From ma@panix.com  Sat Apr  5 20:25:34 1997
From: ma@panix.com (malgosia askanas)
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 1997 15:25:34 -0500 (EST)
Subject: M-TH: Re: M-I: PANIC LEFT: TAKE THREE
Message-ID: <199704052025.PAA15891@panix2.panix.com>

Doug wrote:

> A poem, say, that begins "Of Man's First
> Disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree..." makes you want to
> read beyond the second line, even if you find Christianity a ludicrous or
> even repellent doctrine. Ditto a political essay beginning "A specter is
> haunting Europe...." 

Hee hee.  But then you have to give credit where credit is due, and say:
ditto a book that begins: "This book first arose out of a passage in Borges,
out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar
landmarks of my thought..." or, another, that begins: "It is at work 
everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.
It breathes, it heats, it eats."

I would submit to you that one reason why some of the so-called "pomos"
write the way they do is given in this passage from Heidegger's _What is
called Thinking?_:  "What must be thought about, turns away from man.  It 
withdraws from him.  But how can we have the least knowledge of something
that withdraws from the beginning, how can we even give it a name?  
Whatever withdraws, refuses arrival.  But -- withdrawing is not nothing.
Withdrawal is an event.  In fact, what withdraws may even concern and
and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and
touches him.  Being struck by actuality is what we like to regard as
constitutive of the actuality of the actual.  However, in being struck
by what is actual, man may be debarred precisely from what concerns
and touches him -- touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping
him by its withdrawal.  The event of withdrawal could be what is most 
present in all our present, and so infinitely exceed the actuality of
everything actual."

You might say, of course, that by quoting Heidegger one is merely going
in circles, since he is just as guilty of intolerability of style as
the "pomos" and just as objectionable from every other point of view.
But I am quoting this not because I think this will legitimize the
"pomos'" stylistic obscureness, but because I think that, for some
of them, the obscureness stems from a basic perception that "what is
to be thought about turns away from man", and can only be pursued by
a style that does justice to this withdrawal.  Of course in other cases
the obscureness is just a device for wasting time and draining the vital 
fluids of the mind. 


-m 


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