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To Red Slider's websiteThe Catastrophic - Two brief essays and a Book Review
[Mulling over matters of world change with friends, Anny Ballardini and Obododimma Oha sent us the following text: ]
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We will turn to the idea of the messianic in Chapter Ten of this book, but
for the moment it suffices to stress that both Benjamin and Agamben employ
the term in singular fashion. For them, a messianic idea of history is not
one in which we wait for the Messiah to come, end history, and redeem
humanity, but instead is a paradigm for historical time in which we act as
though the Messiah is already here, or even has already come and gone. What
is so difficult about Agamben's use of the term messianic is how radically
it is to be distinguished from the apocalyptic. Agamben says that to
understand "messianic time" as it is presented in Paul's letters "one must
first distinguish messianic time from apocalyptic time, the time of the now
from a time directed towards the future" (LAM, 51). To this he adds, "If l
had to try to reduce the distinction to a formula, I would say that the
messianic is not, as it is always understood, the end of time, but the time
of the end" (LAM, 51). The model of time corresponding to this idea is one
that no longer looks for its decisive moment in a more or less remote
future, but instead finds it in every minute of every day, in this world and
in this life; and it is through such expressions as "dialectics at a
standstill" and "means without end" that the two thinkers aim to return our
gaze from the distant future to the pressing present."
( from GIORGIO AGAMBEN: *A Critical Introduction*, Leland de la Durantaye, 2009, p. 120) Set in the context of this split between "the end of time" and "the time of the end" is Michael Rothenberg's recent invitation for the global writing public to participate in "a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social and political change" titled *100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE*on 24 September, 2011. As protests for political reforms sweep across North Africa, the Middle East, in some parts of Europe, in the United States, with the recent disasters in The Gulf of Mexico and in Japan, one cannot help thinking about the "Rothenberg Project" as a highly significant creative response to change as something more than an adjustment to the way social relations are constructed. Obododimma Oha and Anny Ballardini, in collaboration with Michael Rothenberg's event, will edit and feature outstanding poetic compositions for the *100 THOUSAND POETS FOR CHANGE* on Fieralingue's * Poets' Corner Best wishes, Obododimma Oha Anny Ballardini March, 2011 |
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I have little to say about either the messianic or the apocalyptic. Not my competence. I have however said and written some about the catastrophic, which I believe embraces the whole of the specter of time. Clearly as time present: the event, the shock, "The Day The Earth Stood Still", that violently collapses the moment and surges indelibly onto the map of the present . For good reason, archeologist's, vulcanologists and other scientists refer to these cataclysmic surges as, "The fingers of God." But, the catastrophic also reverberates and vibrates deep into both the past and future, with consequences not only cocooned in the natural landscape, but in the psychic landscape as well. The harmonics of these events are sounded and resounded both as artifact and apprehension. They appear as such in those same apocalyptic and messianic texts you speak of; indeed, provoke those texts into being and inform them with every reading and re-reading. The shock of Vesuvius, of Thera, of the 'great flood' of a molten pre-biotic earth or the upheaval of the ocean floor and the silent molten drips of sun-death from the reactors of Fukishima become substance of gospels and myths, the science fictions and speculative projections about our past and onto our future. As well, each discovery and rediscovery of the catastrophic leads to entirely new revisions and formulations of bi-directional time (more accurately, 'scalar time', but that's another complicated story). Our technological, social, political, legal, sexual, recreational, environmental and other productions are mere spectacles of these events. In each sift through the ashes of Pompeii, or the debris of the WTC, we revise our histories to be consonant with these events. I dare say, when the Theran excavations are undertaken and the rubble of Atlantis is revealed, neither the past nor the future will ever be quite the same as they are today. Book Review: Reference & review: A good general work on the subject of catastrophe and its interpenetration of human affairs is "Ghosts of Vesuvius" (Harper, 2004) by forensic archeologist, Charles Pellegrino. I reviewed it, thus, for Amazon.com: "I give 'Ghosts of Vesuvius' four stars, based on the small flaws that other reviewers have already treated (most of them arguable). I give it a solid five stars (more if they had them) for entirely different qualities which other reviewerss have not mentioned and, perhaps, not noticed. When seen through the lens of what Gregory Bateson first called a "metalogue" (a text or conversation in which the form resembles the content), an entirely different standard of appraisal must be granted this volume. 