vivemos, como diz Steiner, tempos de ocasos ocasionais desde há 500 mil anos de Homos erectus e de outros Homos, não de acaso e não de ocaso, nem mesmo de casos .....mas de ocasos....occasus QUEDAS ....E NÃO QUECAS POIS tudo o que conhecemos, que dAmos por adquirido, ESTÁ DESTINADO a desaparecer, POIS TUDO É, FOI E SERÁ sonegado...TUDO MORRE ATÉ AS CIVILIZAÇÕES E AS ESTRELAS E OS UNIVERSOS DE BIG BANG EM BIG BANG ....caminhamos entre ruínas ESTELARES , que é outra forma de dizer que sobrevivemos COMO DESTROÇOS DE SUPERNOVAS . construímos diques OU PENSAMOS FAZÊ-LO, contra os outros CONTRA O TEMPO E CONTRA O ESPAÇO e contra as várias versões de nós próprios que fomos deixando à solta NO CONTÍNUO ESPAÇO-TEMPORAL a frase de steiner - we have no more beginnings - baila-LHE DENTRO OU BATIA-LHE dentro desde que a LEU pela primeira vez...É UMA FRASE BANAL PROVAVELMENTE REPETIDA DESDE HÁ MILÉNIOS NA VERSÃO FALADA OU EM SIGNOS ....WE HAVE NO MORE VIRGINS IN THIS ISLAMIC STATE ...É O OCASO DAS VIRGENS. COMBATER O CAOS É APARENTEMENTE uma espécie de dever moral. NUMA TERMODINÂMICA FEITA DE FÉ claro que temos mais começos, todos os que quisermos.....MAS SÓ NAS PRÓXIMAS REENCARNAÇÕES EM UNIVERSOS MENOS USADOS E ABUSADOS We have no more beginnings.-OB OR OC KAD DE CAIR NUM TEM A VER CUM ---- Incipit: that proud Latin word which signals the start survives in our dusty 'inception'..

INCIPIENS ........ INCIPERE Incipit: that proud LOW Latin word which signals O COMEÇO A PARTIDA DAS LETRAS EM CADEIAS CURTAS OU LONGAS the start THAT survives in our DELES dusty OR MOLDY OR ...WHATEVER 'inception'. The medieval FRANÇAIS scribe marks the opening line, the new chapter with an illuminated capital. In its golden or carmine vortex the illuminator of manuscripts sets heraldic beasts, dragons at morning, singers and prophets. The initial, where this term signifies beginning and primacy, acts as a fanfare. It declares Plato's ONE OF THIS SOCRATES LOVER ...maxim OR MAXIM'S À 600 COUPS PER MINUTE  - by no means self-evident - whereby in all things natural and human, the origin is the most excellent. Today, in western orientations - observe the muted presence of morning light in that word - the reflexes, the turns of perception, are those of afternoon, of twilight LUSCOS FUSCOS  PLUS  Kierkegaard and the call of the wild ... the wounds of negativity'.)

