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Ascolo Parodites
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What is substance? It is a word that we use to indicate the opening of our consciousness toward sit Galatea tuae non aliena viae-- that in which we suspend our judgment, toward nonentity unwearying and immeasurable. Is that not the essence of Spinozan ethics? Does not the noble 'Deus sive Natura' signify precisely this nonentity? And what is man? That is precisely that in which judgment rests: that on which judgment is pronounced. It is nothingness. And nothingness is such a thing that is not discovered, that cannot be discovered, but only learned: laboriously, slowly, painfully. For ideals can be discovered, the bodies of women can be discovered: realities, death and life, snow and ash, thunder and lightning-- these must be learned. It is the nothingness of divine justice, of the punishment and judgment of God. A nothingness, as Pascal knew, that we use to indicate that in which the powers of judgment flow remedially, like the river of Cephissus, or not at all; we use the word to signify that in which our judgment, our most penetrating eye, has ceased to carry value, precisely because there is so much foreground in man- from what side we do not know it and so we say that word, man. We speak about the perspective of man in order to speak about substance, beasts, the universe, we speak about the measure of all things, but there are a hundred thousand other sides of perspectives and measurements of all things. Thus man himself often uses the word 'transcendence' which only makes insufferable knowledge sufferable, and makes the task of thought endurable again. Here the contention of Blesensis, facilius sustineantur; sic cor humanum necesse est igne charitatis accendi, ad hoc ut de facili sustineat tribulationes, that the disposition to doing good blosters a good disposition, is expressed as a law. For it seems that the substance in us is linked to inference and equality. Yet this connection becomes evident only when man undertakes the construction an entire universe. Of this task, one immediately wonders how man has survived thus far. For man sees that one fruit provides sustenance, and is not poisonous, because his friend consumed it and did not fall ill; and he sees another fruit that appears similar, which hangs upon the branch over there, and so it is through the power of inference that he begins to recognize that there is an equality between the two fruits. But it could just as well not be linked to them. The other fruit could be deadly. Alas, the most sorrowful expression of man, as it is written in the Epidorpides: Natura parens unica: Fortuna noverca est, Nature is thy mother and fortune tis thy stepmother. And through inference, it follows that immediately alongside the sleep of dreaming, the sleep of consciousness, is the sleep of fatigue, the sleep of blood and muscle, which comes immediately to mind: as if there were not animals that once slept without the oneric or any sort of dream, and who are tired, and as if there were not trees and rocks that now sleep without fatigue, and yet dream. Alas! The earth breaks apart at our feet, and pays us no Greek courtesy, without according unto us a God to fill the chaos, without feeling this inebriation, this amazing stupor that searches among the benthos, amongst the deserts, amongst the terrors of the beasts and the whole of nature, which seems to testify to the innocence of law, for a maternal being where the heart may awaken. For the heart sleeps in innocence, and dreams away the judgment of its own God. Therefor let us cease admonishing the fearful and spritely little truths of our heart with the great year of becoming! Let us remind ourselves: amore abundas. We must change our fate. We must hold our tongue in the taunting of the dawn, and excuse all the black perjury which death has committed in the name of nothingness, which it is not wise enough to know. Nothingness even confesses unto nothingness that bears a human eye. We must go on from nothingness to nothingness and from pain to pain; from the pain of trees and rocks, to the pain of chemistry and dying stars, to the whole universe which clenches its jaw with the tetanus of nonentity, for everything is in pain, everything wreathes: the pain of war, the lust and wreathing for nothingness, inapproachable and scorning. Entire worlds rise and fall in the gravity of affliction, filled with love- if love is love enough to decieve the 'law of nature,' which is far dumber than any of the creatures which emerged from out of it.One asks, almost to save himself: Is God a being? If he is, he is in pain. If he is not, he does not exist. But he does not exist, except as the nothingness that approaches with all its forms, as pain.
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