Doug Henwood wrote,
>The index stands at 167, just below its Gulf War high of 168 -
When's the last time you checked, Doug? I looked it up after receiving your
message and found the index at 168, tying the GW high.
All kidding aside, there's a more serious side to this apocalypse stuff.
Rudolf Bultmann (History and Eschatology) and Frank Kermode (The Sense of an
Ending) both present compelling arguments for the importance of apocalypstic
narrative in the way that we structure our accounts of history and
experience. I wouldn't call those authors deconstructionists, just a good
old fashioned theologist and literary critic.
The problem is one of finding a recognizable model to explain events that
are much larger than ordinary experience. The biggest model we can
comprehend is at the scale of the birth-life-death of the creature, so
that's the model projected on to "creation". Compare this to Margaret
Thatcher's image of the state as a grocery store that has to balance its
books. The image is maddeningly naive but very compelling. The hubris of the
technician is the dream that with enough detail the mythical origins can
somehow be expunged from the model. This is like pulling ourselves up by our
own bootstraps or lifting the world with a lever.
Hans Blumenberg argued that we can never definitively "bring an end to
myth." Opposing "science" to myth ultimately results in the mythologizing of
the science. What we can do, however, is to consciously *rework* the myth so
that it becomes a source of liberating experiment rather than a "mind-forged
manacle".
I think this is where Blake and Goethe meet Marx and Paine, in the restless
reworking of myth. The reworking of myth can never cease, when it does it
reverts to mythologizing: stale, suffocating, Stalin, Thatcher . . . the
myth that "there is no alternative" -- the bogus claim that the myth "to
which there is no alternative" is therefore not a myth.
There is *always* an other.
Regards,
Tom Walker
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