The "law" of horror is "a perversion of reality, a mockery of the Logos"; that is, horror is the active manifestation of the
unbeing of evil, the privation of being, or the corruption and degeneration of a dramatic form's glory (131ff.).
(21) Essentially, it created the category of the
unbeing. The category of the fully and totally removed from the un-excepted state.
Reason has become irrational as the animate is confused with the inanimate; students are turned into objects where the imprint of
unbeing is left upon being.
/ It quests for the water / from which the rainbow / seeps its beauty and its
unbeing." (Blaga 2001: 245)
The search stems not from a question but from an answer an acceptance that there is no respite but in the arms of the beloved- the only obstruction remaining in this non-linear tangent of time is: of when of waiting of persistently burning till the being is extinguished to
unbeing.
Thus the center of this novel is her ontological '
unbeing'.
Good character, by contrast, like the sense of sight, "makes us know, and makes many differences clear." (86) As a form of insentience, finally, bad character is a form of death--for to live insentient, as plants do, is in a sense "to lie dead and
unbeing." (87) Through the completions that keep them from such a death, human beings attain the stature marked out for them in Aristotle's ethical works.
In this way, linguistic potentiality connects with post-colonial anticipations, in a synthesis efficiently captured by the neologism 'semiotic tidalectics': Mattina wondered what might happen if by morning all the world's words had fallen upon every corner of the world, if everyone had been transformed to a similar state of
unbeing and unknowing, if a universal process of new knowing, new thinking and feeling, and a new language might then fall, transforming life on earth to a new stage, unknowable yet, until the influence of the discovery of the Gravity Star had touched first one, then another, then many areas of the earth most receptive at that moment to geological and spiritual explosions and earthquakes (p.
Thus, for Luke, to be and know environmentally and internationally now requires deep and critical engagement with the "
unbeing and "unknowing" environings of nature and global capital.
Borne on the river of change and history toward the dark gulf of
unbeing, he seeks to halt its flow, to save on the pages of his books fragments of a homeland trampled out by history--the poor, unreconciled Sisyphus, dying unpardoned, with a cry of despair hurled against the cinders, against the ashes of nothingness.