Buber: Congealing the Whirl of Doom

[Dave Monroe]

Cont'd ...

If you follow Nietzsche, the life-or-death options
offered by the System are equally deadly only if you
remain a slave, only if you remain enslaved by the
ascetic priests of late capitalism. The Nietzschean
noble man in Pynchon, of course, developed via Rilke,
is Captain Weissman a.k.a. Dominus Blicero ....

Blicero loves death with all the passion of the noble
man. It's his answer to Their use of the fear of death
to control us: love what you are supposed to fear, and
you are free. "I want to break out," he tells
Gottfried just before the 00000 is launched--"to leave
this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken
in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life,
will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of
what we would become. . . ." (724). 

[...]

Blicero and Gottfried, Blicero and death, rocket and
sky, rocket and earth, isn't that the reciprocal
relation Buber wants to see between I and You? Isn't
that Blicero's victory over the System, that he
repersonalizes the world he destroys? 

The radio he instals in the rocket's cockpit is a
receiver without a transmitter. Gottfried, God's peace
in death, is a silent partner in Blicero's dialogue
with the cosmos. Blicero wants to fill Gottfried's
ears with his voice; Gottfried's voice is powerless to
respond, to resist or reshape Blicero's mad Romantic
design. Lover and beloved, master and slave: in
Blicero's Nietzschean (or Greek) imagination there can
be no reciprocation even in love, perhaps especially
in love. Love is a gift of power that empowers the
giver. 

Buber would say Blicero doesn't speak the I-You at
all; he's like Napoleon, who wants to hear the I-You
but not return it ....

Emptied out by his complicity in the System, Blicero
would fill himself with the slavish adoration of his
proteges, Gottfried, Katje, Enzian. But he can't be
filled; only worshipped. And worship can't stir his
sated synapses. Dead already, Blicero wills himself a
demonic superman status beyond life and death, beyond
the System, and seeks to achieve it through the rocket
and the cosmic sacrifice of God's peace. The
beloved--Gottfried, God's peace, God's earth--exists
for him only by virtue of being destroyed, in love, by
the lover. 

What an enormous mockery of Buber's idea of dialogue.
A democratized romantic myth that can't work. 

Blicero's failure doesn't rule out the possibility. 

No, but it brings home the extreme unlikelihood of its
ever working. Blicero is like all of us: so wrapped up
in ourselves, or rather so wrapped up in our own need
not to be wrapped up in ourselves, our need not to
notice our need, our willed ignorance of lack, that we
have no libido left for other people, no You to speak
to the people around us. Everything gets expended on
ghostly images of other people, characters in the
wispy movies we show in our heads. The I-You goes out,
and reaches only the phantoms that stalk through our
dreams, our own alienated mirror images. We seek other
people's love without offering our own, and when we
get it we can't trust it, it fails to warm us, fails
to fill us. We raise the stakes--not as far as
Blicero, most of us, not to cosmic, apocalyptic
proportions, most of us. But we raise them far enough
to render our lives a travesty of living. 

Blicero like "all of us"--all of us men, you mean. 

Don't women do the same thing? Blicero is the classic
male writ large, of course, the careful macho reserve
masking a vast arid emptiness masking fierce
destructive anger masking a fear of loss, lack,
attrition, lovelessness, masking finally that great
insatiable need to be loved ....

Does it have to be that way? Are we doomed to our
lack? 

Can it be otherwise? Can you give me an example that
isn't just another mask?

[...]

http://home.olemiss.edu/~djr/pages/writer/books/html/3dialogs/buber.html

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