It is not for us to know if we will arrive safely at our destination - Agatha Christie
For is it not written that every wise woman buildeth her house, but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands? But then, is it not unwritten that the limit of what might be built at any given moment, what is available as material for every possible building, is never more than a this-house before its own particularisation in the moment of its falling, and so its solidification is therefore nothing but the arrested and unspoken anticipation (amongst some of those dwelling there) of its melting away? If the fallen house describes its former state more perfectly than it ever achieved in its standing, then the built house achieves no more than the permanency of its vulnerabilities at the moment of its completion. What is built commences immediately upon the path of its falling, and may not be added to, or even be mended, without multiplying the number of its points of weakness. Spiders and draughts, damp and mould enter at will.
So it is that Kierkegaard tells of a needlewoman who sewed an altar cloth as the materialisation in the world of her devotion directed beyond it. The woman dedicated every hour of her waking life to the work from its beginning to its completion and she worked at the highest level of needlecraft - only the greatest of endeavours may thereby be withdrawn from the world. The needlewoman embroidered the cloth with flowers and stars of exquisite and intricate design - and these expressed with the utmost eloquence the profundity of her faith. Upon its completion, she considered it adequate to its function, a human and therefore imperfect and therefore humble but nonetheless authentically committed expression of the path, and of the approach along the path, to god.
The embroidered cloth was a true work of dedication, a true expression of devotion. We may only imagine her distress then as she observed others looking at the cloth, her work of faith, as if it were but a work of her art. It wounded her to hear them attribute the work to her and not to god, to praise it and her, and not god. The needlewoman had embroidered her faith into the cloth but the sacred meaning was not understood by those who saw it, and the sacred itself, that which she sewed before, and sewed in the name of, was also not present in the cloth. What she had sewed expressed a house, a plucking or unpicking, falling away from itself.
In contemplating her own work, she felt her powerlessness in supplication before that to which she was devoted. Through the gaze of those looking at her work, she understood there was nothing in the cloth but the mode of her life energy vibrating in the world as this materialised itself as technical proficiency combined with the profundity of her vision. We may also imagine her iconoclastic desire to destroy the cloth, to plucketh down the building, and yet also not acting, knowing that her desire whilst seeking a truer and more direct approach to the divine, would, at the same time, feel sacrilegious, a desecration. What is the iconoclast’s white walled interior but the exuberant raiment of his faith, unpicked? It is exactly this predicament, where we are caught between our commitment and our anguish at our commitment’s limits, at our building up of something that is also only a falling down, a gaze sewn into the world, unpicked, where we encounter the nature of our involvement in what lies beyond us - the form taken of our beggaring by the world. In our faith we stray, in our straying we return. Just now, I glimpsed, by no other means than association, a carnival of souls spinning like so many teetotums beneath the skin of the world, pressing upwards, reaching for a return to life, but never touching it.
Every radical of my acquaintance, who has sought to cajole or to persuade me, has done so successfully. Why not transfer my thoughts from what I had just then been thinking? Why not turn my attention from my path to his? What difference does it make if I give or withhold my assent? Fate decides. It has become my habit that I will always begin by agreeing to see things his way. For the enchantment of it. But I have also always considered messengers, in the presumption of their approach to me, as it were, knocking on my door, canvassing my support, as a sign of malignant intent. Indifference and disinterest are the only traits I trust in others. These world changers and message bearers are wolves beside the forest path. I never considered anyone who was ready to bend my will to their’s, even as they succeeded, as anything other than as spies or sociopaths. And it was precisely this quality of their malignancy that persuaded me to accept everything they had to say - I feel deep sympathy for devils, I see the pain they manifest in the logic and argument that they advance as proof of their fervency. I feel no anger against them, nor disgust at their need. For this reason, I see no function in mercy but in the mercy that may be shown to fallen tyrants. But I forgive them before they fall, they are the rock, more treacherous than sand, upon which the city will be built. So the radical persuades me with his failure to persuade me, his charming charmlessness, guileless guile. It is the effusion from his wounded core, the magma energy of his frailty, that turns my attention towards him.
