Thursday, April 19, 2012
There's this line in the Bechdel profile in this week's New Yorker, about how her father ruined any potential for Whitman to be a "queer, radical, lunatic companion" b/c he kept pushing "great writers" on her. I remember my dad always had hundreds of volumes on his shelves, including a thick collected Whitman with an Eakins painting of sexy boyflesh on the front cover--i mostly got my love of Whitman as a queer radical lunatic companion (and Dickinson in her way) because i wanted to make sure that my tastes were less bourgeois then my fathers, who i thinks taste was a bourgeois attempt to radically dismiss my grandparents petit bourgeois tendencies. so there was like three layers of queer recursion against a central goal there, mostly centered on not particularly liking my father.
Monday, April 16, 2012
first things, i have to stop eating at the bedford acaedmy.
had lunch with david, which is usually pleasent, but it was strange today, he has been engaging with this 60 year old named carmine, who asked for money, and resources, and ends up getting it more often then not, and because David is kind and sweet, he lets himself take advantage of.
carmine called today and thratened to kill himself, and david talked to his boss and was going to go meet carmine and give him some money, but he didn't end up going, left carmine alone--and i worry that one of the reasons why im friends wiht david and some of the other wycliffites is that i am good at maniuplating people, good at working my needs against there xian instincts.
only reason why im passing school too...good at playing crazy.
had lunch with david, which is usually pleasent, but it was strange today, he has been engaging with this 60 year old named carmine, who asked for money, and resources, and ends up getting it more often then not, and because David is kind and sweet, he lets himself take advantage of.
carmine called today and thratened to kill himself, and david talked to his boss and was going to go meet carmine and give him some money, but he didn't end up going, left carmine alone--and i worry that one of the reasons why im friends wiht david and some of the other wycliffites is that i am good at maniuplating people, good at working my needs against there xian instincts.
only reason why im passing school too...good at playing crazy.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
also, another note about the barber:
i told him i needed the beard off for the hospital, and he asked which hopsital, and i said camh, and he talked about taking the ossington bus from home to work, and knowing who would lose it, who would be florid--and i keep thinking that the key to access camh is floridness, and i can do camp but i cant do florid, and i told him that a bit, not a lot of that, but a little bit of that--and he responsed with an annecdote about this wonderful shitty band that he was part of.
the same barbersharp that has drawings of ships and plastic pistols on the wall--and im reminded of these anecdote, because i talked to sundar about the differences b/w lethbridge hipsters and montreal hipsters or edmonton hipsters and toronto hipsters
i told him i needed the beard off for the hospital, and he asked which hopsital, and i said camh, and he talked about taking the ossington bus from home to work, and knowing who would lose it, who would be florid--and i keep thinking that the key to access camh is floridness, and i can do camp but i cant do florid, and i told him that a bit, not a lot of that, but a little bit of that--and he responsed with an annecdote about this wonderful shitty band that he was part of.
the same barbersharp that has drawings of ships and plastic pistols on the wall--and im reminded of these anecdote, because i talked to sundar about the differences b/w lethbridge hipsters and montreal hipsters or edmonton hipsters and toronto hipsters
Saturday, April 14, 2012
beard trimmed by alex, who is young and hip, and v cute--and i most likely didnt need to get the beard trimmed as severe as i did, but i had two thots
a) i wanted to be a good boy, to behave, for Dr Bloomberger, i want to like the music he plays, i want to have the right beard, i want to be calm and patient, i want to do anything i need to do to love--and he makes me feel loved, last thursday he put his hand on my shoulder, and he had we'll work on getting you better, and i trusted him--i tend to trust neurologists more than shrinks, for fairly obvious reasons.
b) alex, who trimmed me, had the razor close to his thigh and his thigh close to my hand, and the closeness, the sheer intimacy, and his attractiveness, i really didn't want him to stop.
there is something about the nature of hair, of closeness, of the razor, of being good, of intimaticy, and of a certain kind of bottoming, becomes emboided and profoundly human in ways that seem new
a) i wanted to be a good boy, to behave, for Dr Bloomberger, i want to like the music he plays, i want to have the right beard, i want to be calm and patient, i want to do anything i need to do to love--and he makes me feel loved, last thursday he put his hand on my shoulder, and he had we'll work on getting you better, and i trusted him--i tend to trust neurologists more than shrinks, for fairly obvious reasons.
b) alex, who trimmed me, had the razor close to his thigh and his thigh close to my hand, and the closeness, the sheer intimacy, and his attractiveness, i really didn't want him to stop.
there is something about the nature of hair, of closeness, of the razor, of being good, of intimaticy, and of a certain kind of bottoming, becomes emboided and profoundly human in ways that seem new
Monday, April 09, 2012
Sunday, April 08, 2012
almost burnt down the courtyard trying to extuingish the easter fire, then responsible for reading that passage in isaiah i get every year and turned on some candles, during the vigil...when the vigil moved from old testament to new, we went from candles to full electronic light, so it was all black with tiny blazes of yellow light and then the blaze of tungsten on concrete. patrick's baptism, which he broke down weeping, and which i tried not to laugh, and richard and chris, so mutt and jeff, i am finding church less solmen and more high camp these days
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Augustine Pear
Right now, these are just qoutes for the thesis, trying to get into writing.
From A Pentient Prepares: Affect, Contrition, TEars. By Christopher Swift, anthologised in Crying in the Middle Ages, Routledge 2011.
qouting Peter Lombard's Four Books of Sentences: And as in the sacrament of the Body, so also in this sacrament, they szay that one thing, namely the outward penance, is the sacrament alone, aonther the sacarement and the res (the thing of the sacaremtn of penance) namely the inward pennance, and still another the res and not that sacarament, namely; the remission of sins. For the inward Penance is also the res of the Sacrament, that is, of the outward PEnance, and the sacaremnt of the remission of sin, which it symbolises and causes. The outward Penannce is sign of the inward and the remission of sins. 84
The translation of was widely availble in late medieval Spain and was inffluential in the theology of Ingatious Loyala. In the Vita, Ludoph recommends that the pppentitent, "try as hard as he can to have tears" while pondering the passion 88
qouting Helen Spackmen Minding the Matter of Reprsentation: "the abject...(is) those aspects of copraliity--eg menstrual blood, salvia, faeces, urine--which the body must excreete and seperate from in order to surrive, but which are simultenous reminders of our own inevitable decadence and mortality. In medevial re-eanctments of the Passion dating Corpus Christi, perfomers were known to spit and urinate on the actor playing Jesus.
Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistence.
Marge Peircy, from the Book of Ruth and Naomi:
When you pick up the Tanakh and read
the Book of Ruth, it is a shock
how little it resembles memory.
