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The condition of modernity is fraught with anxiety. One wants desperately to believe, but finds himself incapable of faith. The Enlightenment quest to vanquish myth in all its forms, to achieve perfect rational consciousness, contains within it the seed of its own undoing. There is the feeling that one is standing at the cusp of some fathomless oblivion (“I stand on an abyss”), lost in the black infinity of an ocean at twilight. There islands of memory drift by, fragments of a shattered history, but even these are devoured by the voracious tide. Whether the conscious mind could still be called sane in the face of such incomprehensibility is difficult to determine. But it would seem likely that the rational mind, designed only for phenomenal apprehension, would be driven mad by the limitless horizons of the noumenal. The finitude of consciousness is overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of this oceanic unconscious. One finds himself on the brink of his own annihilation, searching desperately, as Ivanov did, for answers to the most cosmic of questions: “[W]hence has the Soul of the World come? from the bluing crystal of untold differences? from the light blue nimbus of unuttered proximity?” |
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发表于 2-7-2009 00:13:20
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