Earth and Unearth
Rootedness-in-soil: not blood and soil, but lifeblood and earthblood. The earthly character of dwelling mortal existence. Yet, rootedness also means unrootedness: without absolute ground and justification. This groundlessness is originary guilt: null ground of a nullity. The earthly is the given. The unearthly is the "debt." Here, components of "what is owed" and "what is given." Debt and givenness. What is owed: given as already null and "default." Debt | givenness. Not "opposites" but originary structures of strife and tension: rift and sundering.
The blood character as life unto life: soul unto soil. That which is earthly given unto the unearthly mysteriousness as guilty of nullity. Whence comes the ground? From out of nothing? From out of roots and soil? The debt is also the guilt of death. The nothing permeates being. Does being permeate the nothing? Human-ity too as existence is permeated with the nothing. For what is soul but a fundamental bringing-forth-death? Human-ity in its mortality is guilty of the indebtedness of death. For as long as it exists, it's defaulted as having that which is outstanding and to which it must owe up. The earthly is guilty, indebted to, the unearthly. Soul is full of life as full of vital lifeblood which (it) spills unto and onto the fertile earth, soil, which it must relinquish unto death and the nothing—this other part of the mysterious unearthly.
Being is permeated with the nothing. Both are terrifyingly mysterious. For being is the same as nothing. Does the nothing weep for being? Who weeps for us? Does the nothing carry the memory of being? Who remembers being? Who laments nothing? Who remembers the cause for lamentation? For being has come to pass and now it's us who face its abandonment and the presence of the nothing. Yet this says something of authentic human existence: in seeing the passing away of being and the staring down of the nothing. One is epochal; the other is existential.
The phenomenon of vital full-life: seen and felt in the blood: the 1. existence and 2. the spilling. Vitality and fertility imply their degeneration and death by their very mortality. Beneath this mysterious paradox of the body and blood, vitality and mortality, lies the precious and vulnerable life and soul of the human in its human-ity, seen on and in, within and without, in and of its mortal skin and flesh. To not only hold—but to hold forever in caress and embrace. But yours—and mine—is a finite existence, a terminal mortal life. It's one that terminates and yet is enclosed and recurs. Infinity isn't bounded but stretches forth. Finitude is originarily enclosed. But that which stretches forth indefinitely and that which is bounded and recurs don't end. Yet all lines terminate and all cycles phase out. That which is timeless is peculiarly what has already passed. Its time has lapsed and so it no longer has existence.
But the time of all human life in its temporality is always passing and lapsing. The debt of death is always paid. Lendedness: that which is lent—held out into the nothing of existence—suspended and stretched out in givenness: givenness unto death. But given also unto being and life. Lent out as stretched in the in-between: suspense. Pregnant with possibility—and impossibility. The nothing reaches into being and death reaches into life. Unmaking reaches into the making. Groundlessness reaches into groundedness. The unearthly haunts the earthly. Lifeblood rooted in earthblood becomes body interred in soil. Yet the memory of the cemetery is meaningful, and tears bring back what was soulful of the dead and, yet, disclose unto the tearful their ownmost suspense of being held out into the existence of the nothing.
Peculiar ways of originary strife as rift and sundering. Suspenseful human existence: as lent out, suspended and stretched along in the in-between, full and pregnant, expectant, with possibility—without ultimate ground and yet must chose and ground. Choosing and grounding as response to a call of being to owe up to death and groundlessness, burdened with the task to go on living—is to poietically labor in the soil of earth, to chose and build a world—is to be possessed of soul and rooted-in-soil. In light of death, physical and the possibility of world death, existence is imbued with life. The urge for life keeps at bay enemy and predator, keeps near the precious and beloved, and builds a dwelling for its people—on the basis of mortal lifeblood and earthblood. Earthly owing up as unearthly indebtedness of death.