It's concerned with inheritance,
lands, men's names and how women
must wiggle and wobble to live
yet women have kept it dear... (from mars and her children, 126)
From Holbein's Dead Christ:
I know that the Christian Church laid it down in the first few centuries, of its existence, that Christ really did suffer and that the PAssion was not symbolical. His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, tumeified, covered with errible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinnting; the large, open whites of the eyes, have a sort of dead and glassy glint. But, strange to say, as one looks at the dead body of this tooortured man, one cannot help asking oneself, the ppeculair, arresting question: if such a corpse (and it must have been ust like that was seen by all His disciples, by His future cheif apostles, by the women who followed Him and stood by the cross, by all who beleived in Gim and worshipped Him, then how could they possibly have beleived, conforted wiith such a sight ,that this martyr would rise again... (198)
Christ's dereliiction is here at its worst:forsaken by the Father, he is apart from all of us. Unless, Holbein, whose mind pungent as it was, does not appear to have lead him across the threshhold of atheism, wanted to include us, humans, forigners, spectatators, that we are, forthrightly in this crucial moment of Christ's life... (113)
From Luther:
Where there lives a melancholy person, the devil has drawn his bath...I have learned from experiencee, how one must heave during temptation. Whoever is bessseiged with sadness, despair or any other deep afflication, whoever harbors a serpent in his concisence must first hold to the conslation of the Divine word...
The break, breif as it might have been, in the bond linking Christ to his Father, and to life introduces into the mythical representation of the subject, a fundamental and psychically necessary discontinuitnny. Such, a cesura, which some have called a "hiatus", provides an image, at the same tme as a narrative, for many separations that build up the pyschic life of individuals. I tprovides image and narrative for some pyschic cataclysms hat more or less frequenlty threaten the assumed balance of individuals. Thus, pyschoanalysis identifies and relaes as an indispensable condiiton for autonomy a seiries of splittings (Hegel spoke a "work of the negative); birth, weaning, seperation, furstration, castarion. REal, immaginary or symbolic those processes nescessaaarily structure our individualtion. Their nonexeccution or repudation leads to pyschootic confusion; their dramatazation is, on the contrary, a source of excoorhobaint and destructive angusih. Because Christianity set that rupture at the very heart of it's absoulate subect--Christ, because it represtennd it as a passion that was the solidary lining of his resurrection, his glory, and his eternity, it brought to consiousness the essential dramas that are internal to the becoming of each nad every subject,. It thus endows itself with a tremdennnndous cathertic power. (132)
Holbein's etc is one of the rare if not a unqie realazation located at the very place of the severece of representation of which HEgel spoke,. The Gothic eroticism of paroaxysmal pain is missing, just as the promise of the beyond or the renaceenet exhlation of nature are llacking. What remains is the right rope--as the reprersented body--if an exonomical sparing graphic rendeiton of pain held back within the solitary mediation of artist and veiwer... (133)
From No Future, Lee Edeleman
Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming, but rather, of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the symbolic order. One name for this unnambeable remainder, as Lacan describes it, is jouissance, sometimes translated as enjoyment: a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law. this passage, toward which the pulsion of the drives continously impels us, may have the effect, insofar as it gets attached to a particular object or end, of congealing identity around the fantasy of satisaction or fulfillment by means of that object. At the same time, however, this jousissance, dissolves such fetishisitc investments, undoing the consistency of a socal reality that relies on Imiginary identications, on the structures of Symbolic law, and on the paterneal metaphor of the same (25)
lamella
Aphanisis, the term Ernest Jones, introduced to identify the anexity inducing proestct of the disappearence of desire... 64
Lacan's use of the word:
"it refers instead to the fading or disappearence of the subject, whose division the signifer effects in such a way that "there is no subject, without somwhere, aphanis of the subject" Lacan will then go on to add, "There is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphansis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconcious"...the apanisis of the unconcious: "when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is mannifested elsewhere as fading, as disappereance"... (65)
Suzzane Banard The Touch Of Angels,
Lacan Book XX
From Gerard Loughlin's Alien SEx:
In such oral copulation--when 'eating God, as Mechtild of Maghdeburg put it--the sexuality of these celeibate women, was not so much sublimated as 'simply set free'. The distinctinon between sexuality and sacaremtnality became intereminate, and the body's desire to parcipated in the desire of God... (11)
Richard Rolle
Desire is deathly for Gregopry of Nyssa, but it is also the w ay of life, that which enraptures the soul and moves it toward the good infintely. this is not a matter of two different kinds of desire, as between two different kinds of love, eros and agape. The latter distinction, as famously advanced by Bygren, is overwrought, overly concvered to deliomit pagan passions from Christian chairty, human from divine love. In someone like Gregory of Nyssa, we find a much more fluid conception of the desiring body, and not least because the body is produced by desire. The body is drawn by the desirable, a movement occaisoned by the attractive and beautiful, and so a motive particpation in that whihc attracts, as a shinging light catheces the eye and makes us look. After Freud, it is too easy to assume that desire is only, or most fundamentally, hunger; and that this is how it was understood from the first, as when Socrates argues that Eros is the love of what is lacking... (13)
The person of Christ is one work t hat must finally include everyone. The person of Christ is one with his entire, multiple body. In each appearing of Christ--in image and word, icon and scripture, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in each stranger who befriends another--it is Christ himself who arrives, entire and undivided, as if all other appearings were infinitely folded within each one, available to the mystic eye... (80)
God will be the end of our desires. He will be seen without end, loved without stint, praised without weariness. And this duty, this affection, this employment, will, like eternal life itself, be common to all. Augustine, City of God.
