3427. “The Bondsman always labors in submission to the true master and Master, the fear of death”
Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness:
Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit
You wake up in the dead of night, and your Lazy Susan of a Mind stops its slow spin, leaving in front of your consciousness a particular crevice of concern. (I’m having some difficulty assembling the right language to convey my meaning here—bear with me: you remember or have heard tell of those revolving platters [they were made of monkey-pod (least that’s how I remember them—but maybe that was a Hawaii thing)], with dishes containing different kinds of food—maybe poi, or some kind of weird-ass polynesian salad or lomi salmon [no spam]—my memory is a little hazy here. I’m thinking these intriguing contraptions were around sometime in the early seventies, maybe, during the heyday of fondue and culottes.) Anyways, I digress: I’m malingering on the details, and all the while, I have a Job to report out—so enough already with the Lazy Susan. Getting back to the quarry of this meditation: you wake up in the dead of the night, and you’re all Jesus Holy Christ, I have so much to do! There’s so much work I should have done, already! I’ll never get it done. They’re gonna kill me!
So who, exactly, is going to kill you? According to the “existential fable” (Pippin) Hegel sets up, it’s some primal master, who in a struggle to the death with some primal slave, wins the game of chicken (the p.m. is willing to die in the fight; the p.s. not so much, ergo the p.s. loses and, to earn his living, has to carry all the p.m.’s water, until such time that the p.m. is so dependent on the p.s. that the lazy Susan turns around).
But that’s not the part of the story that I care about right now. Another part of the story is getting to me right now. I’m wondering if and when work can ever be liberated from the fear of death. I hope so. I hope soon.
LABOR DAY, 2011
Note: “Labour … blossoming or dancing” (Yeats).
3505. “Telephone Directory,” “Heaven”
W. H. Auden
One could conceive of Heaven having
a Telephone Directory (“Postscript …”).
We mostly don’t call each other anymore. Not like we used to, anyway. And when we do, we mostly don’t pick up. That’s cool, though. It just makes us appreciate more the times we do get through. Now, when we answer, it’s like the reverse charge of the bye, which always sounds like the beginning of the big one; it’s like a hello from here, all the way to Heaven. That’s why our hope goes way beyond the bounds of all area codes when we hear the ring at the other end of the line—
Note: “Stardust in negative, between the rings” (Merrill, “Mirabell”).
3507. “She’d take it all for fun if I didn’t hurt her, and that I can’t do”
George Eliot, Silas Marner
How easy to recall a father, cruel; much harder to remember those times when he failed to be so—last-minute confusions of charity that softened a spanking or a grounding into a sentence as slight as the punch line of a forgotten joke; as sweet as the sign of a remembered peace.
Note: “this fair defect of nature” (Milton, Paradise Lost).