Might we know commitment only from the place of ambivalence? Loyalty is a moment in betrayal, and not the other way round. Or, rather, commitment is a false relation to what is committed to. But equally, I may express my faithlessness only in my faith. And so it is that transgression becomes distinct from trespass at the level of an intimacy in intent. I have no capacity or will to deviate from that to which I am opposed - whatever I repudiate is fixed and preserved, it becomes, in the most profound sense, what I am committed to. The more I hate a thing, the more it belongs in my life, and the more it is there, the more deeply I depend upon it so as to continue as I am. I am changed by my unswerving commitments, and in my inadvertencies; by refusing to adapt I am swept along; compromised because uncompromising. I have never found myself a member of a crowd without also feeling a wave of profound melancholic sympathy for whatever is being crowded against. I have never chanted slogans nor insults, or shaken my fist, nor stoned an unbeliever, and I am habitually careless in my prayers.
I do not think truth is born from suffering, nor that the oppressed either understand or know how to escape their oppression - to be sure, creation is a product of constraint and not abundance, of being in relation to power but not being powerful. But it is so easy to trespass against another without knowing you are causing offence, but transgression is always a deliberate act against external constraints. Of course, it often occurs that the transgressed against creates elaborate territorial rules in order to trap the transgressor who at first merely trespasses but later, also offended, is then provoked by the enjoyment of the trespassed against, continuing with the policy of incursion - each enjoying, and feeding off, the energy expended by the other upon their own antagonistic and yet also co-dependent concept of where the line is drawn. The church will uncover its heretics, and the state its enemies within.
That is only to say, transgression is an event situated within established relations - so where it involves persons invading territories, that is one thing, but where it is persons intruding upon other persons, that is another. The territorial desire to offend and to take offence depends, as the ground of the transgressive relation, upon an immediately conditioned temporality - a transgressive act triggers an instantaneous response from the transgressed against. The conditioning that is structured as the transgressive relationship, taking offence and taking offence against that offence, provoking and feeling provoked into provoking, may be disassembled where its immediate temporality is bypassed. Where offence is slowed down, and there is no social form that is not constructed out of offence, it begins to escape itself (cf mouse on the moon).
Imperceptible transgressions within the Law, gentle driftings inside the territory’s gravitational field rather than a friction generating direct confrontation, begins to describe an altered ground from which new relations are derived, and other rules are negotiated. Before the Sermon on the Mount, nobody had considered non-resistance as a stratagem of inoffensive transgression: if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Welcomed invaders forget their homeland. The wilful transgressor may intrude only a short distance into the enemy’s territory but then drift from, even as she obeys, the rules by which the borders of her own territory are enforced.
The radical agitator before me, this unother, seeking to seduce me, desires that I desire him. He stakes his claim upon what he claims has already come to pass, it’s already here, already inside, the disaster, the rapture, is now. The power of every rhetorician is drawn from his conjuring in the perception of his audience a sense of manifest latency - he wishes to persuade them of the imminence of their doom, their salvation, the collapse of all things, the immediacy of the city on the hill. His appeal buried within his imperative is the sound, moment by moment, of a primitive desire to transform (in the perception of others) the example into explanation. If we assent, he encloses us. It is then perhaps, my capacity for responsiveness to the other’s unlikely appeal, a predilection for the pathos of tricksters and conmen, a predisposition for my ears to hear the wrong note; my desire for the lie qua lie that will clinch it for me, causing my separation from natural born scepticism, detaching me, sweeping me along. The untenable sets me in motion, as I seek out make do and mend arguments and perspectives, no matter how fantastical, to establish their possibility, and to make it so (cf saps at sea).
And so at every juncture, my journey was deflected, as in a Markov chain, as in a pinball game, by the most recent encounter with yet another devil on the road. At every station I was gently separated from my way and my possessions diverted down ever narrowing, ever more lonely, paths and into ever greater obscurity. After Beaumarchais, ‘It's your world, but I make my way in it.’ I am convinced now that those who deflected me from my own brilliance into my own occlusion did so on purpose. Whether they did it in concert, I cannot tell. But I do not regret it at all, I may carry out my work cramped in the furthest corner just as well as if I were amplified from the widest platform. I went with them gladly, it was a picaresque. And if it is not quite right to say, in obliging them, in assenting to step their way a little further into the shadows, that in entering their world I thereby acted against it, after all I did not act against them, then at least I did nothing but see them in a position other than the position from which they saw me - if I was never a thorn in their flesh, then I have become a sort of flesh buried in their thorn.