The lust triumphs not only over the whole body, and not only outwardly, but inwardly also. when the emotion of the mind is united with the cravings of the flesh, it convusles the whole man, so that there follows a pleasure greater than any other: a body bleasure so g reat that, at the moment of time, when he acheives his climax, the alterness and so to speak vigilance of a man's mind is almost entirely overwhelmed, Agustine, city of God, book 14, ch 16,
From Eros and Allegory Denys Turner
It is, prima facie, puzzling that men, dedicated to a life of cleibnacy should find so natural a mode of expression for their spirtual aspiraitons in the erotic poetry of the Song, at any rate, if it is not so puzzling in itself--after all, these men wanted to talk about love, they needed a human model for it, and sexual love is at le ast one obvious candiate--the intensity of their interest in the songs's eroticism and their unwillingness to bother with the credentials of other candiate models of love, certainly demands explanation. so the question 'Why the song" is the point of departure of my enquire; and since, as I argue, it was because of, not in spite of the songs eroticism that their interest was around, the question 'why eros' is the natueral counterpart to the first. (64)
Nicholas of Lyra
In a passage of quite remarkably hyperbolic rhetoric, Denys the Carthu8sian speaks of the desire for the sweetness of God, an unfathomable, limitless, measureless stream, as the desire to be carried way, transformed and absobed into him, and all enraptured, be pungled in to the most joyful, vast ocean of his happiness. And yet, the powor silly little soul, is thrust into this heavy weight of matter, tied to the millstone of the body' and can scarecely have the presumption to desire that kiss of his mouth of h im, but confined as it is in this land of unlikeness, it makes bold to do so by its love, which ;fretting at seperation, compels it. The soul is intoxicated by desire, a desire intensfied by the very serpartion which it seeks to overcome; it suffers from the serpeation, from its enfoced exile in the regio dissimitudinis, but the suffering is a long and the long is a suffering (nn 41-42) (88)
Orgien seems insenstive to the distinction between the kind of textual anolomly which demands the hermenutical solution of allegory and a literaly anomoaly which derives si9mply from a persvese bliness to metaphor. BEcause of this failure to distingushi between geneuine herentical crux and mere literary Crassness, Orgien appears to conclude fomr the fact that certain texts are non linteral in the first sense, ie are m etaphorica, that they must be read as having a psirtual meaning only--as a type by which they point to certain mysteries. Metaphor is not part of the literal meaning, in the first sense, therefore it is to be interepted spirtually (as non-literal in the s econd sense.... (96)
Beyond Pleasure
Magaret Iverson
(speaking of Holbein's The Ambassador:
Lacan writes "a marvelous illusion in the form of a beautiful image of the passion appears beyond the mirror, whewreas something decomposing and disgusting spreads out around it." The device seems designed to demonstrate the proximity of beautiy and death." Similary, our fascination with the figure of the beautiful Antigone, Lacan argues, has to do with her implacabloe death drive--her determanition to bury her brothers decomposing body desire prohibiytion and the ineveitable consquences. Lacan reinterpets Aristoltes conception of CAtharis in tragedy to mean that we are purged of everything belonging to the order of the imigainry. Antigone's instrsigence is beyond ordianry forms of intelligiblity or visibllity. She is anamourc. The beautiful, on this view, cuts through the knot kepping the subject ensalved by his or her ego. It enables us to reocngize and to live with our subjective void. There is a perverse sort of pleasure mixed with pain in this recogniiton, which Lacan called jouissance. (13)
Gregory of Nyssa Life of Moses:
Human nature is divided into male and female, and the free choice of virture or of evil is set before bot hequally. For this reason the corresponding example of virture for each sex has been exemplified by the dvine voice, so that each, by obsevering the one to which he is akin (the men to Abraham and the women to SArah) may be directed in the life of virtue by the approriate examples (12/32)
The next qoutes are foundaitonal to Bynum's arguements and blood and matter:
Pharoh (for this was the Egyptian tyran's name) attempted to counter the divine signs performed by Moses and Aaron with magical tricks performed by his sorcereers. When Moses again turned his own rod in to an animal before the eyes of the Egyptions, they thought that with the socercery of the magicians could equally work miracles wiht their rods. This deceit was exposed then the serpent produced from the staff of Moses ate the sticks of sorcery--the snakes no less! The rods of the sorcerers had no means of defense nor any power of life, only the appreance which cleverly devised socery showed to the yes of those easily decieved. (24/36)
...The people were ordered bnefore hand to keep themlseves from defilements of all kinds which pertain to both soul and body and to purify themseves by certain lustraitons. They were to keep themslves pure from intercourse for a stated number of days, so that pure of passion, they might approach the mountians to be intiated, cleansed of every emotion and bodily concern. (42/42)
Whenever life demands that the sober and provident rational thought which ar ethe parents of the mile child launch their good child on the billows of this life, they make him safe in an ark so that when he is given to the stream he will not be downed. The ark, constructed out of various baords, would be educaiton in the different d isiplines, which holds what it carries above the wagves of life (7/56)
When he writers "That light teaches us what we must do to stand within the rays of true light: Sandaled feet cannot ascend that height where the light of truth is seen, but the dead and earhtly covering of skins, which was placed aournd our nature at the ebgginning when we were found naked because of disobdience to the divine will, must be removed from the feet of the soul" Is this making the argument" Is this making the argument that all flesh is corrupt, and that there is a perfect disembodiment, away from the materalism of the world--and if this is the case, is this arguement a little bit gnostic? (22/62)
Now he who poseses the invincible rod of virture which consumes the rods of magic progresses along his course to greater marvels. Marvels are not performed for the purpose of terrifying those who happen to be present, but they look to beneift of those being saved. By these very marvels of virture the enemey is defeated and his own people are strengthend.
Truly, after the death of the frog like emotions, the former manner of life of those who have been delivered from such an illness becomes to them a foul and orodurs memory which disgusts the soul in shame. It is as the Apostle says to those changed from evil to virture: What did you get from this? Nothing from expereinces that now make you blush? 79/72
Do not be suprised at all if both things--the death of the first born and the pouring out of the blood--did not happen to the Istrealites and on that account reject the contemplation which we have proposed concerning the destruciton of evil as it were a fabriciaton without any truth. For now in the difference of the names, Isrealite and Egyption, we perceive meaning proposes that we persevie the Isrealite as virtious, we would not reasonably require the firstfruits of virtures offspring to be destroyed but rather those whose desctruction is more advantegous than their cultivaiton. (77)
From the Pope's Body:
Agostiono Paravinici Baglinai
Boniface VIII Of Loathesome Savageness, 1299
An interesting case w as noted by an annonymous ceremonlaist and eyewitness. As we have seen, on Ash Wednesday, 1303, Boniface VIII, accepted the abultion of the hands from the first of the cardinal bishops but he does not appear to have recieved the imposotion of the ashes. If this was the case, the pope indeed performed a rite of purificaiton but not of mortality, while avoaiding, morever, a ritual submisison to the representive of the college of cardinals (38)
(about a 14th century cermony around easter, where live lambs, the agnus, were replaced with wax lambs---the symbolic for the real, which was an almost a xerox of a 9th century roman ordo : "In the catholic church, in the city of Rome, at the first dwn of Holy Starudy, the archdeacon comes onto the Lateran Basically and pours some wax in to a great vase: and he mixes in some oil and blesses the wax, then he models the wax in to the likness of lambs and sotres them in a clean place. On to octave of EAster, these same lambs are distrubuted by the arch deacon to the people, who burn them at home as incense, and for fumiagtion as the need arises." The celebraitnt was the archdeacon, the wax lambs acted as tailsmen (76)
Roger Bacon
"Bacon's these can be summarized as follows: to reach the full natural span of life set by God and nature, man can avail himself of the marvelous powers of astronomy, achlmeny adn optics (persptciva) Human;s natures importality is not owing soley to the resurrectionl man's immoirtality is natural: that is , it concers the body as well as the soul. It is true., BAcon explained, that "for the sake of the body, man was by nature immortal, which means that he cannot ide or be subject to death, expect because of sin; at the resurrection of the dead, all men will be immportal not only the saints, but also the damned. But it was also true that it is not suporising that as the soul is rational, so also the body is immportal."
