn’t give a FUCK look of him. I AM THE KING. The Cock-eyed face of power on him. Tunnel vision. Hence the voice. HMV. His Master’s Voice. Lacanian. Tripping on the Real. The lexical field filled with metaphors is far more really lasting then the mere sports field with all its associated bruises and weather stains, for they will all be memories. Whereas, the symbolism will reign eternal. Such then is the very potent power of poetry. This is why the intelligent princes feared it. Not only the Greeks but in every culture.

    White saw again his Irish Master incontinent with piss- stained grey pants, his face a travesty of a man. More a Terminator in decline, his rusting member leaking out like some old oil well. Grotesquerie. For teenage boys a male mockery.

    White would go home alone and strip and slip into his mother’s room would steal, like countless boys before him, tights and underclothes. Fetishes that he would take away to his cave where he would sit alone unmanned and Freudian.

    Enter the imagery of Salvador Dali. The Great Masturbator. Eros and Thanatos. Sex and Death. Such were the twin pillars guarding the Exit, from the mad man’s lair. Such was the wonder of her hair. The other worldly feminine. That offered some kind of safe-haven. From IT. From Him.

    Enter then the Muse.

    Feature Image: The blinded Polyphemus seeks vengeance on Odysseus: Guido Reni‘s painting in the Capitoline Museums.

  • Love and Literature in Numbers

    Whenever I think about Literature I think about Love. Both are written with big Ls. The Elles. Like an enjambment of run on legs, going on ad infinitum.

    And when I think of Love I think also, inevitably, of betrayal. One cannot be without the other; the two legs upon which humanity stands. Only in their resolution can we find peace. So, Literature – like His story – is very personal. Let me tell you my own.

    It is a story about numbers, mainly Thee and Four. Here I am borrowing from Joyce and Beckett, both of whom in their turn drew from Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher, a genius unjustly ignored in his lifetime. Even today, if you ask an educated people about Gimbattista Vico chances are most won’t know anything beyond his Three Ages of Man theory that helped Joyce formulate the structure of Finnegans Wake.

    Now let me go back to the women in my life. There were three, you see. I said that this was a story about the numbers Three and Four, but in order to tell this story, I first need to tell you about these three women.

    It is a story about Power; all history concerns Power after all.

    With the first I was in a situation of Power. I could do anything. Or so it seemed. She clung to me. She lay at my feet and looked up to me like I was a God. And I was too. For when you are so very young, you feel God-like. Such is youth!

    Look at them now, the youth of today, walking on the street! Love for them is the eternally INFINITE. That is why with youth there is still hope. As they are believers in the truth. It spreads out before them in space and time. Boundless. They are perpetually in a mindset ready for exploration. Of all kinds. This is why some of them love Art and Literature.

    Rogelio de Egusquiza‘s Tristan and Isolt (Death) (1910).

    Life Moves On

    I am in my fifties now. I no longer believe in infinity. For me things are all too FINITE. Where I once saw open space, I now see enclosure.

    She used to lie at my feet like I was a God. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it, to have that power! You stand above them like a God or a Goddess, looking down upon them, deciding on their fate.

    And of course – as we all know – with such power comes enormous responsibility. The only problem is that when you are young you rarely feel like being responsible. Then one day you decide to do a terrible thing. Everyone does it, at some point. You kill them!

    Metaphorically, at least. But this is the first real taste of death, and it is a truly terrible thing. Now, you have the taste of death upon your tongue. The one that you used to kiss. Now, s/he only tastes of poison.

    You move on.

    It is that simple. It’s called survival. Call this the first age when everything was divine and when you discovered metaphor and the apocalypse of dying.

    The Soler Family, Pablo Picasso, 1903.

    Nemesis and Trinity

    So, time passes. You meet another one. Number Two. S/he is your Nemesis. For she will destroy you. Just like you destroyed number One, now your time too will come. Somehow this enters into our conception of justice. What goes round comes round. Karma.

    Just as you had looked down, all those years ago, on your first lover; just as you looked down on the one who crawled around at your feet, now you are in that very same position! Who would have thought it? There now, look at you! That miserable specimen down on both your hands and knees before Her, who is looking down upon you. Like she’s contemplating an insect. And, of course, She eventually squashes you under Her boot heels. She crushes and grinds you into the earth so that there is no longer any trace of you. You are extinguished. Finally. You are dead.

