A reflection on the Novel Love and Garbage -by Phin Upham

I recently read “Space of Love and Garbage” by Stephen S. Erickson, included in the collection of essays by Phin Upham of the same title. Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was in some new space. I’d entered the place where oblivion was born. Or despair. And also understanding. Or perhaps even love—not as a mirage but as a space for the soul to move in.
Here is the bio (above) from the essay and a quotation of my favorite paragraphs of the essay (below).
These meditations are in part occasioned by Ivan Klima’s provocative title to his recent novel Love and Garbage. Not just occasioned by the title, of course, but by the novel’s content as well. This content, however, I wish to open to further investigation, and a somewhat controversial one. My inquiry will be guided by some (partially historical) reflections on the problematic, if not largely dismissed and abandoned notion of ‘the spiritual present’. Each of the nine sections which follow involves an attempt to dis-close and, thus, open to questioning an aspect of this ‘present’. ‘Present’ should be understood in time’s broadest sense, the one which guides Hegel when he says that philosophy is its time comprehended in thought.
Each section, also, is a beginning in the direction of making more—or has it (now) become “once more”?—credible experiences of the spirit. Any such undertaking is controversial, and to take cognizance of this a deliberate ambiguity is to be found in the preceding sentence, one grounded in syntactical form. The ambiguity engenders two readings, allowing, thereby, two quite different sorts of readers (or aspects of the ‘same’ reader): at one extreme the (problematically) devoted and at the other the (problematically) disdainful. In the more moderate undertaking in which I engage, it becomes all the more appropriate that each section, itself in varying ways questionable, also raises questions.

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If you want to but this book go to Ebay : Space of Love & Garbage – Phin Upham