Bezna: Bezna, #5

BEZNA

[darkness, fear, unknown]

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*Bezna in Romanian means consistent darkness + diffuse fear

Edited by Alina Popa, Florin Flueras

© The authors & Artworlds, 2014

Content

Emil Cioran – The Book of Delusions

Nicola Masciandaro – Following the Sigh

Alina Popa – Dead Thinking

Florin Flueras – Dead Thinking

Deanna Khamis – The Stillness of Eternity

Ben Woodard – The Horrendous Instantiation

Amy Ireland – Digital Dismemberment

Eugene Thacker – Cosmic Pessimism

Irina Gheorghe – A Short History of the Vague

Anastasia Jurescu – Puff

Cosima Opartan – Left Handedness

Dylan Trigg – The Prehuman Earth

Francis Russell – Underground?

Stefan Tiron – Glow Baby Glow

Sarah Jones – In Darkness

Dorothee Neumann – A-Ă-Â

Aulos – From the Under-Chambers of the Mind

Octavian-Liviu Diaconeasa – Black Golden Skulls

Mihai Lukacs – Plagued. The Fear of Theory

Bogdan Draganescu – Praise of Nonknowing

The Book of Delusions (fragments)

Emil Cioran

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To Have Been Done With Death

Every time the human is haunted by the thought of death, she becomes an-other. Your thought of death is only your witnessing, conscious or unconscious, of metamorphosis. You dreamed, and death passed through your dream. And how different your dream has become. You loved, and in love death crossed over you. And how different your love has become. How different your wishes have become, how different the senses. In every thought, you have become other. You have lost yourself in them and with them, and they have become lost in you. Not in nuances, but in abysses above abysses the thought of death has lifted you.

Nobody has ever defeated the obsession with death through lucidity and knowledge. There is no argument against it. Eternity is on its side, right? Only life has to defend itself continually; death was born triumphant. And how can it not be triumphant if nothingness is its father and horror its mother?

Death is to be defeated only through exhaustion. The obsession with it tires us and then burns itself out. Death grows old in us from too much presence. After it has told us everything we cannot use it anymore. Our chronic symbiosis with death teaches us everything; through it all things are known. That is why knowledge­ can do nothing against it.

In itself, death is eternal. Yet in me it deteriorated and is of no use anymore. Not to find any use in death – Does anybody understand this? How is it that not only life can be exhausted, but death as well?

I don’t know whether it always or only sometimes seems to me that I will never die. To die, to perish one day, has lost any meaning. I will die. Nothing more. And this strange detachment from death does not proceed from anything else than the retrospective feeling of death. I am afraid of the death that was once in me. I am not frightened by the one that awaits me, but by the one that filled me all these years, by the sinister halo of youth. It is the fear of my own past and its stigmata, imprinted by death. People are waiting for death and they couple it with their future. Why do they fear only the junction of future and death, the impenetrable bedrock of time?

What about having left death behind? To look behind you and stare at death! Have I been resurrected or did I circumvent my own end?

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Detachment from death leads us to a profound sense of total detachment. For only when we have left death itself behind us can we talk about detachment without affectation.

Only then will we have understood that detachment does not mark the painful loss of the all, but the suffocating presence of all without us needing it anymore.

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Were I not flesh, blood, breath, uprooted from time and rooted in a remote blueness, I would spin in the seraphic dematerialization of space. In vibrant void, traversed by fire and otherworldly colors, I would begin myself in void, without the memory of matter – not knowing if I had ever gone through it, just with an impression of passing it by.

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Fear finds its excuse in the ultimate cause of being. We are not afraid of something, but of that something else, which is nothingness. There is no reason to not always be afraid.

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Compared to fear, trembling is free from any exterior conditioning and more independent from the objective world. In itself, the question Why are you trembling? addresses an inner determinant or an indeterminable cause. If fear is hard to endure in the absence of fabricated rather than real reasons, trembling (the tremor of all organs...) is endured the more inexplicable it is. In trembling, fright does not dominate, but instead bewilderment, our bewilderment about the silence preceding it.

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What are you trembling for? For myself, because of myself.

