Ah Oliver

It's so and I don't think this is a Levinnassian interruption of the face, more it's good to hear from you from time to time I miss our teas. I am going to have to write to Dennis again either he didn't get my letter or he finds all this post-modernist or is it post-phenomenological babbling intimidating. I don't claim to know what I know if someone did I'd ask them to explain. But I'll write him again.

Oh I think I am having a breakthrough. A feeling of lightness like a swallow on the wing or just before the split second before, or it could be those painless giant kidney stones, or it might just be one of those mild gastro-enterititus/colds that doesn't fully materialize because the immune system recognizes it early and gets the right anti-bodies in first. But I think I am coming to terms with that woman. Not in a face-to-face asymmetrical, I shall not kill the Other, I shall not absorb the Other into anodyne sameness, I shall live on the fumes of terror, the rumbling of pure existence in the night, not in that way, not even in the I have to build up my tapa for the prize of sammadhi is worth all the mosquito bites climbing the fifth mountain.

I have no rational reason for believing that an understanding, though ok it was Levinas, I know he is getting boring for me and I am fascinated by him, he was giving a Talmudic explication of the Canaan story, not defending Israel as such. He died 1995 family wiped out in the Shoah, his wife and daughter saved by a just gentile and our Holy Mother Church. We get some things right. He is a zionist I could deal with, a Qabalistic anti-Hassidic anti-fundamentalist anti-mystic rational qabalist. Anyway the reason the Jews have to wander for 40 years is because they make calumny against the Holy Land. But the Holy Land is just trees and rocks. How much worse will the punishment be for those who make Calumny against the children of men. It's not that Jews don't like mercy and forgiveness but they like fixed laws with some decent solid lex talionis punishment. Then if mercy comes be surprised be grateful. There is something mealy mouthed about an all forgiving merciful God with the mercy built in buy one get mercy free. We must rid the Church of Americanisms.

I am still a little schocked and surprised by how the Other has acted since my mother's death. As petty and banal as real evil is, I do not understand it. That scene from Pass it on, the older hero has returned home a stout teenager to set his mother and sister free from his abusive drunk father. He knocks him down and so his father cowers and then he goes to call his mother and sister to freedom. Next thing he knows he wakes from unconciousness tied to a chair covered in gasoline and the last thing he sees of his father is the smug look as he throws the lighter at him. His mother and sister perish and he survives to tell the story. It's not what is meant by the visage but it cannot be the last look. The look still disturbs me, though I know it is not the last.

Kottayam is I hope a smaller town in Kerala. Woah distances just looks a bit south on the map. It's gonna take 16 hours by train but I'd get to sleep. Or 12 hours by Bus.

St Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute run by the Syro Malankara Church SEERI, I can study Syriac there but all I really want is to buy some text books. One day there, a new atmosphere, slightly difference seminary food, it's sort of a holiday pilgrimage. If only I had a fellow Syriac Scholar I could pilgrimage with. Plus I don't really feel I belong here. I could probably stay for many years but it would have been nice to belong. I don't get invited to special masses. I don't even get informed when they change the lecture date or venue.

Kottayam is a change before the change in Nellikuduru. I guess when I think of Kottayam I think of Arundhati Roy or one of the heroines of her book because I am pretty sure she didn't write anything again, just has angry rants about how nasty surreal this country is which isn't art no matter how you dress it up it's just how things are.

So finally Levinas lectures today and tomorrow. Next week Kottayam. And then term is almost over. And in Kottayam I hope to have a cross of iron, the metal of Dalits. We aren't allowed to wear silver or gold just iron. But I would rather be a man of iron.