(aka “Faith Is A Means By Which One Resigns Oneself To The Present In Order To Invest In The Abstract Promise Of The Future” In Order To Put One’s Resignation Under Erasure In Order To Continue To Breathe In Breathe Out The Air Of The Present In Spite Of Its Smoky “Auschwitz” “After “Auschwitz” After “Auschwitz” Flavor And The Certainty That The Abstract Promise You Want The Future To Keep Will Damn Well Never Be Kept)
I have to
Like
Open the bruise up and
let some of the bruise blood come out to show them
An hourglass’s worth
of sand
And a magpie
That builds a nest
Of shrapnel from a
roadside bomb
Old blunt rusted
machetes
Straw
Ashes
Sand
Hair
Scraps of Mahmoud
Darwish and Paul Celan
Depleted uranium
Klee’s Angelus Novus
Nothing but a work of
art from the age of mechanical reproduction
And a sentence made by
chance of twigs that reads
And yet
For all its
indeterminacy
Abstraction
And minimalism
The figure or trace of
the other
Like the
figure-beyond-figure of the other of
(Every)
Other
And the other of
“this” other
(But which “one”
Exactly?)
The best and the worst
Remains a moment
(As Adorno would say
A “truth-moment
[Wahrheitsmoment]”)
Whose theological
overtones
(Or
In psychoanalytic
parlance
Overdetermination)
Like a riddle
Remain discernible or
Rather
Legible
Decipherable
And some black plastic
bits of an old LP
Bits of the track with the lyric
Somebody done hoodooed the hoodoo man
I have to
Like
Open the bruise up and
let some of the bruise blood come out to show them
Come out to show them
Come out to show them
Cuh cuh cuh sho theh
Cuh cuh cuh sho theh
Cuh sho theh cuh
Sho theh cuh
Sho theh cuh
Sho theh
[Note: Sources: “A thousand words: Francis Alÿs talks about When Faith Moves Mountains”, ArtForum, Summer 2002 (Alÿs is quoting Cuauhtémoc Medina); Daniel Hamm, whose voice is the basis of Steve Reich’s “Come Out”; Andréa Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory; Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno & Levinas (tr. Geoffrey Hale); Junior Wells, “Hoodoo Man Blues”. Homage to Steve Reich. For Ernesto Priego]
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