Was originally meant to be a postscript to The Claim. Then Left suggested I write it from Touko's perspective and it ballooned out of control. Blame him.
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付言, 浮言, 誣言, 不言
or The Mirror of the Heart of Samantabhadra
...what one "discovers" at 塔 is an "erudition" (ex-ruditio: from/out of the rough/raw state) and an "education" (ex-ducere: to "lead out of", to "draw" or "guide" out) altogether incomparable with that to be found elsewhere i.e. at "secular" universities. Certainly they share a common ancestor. But very remote. (Where was it? The monasteries? The round-walled city? The olive grove?) They have diverged sufficiently - the content of their "education" is so different that its form cannot help but diverge.
This is the whole world-history in miniature. The closure of the sky, the paling of the earth. The great divorce. Our "history" - "destiny."
The "education" which takes place at 塔 cannot be understood as the transfer of a specified "competence" from teacher to student. This is what a secular institution does. A "competence" is transferred (instruction) and verified (examination). This is possible for the secular institution. It handles only a kind of knowledge that can propagate in the open without resistance. A "competence" (in the sense of being measurable, verifiable, certifiable, seen, displayed, recognised) is possible here because it can be transferred and verified, in the open, without impedance. Because: this kind of knowledge is of the one substance with the open (the "world"). It is a knowledge of the "world" to which the "world" is indifferent. One is tempted to define it: the post-Galilean constellation i.e. the mathematised pre-thematisation of space and time which serves as "foundation" for the natural sciences/technologies. But the roots of this kind of knowledge are in fact far deeper. The "world" that the infinitesimal calculus "made." Calculus and double-entry bookkeeping. But these too are - only symptoms. (But all this is by the way.)[MARGINAL NOTE]
"God and the soul, that is what I desire to know."
"Nothing more?"
"Nothing whatsoever."
- St. Augustine
In here (塔) we must contend with a knowledge that cannot "survive" in the open. There it is crushed. It is a knowledge weak before the "world" which nonetheless pertains to that "world" - the remnant/imitation/ruin of its previous phase/stratum. Prior to the divorce. Mystery adumbrates muein - "to close/shut" (e.g. one's eyes). A closed knowledge. Closed to communication, transfer. Closed because an irruption of - the (radically) incommunicable. In terms of the discourse which transfers/verifies a "competence" - to speak of mystery is to give speech indistinguishable from silence, nonsense. Yet it is true. (In the same sense in which the propositions of the natural sciences are "true"? No. A different "foundation" or set of "foundations." Yet not altogether different?)
Question: how is an "education" in mystery possible?
Such an "education" is necessarily initiatoric. Viz.: it is not the transfer of a "competence" but the preparation of the student to stand ready for the "arrival" of that knowledge. To await as best one can the gift, awarded subject to criteria which are unknown to you, of a "state of grace" - in a manner of speaking. This is best done by the family line. Filiation has its advantages. It is already a kind of silent communication of the incommunicable - receipt of the bequest from the parents. The bloody matrix, the womb: a "community" of blood. The best preparation for 巫 is not to be told this or that, to learn it by heart, but - to be born correctly. Under the right stars. And it is true that a great deal of the "education" in mystery is even today conducted strictly "in the family." But not all.
Why not all? Why is there an institution for 巫? Could it not have been otherwise? Why not just families, scattered starlike points of tradition across the world? Why this - cluster? Lengthy historical exposition would be required. All that in the way of a narrative of pure contingency. Historiography could perhaps answer the "how" but not the "why." The why of it - to ask: what is rational and necessary in this thing?
I sketch an answer. Very simply it is a matter of the security of heritage (Ahnenerbe.) The demand for an institution arises from all the ways in which the family by itself is inadequate to its own purpose. The family by itself - one bad generation and you are done for. The family by itself - is vulnerable to outside pressures (war, exile, political difficulties). The possessions of the family - qua external or tertiary memory - are vulnerable insofar as the resources of the individual family are limited. The purpose of the institution is collective security. (We may say that the zero degree of the "institution" of education in mystery is the "crest." And therefore 塔 may be understood therefore as a kind of "crest" - not for an individual or a family but - for 巫 "in general.") But this brings us no closer. How is such an institution possible? How to extend this "education" beyond the sphere of the family, while retaining it as initiatoric?
