Totality & Infinity

There is this thing from Levinas that stuck in my head for some reason, flipping randomly again through Totality & Infinity. This: 

By memory I ground myself after the event, retroactively: I assume today what in the absolute past of the origin had no subject to receive it & had therefore the weight of a fatality. By memory I assume & put back in question. Memory realizes impossibility: memory, after the event, assumes the passivity of the past & masters it. Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.

The weight of a fatality. I don’t quite know why, but I am hung up on that phrase. Context certainly helps with Levinas, but if you’ve read him, you know that context is also untranslatable. You step into a zephyr & learn his language, being thrashed across the pages, dizzied & bruised. He was a polyglot in every thought’s own vernacular, an arcane labyrinth lineated by word upon gossamer word, a sort of sculpture garden built of the most delicate butterfly wings. 

The thrust of the book rests on just that cusp of dead time between what has transpired & what is in the process of becoming-- the present, essentially. I am only capable of the most sophomoric consolidations, so forgive me if one among the four of you to ever read this is a scholar of ethics unbeknownst to me, but the idea is that that pinpoint wherein historical time collides with the urgency of now involves, if we’re being honest, all of the simple novelty of a first encounter, recurring over & over again. Which means there is no prefiguring, no bracketed association, no language for otherness that is not spilling through the self’s sieve of desirousness. It becomes incumbent on us to approach presence, then, ethically, in consideration of what is inherently transactional. 

But behind all of that is that notion of a recurring fatality in the arena of remembering. Our collected, individuated notions of what our times in life have accumulated continue their ceaseless reconfiguration at every nanosecond. We become author to our living obituary this way, assuming “the passivity of the past” while mastering it. Wordsworth got at this a number of times in a number of places, but generally thought the present a sort of kindling by which to bellow the flames of the past into life again, for the plunder of a poem or the respite of a memory. 

I like the notion that each of us carries a history within us, that those histories can clash with one another, that even the most banal disagreement about how a night’s events unfolded, for instance, is at its core an ontological or epistemological confrontation in which both sides slip & fail. What is known is plasticized, made permeable. Rigidity collapses, totality becomes a myth, in the sense that it has the ring of truth but bears the timbre of human telling. 

I don’t know why it is sticking in my head presently. I suppose I am negotiating a great deal with memory, with my own past, while I judiciously walk the thin line of the present & steer it towards still differing horizon lines. It is a difficult work, the honest assessment of where we have been, coupled with the perhaps more circumstantially difficult work of determining where we will go. One never wants nostalgia to “do its ruinous work on memory,” as Chabon had it, but nor do you want to move along for the sake of motion. 

I have a complicated relationship with the notion of home, which means I have a complicated relationship with memory. Without the daily or yearly reminders of where I had been in my youth, having moved so many times, those places have either begun or completed their slow disintegration from my recollection. There are landscapes that populate my memory that I cannot place, fields ungrounded & floating about without a place name, without a state to drop them in. There are bedrooms my memory will awaken in me in houses to which they do not belong. It conflates, it falls apart. We moved along. & so because of that I know the floors & foundations of remembering are shifting things, liquefaction, & I do not trust my own footfall in trespassing through the past. It is an always uncertain ground. But then, in the end, I don’t think that unique to someone who has moved a great deal, & this bit from Levinas helps put that verisimilitude in context (between the past itself jumbling the architecture of the mind & the ceaseless permutations of the present doing so). What I take comfort in are the lilly pads that hold me up, how I can jump from one to the next, & find in their rootedness a path through the fog-enshrouded oceans of my having-been. It may be a shapeless, living thing, but if there is a trail through it, a faint corona of votives hung over those steps I took from time to time in rhyme, that compel me toward the sense of what might profitably come next, then there is at least that. 

Maybe all to say, as always, that the notion of certainty, of totality, threatens with the heft of its impossible task, a kind of eidelon of the order-obsessed, a chimera that I’d rather not chase. It is enough to move with uncertainty. It is enough to know some brief & fugitive moments of light, some vague familiarity or accord with what has brought us our joy & our love & our sense of fulgence in the past. & to strive again for its rhyme.