I was reading Jean-Luc Nancy's Dis-enclosure today and ran across this passage.

This affirmation that existence is experience: that it does nothing else, cut loose from the goal for the project of the will--does nothing else but expose itself to the unforeseeable, the unheard of of its own event. Experience simply--we should say--"events" ["s'evenir"] "comes forth of itself." This evenir opens within the world an outside that is not beyond-the-world, but the truth of the world. (link)

Elsewhere Nancy refers to this opening up of the world to an other that is not beyond but within as "transimmanence." This opening or disclosing from within is precisely the sort of movement required of an eschatology that is resolutely dissociated from teleology (as Derrida puts it in his text on Marx). Not only ateleological but also and especially anti-teleological in the classical -- and flatfooted -- Hegelian sense. (I quite agree, I should add, that the old reading of Hegel as that master of teleogy is, perhaps, a misunderstanding of his work, that is, that the dialectic "works," so to speak, by not working at all, but instead revealing the tears in the fabric of reality. So there is thus a different between Hegel and Hegelianism on this point). But how, then, to think the impossible, i.e., the future, the unknown future as absolute mystery, risk, danger, and indeed surprise, from within such a space or opening? 

there are times when those eyes inside your
brain stare back at
you;
it is always sudden.
sometimes when you come in
and lie down on the bed
it happens--
2 eyes that have nothing to do with
you
stare back at you from inside your
brain.
you sit up
until they go away.

or say you scream at a child
or slap a woman--
as you walk into the kitchen
the eyes appear in the back of your brain
hand there
as you drink
water.

or somtimes you are at peace
sitting on a park bench
reading a newspaper--
here come the
eyes:
fat red golden eyes,
a pair.
you get up and
walk
away.

or the phone rings and as you answer the
phone
the eyes arrive again--
"yes, of course. no, I'm not doing
anything. yeh, I feel
o.k."
then you hang up, go to the bathroom and
throw water on
your face.

I would gladly give these eyes to the
blind or to anybody who
would take them.

o, o, there they are
again.

I don't understand it.
what do they
want?

-Charles Bukowski, "what do they want?"

(link)

From his autobiography:

From "Theses on the Philosophy of History":

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position against Fascism. One reason why Facism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history that give rise to it is untenable.

No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.

C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1958 [1936]), p. 82.

(link)

Allen Ginsberg has been our consistent spokesman for that phase of the work in which the artist lays evaluation aside so that the gift may come forward:

The parts that embarrass you the most are usally the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal...That was something I learned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing...The cure for that is to write things down you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly...so you can actually be free to say anything you want...

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless--abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world.  Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mind...You really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself...in the sense of not writing to impressing yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

Lewis Hyde, The Gift.

We are all in a room with four walls, a floor, a ceiling and no windows or door. The room is furnished and some of us are sitting comfortably, others most definitely are not. The walls are advancing inwards gradually, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, making us all more uncomfortable, advancing all the time, threatening to crush us all to death.

There are discussions within the room, but they are mostly about how to arrange the furniture. People do not seem to see the walls advancing. From time to time there are elections about how to place the furniture. These elections are not unimportant: They make some people more comfortable, others less so; they may even affect the speed at which the walls are moving, but they do nothing to stop their relentless advance.

As the walls grow closer, people react in different ways. Some refuse absolutely to see the advance of the walls, shutting themselves tightly into a world of Disney and defending with determination the chairs they are sitting on. Some see and denounce the movement of the walls, build a party with a radical program and look forward to a day in the future when there will be no walls. Others – and I among them – run to the walls and try desperately to find cracks, or faults beneath the surface, or to create cracks by banging on the walls. This looking for and creation of cracks is a practical-theoretical activity, a throwing ourselves against the walls and also a standing back to try and see cracks or faults in the surface. The two activities are complementary: Theory makes little sense unless it is understood as part of the desperate effort to find a way out, to create cracks that defy the apparently unstoppable advance of capital, of the walls that are pushing us to our destruction.

(link)