First it must be secret. But a purely "external" kind of secrecy is not enough. It is not enough to reproduce a secular institution as it were inside a walled garden. It is not as if mystery is just another subspecies of "doctrine" to be learned, in principle communicable and transferable, but kept "restricted" to certain persons for contingent reasons. Now one may be forgiven (?) for arriving at the view that this is what is the case. Because 塔 does on first glance present as something "like" a university constructed similarly, in form, to those of western Europe around 1200 AD. The Sorbonne. There are lecturers, lecture halls. Libraries. Publications. There are degrees, ranks, classes. There are courses, generalities and specialities. This is true. But all so much surface detail.
塔 - indeed a walled garden. Restricted. Hidden - closed - from the "world." A cohort of "guardians" - the like of which Plato's daydream-state pales before - ensure it remains closed. But sheer naivete, to think that that is all. That 塔 is like a bubble or an island in the sea. An open space secured from without. Wrong. 塔 - a labyrinth. A labyrinth that hides itself within itself. A place where hiddenness itself is hidden.
Suppose: primordially, 塔 is a group of 巫 families who pooled their libraries. Their tertiary memories. To protect, to preserve. The outlook was growing dark - world-historically. They were to facilitate the preservation of themselves. They entered into this compact with only self-interest in mind (perhaps) but found themselves nonetheless working toward preserving 巫 "in general." The core of the institution is precisely this. Collective library and scriptorium. But the original families remained jealously possessive of their libraries. (The necessity of competition and the equal and opposite necessity of cooperation. Unresolvable tension. Such "politics", factionalisation and positioning, as is found at 塔 is all downstream of this.) More important than retaining physical control over the books - since the bulk of grimoires were and are properly esoteric i.e. written in code, elliptical fashion, subtlety within subtlety which requires special preparation to decipher - was retaining control over their content. They were possessive of the authoritative interpretation of their meaning. So they guarded their portions. They sub-restricted not only "access" to their part of the agglutinated library but also "access" to the authoritative explication of the texts. They dispensed the authoritative explication as they saw fit. As little as they could, to those outside. To those they thought worthier - a little more. Worthier still, a charmed circle - a little more. And so on. Some within their charmed circles were taken into "confidence" after a fashion and given license to dispense on their own judgement the authoritative explication(s) to others - though only partially, in mutilated part, in the nature of things. These are the first specialisations - the first "faculties." This, in its essence, is what "teaching" at 塔 still is. And only by understanding this can you understand the specific rationality of what goes on here.
Whether one comes to 塔 as a matter of course - for "family" reasons - or by "choice", usually to gain access to (part of) the library or certain avenues/instruments for research (which may themselves be considered as certain crystallisations of tertiary memory) one is nonetheless obliged to begin by taking a "course." To be let in the library at all, must be engaged in, or have completed, some grade of baccalaureus. Many subtle distinctions between that and a licentia docendi, unimportant here. Taking a course of any kind whatever involves two activities. The lectio and the disputatio. Of these the latter is the more interesting. But the former is essential.
The lectio is what lectio have been for a very long time: the reading of a designated text accompanied by commentary and explication (subtilitas explicandi). Many are dry and tedious; some are not. Not all are equal. The students undertaking a given course form a circle around the lecturer. They attend lectio which he gives. Within that circle - a subset of it - develops, however, an inner circle. A "sifting" operation creates a subgroup of students. These will attend, in addition, another lectio by the same lecturer - kept secret from the others. They are a "secret society" or "fraternity" within the body of a given lecturer's students. They identify one another by means kept secret. They are privy to an occulted timetable. But - it needs to be emphasised - this does not stop at one iteration. No. Within this inner circle is a circle yet more "inner" - a sub-subset. A "hind-society" - a secret within a secret. Which in turn has its own occulted timetable of lectio, its own identifying marks. And within that - and within that - et cetera. A labyrinth, as I said. There is an ordered hierarchy - each layer more esoteric than the last - in which the commentary and explication of texts is made available. To say nothing of the texts themselves. Nothing so crude as having access to the more rarefied texts "restricted" to those within the inner, or inner-inner (etc.) circles of a given lecturer. Rather: it is only by knowing what you know, within the inner-inner circle, within those secret (occulted) lectio (and discussion groups, etc.) that you know to look for those texts at all. The contraction of successive circles is a widening of the student's hermeneutic horizon. There are other privileges to being in one or another degree of a "charmed circle." We shall not name them here. The system is open to abuse, certainly - in fact a certain amount of abuse is both expected and necessary to its functioning. It is how the "faculty" reproduces itself, to name one thing. But this is all paraphernalia. What is important - crucial - to us here is: how is the "sifting" operation conducted? How does one pass from the outside into an inner circle, from the inner into a circle more inward still? The answer is very simple. This is the purpose of the other activity. The disputatio. And the disputatio is - truly - something quite unique. On first glance I found it strange. Idiotic archaic survival. Only later - observed several, and then participated in several more - did I understand. The pitiless brilliance of its design.
