After last night's brave and admittedly somewhat demented post – not that I discount its ideas and feelings: I think I really could crack my behavior, my limitations, open, if I had the energy and courage, which I may yet be able to find – I put myself together today to go to the pharmacy and the office. Did necessary errands, picked up my now even vaster cache of medications, and took a taxi home after less than an hour in the office, as I could hardly stand... and am now still physically drained after some hours of sleep, shaking slightly when I walk, or pick things up.
But still able to read and type, of course. No research today, despite yesterday's wild vows; but headed for bed, I picked a very strange book that I bought last month off the shelf.
Of course the great intellectual and emotional tragedy of Adorno's life was Benjamin's suicide in 1940; because it appears that Benjamin was the only person Adorno took entirely seriously, the only person whose challenges he felt deserved a carefully considered answer. For Adorno, almost all other humans were to some extent fools, dupes, madmen or weaklings; and when Benjamin died, the only person who could disagree with Adorno and yet be taken seriously by him died, finally and forever. It's hard not to see the shattered postwar Adorno as grieving not only for Germany, for the Jews, for political freedom, for cultural freedom, but also grieving even more deeply for the only person he ever really respected.
But that is a rather grand overview of his story... and almost all of Adorno's books, from the brilliantly canonic to the flippantly sardonic, have found a place on my shelves. At one time I identified with him, perhaps too much (as he probably had ten or twenty IQ points on me in any case, not to mention better training of course, along with his intricately messed-up personality); and my work, although it has fallen far from his in material and ideas, barely conceals its deep Adornian roots. I do feel lucky, and blessed, to have had accidental meetings in my life that caused me to take Jung seriously rather than Freud – it has kept me from the malevolent, despairing cynicism that I read in most of the more Freudian or Lacanian intellectuals, and I'm grateful for that. (Think of it this way: who could bear to have both AIDS and Lacan in their lives? Impossible, or at least insane.)
So... the publication of Adorno's Dream Notes induces a strange mixture of responses – exciting, disturbing, fascinating, and even faintly funny. That this most fiercely guarded of men, always on the offensive with almost everyone, would write down his dreams and consider baring them for publication – it is amazing in several ways. It also has its sad side – the dreams are almost all dark, the frequent sense of danger and loss and collapse testimony to the fact that Adorno actually reduced the darkness of his world vision in his professional writings. (I am grateful that some of my own dreams are more golden than black, that there are sometimes bursts of love, light, and almost utopian flights, that sustain me through whatever the day may bring.) But, to someone who has spent as many years 'involved' with Adorno as I have, it is like listening to an old friend, exhausted and somewhat disoriented after a major illness, saying strange but resonant things in a tired whisper – one feels concern and even pity; but it builds an even deeper three-dimensional sense of his extraordinarily rich personality.
Such that one could almost – but no, it is still almost – love this tragic, brilliant man....
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