neitsche, the anti christ:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322.txt
Christianity is called the religion of _pity_.--Pity stands in
opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the
feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he
pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is
multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under
certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and
living energy--a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the
cause (--the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view
of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures
the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its
character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity
thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural
selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on
the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining
life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a
gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue
(--in every _superior_ moral system it appears as a weakness--); going
still further, it has been called _the_ virtue, the source and
foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that
this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and
upon whose shield _the denial of life_ was inscribed. Schopenhauer was
right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made _worthy of
denial_--pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing
and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work
for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of _protector_
of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of
_decadence_--pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say
"extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the _true_
life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric,
from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears _a good deal
less innocent_ when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals
beneath sublime words: the tendency to _destroy life_. Schopenhauer was
hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue....
Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state
of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded
tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek
some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous
accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case (and also,
alack, in that of our whole literary _decadence_, from St. Petersburg to
Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged....
Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than
Christian pity. To be the doctors _here_, to be unmerciful _here_, to
wield the knife _here_--all this is _our_ business, all this is _our_
sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!--
9
Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it
everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and
dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this
condition is called _faith_: in other words, closing one's eyes upon
one's self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable
falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness
upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon
faulty vision; they argue that no _other_ sort of vision has value any
more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God,"
"salvation" and "eternity." I unearth this theological instinct in all
directions: it is the most widespread and the most _subterranean_ form
of falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true
_must_ be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His
profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming
into honour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence
of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the
concepts "true" and "false" are forced to change places: whatever is
most damaging to life is there called "true," and whatever exalts it,
intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is
there called "false."... When theologians, working through the
"consciences" of princes (or of peoples--), stretch out their hands for
_power_, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will
to make an end, the _nihilistic_ will exerts that power....
39.
--I shall go back a bit, and tell you the _authentic_ history of
Christianity.--The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding--at
bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The
"Gospels" _died_ on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called
the "Gospels" was the very reverse of what _he_ had lived: "bad
tidings," a _Dysangelium_.[14] It is an error amounting to
nonsensicality to see in "faith," and particularly in faith in salvation
through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the
Christian _way of life_, the life _lived_ by him who died on the cross,
is Christian.... To this day _such_ a life is still possible, and for
_certain_ men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will
remain possible in all ages.... _Not_ faith, but acts; above all, an
_avoidance_ of acts, a different _state of being_.... States of
consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything
as true--as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is
perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts:
strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false.
To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance
of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the
negation of Christianity. _In fact, there are no Christians._ The
"Christian"--he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian--is
simply a psychological self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears
that, _despite_ all his "faith," he has been ruled _only_ by his
instincts--and _what instincts_!--In all ages--for example, in the case
of Luther--"faith" has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a _curtain_
behind which the instincts have played their game--a shrewd _blindness_
to the domination of _certain_ of the instincts.... I have already
called "faith" the specially Christian form of _shrewdness_--people
always _talk_ of their "faith" and _act_ according to their
instincts.... In the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing
that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes
an instinctive _hatred_ of reality as the motive power, the only motive
power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even
here, in _psychologicis_, there is a radical error, which is to say one
conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in _substance_. Take
away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place--and the whole of
Christianity crumbles to nothingness!--Viewed calmly, this strangest of
all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive
and ingenious _only_ in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life
and to the heart--this remains a _spectacle for the gods_--for those
gods who are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for
example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their
_disgust_ leaves them (--and us!) they will be thankful for the
spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps because of _this_ curious
exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the earth deserves a
glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, let us
not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false _to the point of
innocence_, is far above the ape--in its application to the Christians a
well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness....
48
--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the
beginning of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of _science_?... No one,
in fact, has understood it. This priest-book _par excellence_ opens, as
is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: _he_ faces
only one great danger; _ergo_, "God" faces only one great danger.--
From A Pentient Prepares: Affect, Contrition, TEars. By Christopher Swift, anthologised in Crying in the Middle Ages, Routledge 2011.
qouting Peter Lombard's Four Books of Sentences: And as in the sacrament of the Body, so also in this sacrament, they szay that one thing, namely the outward penance, is the sacrament alone, aonther the sacarement and the res (the thing of the sacaremtn of penance) namely the inward pennance, and still another the res and not that sacarament, namely; the remission of sins. For the inward Penance is also the res of the Sacrament, that is, of the outward PEnance, and the sacaremnt of the remission of sin, which it symbolises and causes. The outward Penannce is sign of the inward and the remission of sins. 84
The translation of was widely availble in late medieval Spain and was inffluential in the theology of Ingatious Loyala. In the Vita, Ludoph recommends that the pppentitent, "try as hard as he can to have tears" while pondering the passion 88
qouting Helen Spackmen Minding the Matter of Reprsentation: "the abject...(is) those aspects of copraliity--eg menstrual blood, salvia, faeces, urine--which the body must excreete and seperate from in order to surrive, but which are simultenous reminders of our own inevitable decadence and mortality. In medevial re-eanctments of the Passion dating Corpus Christi, perfomers were known to spit and urinate on the actor playing Jesus.
Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistence.
Marge Peircy, from the Book of Ruth and Naomi:
When you pick up the Tanakh and read
the Book of Ruth, it is a shock
how little it resembles memory.
It's concerned with inheritance,
lands, men's names and how women
must wiggle and wobble to live
yet women have kept it dear... (from mars and her children, 126)
From Holbein's Dead Christ:
I know that the Christian Church laid it down in the first few centuries, of its existence, that Christ really did suffer and that the PAssion was not symbolical. His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, tumeified, covered with errible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinnting; the large, open whites of the eyes, have a sort of dead and glassy glint. But, strange to say, as one looks at the dead body of this tooortured man, one cannot help asking oneself, the ppeculair, arresting question: if such a corpse (and it must have been ust like that was seen by all His disciples, by His future cheif apostles, by the women who followed Him and stood by the cross, by all who beleived in Gim and worshipped Him, then how could they possibly have beleived, conforted wiith such a sight ,that this martyr would rise again... (198)
Christ's dereliiction is here at its worst:forsaken by the Father, he is apart from all of us. Unless, Holbein, whose mind pungent as it was, does not appear to have lead him across the threshhold of atheism, wanted to include us, humans, forigners, spectatators, that we are, forthrightly in this crucial moment of Christ's life... (113)
From Luther:
Where there lives a melancholy person, the devil has drawn his bath...I have learned from experiencee, how one must heave during temptation. Whoever is bessseiged with sadness, despair or any other deep afflication, whoever harbors a serpent in his concisence must first hold to the conslation of the Divine word...
