Todtnauberg

Heidegger's hut

There are lots of jokes about the benefit of being alive. The alternative is not being alive. So it’s a  no brainer. These comedians may not be familiar with the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan which is btw the soundtrack for Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). The Danish director is obviously trying to make a point when he plays it ad nauseum. Liebestod is literally "life in death," a term which is almost, but not quite, synonymous with another German word Leidenschaft or "passion." Juliet is a perfect example of this since she is dead and alive a little like Schrodinger's cat who is both here and not. Heidegger remarked that only in the awareness of death can humans live an authentic existence. Paul Celan the famed poet of the Holocaust once attempted to visit Heidegger in his Black Forest, Todtnauberg retreat one would guess to ask how a great philosopher could support Hitler? He might have also asked Hannah Arendt how she how she as the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism could have slept with her proto- fascist professor? That’s another thing about the world of the living. It’s full of things which are hard to understand.

read "Current Affairs" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Hard Knocks

photo: Meanwell Packaging

“Knock, knock.”

“Knock, knock.”

“Knock fucking knock already,”

“If you don’t say ‘who’s there?’ I’m going to knock this fucking door down."

What are you supposed to do? You keep knocking on the same door with no one ever giving you any more than the same yawn of cosmic indifference. 

Thank you for asking but the answer is "no!"

The pounding gets louder. There's the sound of splintering, as a fist finally penetrates the wood.

read "Current Affairs" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

   

The Anschluss

During the Anschluss the Nazis annexed Austria, then followed the occupation of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. Trump started by attempting to march into Greenland. When that failed, he kidnapped Maduro the leader of Venezuela and placed him in The Metropolitan House of Detention, where he is still resides. It was lights out for Cuba which deprived of oil would be the next domino, but not before the mullahs were assassinated. If you redraw the map of the United States it will now include Venezuela and Cuba which is not strange when you consider Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Iran is a bit of an outlier. The closest state to it, in size, would be Alaska (a bit larger with 665,000 square miles to Iran's 636,000) though Iran has a bigger population with 93 million versus Alaska's 748,000.

read "Current Affairs" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Inscriptions

As the world shatters into oblivion, old inscriptions have a new urgency and profundity. Here is one found in a second hand copy Library of America Nabokov Novel and Memoirs 1941-1951,purchased on Amazon (which includes the unspeakably beautiful Speak, Memory):

"When as if he believed in God, V.N. said, 'I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.' Thanks for being a good student and friend. All the best (signature not parsable)." 

Guess, the student/friend needed to deaccession a book.

read "Current Affairs" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Political Violence

Can you be against political violence and still wish that certain politicians were dead? Or the very un Christian question of people in general? If you turn the other cheek, is it likely to get slapped? In the old days people got tarred and feathered or put in stocks. In The Scarlet Letter Heather Prynne is forced to wear an A on her dress. Certain people won't die no matter how many times you kill them. The trope of the vengeful monster returning drives many horror films. There are people who believe their thoughts and wishes come true. They desperately try not to wish that a certain figure will burn in hell. Usually they don't have to worry.

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Royal Flush

How many fortunes have been lost in the course of trying to stanch a loss? A pile of chips is an ineradicable memory. You are flush with money (albeit in surrogate form)! Dramatic shifts often occur effortlessly while batting an eyelash. Hi tech hubris, in fact is measured in bytes of data. Overnight you may find yourself under water and in debt to the house. In Democracy in America De Tocqueville talks about the lability of a society where one generation can be rich and the next poor. The impoverished aristocrat is not an anomaly—though the American aristocrat is really one of Disney's Aristocats. Bastille Day occurs, in theory, every four years. Loss aversion is the psychological concept explored by the Nobel prize winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, but it’s a fear and tempering mechanism that is too often lost in the heat of battle or battle--or lust.

Ineptitude

Andrew Marvell

Does everyone have the opposite of halcyon days, perhaps days of ineptitude? You may have been a gawky kid who wasn’t good at anything. Then all of a sudden you find yourself. You discover a previously hidden talent for boxing (perhaps as a result of early frustrations). You become a crack student (at least of human behavior) and the repository of some "gull," yes gull's romantic wishes. Someone else will use you to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Then by the time you arrive, you will be told it’s time to go. You are certainly not in your prime. When you get in the literal and metaphoric ring, you find your strength is already beginning to fade. In fact you walk right into someone’s metaphorical stiff jab. You forget everything. You would console yourself with the notion of starting all over again "if there were world enough and time"--to quote Andrew Marvell. 

read "Current Events" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star