    There now. That is the story of numbers One and Two.

    What happens next? And what, by the way, does any of this have to do with Messrs Beckett and Joyce? Everything, my dears. Just wait. Be patient, as I will explain. I will take you by the hand and help you to join up all the dots.

    But first, let me introduce you to number Thee.

    Isn’t she a beauty? Now, remember the score is one-all now. Even Stephens, as we say. You are finally at the age of equality. It happens early on for some; for others later on. And for some poor buggers, it never even comes!

    You have to will it. But if s/he does come, you will finally have a chance to redeem yourself. For, like her, you too have been broken. You are no longer the youth you once were. Infinity has been clouded by impossible violence. You need to thread carefully now, and hold onto what you have with more caution.

    And you do. Whereas before your relationships – that is with numbers One and Two – may have lasted only five or so years, with number Three it is all-enduring. Before you know it, twenty years have passed and you have children growing up around you; who you now cherish as you once cherished your own life.

    This is the story of Three. The Trinity, if you will.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy.

    How It Is

    Moving on to Samuel Beckett and a story from his How It Is (1961) that has obsessed me like no other in Literature. This novel by the Irish Modernist writer has obsessed me throughout most of my adult life. It acts like a portal into human history through Literature, travelling back to the Ancients of Greece, and Rome. But before exploring this, I must first tell you about Giambattista Vico.

    When talking about Giambattista Vico and Samuel Beckett, we must also consider James Joyce. The number three is there again! They form a triad. A holy Trinity. It was Joyce, after all, who asked the young Beckett to write an article about Work in Progress – the working title for Finnegans Wake (1939) – when they first met in Paris in 1928.

    This was when he wrote his famous essay Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce (1929), in which he singles out Vico – more than the other Italians mentioned in the title – for particular attention, and the important influence of this Neapolitan thinker on James Joyce, in particular on the structural composition of Finnegans Wake.

    But it also demonstrated Vico’s influence on Samuel Beckett, a point that has tended to be ignored by Beckett scholars.

    Let us consider the essence of Vico’s ideas on the Three Ages of Man, and how Joyce was to incorporate Vico’s theories on history into his epic final novel.

    In the La Scienza nouva or A New Science (1725), Vico attempts to break history down into a cyclical process, as natural as the four seasons. In fact, Vico’s Three Ages of Man idea actually contains four parts, and in this Joyce is a stickler. For this reason, though not alone, that Finnegans Wake is made up of four books. One being for each Age.

    The Muses Melpomene, Erato, and Polyhymnia, by Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655.

    The Four Ages

    What then are these Four Ages? The First is called the Divine Age and language in particular, but also laws, are divinely thought of, or God-given. God in this case is Jupiter, as we are in the Pagan era.

    Though, coming from a Christian era, we should recognise the intermediary nature of the Muse Uranus, mother of all the Muses, assigned the role of intermediary between God and man. However, She, in turn, needs a human vessel in order to transfer her God-given knowledge, and this, according to Vico, is where the poets come in.

    As it was a theological age, so all poets were theological, unlike today. That is to say, they were only concerned with divine matters.

    Language itself was divine. And metaphor played an incredibly important role, as signs and symbols were all-important.

    Vico singles out the bolt of lightning, for example, as the first sign of Jupiter. This is simply to show how terrified these primitive people were in the beginning. They lived in caves, like Home’s Cyclops. This was a period of epic wandering. Man was chaotic and unruly. The Muse, through her instruction, tamed him. Such are the divine origins of language.

    Joycean scholars have had great fun deciphering the various myths from the Bible and Antiquity that register in Book 1 of Finnegans Wake. It is indeed a really funny book – as Joyceans constantly highlight –full of puns referring back to famous figures, such as the Duke of Wellington and Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, and the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, and so many more.

    It is a great sprawling narrative divided into eight chapters each one given over to one of the major characters who are called the Earwickers. Father and Mother – Humphry and Anna, and their three siblings Shem, Sham and Issy. The first chapter is a kind of prelude given over to history and the origins of the Muse.

    Beckett in How It Is begins his novel in similar fashion. Just as Joyce derives his ideas from Vico on the origins on human societies, Beckett too points to the Muse at the very beginning of the novel by starting with an invocation.

    Although unconventional, as you would expect from Beckett, that he uses the structural form tells us everything.

