On one level, the central relationship in Kairos is a political allegory for what it's like to live under a political regime that becomes increasingly paranoid and oppressive but retains a promise of utopian idealism.
On another level, it's about tainted love. Our objet d'amour may be art made by a controversial artist, a place ruined by violence, or a person who has both loved and harmed us. What is the balance of chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and dark? When does the scale tip into redemption for this object of our affection, and when into denunciation and rejection? When do we stay, and when leave?
Did anyone else have this personal kind of response to Kairos -- one that allows us to do a moral and aesthetic accounting of our more shameful and problematic loves, and how we assess them or think about them in all their complexity? We may find things beautiful that others call ugly, and vice versa.
I'm thinking about a conversation I had with another Booker Club member about Berlin in regards to Wagner's Ring Cycle, which took me to the film Wagner and Me by Stephen Fry. And I was thinking about how I need Fry to frame Wagner for me, because he understands how fraught his cultural legacy is for some -- that Fry's profound enthusiasm / ecstatic love for Wagner is stained by history, and that it's part of the human experience to love tarnished things richly and to live in the fallen place where purity is no longer possible.
I wanted to preserve this extended quote from The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey:
"One night, lying in bed, I am woken by the loud bang of a bird flying against my window, and a word enters my sight, as if retrieved from a bricked-up wall in my tunnel of memory. Kairos. A word from my small portion of undergraduate Greek, a word I had stored away: meaning not time, but timeliness. By this the Greeks meant the right or opportune moment for doing, a moment that cannot be scheduled, as it is poised unpredictably between beginnings and ends. It does not submit to chronos, which is mere arithmetic: a minute, an hour, a day, a decade, the work of timekeepers. Kairos exists as a potential, a mode of improvisation, of responding to a sudden opening in the fabric of time. No theory can enable or plan for it. Abandon the fixed plan, wait for the moment to arrive, and then act. At nineteen I had been struck by this, had decided that this was how I would live my life. It seemed then to be purely a matter of resolve; instead, it requires an inhuman patience. And faith.
"So this moment may never arrive, and if it arrives it may never achieve completion. Still, the potential is always there, but first you must find the place. In this place the past will be dead and the future a mirage. And when the opening appears it must be passed through without hesitation. The Greeks compared it to the moment in weaving when the shuttle can be passed through the threads on the loom, the instant when a gap opens in the warp of the cloth and the weaver must draw the yarn through to make the pattern. But does this space ever exist other than in our dreams?"
On one level, the central relationship in Kairos is a political allegory for what it's like to live under a political regime that becomes increasingly paranoid and oppressive but retains a promise of utopian idealism.
On another level, it's about tainted love. Our objet d'amour may be art made by a controversial artist, a place ruined by violence, or a person who has both loved and harmed us. What is the balance of chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and dark? When does the scale tip into redemption for this object of our affection, and when into denunciation and rejection? When do we stay, and when leave?
Did anyone else have this personal kind of response to Kairos -- one that allows us to do a moral and aesthetic accounting of our more shameful and problematic loves, and how we assess them or think about them in all their complexity? We may find things beautiful that others call ugly, and vice versa.
I'm thinking about a conversation I had with another Booker Club member about Berlin in regards to Wagner's Ring Cycle, which took me to the film Wagner and Me by Stephen Fry. And I was thinking about how I need Fry to frame Wagner for me, because he understands how fraught his cultural legacy is for some -- that Fry's profound enthusiasm / ecstatic love for Wagner is stained by history, and that it's part of the human experience to love tarnished things richly and to live in the fallen place where purity is no longer possible.
I wanted to preserve this extended quote from The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey:
"One night, lying in bed, I am woken by the loud bang of a bird flying against my window, and a word enters my sight, as if retrieved from a bricked-up wall in my tunnel of memory. Kairos. A word from my small portion of undergraduate Greek, a word I had stored away: meaning not time, but timeliness. By this the Greeks meant the right or opportune moment for doing, a moment that cannot be scheduled, as it is poised unpredictably between beginnings and ends. It does not submit to chronos, which is mere arithmetic: a minute, an hour, a day, a decade, the work of timekeepers. Kairos exists as a potential, a mode of improvisation, of responding to a sudden opening in the fabric of time. No theory can enable or plan for it. Abandon the fixed plan, wait for the moment to arrive, and then act. At nineteen I had been struck by this, had decided that this was how I would live my life. It seemed then to be purely a matter of resolve; instead, it requires an inhuman patience. And faith.
"So this moment may never arrive, and if it arrives it may never achieve completion. Still, the potential is always there, but first you must find the place. In this place the past will be dead and the future a mirage. And when the opening appears it must be passed through without hesitation. The Greeks compared it to the moment in weaving when the shuttle can be passed through the threads on the loom, the instant when a gap opens in the warp of the cloth and the weaver must draw the yarn through to make the pattern. But does this space ever exist other than in our dreams?"