There have been previous senses of ending and fascinations with sundown da morte do sol occidere ...ucide.....suicide .....in western culture da pequena morte pelo sono ...Philosophic witness, the arts, historians of feeling, report on 'closing-times in the gardens of the west' during the crises of the Roman imperial order, as crises do século III e dos restantes séculos antes e depois do Toba ejectar morte sobre o mundo ...e o Yellowstone dar cabo do Homo erectus quase todo há 600 mil e picos  during the apocalyptic fears at the approach of the first millennium AD, in the wake of the Black Death and the Thirty Years' War....and several wars Napoleonic and antediluvianas ....Motions of decay, of autumn and failing light have always attached to men and women's awareness of physical ruin and chemical chaos , of common morality about mortality. Moralists and prostitutes e outros devassos muito lassos com os abraços, even prior to DEMOKRITUS DE ABDERA OU OUTRO DA GAMA Montaigne, pointed out that the newborn infant is old enough to die....E ÀS VEZES MORRE ATÉ ANTES DE NASCER ...OU DURANTE ESTRANGULADO PELA CORDA VITAL....UMBILICAL ....OU OS HOI POLLOI DE SIRACUSA PORQUE NOS MATAM ...PORQUE PODEMOS .... There is in the most confident metaphysical NOT PHYSICAL construct, in the most affirmative work of art a memento mori MUITO GOSTA ESTE GAJO DE LAMBER AS LÍNGUAS MORTAS, a labour, implicit or explicit, to hold at bay the seepage of fatal time, of entropy ......VÁ LÁ METEU TERMODINÂMICA SÓ QUE OS SERES VIVOS CONTRARIAM A ENTROPIA VIA COMPARTIMENTAÇÃO DOS PROCESSOS into each and every living form. It is from this wrestling match...OF WORDS  that philosophic discourse and the generation of art derive their informing stress LIKE A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS , the unresolved tautness of which logic and beauty are formal modes...PEDANTISMO PIROSO NÉ . The cry 'the great god Pan is dead' haunts even those societies with which we associate, perhaps too conventionally, the gusto of optimism.....TERROR PÂNICO OU PANICUS ...

Nevertheless, there is, I think, in the climate? of spirit at the end of the twentieth OR XIX OR III OR IV B.C. century, a core-tiredness. The inward chronometry, the contracts with time which so largely determine our consciousness, point to late afternoon in ways that are ontological - this is to say, of the essence, of the fabric of being. We are, or feel ourselves to be, latecomers. The dishes are being cleared. 'Time, ladies and gents, time.' Such apprehension is the more compelling because it runs counter to the fact that, in the developed economies, individual life spans and expectancies are increasing. Yet the shadows lengthen. We seem to bend earthward and towards night as do plants.

A thirst for explanation, for causality, inhabits our nature. We do want to know: why? What conceivable hypothesis can elucidate a phenomenology, a structure of felt experience, as diffuse, as manifold in its expressions, as that of 'terminality'? Are such questions worth asking seriously, or do they merely invite vacuous high gossip? I am not certain.

Inhumanity is, so far as we have historical evidence, perennial. There have been no utopias, no communities of justice or forgiveness. Our current alarms THE FEAR SELLS  - at the violence in our streets, at the famines in the so-called Third World, at regressions into barbaric ethnic conflicts LIKE VIETNAME AND NICARAGUA UND SO WEITER IRAK I RUN , at the possibility of pandemic disease  THAT NEVER KILLS ALL THE CONSUMERS OF THE MEDICINAL CORNUCOPIA VON PHARMOCOPEIA - must be seen against the background of an exceptional moment. Roughly from the time of Waterloo .....TIRANDO 1848 E 1870 E 1871 E NA ITÁLIA DE 1815 A 1866 ...MAIS COISA MENOS COISA to that of the massacres on the western front in 1915-16, SOME  European RULE BRITANNIA..... bourgeoisie experienced a privileged season DURING ALL CRIMEAN WARS , an armistice with history WITH CIVIL UND UNCIVIL WARS ALL AROUND CUM ABRILADAS DE TUTTI TYPO SAHIB E GUERRAS DE SUCESSÃO E RARAMENTE DE SECESSÃO AO ESTILO BALCÂNICO ....LIBERTEM A VALÁQUIA Ó INFIÉIS DÁ PRÓS DOIS LADOS .... Underwritten by the exploitation of industrial labour at home and colonial rule abroad, Europeans knew a century of progress....OF HIGH CARBON CONTENT IN THE WINTER OF SULPHURIC COAL  of liberal dispensations, of reasonable hope. It is in the afterglow, no doubt idealized, of this exceptional calendar - note the constant comparison of the years prior to August 1914 with a 'long summer' WITH WHITE NIGHTS IN 1907 AND A SMALL DEFEAT IN RUSSIAN TIMES BY THE MIKADO ....AND COMMUNARDS AND SEVERAL REBELIONS SINCE THE PETERLOO MASSACRE ... - that SOME suffer OR Your present discomforts.
Advertisement....??? QUID EST SAPIENTIA ...SEMPER IDEM VELLE ATQUE IDEM NOLLE

