You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
--Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.
Yes, a departure can be a recapitulation of personal and cultural history, and dissipate disgust with the all-familiar, as Eric J. Leed puts it in his superb The Mind of the Traveler.
Yet each departure is also the eternal reenactment of a deep injury: the loss of home, an imaginary home, away from which no one knows you, no one recognises you, no one confirms your being in their gaze.
Because their gaze is always set beyond you.
You are invisible, banished from the others' gaze. The original meaning of 'exile', precisely: a banished person.
Thus an exile proceeds from invisibility to invisibility. Once an exile, always an exile.
Unrecognised, you are always no longer 'there' -- you belong only in the place you long for.
And where is that? Where is the land of those who have fallen from the time and the gaze of others?
Alphonso Lingis calls it 'the community of those who have nothing in common'. Nothing in common except their fallenness, their vulnerability, their mortality. The cracked people.
And it is the necessary alienation of departure that brings you to them, that compels you to communicate, to establish some form of communion, even if at the risk of causing misunderstanding, fear of disclosure.
Blunders happen.
Because they are in pain, we are in pain. And pain isolates, sets adrift.
But recognition can happen, when you see the abyss beneath the mask, the half-hidden wounds in the flesh.
The night of his eyes.
To see the sensibility, susceptibility, vulnerability of another is to see not the inner diagrams but the substance of the body. It is to see the opaque skin, lassitude and torpor, into which the expressions form and vanish. It is to see the night of eyes, on which the forms of the world leave no trace. It is to see the spasms of pain that agitate the substance of the flesh, the tremblings of pleasure that die away. It is to see wrinkles and wounds.
In pain the other sinks back into his or her body, into prostration that already delivers him or her to the death in the world. The flesh in pain is anything but an object; sensibility, subjectivity fill it, with a terrible evidence. This evidence is turned imperatively to me, more pressing than the evolution of the planet and the anonymous enterprises in the humanized map laid out on it, more urgent than the tasks my own death has addressed to me. It is not in elaborating a common language and reason, in collaborating in transpersonal enterprises, that the human community takes form. It is in going to rejoin those who, fallen from the time of personal and collective history, have to go on when nothing is possible or promised.
--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 235-36.
Yes, a departure can be a recapitulation of personal and cultural history, and dissipate disgust with the all-familiar, as Eric J. Leed puts it in his superb The Mind of the Traveler.
Yet each departure is also the eternal reenactment of a deep injury: the loss of home, an imaginary home, away from which no one knows you, no one recognises you, no one confirms your being in their gaze.
Because their gaze is always set beyond you.
You are invisible, banished from the others' gaze. The original meaning of 'exile', precisely: a banished person.
Thus an exile proceeds from invisibility to invisibility. Once an exile, always an exile.
Unrecognised, you are always no longer 'there' -- you belong only in the place you long for.
And where is that? Where is the land of those who have fallen from the time and the gaze of others?
Alphonso Lingis calls it 'the community of those who have nothing in common'. Nothing in common except their fallenness, their vulnerability, their mortality. The cracked people.
And it is the necessary alienation of departure that brings you to them, that compels you to communicate, to establish some form of communion, even if at the risk of causing misunderstanding, fear of disclosure.
Blunders happen.
Because they are in pain, we are in pain. And pain isolates, sets adrift.
But recognition can happen, when you see the abyss beneath the mask, the half-hidden wounds in the flesh.
The night of his eyes.
* * *
To see the sensibility, susceptibility, vulnerability of another is to see not the inner diagrams but the substance of the body. It is to see the opaque skin, lassitude and torpor, into which the expressions form and vanish. It is to see the night of eyes, on which the forms of the world leave no trace. It is to see the spasms of pain that agitate the substance of the flesh, the tremblings of pleasure that die away. It is to see wrinkles and wounds.
In pain the other sinks back into his or her body, into prostration that already delivers him or her to the death in the world. The flesh in pain is anything but an object; sensibility, subjectivity fill it, with a terrible evidence. This evidence is turned imperatively to me, more pressing than the evolution of the planet and the anonymous enterprises in the humanized map laid out on it, more urgent than the tasks my own death has addressed to me. It is not in elaborating a common language and reason, in collaborating in transpersonal enterprises, that the human community takes form. It is in going to rejoin those who, fallen from the time of personal and collective history, have to go on when nothing is possible or promised.
--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 235-36.
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