    The great Russian comparatist Mikhail Bakhtin, in The Dialogical Imagination (1975), is at pains to point out the origins of the novel as a genre and its debt to epic poetry, from which it took many structural features. Most novels are of tri-partite structure in theory, as Aristotle in his Poetics asserts, telling of events before, during and after – which is exactly what Beckett does in How It Is: events before Pim, with Pim and after Pim.

    Who is this Pim, you might be asking? To answer this we move on now to Vico’s Second Age, which is given over to violence.

    Odysseus and his crew are blinding Polyphemus. Detail of a Proto-Attic amphora, circa 650 BC.

    Female Domination

    Recall my story with girl Number Two? How She kicked my sorry little ass! Yes, I am talking about Female Domination of the male species, just as I spoke about Male Domination of the female in the First Age. This is karma. Although with Beckett the characters are practically sexless.

    Similarly, Joyce parodies Hitler and the Nazis in Book 2 of Finnegans Wake, who were on the rise during Joyce’s lifetime. Book 2 of Finnegans Wake is full of wonderful puns at the expense of the Nazis, referencing particularly their atrocious treatment of Jews.

    Beckett in How It Is uses the most crude and forceful comedy. It is truly grotesque. The only comparison that I can think of in literature is a Satyr play – bringing us back to Ancient Greece.

    There is only one surviving Satyr play: The Cyclops by Euripides. Anyone who is familiar with this hilarious text will be aware that it is a parody of Homer’s Odyssey. A grotesque parody in the style of Rabelais.

    Essentially, Euripides takes the myth of Zeus and Ganymede which sees the king of the gods having his way the beautiful youth.

    Ganymede is synonymous with the submissive person in an amorous relationship. The Bottom, in short. As opposed to the Top. We here use the language of S&M, which is what we are talking about. Bottoms and Tops. Dominants and submissives. This is what Beckett is obsessed with in How It Is. This is what I have come to call the maths of rejection.

    Set Theory

    As the novel progresses, Beckett becomes more and more obsessed with the numbers Three and Four. In fact the quartet, not the trilogy, is the ideal set.

    I am using the mathematical term now, taken from set theory. As this is how Beckett chooses to enter into the subject matter. It went on to become a major obsession of his during his later writing career. Consider there were two decades between the publication of How It Is in 1961 and his play Quad, completed in 1981, although tit wasn’t published until three years later.

    Beckett spends the greater part of parts 2 and 3 of How It Is going over the innumerable permutations of movements. We are back with girlfriends One and Two, which started this small discourse on Love and Literature. Remember 1 + 2 = 3. Therefore, if we were to progress to 4, that would mean a return to 1 – to my mind anyway. Meaning I would have to become the bastard again.

    Beckett uses the terms Victim and Torturer. These are the two modes of so-called human behaviour. In Beckett’s world, or, at least in the universe of How It Is, you are one or the other. I wonder which one are you?

    This is a slight simplification, as the movement of the couples in How It Is is in permanent flux.

    Beckett was also obsessed by Heraclitus and Democritus, the crying and laughing philosophers who form the two masks of theatre showing both aspects, extreme poles of human nature: the Tragic and the Comic; the legacy of the Ancient Greeks, which Beckett – without a doubt the greatest playwright of the twentieth century – revitalized.

    What other playwright uses farce to such a violent advantage? Think of the Tramps Estragon and Vladimir contemplating hanging themselves from the tree, as a form of entertainment in Waiting for Godot; Nag and Nell consigned to the dustbins in Endgame; or Winnie up to her neck in it in Happy Days.

    In all the unforgettable imagery conjured in Beckett’s theatre we find unforgettable visual metaphors encapsulating, in their simplicity, human tropes, which endure eternal.

    In this Beckett is the poet of catastrophe and disaster, a role he inherited from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

    Baudelaire was the first to mine the negative aspect in man to such a profound and relentless degree, in this sense Beckett is really his doppelgänger. It was Beckett’s genius to align himself so much to the dark side, as it were, which Baudelaire had ploughed so successfully in Les Fleurs Du Mal.

    Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme

  • Reviving Martin Heidegger’s Dasein – Be-ing

    Before a recent online poetry reading I was invited to meet with other international participants. I assumed the purpose was to gain a little insight into the other writers’ work. In fact, one of the main reasons – I was informed by our overtly gracious American host – was to establish which pronouns we would feel happiest to have ourselves described with.