: for the whole of Europe and Russia, this century WITH ONLY 80 YEARS became a time out of hell..... VIVIA-SE MELHOR E MORRIA-SE MENOS NO SÉCULO XV QUE TINHA MENOS PESSOAL A ATRAVANCÁ-LO Historians estimate at more than seventy million the number of men, women and children AND OLD FARTS done to death by warfare, starvation, deportation, political murder and disease between August 1914 and 'ONE OF THE ethnic cleansing' in the Balkans THE LAST ONE .... There have been hideous visitations of pestilence, famine and slaughter before. The collapse of humaneness in the twentieth century has OR HAD UNSPECIFIC AND specific enigmas THAT ARE NOT PACIFIC . It arises not from riders on the distant steppe or barbarians at the gates. National Socialism, Fascism, Stalinism (though, in this latter instance, more opaquely) spring from within the context, the locale, the administrative-social instruments of the high places of civilization, of education, of scientific progress and humanizing deployment, be it Christian or Enlightened. I do not want to enter into the vexed, in some manner demeaning, debates over the uniqueness of the Shoah OF THE TUTSI OR THE ARMENIAN BECAUSE THEY DON'T DIE WITH INSECTICIDE .... ('holocaust' is a noble, technical Greek designation for religious sacrifice, not a name proper for controlled insanity and the 'wind out of blackness'). But it does look as if the Nazi extermination of European Jewry AND TZIGANS AND GAYS AND UNTERMENSCH OF ALL KINDS is a 'singularity', not so much in respect of scale - Stalinism killed far more - but motivation. Here a category of human persons, down to infancy, were proclaimed guilty of being. Their crime was existence, was the mere claim to life....GOOD PROPAGANDA ....NÃO MATEM OS FILISTEUS SEUS .....ACELDAMAS ...

The catastrophe which overtook European and Slavic .....civilization was particular in another sense. It undid previous advances. Even the ironists of the Enlightenment (Voltaire) had confidently predicted the lasting abolition of judicial torture in Europe. They had ruled inconceivable a general return to censorship, to the burning of books, let alone of heretics or dissenters. Nineteenth-century liberalism and scientific positivism regarded as self-evident the expectation that the spread of schooling, of scientific-technological knowledge and yield, of free travel and contact among communities would bring with them a steady improvement in civility, in political tolerance, in the mores of private and public business. Each of these axioms of reasoned hope has been proved false. It is not only that education has shown itself incapable of making sensibility and cognition resistant to murderous unreason. Far more disturbingly, the evidence is that refined intellectuality, artistic virtuosity and appreciation, scientific eminence will collaborate actively with totalitarian demands or, at best, remain indifferent to surrounding sadism. Resplendent concerts, exhibitions in great museums, the publication of learned books, the pursuit of academic research both scientific and humanistic, flourish within close reach of the death camps. Technocratic ingenuity will serve or remain neutral at the call of the inhuman. The icon of our age is the preservation of a grove dear to Goethe within a concentration camp.

We have not begun to gauge the damage to man - as a species, as one entitling himself sapiens - inflicted by events since 1914. We do not begin to grasp the coexistence in time and in space, a coexistence sharpened by the immediacy of graphic and verbal presentation on the global mass media, of western superfluity and the starvation, the destitution, the infant mortality which now batten on some three fifths of mankind. There is a dynamic of clear-sighted lunacy in our waste of what is left of natural resources, of fauna and flora. The South Col of Everest is a garbage dump. Forty years after Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge buries alive an estimated hundred thousand innocent human beings. ...AND THE HUTU CUT DOWN 1 MILLION OF TUTSI ROACHS ...IN ERITREIA THEY KILL THE LEAST FAITHFUL The rest of the world, fully apprised of the fact, does nothing....AS USUAL New weapons soon start flowing from our factories to the killing fields.

