Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

The place I love best is a sweet memory 

It's a new path that we trod

They say low wages are reality 

If we want to compete abroad. - Bob Dylan 

A word about the title of this blog. Evening Haze, as you may be aware, is a reference to the song "Working Man's Blues # 2 from Bob Dylan's Modern Times album. "There's an evening haze settling over town.." It also  refers to the vision of the sun setting in the hazy sky caused by distant forest fires, a troubling sense of beauty. The opacity of the sky in subdued glory bearing witness to the burning earth. Finally it is meant to reflect the mood or sensibility of the dying West. Under the watchful eye of Captain Derrida the ship of modernity is sinking into the sea of mourning and insanity. 

The bright day is over. The glory and ambition of the modern epoch have long faded and with it, in some ways, we have become dulled to the edge of its raw horrors and violence. Now we are left with its nostalgic memory, presented to us in soft colours against the backdrop of a burning world. 

Sweet memories are, of course, a little comfort against the onslaught of death. The sun of evening is a time for reflection of memories sweetened and softened by the passage of time. It is a bittersweet passage, however, and, as Dylan Thomas reminds us, at times demands a more vigorous passion than the complacency of sentiment:

Do not go gentle into that good night 

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage,rage against the dying of the light. 

So it is that the close of the day brings us not only the sweet sadness of closure, but with it an anger that burns anew. Our days have not all been good and we have not always lived well. All the more reason that we should be angry at their passing. Optimism has no place in us. We have lived too raw and violent and have become too dull and callous for serene acceptance to be open to us. All we can do now is despair, rage, repent and hope violently for a new path and a renewed humanity. 

As we approach the end of the day, the closing time of the West, we are afforded a certain distance to reflect on its good and bad, its pain and its glory. Yet we cannot become trapped within the bittersweet comfort of the past, for the world is now as raw and real as it ever was and demands to be lived in. 

The Hiddenness of Time

The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was.

It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot 

in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it 

paid the outrage of ontology no mind. 

- China Mieville Iron Council 

By some strange happenstance or mystic wisdom I had the pleasure of reading China Mieville's Iron Council, while I was enrolled in a course on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More specifically I read Iron Council as I was working through Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. The effect was electric and unsettling, particularly in the way both these authors engaged with themes of time,existence, and hiddenness. 

Everpresent in Bonhoeffer's theological project is the underlying theme of an "epistemology yielded on the basis of revelation," an idea he discusses explicitly in his post-doctoral work Act and Being. The world is known, in other words, not through empirical observation nor through a process of ratiocination, rather it is known only as it is revealed. In The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer addresses this theme around the binary of revelation/hiddenness. The true disciple of Christ knows only what is revealed to her or him through Jesus Christ, there is no unmediated relationship with the world, with others, or even with oneself. The reverse of this, therefore, is that much is left hidden. Revelation has its own rhythm, its own timing, over which the subject of knowledge has no control. It is given, by the spirit, in the moment it is needed. 

This is a mystery, yet not a mystical fusion of the I with the Oneness of Being. Precisely in its momentous character revelation is a matter of existence, and in existence there are always others. Indeed, for Bonhoeffer becoming a person is only possible through the other. He writes, "the individual becomes a person ever and again through the other, in the moment." (Sanctorum Communio). 

In Mieville's story there is a monk who, out of the pantheon of gods in the world of Iron Council, worships the God of the Moment. This God reveals knowledge to the monk at the necessary times. Yet the discipleship of the monk is not without cost, indeed it is at the cost of the monk's very self-knowledge that the revealing comes. Without giving too much away, as the tale progresses the monk, who has joined with a band of rebels and political outcasts in search of their comrades, loses more and more of her (or his) self-knowing as she seeks the revelation needed to make important decisions. 

Bonhoeffer and Mieville inhabit very different worlds. One a theologian, the other a writer of science fiction. Yet the mysteries of existence, and of time are strongly present. Discipleship, for both, is a costly endeavour, and yet in the end proves the very grace of life. 

It is grace, it is violence, it is passion. The Christian sense of time is not one of linear accumulation. Nor yet of circulation within an ontologically fixed field. The event of Christ is singularity, forever affixed existence within which existence can take place. 

This too is the mystery of the church, the presence of Christ on earth, already fulfilled and yet waiting. Hidden yet revealed. Perhaps the Church too, like Mieville's time golem" is a clot in diachrony, who with the dumb arrogance of its existence pays the outrage of ontology no mind. 

Or perhaps it should be so. 

Omnia Sunt Communia

Omnia sunt communia 

- Thomas Muntzer (1488-1525)

All things are in common. It was this confession that led to the beheading of Thomas Muntzer, theologian and revolutionary. Muntzer's severed head and body was intended as a warning against heresy, and served to enshrine Muntzer an ambiguous role in history. Beloved more of future generations of radicals and revolutionaries than of the church, Muntzer continues to live in the shadows of theological and political discourse. Now, with talk of "the commons" and community increasingly permeating socio-cultural discourse, this ghostly figure haunts us once more - violently condemning our complacency. 

Violently, but not very loudly. From his original manifestation as a powerful theological voice in the turmoil of the Reformation and an inspiring visionary and leader in the Peasant's War, Muntzer next prefigures as a minor analogical character for the Marxist revolutionaries of the 19th century. In our own epoch Muntzer's embodiment is a literary one, in the novel Q published by an anonymous group of Italian authors under the pseudonym Luther Blisset. 

Under the banner of this novel, and some others, protestors took to the streets in Italy last November, marching against Berlusconi's proposed education reforms. The authors of the book, along with a number of other Italian writers, have also been subjected to a proposed blacklisting and banning of their books from library shelves in Italy. Muntzer continues to haunt the political powers of the world, then, not only through the content of works like this but also in the form its production and dissemination whereby the authors endeavour to make their works publicly accessible through free online downloading. 

But all is not well. For in the very aspect of "Creative Commons" and various "free" and "open" Internet organizations and technology we are faced with a farcical notion of commonality that has to blind itself to the economic contexts and realities in which it is implicated, and in some ways perpetuates a much more noxious and undoubtedly more precarious version of capitalist consumption. 

The group of authors above, who are known collectively as Wu Ming, are a case in point. Upon entering their website one is greeted with the options of downloading one of their books for free, and possibly giving a donation through the PayPal technology, or purchasing a physical copy of the book through Amazon.com. One of the concerns here, of course, is the replacement of more localized forms of exchange that for all their inequality do contain a certain level of trust, reflexivity, and responsibility on behalf of all parties involved - these forms are replaced by a megalithic enterprise that opens up a space of virtual freedom, a "commons" from which it alone profits.