    It was the first time that I had experienced first-hand the increasingly bizarre world of contemporary gender politics. While the subsequent exchange of pronouns went on its way, I couldn’t help thinking of Martin Heidegger’s radical alternative to Descartes cogito.

    Shortly after the reading I took down again my English translation, a first edition, of Beiträge zur Philosophie ( Vom Ereignis ), written between 1936 and 1938, though not appearing in print in Germany until 1989 – at Heidegger’s insistence thirteen years after his death – and Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), which was also published posthumously in 1999.

    For the purposes of the present essay, I would like to contrast some of my findings on From Enowning, also known as Of the Event due to a later translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (2012), with those of Charles Bambach, who published a book called Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Cornell University Press, 2003). I believe this may be useful in the context of identity politics today – as illustrated in the anecdote above.

    As I see it, Heidegger’s ideas on Be-ing, along with other useful insights, have been completely railroaded through the excesses of so-called Woke culture. These ideas could have profound implications as we confront contemporary challenges, including climate change.

    Peter O’Neill. Image (c) Victor Dragomiretchi.

    Nazism and Wider Work

    Among the most sinister aspects of contemporary academia is a declining rigor in argument. Thus, for example Heidegger’s undoubted Nazism is being used to undermine all aspects of his work which are simply unparalleled in the context of modern philosophical ideas is. As his former, Jewish, student Hannah Arendt put it:

    The gale that blows through Heidegger’s thinking – like that which still, after thousands of years, blows to us from Plato’s work – is not of our century. It comes from the primordial, and what it leaves behind is something perfect which, like everything perfect, falls back to the primordial.

    In Heidegger’s Roots[1], however, Charles Bambach attempts to demonstrate that the political ideology of the Nazis infects all of Heidegger’s thought, and so, by implication, this thinker can have very little to contribute to society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    I take the case of Bambach here in this essay, but he is just one of many over the last few years who have jumped on the “Heidegger was a Nazi” bandwagon, which may be located within the context of woke ‘cancel culture.’ Against this I argue that if one reads the books Heidegger wrote during the 1930’s – and indeed also during the war – you find his thought has actually nothing to do with Nazi ideology.

    I will be making this case based on two books here, one written in the mid- to late- 1930’s, which I will be referring to as Vom Ereignis/From Enowning[2]; and another from the early 1940’s, at the height of the war as the fate of Stalingrad was being decided, written on the subject of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.[3]

    But let us begin with Bambach in Heidegger’s Roots, who discusses Heidegger’s now infamous Rectoral Address at Freiberg University in 1933, after he had been appointed to the position with the support of the Nazi party. Bambach states that unlike other academics he will actually read the text as a serious piece of philosophical writing, wholly consistent with his Heidegger’s overall contribution to philosophy.

    This is the substance of Bambach’s book: that Heidegger’s politics is an intimate extension of his entire philosophical outlook and that one cannot distinguish between the Nazis and his thought, as they come from the same source. This is a very interesting idea, and Bambach puts up a meticulous case, at least when it comes to this very questionable period in Heidegger’s life and thought.

    Under the Influence

    Even as late as 1935, with the publication of Introduction to Metaphysics[4],  there are still pro-Nazi passages, deeply shocking to read today, revealing the extent to which Heidegger was under the influence of Nazi ideology, and how he tried to use it to promote his own ideas.

    I remember putting this particular book down, despite having been excited by Heidegger’s notions on early Greek thinkers, such as Heraclitus. I simply found the cheap Nazi sentiment really difficult to stomach.

    Bambach is very good when explaining the mood of the times, and the extent to which Heidegger was carried along by Hitler being made Chancellor of Germany, thus legitimating the Nazis as the most powerful party in all of Germany, an idea unthinkable in the 1920’s.

    If other Germans responded to the National Socialist takeover with “a widely held feeling of redemption and liberation from democracy”and felt relief that an incompetent and petty-minded government would no longer be left to solve the profound crisis of the times, Heidegger concerned himself with greater issues. He interpreted the events of early 1933 not as a political transfer of power, but as an epochal shift within being itself, a radical awakening from the slumbers of Weimar politics as usual.[5]

    Two years later, in the summer of 1935, still as Rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger, while offering an interpretation of Heraclitus’s fragment number 59 – generally translated as ‘War/conflict is the Father and King of all,’ – claims that ‘along with the German language, Greek (in regard to the possibilities of thinking) is at once the most powerful and the most spiritual of languages.’

