There is no composer who has defined the true nature of religious experience with more clarity than the living composer Alexander Knaifel. His compositions, the notes themselves, are made up of small, brief flirtations with Grace. It is these stretched that make up the music itself. A music, he believes, that comes from God, not through having been tapped or chosen, but through an intensely powerful intrinsic musicianship acting as receiver to the cosmic radio. He is the least appreciated of the modern composers who share the Russian Orthodox faith.
Purchasing a newly republished book of a long dead writer one can’t help but read the scores of modern advertisements on the front cover, back cover, and first pages. In certain cases, however incorrect or unethical, they often read “prophetic”, “years ahead of its time”, or “as relevant for modern readers as it was _______”. None of these comments would be relevant to a volume of Simone Weil’s work, but all of them would find their way to its front cover (that is if her work were in fact deemed fit for republication.) This is due, I believe she’d argue, to the fact that the current state of affairs is in fact Simone Weil's state of affairs; nothing whatsoever has changed. The empirical philosophy of her writings is that of an all too expectant eschatology, an eschatology that creeps, slower than I think she suspected, towards realization. She is the true modern philosopher and yet read not at all.
Despite much good work, if not by way of a certain bias, NYRB Classics should be ashamed of selecting the readily available Weil essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force for joint publication with a Rachel Bespaloff essay on the same subject. They’ve matched Simone Weil, one of the geniuses of 20th century philosophy, with a well intentioned cultural critic. A modern publishing house must surely have been conscious of publishing the least inflammatory essay of a writer whose work invalidates three fourths of their catalogue and indirectly assails most every writer they've used for their commissioned introductions.
I’d ask the reader to note my refusal of the standard disclaimer, “the events of September 11th, 2001 was the most horrific act the United States of America has ever endured, but...”.
Irrefutably Osama Bin Laden was guilty of his charges. This did not make him unique. In the United State’s ongoing struggles with small, dissident bands of militants spread throughout several countries of the Middle East and Africa, one man cannot and was not the focal point. The modern world does not allow one man, even the President, the powers to dictate world events, the severity of which Bin Laden was accused. Men of power are subordinate to the cumulative exercised powers of those before them. If Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda did not exist, Islamic Extremism would. If President Obama had not credited himself with Bin Laden’s killing, President McCain would have. We do not live in a world, and have not for some time, of either great builders (Rooesevelt) or great destroyers (Hitler). Those men, if they do still exist, are forcibly obedient to the invisible grids around and above them. In so many words the conflict is not between men or nations or sects, but between the political ghosts of East and West; a conflict which exists in the ether, while somehow maintaining a continuous human violence. This ‘somehow’ is the mystery to be solved.
I have a suspicion that the killing of Osama Bin Laden was just. The word suspicion being operative in that it is not within the scope of human intelligence to decide what is just, just what is unjust. The reaction to the killing of Bin Laden however, while neither just or unjust, remains highly immoral. Mothers have taken there children to Ground Zero so they can “experience history first hand”, friends and relatives of those killed on 9/11 also went donning T-Shirts which read “Obama 1, Osama 0” or simply Bin Laden’s face centered by neon red crosshairs. After the September 11th attacks one recalls the burning of effigies, flags, and cheers of general celebration in several nations across the Middle East; we’ve now equalled their bad taste. They’ve held a mirror to us as now we’ve to them. We’ve become each others image: an image of anarchic, archaic notions of justice, retribution and bloodlust sharing one side of an ideological coin. That image is, and carries all the connotations of, the inversion of St. Dismas.
