It is the ultramateriality of body that first responds to the call of existence. Meaning, before the
organization of the formal and geometrical, is present as the elemental. In life as in art, the micro-texturing of substance must itself already embody the calling of vitality, lest meaning be merely narrative. A
narrative, emptied of lyric empathy cannot embody the energism of ultramateriality. Its calling is hollow contour, not dense organic compulsion.
The fallen angels live. They live the life of the most fundamental suffering as they agonize over
civilization’s disinterestedness. Their calling is not only the calling of Mind to ideas, but also the calling of carnality to Ultramateriality. It agonizes, since the calling of Nobility and Dignity to Ultramateriality have fallen to the state of comfort and consumption. Nobility of mind without the nobility of body leads necessarily to the Late Modernist disengagement with existence. Mind alone cannot recuperate the force of nobility. Dignity must surface in the body in order for dead matter to be transformed into living substance. Life is vulnerability. Ultramateriality exhibits urgency. Though civilization through instrumentality
attempts to conceal the elemental, yet within the interiority of Life still stands the absolute exteriority of Death. It is not a matter of flesh becoming purified and transcendent, but the reverse. Ideas must become incarnate to awaken unto the force of the first understanding. When one suffers, one suffers as all living things suffer, immersed in the anonymous flesh of living substance. This is the locus of elemental empathy.
It is not that we live and pass into shadow, but that we live, that we cast the shadow. Anxiety and suffering translucidates mortality. Suffering demands an elemental understanding of temporality. Death calls forth the ever present shadow. Mortality is not a rational deduction. Death does not stand behind life; death stands inside life, exposing the vulnerability of carnality. Technicity and comfort cast its own shadow over the first appeal, the first vulnerability, the first dignity. The exposed surface of the other demands a response. To this calling one can say either ‘’yes’’ or ‘’no.’’ But there exists a troubling
third which neither says “yes’’ or ‘’no;’’ a third which has, in the course of technicity, mushroomed to proportions that have displaced the first appeal. A third which is busy in the task of civilization.