    This is just one quote among many peppering a text written in the context of German rearmament that would culminate in World War II, which makes for very unsavoury reading, particularly when considering his standing in German academia.[6]

    Heidegger in 1960.

    Change of Track

    One year later, however, after the Introduction to Metaphysics, in 1936, one meets a radically different text: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).

    It is as if the book is written by a different author altogether. Gone is the hyperbole. The very register and tone are completely different. But, most importantly, there is no mention of German supremacy. There is no mention of Germany at all!

    Along with Sein und Zeit (1926) or Being and Time, Vom Ereignis or From Enowning (1936) this is the most important of all Heidegger’s texts and the one that he considered the most important of all his books.[7]

    Ten years earlier in Being and Time Heidegger claimed that his task was to ‘destroy’ the history of Ontology, or Western metaphysics as we know it; in other words Descartes cogito  by replacing it with Dasein or Be-ing, in Vom Ereignis/ from enowning/ of the Event. Here Heidegger sets out, for the first time, a philosophical structure in six parts, in which he attempts, using the concept of Be-ing/ Dasein, to return to inceptual Greek thinking.

    This will become the most important concept for Heidegger to put down in writing. Bambach actually acknowledges this shift , but with nothing like the emphasis it deserves.

    The contents of Vom Ereignis/From Enowning/Of the Event retains real significance for us today, particularly considering our current environmental crisis – a crisis even more severe than the one that Heidegger confronted in the 1930s in Nazi Germany; given today we face actual extinction if we do not radically change the way we live as a species (Dasein) on planet Earth.

    Machination

    One of Heidegger’s central concerns with the world of men he expresses in Vom Ereignis is machination. In part two of the book Echo, Heidegger attempts to grasp inceptual historic thinking originating from the Greeks.

    This involves an attempt at recuperating Be-ing which has been abandoned as he sees it, as opposed to following cause and effect metaphysics, which are the result of Christian thinking.

    There are whole passages in this text which are profoundly at odds with Nazi German policy at the time of the book’s composition, and which, frankly, apart from a mere sentence acknowledging this fact, Bambach largely ignores in this his most fundamental work. It is, after all, referred to as ‘the turn’ or the seminal event in his thinking, in which he decisively takes his own path in philosophical thinking, which remains completely unparalleled today.

    One is accustomed to calling the epoch of “civilisation” one of dis-enchantment, and this seems for its part exclusively to be the same as the total lack of questioning. However, it is exactly the opposite. One has only to know from where the enchantment comes. The answer: from the unrestrained domination of machination.[8]

    Notably, at the time of writing, in March and in June 1936, the German army had marched into the Rhineland, and were also supplying General Franco with ‘several formations of Junkers 52’s’.[9]

    The German military was to become one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world. Heidegger was not only critical of this particular phenomenon, but in the same passage, he continues:

    The bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only one sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which everything presses forth into calculation, usage, breeding, manageability, and regulation. Even “taste” now becomes a matter for this regulation, and everything depends on a “good ambiance”.[10]

    Joseph Goebbels views the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

    Degenerate Art

    The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst ) took place from July to November of 1937, while Heidegger was working on his masterwork Vom Ereignis – From Enowning – Of the Event.

    Heidegger’s use of the term ‘bewitchment’ is interesting considering the mesmeric effect Hitler had on the masses at Nurnberg. During the same year, 1937, the ‘Rally of Labour’ was held (Reichsparteitag der Arbeit) in which masses of people converged on the city.

    In the Pathé newsreels of the time you can see the machination of people converging in the stadium. They are marching just like machines. Heidegger repeats the phrase again, even placing it in italics in the text: ‘the epoch of total lack of questioning of all things and of all machinations.’[11] Heidegger did not allow the book to be published for fifty years after its composition. So far, it has been translated into English twice. It is the most extraordinary testament to Martin Heidegger’s thought, as it is a complete break with Western metaphysical thinking.

    Regenerative Ideas

    Having begun this essay with a discussion of the use of pronouns today, in terms of gender identity, I now consider Heidegger’s concept of Dasein or Be-ing in English as an alternative designator for the subject.

