The first night's reading
Exordium
The responsibility we have as the living to honour our dead ancestors is something we cannot escape. Marx with all the dead ancestors lies behind the cave wall’s membrane (1) as a spirit, waiting to be contacted by the tribe’s shaman. Ancestors of thought are no less important than ancestors of blood; reverence being their due, which we perform through the shaping of our words in their image.
What is right, (justice) is a deep rooted tacit understanding of what it is to live. What it is to live is to believe in the future. To believe in the future of rightness is to live a proper life. A proper life is lived in harmony with the now and in remembrance of things past.
We become aware that someone in the distance is whistling for their dog, this has been going on for some time and the owner's whistle starts to sound anxious.
Injunctions of Marx
Pan European ghosts reside in Yorick’s skull, echoes of a vanitas of false value and a reminder of the ephemeral nature of our lives. The dignity of life is predicated on being aware of its fragility and still being able to shape its individual moments according to those ‘right’ values that stem from a belief structure. That belief is the link to a human core, a core that lies at the centre of history and the peoples of our past. Their beliefs sounding as silent music in our future empty skulls.
Time is only in joint when the levers for change have a fulcrum, the norm being a floating world between perception and reverie, action and dream. Only in the heat of revolution does time lever itself back into its socket. The spectre is that of change. The spectre is that of long forgotten first readings, the text of the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, haunting our language and its possibilities far more deeply than the reality of the Communist project. At certain precise moments in Derrida’s life he would be standing on platforms that could support fulcrums of change, one of these moments would have been the moment immediately on reading “A spectre is haunting Europe” a moment all of us that have read that text have shared with him. The commonality of reading , a socialism of the text.
We are all living in our parent’s shadow. We are apparitions that walk in the shadow of former selves.
Arriving at his uncle’s house for his father’s funeral, as he walked towards the house, he was seen for the first time by his uncle who believed that this new arrival was his brother returned from the dead.
Our gait, our mannerisms and appearance all encoded and shaped by our genetic and cultural inheritance. I sing my father in my voice and shape my intonation through the ghost of Marx.
The ghosts of Europe are its poets and playwrights, their words echoing through our language and our daily speech, poetic memories shaping our thoughts as they arrive through our throats. Yates when asked where his poetry came from said it was made from a mouthful of air. As we open our mouths to speak, we release the ghosts of our literary past. The air shared by us all, both living and dead, is the same as breathed in and spoken out as our ancestors. Each of us in our own time playing out the consequences of our collective theatre. The Communist manifesto opens its first act in memory of Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
For Derrida as with so many European intellectuals born before the Second World War, the real ghosts are those whose bodies are lost within the death pits of genocides, the missing millions being those who cannot be counted. (2) We all live within the domain of the dead (3); we cannot escape the many places where the dead cohabit with the world of the living, our lives being surrounded by the ghosts of our forefathers, our every movement an echo of others who had similar ticks and nervous itches, particular gaits and finger shapes, all passed down from father to son, from son to daughter, daughter to daughter and daughter to son, in genetic links stretching back into the African dawn of haplogroup G (4).
The spirit world was for our ancestors the world of the dead. The spectre is that creature that lays on the cusp between life and death, zombie like in its refusal to lie down. its otherness more frightening being out of joint with reality. In this image lies the imprint of another, of Christ pinned to the cross, between life and death, at that moment when the last breath escapes; “It is finished.” being his last earthly words as he passes from man to God. A moment of transformation of flesh into spirit, now embedded within the Catholic mass as the central plank of a religion founded on transubstantiation. The word made flesh is remade within the writings of Marx, economic argument transformed into belief.
The dog pricks up its left ear, it is listening for the past.
1 Lewis-Williams, D (2004) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art London: Thames and Hudson
2 Primo Levi: You count the living and the dead, the missing are neither alive nor dead and they cannot be counted. Levi, P (2000) If not now, when? London: Penguin
3 Pogue Harrison, R (2005) The Dominion of the Dead Chicago: University Press
4 The haplogroup G DNA strand is thought to have originated in the Middle East, and to have spread into Europe during the Neolithic period.
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