The break, breif as it might have been, in the bond linking Christ to his Father, and to life introduces into the mythical representation of the subject, a fundamental and psychically necessary discontinuitnny. Such, a cesura, which some have called a "hiatus", provides an image, at the same tme as a narrative, for many separations that build up the pyschic life of individuals. I tprovides image and narrative for some pyschic cataclysms hat more or less frequenlty threaten the assumed balance of individuals. Thus, pyschoanalysis identifies and relaes as an indispensable condiiton for autonomy a seiries of splittings (Hegel spoke a "work of the negative); birth, weaning, seperation, furstration, castarion. REal, immaginary or symbolic those processes nescessaaarily structure our individualtion. Their nonexeccution or repudation leads to pyschootic confusion; their dramatazation is, on the contrary, a source of excoorhobaint and destructive angusih. Because Christianity set that rupture at the very heart of it's absoulate subect--Christ, because it represtennd it as a passion that was the solidary lining of his resurrection, his glory, and his eternity, it brought to consiousness the essential dramas that are internal to the becoming of each nad every subject,. It thus endows itself with a tremdennnndous cathertic power. (132)
Holbein's etc is one of the rare if not a unqie realazation located at the very place of the severece of representation of which HEgel spoke,. The Gothic eroticism of paroaxysmal pain is missing, just as the promise of the beyond or the renaceenet exhlation of nature are llacking. What remains is the right rope--as the reprersented body--if an exonomical sparing graphic rendeiton of pain held back within the solitary mediation of artist and veiwer... (133)
From No Future, Lee Edeleman
Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming, but rather, of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the symbolic order. One name for this unnambeable remainder, as Lacan describes it, is jouissance, sometimes translated as enjoyment: a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and law. this passage, toward which the pulsion of the drives continously impels us, may have the effect, insofar as it gets attached to a particular object or end, of congealing identity around the fantasy of satisaction or fulfillment by means of that object. At the same time, however, this jousissance, dissolves such fetishisitc investments, undoing the consistency of a socal reality that relies on Imiginary identications, on the structures of Symbolic law, and on the paterneal metaphor of the same (25)
lamella
Aphanisis, the term Ernest Jones, introduced to identify the anexity inducing proestct of the disappearence of desire... 64
Lacan's use of the word:
"it refers instead to the fading or disappearence of the subject, whose division the signifer effects in such a way that "there is no subject, without somwhere, aphanis of the subject" Lacan will then go on to add, "There is an emergence of the subject at the level of meaning only from its aphansis in the Other locus, which is that of the unconcious"...the apanisis of the unconcious: "when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is mannifested elsewhere as fading, as disappereance"... (65)
Suzzane Banard The Touch Of Angels,
Lacan Book XX
From Gerard Loughlin's Alien SEx:
In such oral copulation--when 'eating God, as Mechtild of Maghdeburg put it--the sexuality of these celeibate women, was not so much sublimated as 'simply set free'. The distinctinon between sexuality and sacaremtnality became intereminate, and the body's desire to parcipated in the desire of God... (11)
Richard Rolle
Desire is deathly for Gregopry of Nyssa, but it is also the w ay of life, that which enraptures the soul and moves it toward the good infintely. this is not a matter of two different kinds of desire, as between two different kinds of love, eros and agape. The latter distinction, as famously advanced by Bygren, is overwrought, overly concvered to deliomit pagan passions from Christian chairty, human from divine love. In someone like Gregory of Nyssa, we find a much more fluid conception of the desiring body, and not least because the body is produced by desire. The body is drawn by the desirable, a movement occaisoned by the attractive and beautiful, and so a motive particpation in that whihc attracts, as a shinging light catheces the eye and makes us look. After Freud, it is too easy to assume that desire is only, or most fundamentally, hunger; and that this is how it was understood from the first, as when Socrates argues that Eros is the love of what is lacking... (13)
The person of Christ is one work t hat must finally include everyone. The person of Christ is one with his entire, multiple body. In each appearing of Christ--in image and word, icon and scripture, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, in each stranger who befriends another--it is Christ himself who arrives, entire and undivided, as if all other appearings were infinitely folded within each one, available to the mystic eye... (80)
God will be the end of our desires. He will be seen without end, loved without stint, praised without weariness. And this duty, this affection, this employment, will, like eternal life itself, be common to all. Augustine, City of God.