    Heidegger is an Aristotelian in his thinking, who views the multiple in the One, Be-ing as representative of all living creatures, regardless of race, sex etc. It is a wonderfully free and natural idea, totally revolutionary in concept, and here is the thing: the majority of people living in the world today have absolutely no sense of the existence of such a rich philosophical idea

    People are far more interested in banging on about an extremely regrettable period in the German thinker’s career. But if we are really serious as a species, in other words if we are really serious about surviving as opposed to going extinct, we had better put such petty notions of self aside, and concentrate instead on regenerative ideas on the way we perceive one another as Dasein.

    Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia – Heraclitus (believed to be Democritus) 1652-53 – Luca Giordano

    Heraclitus

    As stated in the introduction, I want to speak about two of Heidegger’s works. The second book that I turn to is Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos[12] which was originally written at a point when the Wehrmacht met disaster at Stalingrad in 1943.

    One of the first things I noticed was, again, the register or tone of the book. Especially considering when it was written, it is a miraculously peaceful work. None of the posturing that appeared in Introduction to Metaphysics is on display in this book.

    Bambach does not refer to this work as it was only published in English for the first time in 2018. So a period of fifteen years separates the publication of his 2003 book and this second posthumous work.

    My focus here is Heidegger’s beautiful meditation on a god so synonymous with Heraclitus, who is of course Artemis, goddess of the hunt.

    Heidegger refers to fragment number 51 which he translates as, ‘The jointure (namely, the self differentiating) unfolds drawing – back, as shows itself in the image of the bow and lyre.’

    This meditation is taken from the first section of the book, whose title is The Inception of Occidental Thinking. This point is important to underline as it forms a continuum with Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning).

    Heidegger sets out in the former work the six ways to inceptual thinking (1. Preview, 2. Echo, 3. Playing Forth, 4. Leap, 5. Grounding and finally 6. The Last God.). He rejects all causality in place of what he defines as inceptual Greek thinking. In other words, pre-Platonic.

    Nietzsche had already made this distinction in his lectures from Basel in the 1870s,[13] so Heidegger was following his former master in many respects. For Heidegger, the elegance of this fragment, contrasting the bow and the lyre, is emblematic of all of Heraclitus’s essential doctrine of unity in opposites.

    Drawing on the laws of attraction, Heidegger uses the terms ‘submerging’ and ‘emerging’ to remarkable effect. He draws out the subtlety of Heraclitus’s thought in his own very particular way through the idea of unconcealment, which for Heidegger is the essence of authentic Greek thinking before Plato.

    At that point truth was emerging from the abiding sway of Be-ing and could only be perceived in the clearing of the mind momentarily, before being obscured again. There is something profoundly sensual about Heidegger’s engagement with the Artemis fragment, and it is a testament to the translators who have managed to capture the wonderful poetry of the meditation throughout the entire work.

    Therefore, she roams, as the huntress, the entirety of what we call ‘nature’. We certainly must not think about the essence of ‘tension’ in modern dynamical and quantitative terms, but rather as the lightened apartness of an expanse that is, at the same time, held together. In emerging, emerging receives the self-concealing in itself, because it can emerge as emerging only out of self-concealing: it draws back into this. [14]

    Again, as in Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ), in Hercalitus, Heidegger departs from the twentieth century and all of its woes – its abandonment of Dasein Be-ing – in order to return to historic thought.

    Image Daniel Idini (c)

    The Turn

    Such is ‘the Turn’ – at least what has become known as ‘the Turn’ – in his thinking. When Heidegger abandoned not only Nazi ideology, at least in the thinking expressed in these books, but also Western metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche. The results are simply extraordinary.

    This is why I feel compelled, living in a world that seems to have abandoned all sense, to critique writers like Charles Bambach, who focus myopically on the very negative elements in Heidegger’s work, but which seems to me much more a part of the man, the lesser part, as distinct from the essential work.

    [1] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots – Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, London, 2003.

    [2] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions from Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999.

    [3] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus – The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, Translated by Julia Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018.

    [4] Heidegger, Martin: Introduction to Metaphysics, New Translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale Nota Bene, Yale University Press, 2000.

    [5] Bambach, Charles: Heidegger’s Roots; Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks, Cornell University Press, 2003, p.70.

    [6] The German TV miniseries Generation War ( Unsere Mütter, unsere Vätter ) has one of the leading characters mention the possibility of attending a lecture by Heidegger when he gets his leave and he can return to Germany from the Eastern Front. Once can only imagine the very powerful feelings generated in the minds of young Germans who were exposed to such very powerful and interesting ideas, yet which were put to the service of National Socialism.

