Remora
When I first started logging, I made a private resolution to try to do something every day.
What I would like to do, today, is write a long commentary on Voltaire's response to the Lisbon Earthquake, with invidious references to yesterday's day of prayer.
But I have to work my ass off this weekend, in order to catch up with my committments: three reviews, and then a piece I am supposedly doing, due wednesday, on terrorism.
So I am going to have to suspend the Voltaire thing.
Also, I have received a few comments on my posts about the WTC bombing (or holocaust, or mass murder - one thing it wasn't was a tragedy. Unless building a skyscraper is considered an act of hubris. But even then, the hijacking and jet fuel explosion doesn't compute as a tragedy. Sorry.). The comments surprised me - my friend David said that my posts were cold. He said he didn't mean this as an insult, just that is what they were.
I guess I have responded, so far, in these posts, on a highly intellectual plane. The reason is, my emotional response, my grief, my obsessive replaying of the planes hitting the towers within my mind - all of these things aren't, yet, things I can write about in a direct way. Maybe I won't ever be able to do that. I wasn't there - my experience is of being by, being a bystander. Karl Kraus once remarked that the ontological effect of newspapers was to shift our Dasein into Dabeisein - a sort of untranslateable German pun, but you get my point. Or do you? Lately I wonder if my points are similar to private jokes, which I think are funny and everybody else thinks are incomprehensible. Spelling it out - the movement from being there to being by there is the dialectical moment of inauthenticity, its historically specific structure.
But don't get me started, me with my big Heideggerian mouth!
In any case - I am not at all cold about this thing. I am frozen, I am at dead zero, I am an emotional evacuee. That's what I am.
As for todays link - this is the best I could do. I'm not, repeat, not trying to be cold, but we need information about what is going on, and what the puzzle American forces, apparently, are going to enter is all about.