Let us get back to belief shall we? Again. And memory in writing.

From: MMK
To: BW, BK

Hey, take a look at the excerpt below drawn from an essay by Eugene McCarraher called The Incoherence of Hannah Arendt: Breaking the marriage between heaven and earth

‘Arendt’s intellectual debut was a dissertation on Augustine’s conception of love. It’s a convoluted and repetitious monograph, bathed in the brooding earnestness of Existenz philosophy. Arendt delineates the crucial Augustinian distinction between cupiditas: the love of worldly goods for their ministration to one’s immediate desires; and caritas: the love of eternal goods and especially of God, a love which then enables us to love earthly things rightly. For those possessed by cupiditas, earthly life is a tragedy of accumulation, for the things and people they acquire or control cannot satisfy the desire for eternal happiness that animates their errant love. Even worse for the prisoners of cupiditas, life’s intractable brevity implies no horizon beyond the grave, and so the avoidance of death, “transformed into the worst evil,” compels the most desperate and even horrific conduct. While she must have remembered the sting of cupiditas in her futile love for Heidegger, Arendt seems to have recognized the outlines of caritas in their philosophical communion. Arendt also saw that memory was central to Augustine’s moral reflection, for in revisiting what he dubbed “the camps and vast palaces of memory,” we also glimpse the kingdom that lies beyond the injustice and suffering of the earthly city. If God is the Alpha and the Omega, the genesis and the telos, then “the return to one’s origin,” as she glossed Augustine, “can be an anticipatory reference to one’s end.” Those who fully recognize and accept their beginning in time will practice “remembrance and gratitude,” an unstinting thankfulness for the unmerited gift of existence from which all genuine virtue arises. And finally, eschatology, Arendt realized, is a remembrance of things future, a capacity, as Eliot put it, to see the place for the first time. Indeed, “it is memory and not expectation . . . that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.” Contrary to Marx, for whom the past was a burden on the brains of the living, Arendt maintained that memory, the personal and collective storehouse of injustice, heroism, barbarity, and magnificence is an ark of liberation, a reminder that the present does not define the limits of human possibility.

From: BW

An excellent essay – but I think I was not persuaded by its central thesis that Arendt is incoherent because she refuses to see religious good and bad within the prism of faith; or even take into account its presence from a distance.

The guy fails to mention that the very possibility of seeing from without means that there are people who have lived within certain religious faiths for so long that the ideas are ingrained in a culture that may one day feel it has “gone past all that” – but that’s neither here nor there.

The idea of a ‘future memory’ excites me: of course what picture can you project onto a screen that tells you where you are going? And that you need to use the past to make this up. And the thing to deal with – and here I am reaching – maybe it is not death we fear so much, but the present which, without the past or a projected fear is a black hole. Death is at least clear about itself. What about the fear of the open-ended?

MMK wrote:

We are back to the matter of whether it is our fear of death that leads to the desire for assured immortality or the transcendent idea. Back to Spengler (Asia Time’s Spengler) who reviews Rosenzweig (in a book I intend to purchase). Rosenzweig says it so much better than me:

From death – from the fear of death – arises the perception of the transcendent, his book begins, and in the face of the fear of death, one proceeds – to life, as he avers in the book’s last sentence. But the path to life requires a life outside of time, that is, the hope of immortality. Man cannot abide his mortal existence, cannot tolerate the fear of death, without the prospect of life eternal.

Sure we can fear the open ended but death’s very clarity and inevitability, one that appears to mock all our material efforts on earth as futile, is what makes it unbearable. This future memory as you put it is not about a life lived merely on this earth but life eternal. Memory as a storehouse that is used in this case to fashion the case for future immortality, not a few more years on earth with a little more money and food. What we pursue is assurance that death is merely a gate to further life. Why exactly am I making this point? search me. But I think that I am trying to fashion some kind of understanding of what so many people in Kenya and elsewhere are looking for when they turn to the heavens. I think that Marx’s point which is where I have been for years does not really explain this hunger for the spirit. He says that ‘religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering…’ That ‘religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’ From this, I used to surmise like he did that religion is a lifeboat of hope in a cruel world clung to by people who do not understand the REAL causes of their worldly suffering. Of course this is true, but the true anguish for most people is the idea of death. Beyond a certain wretched condition, the most unbearable of cruelties is of death. OK, I am repeating myself. But just to finish, I think from this conception of what a ‘life’ is springs the need for a history which gives you the material to catapult you past the grave; this is, I think, the foundation of most narratives employed by people.

From BK:

Everyday-religion and my reactions to it – i.e. disgust with evangelical B.S, the pretentiousness of the P.C.E.A of my childhood – blind me to the great ideas of theology i.e. cupiditas, caritas, and the theology of Augustine. I find myself dismissing anything with a whiff of religion in it, becoming emotional and mistakenly thinking it is the lens being used to pose great ideas. This is probably crazy considering that theology has held and continues to hold some of the most far-reaching, intensive conversations about Being. Unfortunately, like politics, which draws the same reaction from me as political theory, everyday religion makes a mockery of the beautiful ideas of theology. It tends toward the mundane, everyday and the ugly. The eternal good is sacrificed in the bleating of a Margaret Wanjiru. Religion destroys the imagination rather than celebrates it, fundamentalism in the name of religion always makes the masses more mediocre.

Really, religion in Kenya today talks the talk of eternal good, but there is huge craving for the here and now. And the result is multitudes of people who are caught up in-the-between. They fail to find either earthly pleasures or the eternal good. And for what, because they live in cycles of striving for the latter but dying for the former. I guess you might as well be a hedonist, accept it and get over and done with as opposed to being a hedonistic failure one and living in cycles of constant regrets of the flesh, seeking absolution, and going around in a never ending circle, which is no way to live. These people translate into the pastor who goes to Koinange Street , Moi and the church going thing, the goat eating Kenyan Saturday and the fundamentalist Kenyan Sunday morning …Man! Schizophrenia. Interesting thing is that all these mundane things are what give the writer fodder. What happens when you apply a religious fervor in your pursuit of money? You get the Kikuyu Calvinist. What about religious fervor and sex …

Anyway, the thing of history as a glimpse of the transcendental is amazing. Kundera immediately comes to mind, especially his ideas that writing like laughter and forgetting become the 3 things that save us from the great tragedy of life. Of course, Arendt takes it further and saying that the real secret lies in the past. My own thoughts on writing and memory are based on a quote I really like (but have forgotten who said it): The great tragedy of life is nothing else but the boredom, the constant waiting in line. For me this is true in a sense, but obviously only if you live in the here and now rather than skipping merrily between past and future. And what is writing really about but trying to make sense of a past and present to talk about the future. Writing is the place that tries to capture life through a glimpse of the transcendental, be it in the past, present and future. I wonder what happens when you look at these ideas and use them to analyze contemporary Kenyan stories. Arendt’s ideas would be interesting if used to look at say: Discovering Home which is about is really about memories of home.