This further begs the question, does the 'eschaton' itself, as an 'event', belong within the context of actualized 'narrative', or beyond and outside its temporal limits, as Judith Butler suggests in her use of Levinas and Walter Benjamin -- or is it dialectically within and outside of 'narrative' simultaneously as Paul Tillich suggests: "Inherent in anticipation is a temporal image of a perfect consummation that is coming. This temporal image is a symbolic form essential to all eschatological thinking; it cannot be dispensed with, although its directness can be broken." [2]
Reflecting on 'end' often pushes the human imagination to limits -- of 'pleasure' or 'pain' (as experienced individually or collectively, in notions of 'heaven' and 'hell') -- but also tends to push imagination toward an alternative limit: the gaping 'nothingness' that resides between those two frequently established limits. In this way, pondering the limit of time can illuminate limits of other forms. Unsurprisingly there is a pervasive affinity within music of all kinds for eschatological themes -- a courageous willingness to explore frontiers and horizons that exist not wholly within the limits time constructs. This final episode of Leitourgia exhibits a collection of recordings that explore such contemplations of the eschaton.
Below is an image from Tarkovsky's 1975 film, 'The Mirror' -- quilted together in an oneiric sequence of memories, as experienced by what is often interpreted as a dying man in the final moments of his life -- often thought to be Tarkovsky himself, as many of the scenes resemble biographical events in his own life.
episode download: [forthcoming]
0:00:25 - promo: cfrc twitter
0:00:36 - The Postal Service - 'Such Great Heights'
0:05:00 - Belle and Sebastian - 'If You're Feeling Sinister'
0:10:17 - Pharaoh Sanders - 'Creator Has a Master Plan'
'":"":59 - talking
0:13:33 - The Browns - 'The Three Bells'
0:16:23 - Willis Earl Beal - 'Take Me Away'
0:19:19 - James Blake - 'Measurements'
0:23:34 - Colin Stetson - 'Judges'
0:28:46 - Fire Moss - 'Omega'
0:32:01 - DJ Screw - 'Lost Souls'
0:39:53 - You'll Never Get To Heaven - 'Caught in Time So Far Away'
0:43:37 - Canned Heat - 'Burning Hell'
0:47:32 - Throbbing Gristle - 'Six Six Sixties'
0:49:35 - b0ots - 'apocalypse meow'
0:50:04 - talking: Sharon Betcher and disability theology [3], death of god theology [4], [6]
0:53:21 - Prince Rama - 'So Destroyed'
0:55:55 - Wild Nothing - 'The Witching Hour'
1:00:00 - Coil - 'Paradisiac'
1:02:25 - Popol Vuh - 'Through Pains to Heaven'
1:03:14 - talking (concluded abruptly in the form of the earliest manuscripts of Mark's Gospel)
1:06:01 - station id: Shad
1:06:05 - promo: Below The Decks (radio show)
1:06:37 - Bombay Bicycle Club - 'Lamplight'
1:10:22 - Heavenly - 'C Is The Heavenly Option'
1:13:42 - 16 Horsepower - 'For Heaven's Sake'
1:18:32 - David Lynch & Peter Ivers - 'In Heaven' (Eraserhead OST)
1:20:08 - John Cage - 'Postcard From Heaven' (1982)
1:27:09 - 13th Floor Elevators - 'Kingdom of Heaven'
"For Levinas, then, messianism seems linked with this fact, that judgment does not and cannot occur in history... we cannot regard historical events, no matter how terrible or felicitous, as enacting or revealing moral judgments of some kind... If messianism is engaged with a form of waiting, a waiting for the Messiah and, indeed, a waiting for justice, it also is precisely a kind of waiting that connot be fulfilled in historical time. Messianism is distinguished from eschatology."
- Judith Butler (Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, p. 40)
"We now know that there have been several extinction events. The most devastating, when life itself came close to being extinguished, occurred about 250 million years ago. Over a mere 100,000 years about 90% of the earth’s species succumbed, with the rate and pace varying on sea and land. Why? That debate continues. Was it another asteroid? Few seem to think so. Was it a series of huge methane bursts from the sea, fouling the atmosphere and changing the climate? Perhaps. Other major evolutionary turning points are now under investigation as well, punctuated by a large series of “minor” events. One major extinction started around 450 million years ago, another around 200 million years ago, and, yes, another is rapidly underway as we speak. The last one is primarily a product of human activity, in which our modes of travel inadvertently carry bacteria, fungi, and other species into new environments, our modes of carbon extraction contribute to rapid climate change, and our break up of species migration routes block the escape of diverse species. Welcome to the Anthropocene."
- William E. Connolly & Jairus Victor Grove, [5]
"[W]hy is the universe now taken to have such a goal at all? ...Avoiding all reference to such a purpose was taken to be a necessary sign of being 'scientific'... Barrow and Tipler are exceptional in making a welcome stand against this causal drift. They do explicitly discuss theology, and they claim to give good reasons for reinstating a form of it as part of science... Since history invaded physics--since the image of the Big Bang took over and displaced Galileo's carefully timeless, reversible world--this kind of talk has gradually become quite common; clearly it causes no embarrassment... But we ought, I think, to do more than that...
We should not just notice it as evidence of an irresistible, senseless urge. We need to take it seriously and see what it means. If theology has again become a legitimate way of thinking--legitimate enough to be used, even in last chapters--then it can't be confined arbitrarily to those uncriticized contexts. Rules have to be worked out again for its proper use. We need to develop further distinctions which Aristotle began to sketch, between good and bad teleology, between different uses of it, between right and wrong contexts in which to use it. If we stop vetoing it altogether, what we need next is to understand its function."
- Mary Midgley (Science as Salvation, p. 66-67)
"Since the middle of the 20th century, we have become a world that lives with the reality of possible annihilation everyday. While the proverbial shoe waiting to drop has been identified with everything from the atomic bomb to climate disaster, from viral pandemic contagion to asteroid, a form of literature has been proliferating not so interested in that event of apocalypse as what comes after -- a genre known as 'post-apocalyptic'... This narrative genre visits humanity sifting through the ruins, distilling how we will redefine ourselves as societies.
Ironically, disability has within this genre moved from modernity's locus of sick, bad, laid out on a pallet before the 'divine healer' to 'lead character', moved from modernity's locus of 'sore on the eye' to pervasive condition within sociality. The clean slate of an apocalyptically washed world staring over is not, but within post-apocalyptic frames, 'wasteland' -- bodies 'crip/t and crump/t' among the ruins. As Clare Barker puts it, while speaking of disability in those other post-apocalyptic or postcolonial zones, the reconstruction of civil imagining is undertaken not just through mobilizing the trope of disability, but through privileging of disability subjectivities. Figures like the post-apocalyptic 'crip', as also earlier modernity's 'man of reason' carry the possibilities we enfold in our imagination for human life."
- Sharon Betcher (Crip/tography: Disability Theology in the Ruins of God), [3]
Further Info:
[1] 'Time and Narrative' (Volume 1) by Paul Ricouer, p. x (Google Book)
[2] 'Political Expectation' by Paul Tillich, p. 26 (Google Book)
[3] 'Crip/tography: Disability Theology in the Ruins of God' by Sharon Betcher (Video Lecture)
[4] 'The New Apocalypse' by Thomas Altizer (Google Book)
[5] Extinction Events and Human Sciences (Essay/Article)
[6] 'Apocalyptic Nihilism' by John Caputo (Video Lecture)