A disputatio is held in connection with a particular lectio. Usually the same day or the next. We begin with a proposition - the lecturer designates - derived from the content previously studied. A student volunteers (and one "must" volunteer. You are not "obliged" or "chosen" to participate. You must choose it. In the case of conflicts the lecturer will decide; sometimes multiple disputatio will be held for the same proposition to accomodate multiple groups of volunteers.) to attack it. Another student will volunteer to defend it. These two engage in a staged one-on-one debate before an audience of their peers.[MARGINAL NOTE]
I am writing this for "you." To remind you, who (will) have forgotten, of what once excited and captivated you. You will forget - will yourself to forget - or you will let it slip from you - what originally you found admirable in them. I am taking my revenge, before the fact. Have sighted-in my artillery on a place where I calculate you may, will, be, I take aim and fire - at you, myself. For I have known you, I have seen you there already. In a dream I meet your eyes. I say y/our name and it fails to touch you, it skids across the surface like a droplet on the stove, boils away. You are my stupidity, weakness of will. I feel you there, in those moments, already "present" in potential - the basin of a potential future into which my trajectory falls, lacking the velocity to escape. I have known you. I see you now, as you are to be: older, stupider, no longer a "philosopher." No longer sophophilic - the ascending eros levelled out to a keening flatline. Etiolated husk of a woman. You will vegetate. Neither so hard nor so cold nor so brilliant. Your desires, such as they are, will have declined. They will be proportionate, well-kept, cautious, sensible, contented, satisfied, ordinary, everyday. I imagine you smiling indulgently as you read this. You will have "got beyond" me in your mind. This I refuse. Would that I could claw from out of these pages, the smile from your face, the face from the skull, obliterate you. Damnatio. You will never get beyond me - myself. You will have turned back from me and returned along the way you came. Never will you go further. If that is a thought which hurts you - good. The extent to which it does, is the extent to which I retain my tenuous hold on y/our memory.
That is the disputatio. Sounds simple: it is not. In fact I am not sure if "debate" adequately communicates the peculiarity of this institution. Yet nothing of 塔 - and more importantly of the 巫 who study here - nothing at all of them can be understood without understanding what it means for them to have been through this. It is not enough to say that you must dispense immediately with preconceptions of "debate" as a sport conducted, so to speak, by Queensberry rules. There is no point-scoring, there is no time limit, there is very minimal stucture aside from the opening and closing remarks, there is no panel of judges to impress with your impeccable demeanour, there is no saying one's piece, waiting for the other, regulated back-and-forth. At the same time - the disputatio is not sophistry. It is not a shouting match. Not a shallow rhetorical display. It is exceedingly "rational" and "logical" in is proceedings. The argumentation is often exceedingly subtle - displays of great mental discipline, acuity, erudition. (Some make recordings - I saw a tape recorder brought in once - to go over the discourse after the fact.) It proceeds, in a manner of speaking, toward the truth, by the contest of opposing viewpoints. But - and this needs to be underlined - the disputatio is not quite a "dialectic" in the sense intended by Sokrates. It is not a mechanism for bringing the truth to appearance in language. Such truth as it aims at is not - emphasis not - linguistically realisable. One may suggest that it is a mechanism for bringing the failing-points of language to light. I would say: the disputatio brings a certain truth to appearance, for the participants themselves - but not a "rational" or "logical" (discursive) truth. A moral or ethical truth. A truth of character.
