Every living being has its perspective. The unliving, those we so naively-innocently call inanimate–but there is always movement!–have theirs, too. Each perspective is, in relation to the others, vastly disproportionate, unrelatable and incommensurable. Granted. But there is a good deal of trouble hidden in this stance of ours, this our perspective on perspectives, which we tend to overlook. We tend to forget that all living and unliving beings, that we ourselves–for surely we are one of these, or we fall, somehow, between the two, or go back and forth between them–are composed of, and by, a multiplicity of drives, each with its own perspective, its own horizon, its own preferences, its own For and Against. If there is unrelatability or incommensurability between or among perspectives, then, this incommensurability goes all the way up, to the greatest and most encompassing of them, those that surround whole galaxies and universes and the giant systems we timidly call home, as well as all the way down, to the minutest and seemingly most insignificant drives and collections of drives. We are unknown to one another, yes, granted, but we are also unknown, terribly and thoroughly unknown, to ourselves. We must come to terms with this before we set about locking up all the beings surrounding us in existence in their windowless houses, because this thorough-going incommensurability, to the point of a radical solipsism, might just provide an opening, an open window, onto the world and onto other beings, might open up a place, an arena, where we may finally meet and greet and encounter them as what they are: arrays and lightning flashes of perspective, these drives, these warring and unharmonious drives, who, despite their foreign tongues and foreignness in comparison to one another, still meet up on this turf where what is shared is precisely war, struggle and lack of understanding, understanding only this, that lots will remain incommunicable between one perspective and another, but that this is not a justification to ignore them, it does not serve as any excuse to not play their game of appropriation and expropriation with them. In fact, our newly-found stance regarding all things, regarding ourselves, puts us right in the thick of life, as though we all of a sudden are not only wearing it as a garment but have it inside too: life and the unmanageable chaos of life; suddenly we realize that this is sharing enough, that we inevitably share, even when we find ourselves at such a tremendous distance from one another, even when we insist on such a distance.
We have discussed this aspect of sharing before, this strange quality of sharing by which it allows itself to persevere, always and forever, despite our confusion regarding one another. This is our proper place in relation to one another, this our distance from one another, which twists itself so in its meanderings that it turns into a type of closeness and supreme intimacy. For the head musician, the conductor, of our orchestra only has to step down from his chair a moment in order to have some realization that it is not only HIS music playing in the venue of existence. And if he doesn’t, if he plays on in blissful oblivion of these others? Well, then, there is the more vibrant relation of the border separating him from all else, that liminal sound-field serving as the transition from his tunes and way of playing music to these others. Whether he sees it (hears it) or not, whether he acknowledges it or not, this Zwischen place stands, however tenuously and ambiguously, and without it his music would not sound the same, would not be his music–he would cease to be what he is, the player he has become. For we all become the good players that we are in the course of a vibrant battle, vibrant not because it enters our consciousness and becomes explicit–it surely almost never does, this battlefield surrounding all things–but because it is so vibrant and vital as to grow hands and mold and shape the beings in its care to its overarching design, a design not laid on them like a compulsion but like a calling, in a whisper, to become what they are, to become alike and dissimilar from all the rest, in its own way. Overarching, then, not because it has a hold on all of us from on high, but because there are woven threads of significance and gaps of insignificance between us in our lives together, and vague, uncertainly-shimmering nodules where we may say Hi to one-another, or Goodbye, or where we just might not get it and stare at the wavering light as though at stillness, as though at a blank wall, turn around from it, or walk right through it without even noticing or taking any of its gifts seriously, and get back to work, to business, to pleasure–to YOUR work, to YOUR business, to YOUR pleasure.
Or we see these others, these other perspectives, rooted in these other drives, for what they are: against us, threatening and outnumbering us, despite the countless resources we have ourselves in terms of drives and as drives. This time is the beginning of the truth of things; the beginning, but not the end. We must pass through this stage, this horrible stage, of transcendence transcending transcendence if we are to be honest about where we stand in relation to one another, where we stand in relation to ourselves. Relation alone, a relation that only welcomes and invites the different into itself without setting any of its own boundaries, is deficient for this reason: it fails to realize its OWN gifts, how it is a gift or a collection of gifts itself, and can turn away from these gifts, in favor of the others, at the drop of a hat. The deficiency of the other common way, of walking right through the other perspectives, being in blissful ignorance of them, or staring at them blankly as though at a blank wall, is more insidious even if more obvious. This ignorance of the world is really a hidden weakness disguised as self-sufficiency. No, we must pass through the threat of the terrors of being surrounding us at all sides, armed with every conceivable weapon, before we are truly, that is fully, able to receive our gifts from one another; verily, before we might even recognize ourselves as a gift, and receive our own gifts.
Before we realize that we are forever surrounded on all sides by these daggers of the others, and that these other daggers, this otherness, is found in us ourselves as well and poke up from the inside of us, as it were, AS our insides, then the gift’s existence brings to us and bestows upon us are paltry or, worse, comes to naught. No, in order to let these powers be the powers that they are there must be a flash of acknowledgment of them as POWERS, that is, as IMPOSING or THREATENING. Not to say that they shall remain fixed in this stance against us. Again, this acknowledgment is only a stage, an invitation to refine your own powers, a lesson concerning the importance of enemies, before it modulates, at least could modulate, has the potential to transmogrify, into a trained and respectful opponent able to withstand, indeed to welcome, the onslaught of its opponents’ thrusts and counter-thrusts. Then we may have conversation and debate with one another, we may spar with one another, without facing one another either like a dumb Christ or a brutal Caesar or a foolish in-between of them, but, like Nietzsche admonished we become, we might come to mix them so wisely, each with the other, that we can both love and draw boundaries at once, we might say No but at the same time Yes, yes, yes, even to all that calls out to be denied around us, even at the deniers themselves, us included, at denial itself, ours included.
Nietzsche’s Caesar with the soul of Christ is not this foolish in-between, it is not some compromise he would have wished, in his heart of hearts, or from six thousand feet beyond man and time, not to take. It is the pinnacle itself, the ideal, but a strange ideal. It is the relation as lack of relation, the relation in distance and the distance in relation, the coincidentia oppositorum whose eternal tension and recurrence vibrates through all things, vibrates them in their place to make sure they do not fall into darkness and total oblivion. A tenuous place, yes, made up of tenuous threads barely holding us all together, to be sure–almost like no place at all, like a No Place. But it is–our place, our home, all of us together, living and unliving. And it is something we all share, this strange place, total strangers as we are to one another.
Love the Dust 