“the essence of time is resurrection”

From Chapter 4: The Event in Art: How the Spiritual Event of our Time is Expressed in Art

My research of the Event in art discovered that there are seven basic elements, ‘becomings,’ or stages of metamorphosis in the creation process of each real work of art. The more truly inspired the work, the more these becomings will be visible to spiritual sight:

1. Threshold identity
2. Initiation language
3. Sensation body
4. Vortex (metamorphosis)
5. Consciousness' crystal
6. Memory and destiny (Guardian of the Threshold)
7. History (Resurrection)

The Seventh Becoming: History (Resurrection) 

From The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art (Temple Lodge, London, 2018)

Now that the work is indeed really finished and has finally been detached from its maker and become - after the "last touch"- a permanent part and parcel of the external world (physical and virtual), it has become "history," that is, it has been put in the grave of dead time. What becomes now of the work, what process of becoming it is going through after its final completeness, after its death? What does it go through in history, namely, in the grave of past and dead physical - and virtual - time? In his heroic, tragic, and lonely fight against positivist 19th century historicism, Nietzsche emphasized the importance of "creative forgetfulness" as a necessary precondition for the development of real historical conscience and consciousness (see The Use and Abuse of History). This conscience and consciousness can serve as the foundation for a new kind of "memory," that remembers not the factual event that was realized physically and is recorded in history's archives, but the "event that could have been" and remained virtual. Or better said, this could be a memory that remembers the "virtual cloud or aura" that surrounded, and will eternally surround, the event realized in past history. Active, creative forgetfulness, Nietzsche writes, breaks and opens up the dead linear continuum of past historical time, imagined in human heads as a chain of causes and effects advancing from the past to the future, held and regulated as if by iron necessity... This creative forgetting is, therefore, active remembering of the virtual. It stops history's dream of linear causal continuation; it breaks the chain of causal command and logical necessity, which are the pure inventions of the intellectual mind utilized ever since Roman historians began to write distinct western history. Now we may enter the realm of actual virtuality and study "history" from Nietzsche's perspectivist outlook. (Here Deleuze's admonition resounds to turn our attention to the difference between "virtual" and "possible," in order to avoid any relapse to a phenomenological variation of possibilities).

Now what happens if the work and artist are put in the grave of history without going consciously through the preceding stages? What happens if the Alp-Traum (nightmare) of history doesn’t become a conscious event of awakening? In this case the final, 7th stage seals the total reversal of truth into its opposite. Its truth is finally reversed into an active falsehood without redemption.

But truthful art creates, through the moral forces gained in the fully conscious meeting with the guardian, the living memory of the future, planting a seed of new life in history's otherwise dead stream of time. However, the artist is fully embodied in his historical time; he is a true child of his age. He, more than any other, already finds himself (before he even starts to create the work) entangled in a complexity of non-human forces, desires, instincts and concepts that grow and thrive and are also nourished by his work. He cannot but become increasingly aware, if he seeks this awareness energetically, to what extent his work is nourished by the forces of the age and in turn nourishes them. In stage 6 it became painfully clear to what extent the work supports the spread of our current global, social and cultural illness, to what extent my "good work" is already woven, before it started, within this stream of historical time.

Like Nietzsche, Rudolf Steiner also contended that modern, rational, historical science, born in the 19th century, and the historiography written in its vein is but a dream convinced that it is full wakefulness. It is actually an Alptraum precisely because it is so totally convinced that it is awake and illuminated, and therefore lacks any desire to wake up. The truth is that our modern historicism is the deepest historical sleep since humans began to experience history at all. But it is a dream and sleep from which we must awaken if we want to approach historical reality, in order to confront consciously and cooperate with the forces that shape creative historical becoming. (This is the reason why Joyce has Stephen Dedalus say in Ulysses: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake").

In this sense it is true to say that the imaginative dream of poets is closer to spiritual awakening than modern historicism. The artist is unconsciously closer to

the forces that shape real history than the ordinary "science" of history. The artist's dream is at least a true dream because he dreams poetically inside the real formative historical forces, while the science of history, that believes itself fully awake to "real" history, is truly and tragically a dream that falls deeper and deeper into cognitive and moral oblivion the more modern humanity’s disaster intensifies.

Charles Olson was also strongly aware of this fact. He could sense the difference between the Greek experience of "history" and what it became immediately thereafter through Roman history as the foundation of the western historical dream of rational enlightenment. He could sense how history already grew old in Rome, while in Greek times it still breathed the very last breath of its oriental youthfulness. With Herodotus, history was still Istorin, closely related to real becoming, animated by the last echo of the mythological goddess of time and destiny. How fast it became modern history through the beginning of the European, rationalistic, archival history in Thucydides! In Olson's reconstruction of Herodotus' Istorin we can feel how he strives to listen to the open spaces of formative, becoming time, the vastness of Aeons, the murmurings of virtual durations. But the archive's fullness of objective facts, of recorded, photographed historical "information" and infinite flood of "historical material," wholly charms, deludes and lulls us so easily into our modern cognitive sleep and moral forgetfulness.

But if the artist does not forget the future stream of awakening that he experienced through his wakeful trauma, he may join the life of the work also after its final completion and historical entombment. He joins the work’s future becoming in its virtual after-life, through his own virtually actualized immortality. He remains true to its living being and goes with it down into history's grave of dead time, and he awakens together with the work’s eternal being to greater and higher (because now morally motivated), creative consciousness. He increases his power of awakening inside the grave of modern scientific, rationalistic, technological dreams. He wakes up to a deeper consciousness that is more real because it is virtualized, when he lets the historical fate of the work - as finished, dead work - become his profound Agon(y). He is then ready to take that path, the conscious crossing of the threshold that leads into the underworld, where he meets not only the souls of the deceased but where –today - he meets the being of historical death. This journey that became a tragedy in Late Greek times can become a source of most profound hope, such as it was still possible to experience in those ancient Greek mysteries before they closed their portals for the last time. Now it becomes possible again, but not as an individual initiation experienced in isolated mystery centers, but right here in the center of our modern civilization. This is an awakening event inside the breaking down and virtualization of all our known dimensions, as modern science and technology progress further and deeper beyond the threshold of organically embodied life. Dead time then breaks up and with it our conceptions of historical, linear, causal rationalism, or nihilistic indeterminism. History becomes a wholly different life, and in what otherwise appears only as a place without hope, a new stream of becoming emerges.

In the grave of time, of dead historical factuality or nihilism, in the dream of (non)sense, the work is awaiting the resurrection of the artist's being and becoming. That work, which is all human work, and all the treasures of human history, is buried in dead past time, and can only be raised from the dead in the heart of truly awakened humans. As the Israeli poet Gilboa wrote: The miracle is the cultivation and growth of reality.

At the same historical place of time's breaking down, of time's death, if historical time is not raised into full consciousness, a radical reversal of the good is realized. But the same historical time, if raised to a fully artistic and moral consciousness of becoming, also turns into a place of real historical metamorphosis. It is precisely here that history becomes a source of future creative and joyful healing. We wished to demonstrate through the four branches of this research on the Event in science, history, philosophy, and art, that we are justified in harboring this hope and that such hope can be founded on a real resurrection experience. In a sense, everything woven together through these four branches is but a search for means to justify what perhaps only Levinas could have understood in the second half of the last century, namely, that “the essence of time is resurrection.”