I can be more crude: the disputatio is approximately one-half an intellectual bloodsport (akin to the classical duel to the death with short-blades seen c. XIV-XVI centuries) and approximately one-half a highly stylised (non-naturalistic) theatre, reminiscent of the Noh. It is, importantly, a "staged" debate. This is not figurative. Despite slight variations at different venues, the physical setting of the disputatio has a specific construction. It takes place in an elliptical section of floor, about as long as a bus on its major axis, which is rounded on all sides by seating in a tiered rostrum akin to that in the lecture halls. Almost an amphitheatre, very like a miniature colosseum. Gladiatorial. To stand in the ellipse - which is nicknamed the "sand" (euphemistically: one is "in the sand" when taking part) - is to stand at the bottom of a veritable pit, the opponent at the far end, surrounded on every side by hundreds of faces. The psychological pressure is extremely intense. And this is all by design.
The lecturer, who is present, and traditionally sits high above in the very top tier of the seating, begins proceedings by declaring the topic and calling for one to attack it. Really "daring" one to attack it would be a more accurate rendering. A student will then step forth into the sand and volunteer with the traditional challenge. The lecturer will then call for one to defend; the same happens with another volunteer. This is all strictly formula. A ritual the same every time. And the two will then set about. The debate is conducted without notes or other aides-memoire. You are standing alone on every side, in the pit, with nothing but your mind, nothing but empty air between you and the opponent. And you are not standing still. No. There is an intensely physical aspect. Very common to see both parties dripping with sweat at the end. Hand gestures, claps, and taps of the foot, are all used in varying ways to emphasise one's speech - to underscore the clarity and decisiveness of argument. At extremes - balletic. But at the beginning all this is very subdued. The opening phase is long and slow, playfully languid. A treacle-thick irony pervades the room. The two speak quietly, drawling, mumbling. The most common complaint among newcomers is that they can't hear what's being said. In the beginning the defender will, in a low voice, with great politeness and humility, ask the attacker to state his case. The attacker, in a similarly low key, will do this. They will go forward like this. The defender will ask for clarification on certain points; the attacker will grant it. Or vice versa. And this will proceed until one party figures that he has enough to convict the opponent of a mistake. And the politeness and humility will vanish. He will stamp his foot on the floor; his posture will change, his gestures assume a new forcefulness, arrogance and confidence. His voice will louden. This moment - the "turn" - opens the second half.
This is where the knives come out. Questions that cut. A certain degree of taunting and deliciously refined ad hominem coexist with dialectic. Inconsistencies in one's speech are driven home like a nail into the head. Against a master of this kind of rhetoric it can be very difficult to hold together. To be ridiculed in front of a hundred of your peers is one thing; to be made to feel in your gut that you deserve it, for your stupidity, is quite another. One is tempted to sink into the floor. To break down sobbing. Or to become infuriated beyond all reason, even coming to blows in the "sand." All these things have and do happen. And there is a savage glee in reducing one's opponent to that state, and also secondarily in watching it done. There is a certain essential sadism at work in the whole process. One speculates it is connected to the "aristocratic" character of the persons involved. They are "aristocrats" in the sense that the principle of blood descent is overriding, and this means accordingly that the "individual" as such has a limited right to exist. The disputatio is in some sense brutal, horrific - watching a slow-motion mental deathmatch which subsides, inevitably, into a bloody dismemberment homicide - but it is demanded and desired because it is, I suspect, the only way some of these individuals can get any sense of being an individual at all. Very much like the duel among European aristocracy after the fall of the ancien regime. The duel ended, theoretically, in death - but 巫 cannot "practically" be allowed to kill each other, so the disputatio ends in one of the parties being questioned to the point where they are forced to admit the contrary of their original position. Until one or another is crushed, neither is allowed to leave. And the moment of crushing one's opponent is savoured. The gestures become wild, sweeping; the taunts more humiliating than ever. The psychological pressure is unimaginable unless you have been through it yourself. Lifelong grudges have been borne from a particularly stinging defeat in the disputatio. A taunting nickname given in debate can stick for decades. But these are uncommon cases. They reflect a failure to grasp the essence of the affair.
