This applies, in terms of its reception, even to the art that constructs and/or presents universes in which the signals from anything are not necessarily forthcoming, where people perceive the present, not the past.
“Profile: Ole Roemer and the Speed of Light,” excerpt from Cosmic Horizons: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge, ed. Steven Soter and Neil deGrasse Tyson (New York: New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), →.
Things bombard us at a quicker and quicker pace, but, given that light has a finite speed of 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum and that ostensibly no other signal can be faster than the speed of light, they continue nonetheless to be forthcoming, however minimal the delay.
In this respect, and with the exception of entangled subatomic particles, everything has aura before the full presence of the messiah.
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Conversations with François L’Yvonnet, trans. Chris Turner (London; New York: Routledge, 2004).
See “You Said ‘Stay,’ So I Stayed” in my book Forthcoming (Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2000).
In one of his letters from prison, Antonio Gramsci writes of “the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will” (Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); Gramsci attributes these words to Romain Rolland). Unfortunately we already have intellect but we do not yet have the will, which can be achieved only if we one day reach its condition of possibility, the experience of countless recurrence.
Can an event that is willed to recur eternally be repeated? Rather, one day some people are going, through time travel to very similar branches of the multiverse or virtual emulations, to repeat or to be subjected to repetition until they will the event, i.e., will it to recur eternally. Once the epochal will has become an actuality, God creates, every instant, events that are willed to recur eternally, never repeating any of his self-disclosures (Ibn ‘Arabî: “The Real does not disclose Himself in a form twice”).
The withdrawal of tradition, and of the messiah or Mahdî as part of tradition, seems to happen not on the worst day but subsequently.
Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi; trans. Robert Aitken et al. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 145–147.
See: “Variable Speed of Light,” →, more specifically this quote by John Barrow: “(An) important lesson we learn from the way that pure numbers like α define the world is what it really means for worlds to be different. The pure number we call the fine structure constant and denote by α is a combination of the electron charge, e, the speed of light, c, and Planck’s constant, h. At first we might be tempted to think that a world in which the speed of light was slower would be a different world. But this would be a mistake. If c, h, and e were all changed so that the values they have in metric (or any other) units were different when we looked them up in our tables of physical constants, but the value of α remained the same, this new world would be observationally indistinguishable from our world. The only thing that counts in the definition of worlds are the values of the dimensionless constants of Nature. If all masses were doubled in value (including the Planck mass mP) you cannot tell because all the pure numbers defined by the ratios of any pair of masses are unchanged.” John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature; From Alpha to Omega – The Numbers that Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
In so far as they are in a state of entanglement, do subatomic particles already belong to the world of the messiah?
While the vampire is not found where he “is,” as shown by the mirror at the location, he is “found” where he is not—he haunts.
A consequent filmmaker would have subsequently made a film in which the words “See me now!’ would be unproblematic. Might this essay prompt Coppola to make such a sequel? I very much doubt it since this essay is most probably forthcoming, including in relation to him.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro, Robert B. Pippin; trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 111.
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 37. “Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come” (Matthew 12:32). One might interpret these words as implying that speaking a word against the Son of Man is forgivable. But that is not necessarily the case; rather, if we consider these words while keeping in mind those of Derrida on forgiveness, we can view them as indicating that speaking a word against the Son of Man is unforgivable and that by forgiving it God accomplishes the impossible. Between the first part and the second part of the aforementioned sentence in Matthew 12:32, there is going to be the pivotal event of the appearance of the will. While the God of the first part of the sentence has no will yet, the God of the second part of the sentence has will and so it makes no sense for him to forgive anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit, because speaking against the Holy Spirit is not going to be part of the willed world, indeed is going never to have existed since it cannot be willed to return eternally.
Ibid., 32.
Jalal Toufic, February 7, 2005. Very dear Lyn (Hejinian): I hope that the rise of Iraqi Twelver Shi‘ites is going to be accompanied within Twelver Shi‘ism itself, and unlike in Iran and Lebanon, by an emancipation of its esoteric tendencies from the long-reigning stultifying, exoteric ones. If Iraq cannot become one day one of the secular sites of research into and development of the coming technological singularity, which is going to be able to manipulate the laws of physics, then may the nihilistic lawlessness of present day Iraq, in large part the work of Sunni rural fundamentalists, be replaced one day by the antinomianism of some genuinely (Twelver Shi‘ite) messianic era, one à la (Nizârî Shi‘ite) Great Resurrection of Alamut from 1164 to 1210.
Friedrich Nietzsche: “I beware of speaking of chemical ‘laws’: that savors of morality” in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), 630.
According to the theory of relativity, when we believe that things pass, we are mistaken (it may be that the sense of unreality one experiences in death is in part a consequence of the circumstance that the time one undergoes there is not that of the block universe of relativity, but, humorously, what most living people mistakenly consider their time to be: a fleeting time, the past vanishing irremediably moment by moment). How to make what does not pass do so? One way of doing this is by exhausting it (that’s what we have in the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, according to which all the possibilities are actualized in different universes). Not to be fooled by their seeming passage into failing to explore and exhaust things in order to make them really pass. Yes, the great attempt of exhaustive people is, paradoxically, to make that which they are exhausting at long last pass.
It should go without saying that “eternity in heaven” does not mean necessarily that the one in heaven is going to be there for eternity, moving from one joy to another; it means essentially that he or she has an eternal relation to everything that happens to him or her there, that he or she wills the eternal recurrence of everything that happens to him or her there, that he or she blesses each thing that happens there thus: “I will you to recur eternally.”
Contrariwise, many events that are presently considered the hallucinations of schizophrenics and the insubstantial visions of mystics (at least some of these eliciting from the one undergoing them a description in terms of eternity) are going to be considered then part of the willed, redeemed world.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman; translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 97.