Here the ground shakes monstrously and thought can hardly hold its balance. Long winded pity would be obscene; one ought to be concise! 

Monstrosity is numerically indistinct and metaphysically inept: its intensity presses history into nature, squeezes the beast off men and makes them carcasses of fear. Coming over us as natural disaster or as man-made destruction, the monstrous nonsense sucks us in with the cold fury of death’s wind. We are now – are we? – stony masks, and nightmares figure our habitat. Sacred like the God of many names, thus not dissimilar from Borges’ Shakespeare, all natural disasters are one; like all dis/asters, every one disaster is unlike. It is the same, they are the same: aggravated Being. At the crack of November 1755, on the Day of All Saints, God came down with an idea. That day, on earth’s frustrated crust, where the air’s absence was filled by water and emptied by fire, Lisbon became the harbor of hell. The idea behind and above the Lisbon 1755 earthquake is the same as the one I lived through in 1977 Bucharest, and like the one under the Indian Ocean at the end of 2004, when this text is being written. That sameness clusters the multiplicities of life while glimpsing their unanimous end from within the experience of the Event proper. To die or to be born again are all the same, so clearly, not in aenigmate at this precise moment when the Phoenix is forever featherless. The monstrous collapses time epiphanically: it, with redeeming force, makes the enigma of eternity spring forth. The standard is/has been/will be gives way to the breathless no! Depleted of my future the world fulfills itself.

      Then there arises an apophatic maybe; then pain: pure faceless understanding; then pain’s humanization as noostalgy. The aching spirit erases the split between memory and remembrance: memory (Gedächtnis, the organization of a thus overcome past for the purposes of the present) and remembrance (Erinnerung, the mémorie involontaire that bursts into the ego’s present by piercing through its defense mechanisms) become indistinct at and as the heart of this trauma. The reflex representation of pain ensues to deface it, thus provoking the self’s emptying out into this objective correlate. The latter – a magic amulet – soon triggers the totemic copyrighting of our suffering, which expresses our death-wish of power as the unwillingness to learn from either history or its absence. This is a foolish self assertion; yet, given its lack of alternatives, must we infer that the self is bound by foolishness? Then it leads to other forms of scavenging ruins too insidious to dig into (ruins must go through a lethargic time meant to lessen the greatness of the pain of which they are melancholy outposts). Only that, pushed forward by the wind blowing from paradise – as it was, as it were – the eighteenth century was bent on occulting ruins within the spark of its cherished bons mots […]