But anyway, devils met along the way are not so significant. Such encounters only precipitate what is already in motion, bringing to a crisis tendencies that were present before I had set out on my journey. If I accept the challenge of the Chinese finger trap, I also escape it. At each step we take, pressing down upon the skin of the world, our pressure is met magnetically, with equal force, from under the earth by another’s step pressing upwards with a teetotum’s pressure. These are the footsteps of the dead to which we are bound. They draw our movements from us, we follow their design as if we were wearing enchanted shoes. From beneath the surface of the world, pressing up against the bulging embroidered cloth of the living world, the dead set out our every movement, as if our image were reflected in a mirror, as when a prisoner and his visitor place their palms to the security glass between them, not touching but matching. But the things under the earth live upside down - as we move with our head above our feet so they move with their feet uppermost, pressing upwards against the crust containing them, tracing the moves of the living as like the patterns of skaters upon the icy surface of a frozen river. The dead are like the fish that sometimes push their mouths out through the skin of the river, or like moles pushing furiously away from them, the substance of their world, desiring hollowness below and solidity above.
I did not hold anything back from them, my earthly masters, those who would lead me by the nose, even as I pledged my obedience, I did not hold anything back that was mine to give, and yet I could not prevent myself from seeing them, as Lacan might say, not in the position from which they saw me. In part, let’s say, the cause of my disloyal calculations of the absurdity of this commitment in its moment of its greatest sincerity (of, for example, the pathos in this minority’s presentation of the incommensurability of its revolutionary truth), to not believe what I truly believed, was a consequence of my obligations to similar others who had also persuaded me by way of antinomies, of their incomparable truths. What they said to me, in their great enthusiasm, I understood to be but a formal device, a vehicle, for a purpose and desire that could not be directly expressed - their fantasy to live unchallenged, their desire to serve a higher, hidden, satanic master to whom they could deliver me as a recruit - 'I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.' The escape from each master became possible for me at precisely the point where I began to follow another - after all, isn’t agency the last unflushable turd of the bourgeois revolutionist’s image repertoire, and thus the greatest argument for the toilets of decomposition? We do not free ourselves by the process of a simplifying intensification of our commitment (to relations, or to truths), freedom is not a white walled interior, there is not One (‘too many for me’), but on the contrary, we encounter what is free and easy through a neg-uniformity of inputs (Beer’s variety at its fullest amplitude).
Or again, from another way, very small animals make their nests in the lairs of great predators. They are aware they exist beneath the contempt of their host, but know also that the lesser predators will be warded off. In that sense, I am an extremophile, living innocuously alongside the vent. I seek out the pettiness of fanatical tyrants, their vanity, the limit to their power, and I make my home in that shadow, under the volcano. My submissive awareness of my master’s errors is expressed in my willingness to shore up the collapsing house of their delusions. I want to save them, not from but within, the inferno. Above all, I enjoy playing their hand, making their arguments, acting their role - adding the depth and sophistication which their own quixotic enthusiasm forecloses upon. I am the bird that swoops down to peck at the grapes the master has painted - for have I not unwillingly suspended my belief, and thus reinstate it? We see in the world, that the committed must commit in every instance to the discourse that they are committed to - the lines the gods have written for them, they must speak. After all, what is commitment but playing the role they were cast into. To fail in the instance, is to introduce a weakness that the enemy will exploit. My role as very small animal is to add plausibility to the confidence trick in the master’s discourse, as if the world really might be changed, souls saved, and prophecies seen to come to pass. My contribution to changing the world is to contribute to it as if I were contributing to it. Then, haven’t I, in some sense, tricked the tricksters? Transgressed against the transgressors? Betrayed the traitors? I mean falling into the building. I mean being unsewn into the cloth. Have I, or haven’t I? In some sense?