'Ghosts of Vesuvius', its content, is about nearly unimaginable catastrophic events, the big-bang, the demise of the dinosaur, enormous discontinuities of evolutionary process, the largest volcanic explosions known, the 1.6 kiloton fall of the World Trade Center and more. It is equally about the storms of debris and ejecta that accompanied these events; not only rock and ash, heat and glass, but the bits of human history, artifacts, culture, reaction, myth and story, horror that were cast out from these blasts and buried deep in the human psyche, as much as on the land and in the skies overhead. It is a book about blast columns and their collapse, of unbelievably destructive surges and pyroclastic flows, of cataclysms which not only disrupted both physical and biological nature, but which enveloped it, tumbled it, threatened it with extinction, scared it into entirely new directions; humbled it and permanently changed it, from the time of its stellar origins to the texts of its religions and sciences and civilizations and politics. Viewed from that vantage, Ghosts, begins with the all embracing "Call them Alpha and Omega". In its own giant blast column it tosses Fermilab and hadron colliders along with rusticles and proto-humans high into the air of its theme; tumbles ancient religious texts with fragile churches on the circumference of 9/11, fragments human presence in the surges of history with biological flotsam flung over the whole of creation; picks through the ashes of Pompeii and the currents of the deep ocean at the grave of the Titanic. It cradles the hearts and tears of first-responders and forensic archeologists, alike, as they comb the ruins of 9/11 looking for small shock cocoons in which might be preserved some remnant past and future. It searches for something that might explain, might reveal the true nature of what perished on that day. It stretches back in time, epoch by epoch, to the unimaginable grand-daddy of all cataclysmic events, the big bang, and then slingshots us forward through the creations of Civilization, the first appreciations that slavery was a shameful and unworthy aberration, the shadowy history of the collision of religions, the clutch of a doll, the heroic sacrifice of a nameless soldier who perished 2000 years ago and one who did the same ten years ago; of the perfectly preserved shadow of an ancient rose and of an equally intact credit card plucked from the dust of complete devastation, still readable." "Some who reviewed Pellegrino's work were disappointed. It wasn't about the Roman Empire, or volcanoes and Vesuvius, or Pompeii, or the WTC catastrophe, or their favorite and expected subject. They complained that it "drifted" or "got off topic" or was "stream of consciousness", "digressive" or "repetitive". It seems obvious why some would make such complaint. I don't believe Mr. Pellegrino intended this work to be about any single subject or to fill in a gap in anyone's knowledge about some specific slice of history or particular event. I believe he meant for us to come upon it the same way he comes upon a catastrophic site; as a forensic scientist examining the aftermath of an unimaginably destructive event: examining, wondering, supposing, connecting small fragments of history and humanity and space and time, just as he found them. It is not for its author to put it all together into one neat narrative, complete with its beginning, middle and end. Rather, I believe Pellegrino leaves it for us, the forensic reader, to pick up these pieces, splayed into the book like the surge of some original catastrophe. The text as metalogue. It is our job to examine the pieces, to ask, "what does this thing found over here have to do with that thing over there?" Indeed, the author cannot tell you what narratives, insights, understandings you might find in the debris of Ghosts of Vesuvius, any more than the dead of Pompeii will tell you exactly what was going on at the moment they got buried in 60 feet of hot ash - what was going on, what the different objects scattered around mean or how they relate. Pellegrino couldn't even predict what you might find, as reader. Only, that if you just see it all as unrelated scatter, it will look like a mess, a drift, a fragmented work that digresses and goes "off topic." But if you dig around and examine and wonder and imagine, then perhaps you will arrive at something resembling the same joy he experiences when he digs through the ruins of who we are and what happened to us along the way. You might even be lucky enough to discover something didn't even suspect was there to find. - Red Slider, 2011." © 2011 red slider. All rights reserved. |
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