    [7] In a marginal note of Letter on Humanism, the Editor F.-W. von Hermann notes, that Heidegger wrote the following; “enowning” has been since 1936 the guiding word of my thinking’.

    Heidegger, Martin: Contributions to Philosophy ( From Enowning ) – p.364.

    [8] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p.86.

    [9] Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler, Penguin, Classic Biography, Penguin Books, London, p.500.

    [10] Heidegger, Martin: Contributions From Philosophy ( From Enowning ), Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 87.

    [11] Ibid, p.86

    [12] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.115.

    [13] Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Translated from the German and Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois Press, First Paperback Edition, 2006.

    [14] Heidegger, Martin: Heraclitus, Translated by Julia Goesser Assainte and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p.116.

    Feature Image: German POWs at Stalingrad

  • Fiction: Train Station

    Awarded one of the Tidiest Towns in the nation, the place was profoundly inept and utterly corrupt. Indeed disturbing, because winning the competition was proof positive that the town represented how things operated in the entire country. In terms of organisation, it was the stuff of nightmare. Everything had to go through countless committees, and the people you’d want absolutely nothing to do with were the kind who joined the committees.

    When he did think about them, White merely pictured those broken plastic corrugated sheets which had been haphazardly assembled to form a makeshift roof over the old train station. Effectively it was the first view any observant person would have upon arrival. What did this tell you about the country? Here was the town voted, again by countless committees, as being the Tidiest Town in Ireland, and yet the minute you got off the train, you looked up at the train station itself, at these gaping holes in the shattered corrugated plastic sheeting. It was pathetic, thought White, as it revealed the corrupt nature of an entire island. The whole nation, by voting in this way, or rather the Committees who had voted for the town, by recommending that the town should receive the highest accolade in the land, were actually complicit in praising the most mediocre of towns. Mediocrity was their aim. It was as if, for White, these loose panels of plastic, which during winter would let in buckets of rain, while every year the town’s commuters sheltered under the awful structure, getting wet in the process, had become symbolic of the country’s lack of rigour. Its shambolic state.

    He understood why large sections of people in the North wanted nothing to do with the place. Because the level of ineptitude and corruption was shocking. There it was. Visible for all to see, pondered White, who stood under the atrocity. I mean corrugated plastic sheeting! Who in their right mind was going to use such a material to protect the town’s citizens and visitors from the elements? It was the first of many signs that discreetly whispered, These people don’t really care about anyone in the first place. And, if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. That was it, wasn’t it? The “Ah sure, it’ll do!” attitude his neighbour Stan was always banging on about whenever he spoke of the place. Stanley was rarely in country, spending the majority of his time working as a consultant around the world. About what, White didn’t actually know. It was kind of a mystery, but Stan made it very clear to White how much he hated the place and a lot of his fellow Irishmen.

    The open hole in the sheeting spread out in a star formation. It was frayed into bits. Where it was not broken, it was black with dirt, moss and other under growth. As if nobody had actually thought about cleaning it up, not to mention fixing it by replacing it with, at the very least, new sheets.

    “Ah, sure it will do!”

    “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” Stan would say. “Bunch of fucking morons!”

    Every word was spoken with that crisp nearly perfect enunciation that Stan possessed.  It would be the closing punch line in these sessions after having looked at and examined the problem from every possible angle. White had never before brought up the lamentable condition of the roof of the town train station with him before. You see, unlike White, Stan wasn’t a commuter. They inhabited very different worlds. Whereas White was grounded firmly in the everyday world that he saw around him, in other words that of the town, and the city beyond, where he worked, and which was only thirty minutes south by commuter train, Stan’s world was one of airports and hotels. Corporate zones. Stan was very corporate. He exuded the spirit and parlance of international corporatism. White was more about the local.

    Stan was unaware as to the everyday workings in a town where they both lived, and that never ceased to amaze White. While he looked at Stan with incredulity at times, about his innocence, Stan would throw White some pretty incredulous looks when in turn, his lack of savvy on certain matters at an international level was too obvious to ignore. Merging their knowledge of the micro and the macro, together, the two men were, in a sense, whole.

    But they discussed countless other issues together. No, the broken corrugated plastic sheeting hanging over the heads of commuters on the platform outside of the town’s train station was a topic from which he had spared Stanley. Smiling now, White, regarded the drab excuse for a roofing feature. The sheer gombeenism. The degree of decay on a shameless exhibition to all and sundry had to be seen to be believed.