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When you feel there is no corpse to whom your gaze and your trust does not give life, no disease that you cannot turn into health,

when in your lightning bolts and in your fever there is no law that is not a whim, no fate that is not an accident,

when you are cozy in the great outside as in your own home and you derive selfishness from infinity,

when you recover yourself in chaos and crumble all forms, acquiring form,

when you feel the emptiness of the kingdom of heaven and the contempt for so many crowns, brilliant in the sun,

when every resistance perishes in your fire and all is possible, oh-so-possible,

then you will have reached the apex where the forces of the world fade into shadows – shadows absorbed by your mad, divine tremor.

A stone, a flower and a worm are more than all human thinking. Ideas did not give birth and will never give birth, not even to a single atom. Thinking hasn’t brought anything new to the world, except itself; which is yet another world. Ideas ought to have been pregnant, deadly and vibrant; they ought to have given birth, to have menaced and trembled.

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Ideas do not generate anything, so they do not add anything to the world we live in. Why think the world if thinking does not become fate to the world? No law of nature has ever changed because of thought and no idea has ever imposed a new law upon nature. Ideas are neither cosmic nor demiurgic, hence they have been born doomed.

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You reach a moment in life when every pessimist book irritates and revolts you. There is too much indiscretion within them; they reveal too many intimacies, hardly protect the decency of life and rape too many virginities of being.

All the seminal books of mankind should be burned. Only then will we have the courage of futilities and ephemeral things.

Whatever they say, thinkers remain on the surface of life. Doing nothing other than sifting delusions from truths, they remain in suspension between delusion and truth. Passions are the substance of history. There has been no novel written by a sage.

To Have Been Done With Philosophy

I have never under-stood why philosophy enjoys such an awe-inspiring reputation, or the pious respect people have for it. On so many occasions science has been – rightfully – despised, neglected; enthusiasm has scarcely ever attained a mystical dimension. To endow science with a halo is vulgar. Philosophy, on the contrary, since immemorial times, enjoys a favor that it does not merit, whose legitimacy we are bound to question. We will have to convince ourselves once and for all that the truths of philosophy are futile or that it holds no truth at all. Truly, philosophy holds no truth. Though nobody will enter the world of truth unless she has gone through philosophy.

I have not been able to find out what philosophy wants, what philosophers want. Some say the dignity of philosophy consists in its not knowing what it wants. Not that philosophy does not have its topics, but with them one cannot begin anything. I have not encountered a discipline that becomes more sterile, more futile when cultivated for its own sake. To study the philosophers in order to spend your entire life in their society is to compromise yourself in front of all those who have understood well that philosophy can only be but one chapter of their biography. To die being a philosopher is a shame not even death can wipe away.

Haven’t you noticed how all philosophers end up well? This thing should make us ponder. . .Their existence mimicked the sterility and blandness of their ideas. Philosophers don’t live in their ideas, but for them. They waste their lives vainly trying to animate ideas. They don’t know – what the most insignificant of poets knows – that ideas cannot be animated. So many times it seems to me that the lowest poet knows more than the greatest philosopher.

I began to be indifferent to philosophers the moment I realized that philosophy can only be done in a state of psychic indifference, that is, with an outrageous indifference in comparison to any emotional state. Psychic neutrality is the essential trait of the philosopher. Kant was never sad. I cannot love those people who do not muddle thoughts and remorse. Like ideas, philosophers don’t have a fate. How comfortable to be a philosopher!

How could we welcome the knowledge of philosophers if they are neutral to all that is and is not? No philosopher answers to a name. However loud we would call her, she would not hear us. And if she were to hear us, what could she possibly answer? It is weird and inexplicable why people visit philosophy when they need consolation. Why would they turn to philosophy in the midst of their most tormenting privations?

There is nothing more profound and mysterious than the need for consolation. It cannot be theoretically defined, for anything that remains of it is already a sigh. The world of thoughts is an illusion compared to the world of sighs... Once and for all: any philosophy is a failed expectation.

A visionary poet (e.g. Baudelaire, Rilke) expresses in two verses more than a philosopher in her entire work. Philosophical probity is pure timidity. By trying to demonstrate what cannot be demonstrated, to prove what is heterogeneous to thought, to validate the irreducible or the absurd, philosophy meets only a mediocre taste of the absolute. Sometimes it seems that all philosophy is reducible to the law of causality and then a greater disgust overtakes me. Since one cannot do philosophy without the law of causality, everything seems to be outside philosophy.

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There is only one definition of philosophy: the restlessness of impersonal people. It is as if all philosophers were put on death row.

