In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

ACTION VS. IMPOTENCE 255
Direct Actions are "hard" because they disregard the feelings of those
whom they may hit-and sometimes even the expectations of those on
whose support they rely. Taten do not emanate from principles of legitimacy
or from generally acceptable reasons. [see Uncertainty vs. Reality]
The individual strength of those who act lies not in rationality, but in
their determination to do whatever they intuitively encounter and identify
as an absolute, fated obligation. Once they make such eminently
subjective decisions, the agents' subjecthood, paradoxically, is absorbed
in an overwhelming flow of vitality: "Every individual stands secretly
governed and directed before the deed (Tat)-drawn into an irresistible,
powerful current with all the fever of his life" (Junger, 116). [see Authenticity
= Artificiality (Life)] Narrating events from a different battlefield
of the Great War, T. E. Lawrence has a more somber view of the same
existential situation. What Junger describes as a vitalizing flow of physical
strength appears to Lawrence as the "enslaving" state of being possessed:
"As time went by, our need to fight for the ideal increased to an
unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts.
Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery,
manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve
its holiness with all our good and ill content ... By our own act we were
drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the
wind" (Lawrence, 29).
If direct Action enhances physical and sensual tension to the highest
pitch, its counterpart is a slackness that often connotes sexual Impotence.
Evoking a world of prostitutes, criminals, and their victims, the
lyrics of Argentinian tangos oscillate between these extremes, between
direct Actions that "break legislation" and states of exhaustion that lack
all physical strength and emotional warmth:
Accordion from the slums,
old and flat,
I found you like a child
abandoned by its mother
in the door of the convent
with unplastered walls,
in the lantern light
that lit your way in the night .
. . . I took you up to my room,