    White put it down to Ireland’s post-colonial heritage. Casting a condescending glance at some of the town’s inhabitants as he did. For instance, if you looked at the actual railway station itself, apart from the roofing, it was a fine old building, as many of the old train stations were, having been designed and built by the former occupying power. There you had it then. The very infrastructure had been inherited. Nothing, not the laws of the land, nor the great buildings that housed their government and courts (bar one) had all just been taken over. That was a century and three generations ago. White’s own grandfather had fought in that war. The War of Independence, they called it. What a joke. They were no more independent of their so-called old enemy as the man in the moon.

    White looked at his watch. The train would be coming soon. He walked with a quick pace further down the platform. He wanted to get away from the broken corrugated plastic roofing. Another joke. And there were so many of them too. Sick jokes, that is.

    Once inside the train, White’s mood improved slightly. At least he had a seat. That was another thing. There were so few trains now that he noticed more and more people would have to stand, and starting with the commuters from the town just after his own. Imagine that, every day, five days a week, getting on the train with your commuter ticket that you had paid for and you would never have, or only rarely, the opportunity to sit down! That was more of it, the chronic sense that nobody really gave a shit about anyone or anything anymore. There was no sense of community. No civic pride. Why would there be? What had they done? In over a hundred years, what had they actually done to the country since their newfound freedom?

    While White sat there looking around him, the recorded voice came over on the intercom system. It announced the next town in Irish. Nobody spoke the language, or hardly anybody, and yet that was even more of it. The con. Our government printed every document out twice, first in Irish, which was the official language of the country, and then in English which was a language everyone actually spoke. Why they insisted on imposing the language in this way was all part of it. Keeping up Appearances. A great little nation, the Republic of Ireland, for keeping up appearances. Truth be told, White couldn’t stomach it. This Ireland created by all of its little committees. You couldn’t fart without some fucker complaining to a committee.

    He remembered reading somewhere that all revolutions were destined to fail. It was inevitable. Once a revolution had taken place, corruption set in from the word go. This was human nature. There would always be some kind of favouritism. And the types of people who got involved politically, no matter where you were, were always one and the same. Barring, of course, the very rare exception. Chancers who, for the most part, were merely looking out for number one. It was the same the world over. Why should Ireland be any better, or any worse.

    While the train slowed, pulling into the next town, White watched the disappointed faces of new commuters who boarded the train. And who had, as usual, missed the opportunity of sitting down. When he was much younger, White would no doubt have given up his seat to one of them. Women in particular, as that’s the way he’d been brought up. But not now. This was the age of equality. White looked hard at some of the women who were now standing up around him. Resigned faces staring out a window at the Irish sea. How did they like this brave new world? Sometimes, very rarely mind you, some guy would grow embarrassed and offer up his seat to one of them, but it was rare now. Pathetic. And all part of it. Everybody hermetically sealed in their own little bubble. Nobody speaking to anyone else. Addicted to their phones. Passive, they listened to radio propoganda or some endless podcast, or perhaps even watched a feature film. Not a sinner reading a real book.

    That was another myth, a nation of great readers! Ha! Cunts. Not one of them had read a book by James Joyce. His wife, an Italian who had studied both law and literature at university, worked in a busy solicitor’s office in the city centre. The ignorance of the people there had been appalling. Joyce was revered as essential reading, and yet here, in the cuntry of his birth, (a country from which he notoriously sought exile) hardly anyone at all had ever read him. Anything intellectual was immediately disdained. A myth? No, that was indeed the reality here.

    Joyce made White’s mind jump to an idiot who lived in the same town. He had met him under the plastic corrugated roofing on the train station one sunny morning. For some reason Joyce had come up in their brief discussion.

    “My opinion is as good as anyone else’s, isn’t it?” He had asked White.

    White just laughed, knowing that by the man’s own admission he’d hardly read him at all, and yet he felt compelled to ask such a ridiculous question. Not only that, but he genuinely believed it too. It simply beggared belief how stupid some people could be.  But as Stanley’s almost obnoxious North American drawl came crashing in. Every word was perfectly enunciated, to double the effect.

    “Bunch of fucking morons.”

    Just hearing somebody voice the truth out loud made White feel better. Smiling now from ear to ear, he decided that what made us human was the pleasure of sharing.