To repeat: violence, oppression, economic enslavement and social irrationality have been endemic in history, whether tribal or metropolitan. But the twentieth century has, owing to the magnitude of massacre, to the insane contrast between available wealth and actual misère, MISERERE NEC HOC DICO ...to the probability that thermonuclear and bacterial weapons could, in fact, terminate man or his environment, given to despair a new warrant. It has raised the distinct possibility of a reversal of evolution, of a systematic turnabout towards bestialization. It is this which makes of Kafka's Metamorphosis the key fable of modernity or which, despite Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, renders plausible Camus's famous saying: "The only serious philosophical question is that of suicide."PROPRE EST A TE DEUS,,,,TECUM EST INTUS EST ....DEUS ESTÁ NO HOMO ...E NÃO É GRANDE COISA ....

What I want to consider briefly is something of the impact of this darkened condition on grammar, where I take grammar to mean the articulate organization of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve-structure of consciousness when it communicates with itself and with others. I intuit (these are, of course, almost wholly conjectural domains) that the future tense came relatively late into human speech. It may have developed as late as the end of the last Ice Age, together with the 'futurities' entailed by food storage, by the making and preservation of tools beyond immediate need, and by the very gradual discovery of animal-breeding and agriculture. In some meta- or pre-linguistic register, animals would appear to know presentness and, one supposes, a measure of remembrance. The future tense, the ability to discuss possible events on the day after one's funeral or in stellar space a million years hence, looks to be specific to homo sapiens. As does the use of subjunctive and of counter-factual modes which are themselves kindred, as it were, to future tenses. It is only man, so far as we can conceive, who has the means of altering his world by resort to 'if'-clauses, who can generate sentences such as: 'If Caesar had not gone to the Capitol that day.' It seems to me that this fantastic, formally incommensurable 'grammatology' of verb futures, of subjunctives and optatives, proved indispensable to the survival, to the evolution of the 'language animal' confronted, as we were and are, by the scandal, by the incomprehensibility of individual death. There is an actual sense in which every human use of the future tense of the verb 'to be' is a negation, however limited, of mortality. Even as every use of an 'if'-sentence tells of a refusal of the brute inevitability, of the despotism of the fact. 'Shall', 'will' and 'if', circling in intricate fields of semantic force around a hidden centre or nucleus of potentiality, are the passwords to hope.

Hope and fear are supreme fictions empowered by syntax. They are as indivisible from each other as they are from grammar. Hope encloses a fear of unfulfilment. Fear has in it a mustard seed of hope, the intimation of overcoming. It is the status of hope today which is problematic. On any but the trivial, momentary level, hope is a transcendental inference. It is underwritten by theological-metaphysical presumptions, in the strict sense of this word which connotes a possibly unjustified investment, a purchase, as the bourse would say, of 'futures'. 'Hoping' is a speech act, inward or outwardly communicative, which 'presumes' a listener, be it the self. Of this act, prayer is an exemplary case. The theological foundation is that which allows, which requires the desideratum, the forward venture and intent to be addressed to divine hearers in 'the hope', precisely, of support or, at the least, understanding. The metaphysical reinsurance is that of a rational organisation of the world - Descartes must gamble on the supposition that our senses and intellect are not the toys of a malignant deceiver - and, even more importantly, on a morality of distributive justice. Hope would be meaningless in a wholly irrational order or in one of arbitrary, absurdist ethics. Hope, as it has structured the human psyche and behaviour, is only trivially operative where reward and punishment are determined by lottery (gamblers' hopes at roulette are exactly of this vacant order).

The formally religious subscription of the act of hope, direct resort to supernatural intervention, has weakened almost continually in western history and individual consciousness. It has atrophied into more or less superficial ritual and inert figures of speech. Unthinking, one still 'hopes to God'. The philosophical edifice of hope is that of Cartesian rationality (where, most subtly, the theological drifts, like sand in an hourglass, into the metaphysical and the scientific). It is that of Leibniz's optimism and, most eminently, of Kantian morality. A shared pulse of progress, of meliorism energizes the philosophic-ethical enterprise from the early seventeenth century to the positivism of Comte. There are dissenters from hope, visionaries made desperate such as Pascal or Kierkegaard. But they speak from the margin. The prevailing motion of spirit makes of hope not only a fuel for political, social and scientific action, but a reasonable mood. European revolutions, the improvement of social justice and material well-being, are crystallizations of hoped-for futurity, they are rational advents to tomorrow.