I said that the disputatio is key to being taken up into the "inner circle" of a given lecturer, and this is true. They are the process by which the circles are sifted. But - it is not necessarily the "victor" - the one who proves a contradiction in his opponent - who is taken up. That is the lecturer's decision, and the lecturer's judgement is not strictly bound to choose who has superficially "won" the debate. The point of the disputatio is not necessarily to "win" - nor even to win with finesse, with style, with brilliantly refined viciousness. The disputatio is, in its essence, a game. And to realise this is in some ways the point. It is a game that one has to play seriously - one may define an aristocrat, indeed, as one who is capable of playing any game "seriously" i.e. up to the point of death - but it is "just" a game. Like many games its purpose is to inculcate certain moral characteristics. It's like rugby at an English public school. The skills themselves are quite useless. The point is the kind of character it is supposed to make you. It is the "making" of a 巫. It is to cultivate an idealised apathy. It is to bring about a visitation of sublime abstraction. The ideal "player" of the disputatio is one who treats triumph and disaster both the same - who is utterly indifferent, playful, gently detached. If you cannot keep your head when being proven "wrong" in front of your peers - the logic goes - how can you possibly keep your head being proven "wrong" in front of God? (God - the Gottheit. The nothing.) For there is nothing other than this which awaits 巫. There is no path for 巫 which is not, figuratively, a continuous series of lost debates against God-or-nature's-god, in the feeble anticipation of one day, somehow, finally winning. And if you do not have the "guts" for that - you do not belong here.
All this, of course, in your characteristic way, by way of preamble. You are very long-winded.
It is by way of the disputatio that I have come to admire both of them. If one must play the game - it seems to me - one should aspire to be like one or the other.
C. - because he is one of the truly masterful players of the game. For everything else that can be said. He has been doing it for a long time. A lot of practice, on supposes. There is something enthralling, grotesquely fascinating, about the way he goes about crushing the opponent. One gets the sense that he does not take the game "seriously" at all. And yet his play is beautifully savage. I fought him once to a standstill; he had me concede. Once. He brought me very near to tears. But not quite.
S. - because he is so awful a player, who nonetheless grasps the game's essence more deeply than any other. His discourse is stilted. His gestures are slow, ponderous, heavy. He does not think on his feet as well as he might; he is arrogant, as anyone, but cannot communicate it in his words. But he stands there, in the sand, like a statue, and he - somehow - even when caught in contradiction - he never breaks down, he never moves a muscle. He stands there, insistent. And one must shudder at this. One mobilises all the subtle and vicious dialectic one can against him, and he "loses" - he "loses" very often. But he insists. And one cannot help, before such an opponent, doubting oneself. He does not care for dialectic. He attacks directly the self-certitude of the other. Against the other's justifications he insists: and yet. "Notwithstanding." There is a remainder, unthought, unarticulated. Something you missed. And it drives you mad.
A[ozaki] T[ouko].[APPENDED LATER]
There once was a hatefully brilliant little girl, who was granted many things that others were not granted, and denied many things that others were not denied. She was, in a manner of speaking, cultivated. Her grandfather said this. He had reason enough. Great pains were taken in cultivating - care and feeding, light and water, a hothouse, a potting tray, a cane to twist the stem around, a silver-gleam of pruning shears - a poisonous flower. She was, in another manner of speaking, mutilated. Her mother said this. That exact word was not said, but it was used even if it was not used. A flower, notionally, was ripped out of nature and given over to a choking artifice. A tendentious notion. There is no doubt the grandfather had the more considered view on things. But that too was tendentious. Many arguments took place - and it is important that they were many, and not one, because this indicates that both manners of speaking were ultimately just that. Sheer opinion. The true character of her upbringing would remain obscure, to become clear in retrospect if at all. A promise, you see, had been made to this hatefully brilliant little girl. It was explicitly promised that at the end of this cultivation and/or mutilation she would be made ready to know - truly, certainly - which of the two the process had been. And she greatly desired that.
But it was not to be. The promise was broken; that which was promised was given to another. And she took it poorly. She did not like being denied what she so desired; she did not like being left uncertain; she did not like being denied, so close to it, the possibility of being purely, eternally, right. Of knowing. Of certainty. She took a straight razor to her grandfather's throat, one day, calmly and without inward incident. And she almost did the same to her mother. And perhaps the fact that she did that - was itself indicative of the answer she sought. Perhaps.
She took some time to understand that the answer could not, after all, have been given to her. That only she herself could decide it.
By then, in some ways, it was too late.
From the blue diary.
London.
Spring/Summer 1987.
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Originally Posted by Dullahan
