Poetic Revelations by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317079521
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The primal ethos to which nihilism, in Desmond’s thought, leads one is ‘primal’ in the double signification of the term: primary and originative. For him, nihilism is a process one undergoes, a stripping of solid formations of thought and being that returns one to a ‘zero’ point. That zero is full of pain as well as foundational desires, a negating which initiates a process of unknowing that leads not towards an inactive ignorance but towards a dynamic ground: ‘the purgatory of the equivocal brings home to us, in our not-knowing, the truth of the divine as beyond us. I do not say impossibly beyond’ (God and the Between 88; emphasis in original). The suffering returns one to a place of primacy where one may encounter new forms of knowing, which are integrated with the suffering and with existence: ‘with a mindfulness that awaits what will come, come what may; that does not force its own categories on what is there at play’ (God and the Between 88). Desmond imparts a quasi-religious appellative to this nothing, terming it a ‘desert’ reminiscent of the apophatic tradition of the desert fathers: the desert in part because of its intensity of light is a frequent metaphor in his writings to describe an equivocal state of being: ‘One wanders a desert that bleaches with burning light’ (God and the Between 31). Instead of the sun’s representing a univocal entity, as it is often portrayed in Platonic literature, light for Desmond is deeply equivocal: ‘And even when the highest, the Sun, is glimpsed, nothing is univocal; for excess of light produces blindness’ (God and the Between 85). The person becomes a living tabula rasa in this equivocal mode of being in which the sun burns and bleaches one. This blanking of the self, however, also creates a porosity, such that the painful emptiness it implies creates a slate upon which something new may be written. A new mindfulness for existence arrives, ‘that does not force its own categories on what is there at play’ (God and the Between 88).

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