Out of Mosaic and prophetic Judaism grew two major branches or 'heresies'. The first is that of Christianity, with its promise of God's kingdom to come, of reparation for unjust suffering, of a Last Judgement and eternity of love through the Son. The future tense of the verb inhabits nearly every saying of Jesus. He is, for his followers, hope made flesh. The second branch, again Jewish in its theoreticians and early proponents, is that of utopian socialism and, most signally, of Marxism. Here the claims on transcendence are made immanent, the kingdom of justice and equality, of peace and prosperity, is proclaimed to be of this world. With the voice of Amos, socialist idealism and Marxist-Leninist communism cry anathema on selfish wealth, on social oppression, on the crippling of countless common lives by insensate greed. The desert marches on the city. After the bitter struggle (after Golgotha) comes 'the exchange of love for love, of justice for justice'.

The twentieth century has put in doubt the theological, the philosophical and the political-material insurance for hope. It queries the rationale and credibility of future tenses. It makes understandable the statement that "there is abundance of hope, but none for us" (Franz Kafka).

It is not the cant phrase "the death of God", in fact predating Nietzsche and to which I am unable to assign any arguable meaning, that is pertinent. The determinant of our current situation is more embracing. I would call it 'the eclipse of the messianic'. In western religious systems, the messianic, whether personalized or metaphoric, has signified renovation, the end of historical temporality and the coming in glory of an after-world. Over and again, the future tense of hope has sought to date this event (the year 1000 or 1666 or, among present-day chiliastic sects, the turn of our millennium). In a literal sense, hope has sprung eternal. Western faiths are redemption narratives. But the messianic is no less instrumental in secular programmes. For anarchist and Marxist imaginings of futurity, it will be represented by the 'withering away of the state'. Behind this figure lie Kant's argument on universal peace and the Hegelian thesis of an end to history. In a paradoxical regard, the messianic can be independent of any postulate of God: it stands for man's access to perfectibility, to a higher and, presumably, enduring condition of reason and of justice. Again, on both the transcendental and the immanent levels of reference - these two being always closely related in a dialectical reciprocity - we are undergoing a radical displacement. Who except fundamentalists now awaits the actual coming of a Messiah? Who except literalists of a lost communism or anarcho-socialist Arcadia now awaits the actual rebirth of history?

Inevitably, this eclipse of the messianic presses on the future tense. The notion of the Logos, at once central and resistant to paraphrase, or of what is today called 'grammatology' (the Logos inheres in this word) is relevant. The 'Word' that was in the 'beginning', for the pre-Socratics as well as for St John, comprised a generative, dynamic eternity out of which time could spring forward, a present indicative of 'to be' pregnant (in an almost material sense) with "shall' and 'will'. Future tenses are an idiom of the messianic. Take away energizing anticipation, the imperative of waiting, and these tenses will be end-stopped. 'Life expectancy' is, then, no longer a messianic-utopian projection, but an actuarial statistic. Such pressures on the incipience of meaning and communication in the individual and collective subconscious, on the means of articulate speech, are gradual. Figures of daily discourse, totally devoid of concrete truth - 'sunrise', for example - will persist like domestic ghosts. Except in masters of poetry and of speculative thought, language is conservative and opaque to nascent intuitions (hence the need for mathematical and logically formal codes in the swiftly moving sciences). But just as the almost imperceptible tectonic movements in the deeps of the earth sever and re-shape continents, so the forces emanating from the eclipse of the messianic will find manifest expression. Grammars of nihilism flicker, as it were, on the horizon. Poets put it succinctly. Unless I misread, ours are "Those Evenings of the Brain.POIS ASSIS C'EST LA SAGESSE HUMAINE ESTRANHA AO PRÓPRIO HOMO MESMO QUANDO  ENTRANHA