The world is all that is the case. […] There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
In his journals, Georg Simmel stared at Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and then, quietly, refused the implied sameness:
The world process strikes me as the turning of an enormous wheel, but understood as the premise of the eternal recurrence. But the result, the actual repetition at some point of the identical, is not the same— for the wheel has an infinitely large radius; only once an infinite amount of time has elapsed – that is, never – can it reach the same point again. And yet it is a wheel that turns, which, in its ideal, aims at the exhaustion of qualitative manifoldness without ever exhausting it in reality.
Elsewhere, Paul Valery’s Mon Faust: “Only the ineffable is of any importance!”
Even a Somewhere sounds solid in comparison.
Reviewing notebooks again. Trying to catch up on the things I haven’t finished. Finding old words staring at new ones. Lured by the queer sensibility of metaphors that draw on the mystical via negationis [way of negation], or what Hans Blumbenberg calls “those self-portrayals of the elementary perplexity that riddles every theology: having to speak of God incessantly without presuming to dare say anything about him.”
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How Blumenberg squares Cusa in “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality”:
Nicholas of Cusa made this perplexity a speculative means of representing his coincidentia oppositorum [unity of opposites]. He invented the explosive metaphor of the circle whose radius approaches infinity and thus produces a circumference with an infinitely small curvature so that the circle's arc coincides with its tangent. Here, the intentionality of intuition is over-expanded in order that its futility be expressed in itself, so that the anticipation [Vorgriff] performs the retraction of the trespass [Übergriff].
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How metaphors offer us access to ways of thinking that are limited by the nature of our relation to a source, or a source text.
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How translation theory figurates the constellatory potential of language in relation to the absent original, where “original” designates a mythical unitary language demolished with the towel of Babel.
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How the god of the gaps may occasionally partake in this longing for originary wholeness.
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And (I want to argue) poetry works against such regressive nostalgia when it employs the conditional.
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And George Lichtenberg, lamenting something like a deus absconditus in the trunk of the tree. . .
