On Final Participation

David Hickman

Copyright Jo Leeds 2006

Turning to look backwards over my shoulder I see the landscape darkened, and the angel of history sick unto death. And when I look inside the body of the dying angel I am able to make out trees and  rivers, the land in its personae, hovering and alive inside every hovering fragment. Turning back and looking at the cityscape that is the legacy of what we have made for ourselves  I see a few gods in palsy, others long dead ,. . . measured into oblivion by the machines of consumption.

The angel of history has fallen then. In its place is a lacuna. .  an emptiness,  filled , not with phenomena,or with qualities but a felt sense of displacement. . . and inside that displacement lives the ledger, the factoid, the flickering image, a book of notations arrived at through instruments.

There is no sorrow, no silence, no vigil. These are forgotten in the rush to get and spend. There is no future from which to append our own time. Such a future must be imagined, and allowed to impinge, but in the culture at large imagination has been usurped and put almost wholly into the service of production.

The forces of death have become the forces of identity. We know ourselves through our own consumption. We know ourselves through the parceling out of our desire life into a source of distraction. Nothing lives in us but our relationship to death, and the fear of death , which is, in the popular imagination, the fear of missing something, the fear of no longer being plugged in.

**

And the question rises: how does such a blankness find its relationship  to the sweep of time?

The sweetness of Hesiod and Homer are gone. The solemnity and dignity of Dante is lost. Even the guilt and unrest of TS Eliot has been put aside in favor of a more frantic desire. Nothing moral lives in the life of the earth at all. It is instead a source of satisfaction, a resource, an opportunity, a means to an end.

Time. It comes back to time. And not the death that we have inherited, or the spent cultural capital that does not live in us as hope or intimacy or joy, the loss of that sense of participation in our environment a loss  so profound that it has left us without place. No, it must be that the time that may save us is not the time past, but future time, that which is not dead, but is as yet unborn. That which we must listen to out of our own consciousness and will effort to draw down what is unknown to us, and as such is unformed.

**

In the silence: the day, the internality of these turning leaves. Desire infusing the ridgeline of the hills. the ridgeline its own desire—trees colliding in a silence that lifts the mass of it remembering the pool of blue sky. Straining to arrive, to dissolve into the blue that burns above the trees in equanimity and its reflections. And the mountains resonate with the stasis of that blue, their green shudders and turns,-- a metanoia… a prayer in which their return is held and offered…  pouring out minerals into clouds and sky, the trees infusing the sky with oxygen, whose primary desire is to be breathed in again, to find the pink of the lung and die. And it is possible , inside the lyric of this progression, to  remember Owen Barfield, and the notion of the future as Final Participation: the tree inside the tree inside the world inside the “I.”

Death then. It is time for death. The mass is dead, and inside the mass the densities of our memory. The blood that aches in the forms of history, the rote visitation of the dead and their songs crashing into the present and piling on, until the now is filled with the corpses of memory, and the memory is filled with the death of a trillion trillion encrustations of desire. Thick with the glyphs of misery and its wars, slick with the blood of what was that has died, the life of “what was” a little  cinder, the life of “what is” a half-silvered mirror, the zeitgeist a masque of oedipal scorn, in which the breaths of the few animate the many, and the many are torn by the interest they are good for and the cathedrals loom in impenetrable stone that bleeds rote prayer into the emptiness above, filling the memory with asterisks that mark a dead liturgy, suggesting at best a hidden  sigh.

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What is final participation then? How to say what is not yet here, to imagine it, to feel the skin of it unfolding, loosening out of formlessness and pouring toward us

from where we have never been . . .

Barfield describes it as: "a self conscious rapport with the whole phenomenal world"

Jung felt mingled with the leaves and the trees.

Everything Rudolf Steiner said was infused with that sense of intimate belonging, with the certainty that what we are is what we see and taste and hear. . . inside a greater seeing and hearing and thinking. . . one that lends us its way if we are quiet enough, one that asks us for nothing but a chance to know ourselves as what we perceive as we perceive it.

For Goethe the notion of Final Participation was the first and unspoken principle of his fully lived but never articulated epistemology, an epistemology one can read about in Steiner’s work . . . but is wholly present. though unspoken, in Goethe’s fragment on Nature.

But to imagine it here. . . today inside my perception,

is an idea that emerges slowly; the way the sun rises at a line of trees, the blue of its glow pushing up from the darkness, at first a purple hue, that is quickly suffused with a roseate blush. And it is happening in my heart, at the same time it rushes slowly up the hill, the sun coming into its own desire,  which is desireless desire, a purity of illumination that asks only how it can serve, and I can feel that in my chest, and I can hear it speaking itself into my thinking, not as a whisper but as a clarity that is a silence. A way of

experiencing that is akin to love, that is in fact wrought out of a love that I can only remember, though my remembering takes it down, turns it from presence into a memento mori.

Final participation then, is a liberation of the blood, a wedding at cana, the mongrel city. . . in which the “I” becomes the life, the signature of both desire and aspiration, and the love that is expressed there, holds not just the beings of the birds and trees, but the looming burning of invisible powers…. Whose love for us is so great and so minute, that our desire is only seen by them as one more fleck of seen in a vastly tended field.

And the seed pods twist in the field , and the weeds grow wild as the flowers bloom. And we hold inside us as they bloom our awareness of their blooming, and we hold inside us the awareness of their silence towering above us and leaning down, perhaps to whisper or to proffer a kiss, which may be a  annunciation, or perhaps a death.

But we hold it, inside us even as we break, and the breaking becomes us, and the light breaks out of the form we were. . . a future is incubated, inside the very forms that are dying of form.

David Hickman is a graduate of the Hollins College Master’s program in English/Writing and the MFA program in Creative writing at UNC-Greensboro, where he was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. He also holds a Masters degree in Counseling from Appalachian State University. He is the author of a book of poems titled What Silence Said, and the founding editor of KULCHURWEB, an online journal of poetry and graphic arts. He currently lives, works and writes in Greensboro North Carolina.