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One cannot go back from poetry, music, mysticism to philosophy. It is obvious that they are more than philosophy. Poets, composers, and mystics only philosophize in hours of exhaustion, when they are compelled to turn to a minor condition. They realize in themselves that there is no pride in being a philosopher, they understand how little philosophy knows, let alone science. What is thinking compared to the ecstatic vibration, the metaphysical cult of nuances pervading all poems? And how far philosophy is from reality, how pale the world of ideas in comparison to music and mysticism!

There is no generative philosophy. Philosophy does not create anything. By this I mean it can project another world, but not give birth to it, not impregnate it. Philosophers speak as if everything had already happened. No work of art should exist, because all art is a world within the world and therefore it is redundant. No philosophical system made me feel a world independent of the realm of philosophy. The painful truth: read as many philosophers as you wish, you will never feel that you have become a different human being. Obviously I exclude Nietzsche from philosophy, who is much more than a philosopher.

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It is not in the slightest true that philosophers are closer to essential realities than everybody else. In fact, they are subservient only to appearances and they bow exclusively to what has never been and will never be (the only reason for which they are dear to me).

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Man can only attain the ecstasy of appearances. This is the only reality. Poetry, music and mysticism serve these supreme appearances.

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This is how I understand a great soul: not the one that alone gives meaning to the world, but the one towards which the world tends, as if drawn to its middle. It is as if rivers, mountains, and people progressively converged towards it. Its eye is the mirror of all expanses, its hearing the final aim of all pitches, its heart the shelter of all senses and prehensions of the world. Once this man falls ill, the environment becomes infested out of dread of contrast, fear of inferiority in health. The vibrations of a great soul stirs all loneliness around it. Or, everyone else’s fear of loneliness is the only possible reason for the existence of such a soul. To have an inner style means to be your entire inner world, the whole world, a flux. Not being able to be born in you, it seems to wish to die in you. After you nothing is able to die! To have given the world so much life that it ends in you, with you!

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When I think how little there is to learn from the great philosophers! I never needed Kant, Descartes, or Aristotle, who only ever thought for our lonely hours, for our legitimate doubts. But I lingered upon Job, with the piety of a grandson.

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Why is it that man so greatly fears the future when obviously the past inspires greater awe? Should not the undeniable fact that the cosmos has for aeons been unhuman provoke more inner void than one’s own transience? Since the un-birth of nothingness until the time of the first human, consciousness had not been felt as missing, hence the existence of humans is not necessary. The emergence of mankind is absolutely contingent. The universe could have disappeared without reflecting upon itself.

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Humanity cannot dispense with anything; humanity can dispense with everything. The contradiction will be solved when humanity will have dispensed with itself.

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The blind groping of man has always impressed me more than sainthood.

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Between being perfect and being plagued, I will always prefer the latter.

In eternity nothing is lost. I feel bound to this Earth, because it is doomed...

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Ambivalence and equivocation are ultimate truths. To be with truth while against it is not a paradox for anyone who understands that her abysses and revelations can neither not love nor not hate truth. The one who believes in truth is naïve; the one who doesn’t is silly. To go on a straight path is to tread a knife’s edge.

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As much life as you have invested your thoughts with, that much death is in you.

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The extent to which knowledge must grow to rid us of sorrow is as hard to determine as it is easy to ascertain how little it should be so that sorrow is not felt in the first place. There is indeed a sorrow which has nothing to do with knowledge: a mineral sorrow, not even biological.

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Are geological eras moaning in you? If not, why are you talking about time?

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It is not easy to endure the horror that arouses in you an active vibration and a cataclysmic tremor because, by manifesting itself in states of fever, its intensity dims into fear and uncertainty. But the horror born in perplexity, in the obscurity of calmness, in subterraneous astonishment is utterly unbearable. Never in your life have you felt more intensely the urge to shout help! or scream some unintelligible sound. In the midst of the peacefulness that places you among the balanced and self-sufficient, a catastrophe would seem most banal, a collapse most predictable, a death most reasonable. Horror converts the sinister into the obvious and all that is divine becomes monstrous, beginning with the smile. A man incapable of feeling horror, that horror for-no-reason, will never understand any action for-no-reason. You must act against horror. And whatever you may do won’t be understood by anybody, because it makes no sense except against your horror. Why are truths so lonely? The