The lust triumphs not only over the whole body, and not only outwardly, but inwardly also. when the emotion of the mind is united with the cravings of the flesh, it convusles the whole man, so that there follows a pleasure greater than any other: a body bleasure so g reat that, at the moment of time, when he acheives his climax, the alterness and so to speak vigilance of a man's mind is almost entirely overwhelmed, Agustine, city of God, book 14, ch 16,
From Eros and Allegory Denys Turner
It is, prima facie, puzzling that men, dedicated to a life of cleibnacy should find so natural a mode of expression for their spirtual aspiraitons in the erotic poetry of the Song, at any rate, if it is not so puzzling in itself--after all, these men wanted to talk about love, they needed a human model for it, and sexual love is at le ast one obvious candiate--the intensity of their interest in the songs's eroticism and their unwillingness to bother with the credentials of other candiate models of love, certainly demands explanation. so the question 'Why the song" is the point of departure of my enquire; and since, as I argue, it was because of, not in spite of the songs eroticism that their interest was around, the question 'why eros' is the natueral counterpart to the first. (64)
Nicholas of Lyra
In a passage of quite remarkably hyperbolic rhetoric, Denys the Carthu8sian speaks of the desire for the sweetness of God, an unfathomable, limitless, measureless stream, as the desire to be carried way, transformed and absobed into him, and all enraptured, be pungled in to the most joyful, vast ocean of his happiness. And yet, the powor silly little soul, is thrust into this heavy weight of matter, tied to the millstone of the body' and can scarecely have the presumption to desire that kiss of his mouth of h im, but confined as it is in this land of unlikeness, it makes bold to do so by its love, which ;fretting at seperation, compels it. The soul is intoxicated by desire, a desire intensfied by the very serpartion which it seeks to overcome; it suffers from the serpeation, from its enfoced exile in the regio dissimitudinis, but the suffering is a long and the long is a suffering (nn 41-42) (88)
Orgien seems insenstive to the distinction between the kind of textual anolomly which demands the hermenutical solution of allegory and a literaly anomoaly which derives si9mply from a persvese bliness to metaphor. BEcause of this failure to distingushi between geneuine herentical crux and mere literary Crassness, Orgien appears to conclude fomr the fact that certain texts are non linteral in the first sense, ie are m etaphorica, that they must be read as having a psirtual meaning only--as a type by which they point to certain mysteries. Metaphor is not part of the literal meaning, in the first sense, therefore it is to be interepted spirtually (as non-literal in the s econd sense.... (96)
Beyond Pleasure
Magaret Iverson
(speaking of Holbein's The Ambassador:
Lacan writes "a marvelous illusion in the form of a beautiful image of the passion appears beyond the mirror, whewreas something decomposing and disgusting spreads out around it." The device seems designed to demonstrate the proximity of beautiy and death." Similary, our fascination with the figure of the beautiful Antigone, Lacan argues, has to do with her implacabloe death drive--her determanition to bury her brothers decomposing body desire prohibiytion and the ineveitable consquences. Lacan reinterpets Aristoltes conception of CAtharis in tragedy to mean that we are purged of everything belonging to the order of the imigainry. Antigone's instrsigence is beyond ordianry forms of intelligiblity or visibllity. She is anamourc. The beautiful, on this view, cuts through the knot kepping the subject ensalved by his or her ego. It enables us to reocngize and to live with our subjective void. There is a perverse sort of pleasure mixed with pain in this recogniiton, which Lacan called jouissance. (13)
Gregory of Nyssa Life of Moses:
Human nature is divided into male and female, and the free choice of virture or of evil is set before bot hequally. For this reason the corresponding example of virture for each sex has been exemplified by the dvine voice, so that each, by obsevering the one to which he is akin (the men to Abraham and the women to SArah) may be directed in the life of virtue by the approriate examples (12/32)
The next qoutes are foundaitonal to Bynum's arguements and blood and matter:
Pharoh (for this was the Egyptian tyran's name) attempted to counter the divine signs performed by Moses and Aaron with magical tricks performed by his sorcereers. When Moses again turned his own rod in to an animal before the eyes of the Egyptions, they thought that with the socercery of the magicians could equally work miracles wiht their rods. This deceit was exposed then the serpent produced from the staff of Moses ate the sticks of sorcery--the snakes no less! The rods of the sorcerers had no means of defense nor any power of life, only the appreance which cleverly devised socery showed to the yes of those easily decieved. (24/36)
...The people were ordered bnefore hand to keep themlseves from defilements of all kinds which pertain to both soul and body and to purify themseves by certain lustraitons. They were to keep themslves pure from intercourse for a stated number of days, so that pure of passion, they might approach the mountians to be intiated, cleansed of every emotion and bodily concern. (42/42)
Whenever life demands that the sober and provident rational thought which ar ethe parents of the mile child launch their good child on the billows of this life, they make him safe in an ark so that when he is given to the stream he will not be downed. The ark, constructed out of various baords, would be educaiton in the different d isiplines, which holds what it carries above the wagves of life (7/56)
When he writers "That light teaches us what we must do to stand within the rays of true light: Sandaled feet cannot ascend that height where the light of truth is seen, but the dead and earhtly covering of skins, which was placed aournd our nature at the ebgginning when we were found naked because of disobdience to the divine will, must be removed from the feet of the soul" Is this making the argument" Is this making the argument that all flesh is corrupt, and that there is a perfect disembodiment, away from the materalism of the world--and if this is the case, is this arguement a little bit gnostic? (22/62)
Now he who poseses the invincible rod of virture which consumes the rods of magic progresses along his course to greater marvels. Marvels are not performed for the purpose of terrifying those who happen to be present, but they look to beneift of those being saved. By these very marvels of virture the enemey is defeated and his own people are strengthend.
Truly, after the death of the frog like emotions, the former manner of life of those who have been delivered from such an illness becomes to them a foul and orodurs memory which disgusts the soul in shame. It is as the Apostle says to those changed from evil to virture: What did you get from this? Nothing from expereinces that now make you blush? 79/72
Do not be suprised at all if both things--the death of the first born and the pouring out of the blood--did not happen to the Istrealites and on that account reject the contemplation which we have proposed concerning the destruciton of evil as it were a fabriciaton without any truth. For now in the difference of the names, Isrealite and Egyption, we perceive meaning proposes that we persevie the Isrealite as virtious, we would not reasonably require the firstfruits of virtures offspring to be destroyed but rather those whose desctruction is more advantegous than their cultivaiton. (77)
From the Pope's Body:
Agostiono Paravinici Baglinai
Boniface VIII Of Loathesome Savageness, 1299
An interesting case w as noted by an annonymous ceremonlaist and eyewitness. As we have seen, on Ash Wednesday, 1303, Boniface VIII, accepted the abultion of the hands from the first of the cardinal bishops but he does not appear to have recieved the imposotion of the ashes. If this was the case, the pope indeed performed a rite of purificaiton but not of mortality, while avoaiding, morever, a ritual submisison to the representive of the college of cardinals (38)
(about a 14th century cermony around easter, where live lambs, the agnus, were replaced with wax lambs---the symbolic for the real, which was an almost a xerox of a 9th century roman ordo : "In the catholic church, in the city of Rome, at the first dwn of Holy Starudy, the archdeacon comes onto the Lateran Basically and pours some wax in to a great vase: and he mixes in some oil and blesses the wax, then he models the wax in to the likness of lambs and sotres them in a clean place. On to octave of EAster, these same lambs are distrubuted by the arch deacon to the people, who burn them at home as incense, and for fumiagtion as the need arises." The celebraitnt was the archdeacon, the wax lambs acted as tailsmen (76)
Roger Bacon
"Bacon's these can be summarized as follows: to reach the full natural span of life set by God and nature, man can avail himself of the marvelous powers of astronomy, achlmeny adn optics (persptciva) Human;s natures importality is not owing soley to the resurrectionl man's immoirtality is natural: that is , it concers the body as well as the soul. It is true., BAcon explained, that "for the sake of the body, man was by nature immortal, which means that he cannot ide or be subject to death, expect because of sin; at the resurrection of the dead, all men will be immportal not only the saints, but also the damned. But it was also true that it is not suporising that as the soul is rational, so also the body is immportal."
neitsche, the anti christ:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322.txt
Christianity is called the religion of _pity_.--Pity stands in
opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the
feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he
pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is
multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under
certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and
living energy--a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the
cause (--the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view
of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures
the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its
character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity
thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural
selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on
the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining
life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a
gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue
(--in every _superior_ moral system it appears as a weakness--); going
still further, it has been called _the_ virtue, the source and
foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that
this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and
upon whose shield _the denial of life_ was inscribed. Schopenhauer was
right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made _worthy of
denial_--pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing
and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work
for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the role of _protector_
of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of
_decadence_--pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say
"extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the _true_
life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric,
from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears _a good deal
less innocent_ when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals
beneath sublime words: the tendency to _destroy life_. Schopenhauer was
hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue....
Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state
of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded
tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek
some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous
accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer's case (and also,
alack, in that of our whole literary _decadence_, from St. Petersburg to
Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged....
Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than
Christian pity. To be the doctors _here_, to be unmerciful _here_, to
wield the knife _here_--all this is _our_ business, all this is _our_
sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!--
9
Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it
everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and
dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this
condition is called _faith_: in other words, closing one's eyes upon
one's self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable
falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness
upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon
faulty vision; they argue that no _other_ sort of vision has value any
more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of "God,"
"salvation" and "eternity." I unearth this theological instinct in all
directions: it is the most widespread and the most _subterranean_ form
of falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true
_must_ be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His
profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming
into honour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence
of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the
concepts "true" and "false" are forced to change places: whatever is
most damaging to life is there called "true," and whatever exalts it,
intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is
there called "false."... When theologians, working through the
"consciences" of princes (or of peoples--), stretch out their hands for
_power_, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will
to make an end, the _nihilistic_ will exerts that power....
39.
--I shall go back a bit, and tell you the _authentic_ history of
Christianity.--The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding--at
bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The
"Gospels" _died_ on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called
the "Gospels" was the very reverse of what _he_ had lived: "bad
tidings," a _Dysangelium_.[14] It is an error amounting to
nonsensicality to see in "faith," and particularly in faith in salvation
through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the
Christian _way of life_, the life _lived_ by him who died on the cross,
is Christian.... To this day _such_ a life is still possible, and for
_certain_ men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will
remain possible in all ages.... _Not_ faith, but acts; above all, an
_avoidance_ of acts, a different _state of being_.... States of
consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything
as true--as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is
perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts:
strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false.
To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance
of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the
negation of Christianity. _In fact, there are no Christians._ The
"Christian"--he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian--is
simply a psychological self-delusion. Closely examined, it appears
that, _despite_ all his "faith," he has been ruled _only_ by his
instincts--and _what instincts_!--In all ages--for example, in the case
of Luther--"faith" has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a _curtain_
behind which the instincts have played their game--a shrewd _blindness_
to the domination of _certain_ of the instincts.... I have already
called "faith" the specially Christian form of _shrewdness_--people
always _talk_ of their "faith" and _act_ according to their
instincts.... In the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing
that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes
an instinctive _hatred_ of reality as the motive power, the only motive
power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even
here, in _psychologicis_, there is a radical error, which is to say one
conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in _substance_. Take
away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place--and the whole of
Christianity crumbles to nothingness!--Viewed calmly, this strangest of
all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive
and ingenious _only_ in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life
and to the heart--this remains a _spectacle for the gods_--for those
gods who are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for
example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their
_disgust_ leaves them (--and us!) they will be thankful for the
spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps because of _this_ curious
exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the earth deserves a
glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, let us
not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false _to the point of
innocence_, is far above the ape--in its application to the Christians a
well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness....
48
--Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the
beginning of the Bible--of God's mortal terror of _science_?... No one,
in fact, has understood it. This priest-book _par excellence_ opens, as
is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: _he_ faces
only one great danger; _ergo_, "God" faces only one great danger.--
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
notes from a videodrome test screening
if this excerpt is any indication, Jason Sperb's new book on Song of the South, Race, Nostalgia and Disney, is going to be a must read.
12 photos of the so called magic mushroom house, built just outside of aspen, ca 1971--money and drugs dont mix kids.
castration as a catholic cure for sexual otherness, seems to have existed in the Netherlands upto the late 50s.
Ron Paul does memetastic cut and paste editing. This time, Mitt Romeny's waffling to ememniem.
shine shine a zambian fabric designer, updates and reconstructs the implications of south african oil/broadcloth. as does the primitive press--though they are from london.
30 4x5 kodachromes of wwii armamebnts--including a dozen or so of women building planes.
18th century German Scabbard, Ivory.
hipster germans with llamas.
a hadrian themed arts tumblr, elegant photos of casually decript sculptures.
Roberta Smith reviews the new show at the met, about the history of nude photographry.
Golden Tiger from le3paris on Vimeo.
Street Mapping in Paris - le3paris.com from an original idea by Mehmet AYDOGDU Julien NONNON Romain VOLLET with the participation of Laurent LE GOFF Donatien DE LAVENNE Music by THE AGENCY 'Watching Us' (F. Blet / R. Trotel / Y. Mayoux) Published by Industry of Cool From the album 'SOMNOGRAPHE' © 2011 Milstein's photos of black boxes, post aircraft crashes. white background, no context, banal, the really interesting thing about it, is how they aren't black, but blaze orange, the same tone as hunters and cops. Keith David Yonge photog from arizona. smart images, sort of a post structural reworking of the tonal problems found in Adams, and Baltz, but with better colour and harder irony. look at the one of the plywood dinasour and the red on red of supermarket beef. Agnes Sulca, a transgendered activist from Pueblo, who spent most of her 28 years trying to prevent other transgendered workers from dying violently, has been found dead from violent means herself. and a disheartneing report about American transgendered people, and the violence against them, released last month. glitch textiles based on dead digital cameras
Friday, March 16, 2012
two ect sessions this week.
five things to note
a) its mostly waiting--waiting for the session, waiting after the session, four or five hours in this cinderblock bunker with a big flat screen, and 3.30 of that is waiting.
b) i ache and want to puke after the sessions, like the body trying to reassert itself.
c) i think i am the youngest person there, with one exception.
d) everyone seems nice enough, but cognitivly impaired, like the worwst mashed potato bits in the worst of my depression (except the doctors, who i like)
e) walking up in the recovery room, when i'm blind, all i see is these bright colours, yellows of biohazard signs, blues of scrubs, whites of sheets, this seems significant.
five things to note
a) its mostly waiting--waiting for the session, waiting after the session, four or five hours in this cinderblock bunker with a big flat screen, and 3.30 of that is waiting.
b) i ache and want to puke after the sessions, like the body trying to reassert itself.
c) i think i am the youngest person there, with one exception.
d) everyone seems nice enough, but cognitivly impaired, like the worwst mashed potato bits in the worst of my depression (except the doctors, who i like)
e) walking up in the recovery room, when i'm blind, all i see is these bright colours, yellows of biohazard signs, blues of scrubs, whites of sheets, this seems significant.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Some Visual Stuff I didn't have space below for:
How to Tie A Turban, from the 40s.
