sublime and the silent sky

IT certainly is a truism that time has a way of changing all things--time perhaps is change itself, change iteration, mediation, transformation. Since I wrote Hymn I was introduced to Derrida and deconstruction. Ah! I can feel your pain and imagining wincing at the thought of trying to fathom his impenetrable text and his destruction of everything rational and sensible. I mean that is what he was up to--right? 

Well that is precisely what he is not up to. But I am not going to address this here. At this point I want to just acknowledge that my views have changed since the entry of Hymn--although in some ways, I feel the spirit of that post is more profoundly realized both philosophically and in life. 

Beside encountering a much need corrective through Derrida's deconstructive writings, I have also studied Emmanuel Levinas, Kierkegaard, Kant and Nietzsche. In their own way, each have helped me deepen and question the metaphysical heritage articulated in Hymn. 

I am thinking of the sublime now. The sublime is the encounter with what exceeds my ability to assimilate, to totalize, to make my own. The sublime ruptures the presence--the self-proximity that closes off the rupture of the to-come--of the unheralded arrival of the Other that cannot be anticipated or controlled. The sublime exceeds mental appropriation as a temporal effraction and eruption of the beyond. It is the wild beyond abstraction-- it is the wild of abstraction.  It resists my attempts to domesticate it--it withdraws from my drive to assimilate it. 

Isn't this the impulse toward transcendence? It is the recognition of the always excessive wild that is Other and from which I am not separate.