How to Tie A Turban, from the 40s.
Source: bycommonconsent.com via pinkmoose on Pinterest
Source: popularsizes.tumblr.com via pinkmoose on Pinterest
Source: latimesblogs.latimes.com via pinkmoose on Pinterest
Josh Langhoff's review of the new sinead is brilliant.
stripper polaroids from the 70s and publicity shots from the 60s.
13 sateillete photos of slums
the worlds most beautiful gas station is either the AAlto one in Finland, or the Van De Rohe one on Nun's Island on Montreal. The Nun's Island one has been smartly and sensitivley restored and is now used as a youth center.
Dick Dale, Amazing Grace, 2012.
i'm not fond of meryl, and her oscar for the iron lday was a bit of a travesty--the la times explains why.
Roberta Smith on the successes and problems of the first major Cindy Sherman Retrospective. One of the things she notes--is that the genuninely isolating work from the 90s, that do not feature Sherman at all, but where the masks and props take an uncanny turn to their own autonomy, are underplayed in the show--the best example of this, is the Sex Parts series, which deny both the camp ponographics of Koons (which they are courant with) and the phallocentric misogyny of Bellmer (which they are obviously qouting) you can see some of those images here here
and speaking of difficult women this article on the problems of pop music and women's autonomy by Miles Rayner is amazing.
antique machinery scans
Delftware makes me happy Here is a dutch dealer.
Spoek Mathomba are a South African Hip Hop Collective, they are amazing.
China Melville on London might be the best I Love You, and I cannot Leave You, but you are breaking my heart, letter to a city that has ever been written. It might be a book, and it should be a booklet dropped from helicopters.
gary indiana on bresson's pick pocket with the line:
Far more romantic than his dealings with Jeanne are Michel’s encounters with the professional thief identified in the film’s credits by the single name Kassagi. Distinctly reptilian, as comfortable in criminality as a rubber duck in a bubble bath, Kassagi is like the lover who, after you’ve had a few quotidian partners, reveals the astonishing range of pleasures available from someone who actually knows what he’s doing.
karen carpenter isolated vocals.
Network Rail has a virtual archive, of scans of plans and photographs of 19th century anglo railroads.
the website for the Guggenheim Chamberlin gives you four images of each sculpture, and the shots themselves are beautiful. It also does not restrict you from right clicking, and the captions are clear and precise. Will not change yr mind about Chamberlin, but v. much a best practive about sculpture shows.
a story about insects one thought extinct, but found again on one of the worlds most remote islands, and a group of aussie research scientists trying to figure out how to save them. Science!
an oral history of Richard Diebenkorn
Bogdal's essay on the Roma and European History makes the case that the idea of them as an ethnicity seems to begin with the Holocaust, and the problems with that historicised Lacunae.
28 photos of Johnny Cash.
Traditional Dutch Dancing, in Holland Michigan. (Thanks Alex)
this kate beaton comic about small towns and death and economic disapora and canadian regionalism and its small, tight, memoiristic, not funny at all, and made me cry.
Matthew Griffin writes about the power of Dr Reynolds, a year onwards.
syrian doctors have been found to be torturing patients.
Pictionary, the Cormac MCCarthy Edition.
my new totem animal is the pink fairly armidillo.
stripper polaroids from the 70s and publicity shots from the 60s.
13 sateillete photos of slums
the worlds most beautiful gas station is either the AAlto one in Finland, or the Van De Rohe one on Nun's Island on Montreal. The Nun's Island one has been smartly and sensitivley restored and is now used as a youth center.
Dick Dale, Amazing Grace, 2012.
i'm not fond of meryl, and her oscar for the iron lday was a bit of a travesty--the la times explains why.
Roberta Smith on the successes and problems of the first major Cindy Sherman Retrospective. One of the things she notes--is that the genuninely isolating work from the 90s, that do not feature Sherman at all, but where the masks and props take an uncanny turn to their own autonomy, are underplayed in the show--the best example of this, is the Sex Parts series, which deny both the camp ponographics of Koons (which they are courant with) and the phallocentric misogyny of Bellmer (which they are obviously qouting) you can see some of those images here here
and speaking of difficult women this article on the problems of pop music and women's autonomy by Miles Rayner is amazing.
antique machinery scans
Delftware makes me happy Here is a dutch dealer.
Spoek Mathomba are a South African Hip Hop Collective, they are amazing.
China Melville on London might be the best I Love You, and I cannot Leave You, but you are breaking my heart, letter to a city that has ever been written. It might be a book, and it should be a booklet dropped from helicopters.
gary indiana on bresson's pick pocket with the line:
Far more romantic than his dealings with Jeanne are Michel’s encounters with the professional thief identified in the film’s credits by the single name Kassagi. Distinctly reptilian, as comfortable in criminality as a rubber duck in a bubble bath, Kassagi is like the lover who, after you’ve had a few quotidian partners, reveals the astonishing range of pleasures available from someone who actually knows what he’s doing.
karen carpenter isolated vocals.
Network Rail has a virtual archive, of scans of plans and photographs of 19th century anglo railroads.
the website for the Guggenheim Chamberlin gives you four images of each sculpture, and the shots themselves are beautiful. It also does not restrict you from right clicking, and the captions are clear and precise. Will not change yr mind about Chamberlin, but v. much a best practive about sculpture shows.
a story about insects one thought extinct, but found again on one of the worlds most remote islands, and a group of aussie research scientists trying to figure out how to save them. Science!
an oral history of Richard Diebenkorn
Bogdal's essay on the Roma and European History makes the case that the idea of them as an ethnicity seems to begin with the Holocaust, and the problems with that historicised Lacunae.
28 photos of Johnny Cash.
Traditional Dutch Dancing, in Holland Michigan. (Thanks Alex)
this kate beaton comic about small towns and death and economic disapora and canadian regionalism and its small, tight, memoiristic, not funny at all, and made me cry.
Matthew Griffin writes about the power of Dr Reynolds, a year onwards.
syrian doctors have been found to be torturing patients.
Pictionary, the Cormac MCCarthy Edition.
my new totem animal is the pink fairly armidillo.
Monday, March 12, 2012
as part of the ect i had to get the beard off, so i did it after lunch today, at a place i feel comfortable, with someone i am fond of.
it;s funny, there is a lot about my beard that's important.
a) it is a mark of my break with the lds church
b) it is symbolic of my connection to the early lds church
c) it is about the shambolic, slightly chaotic way i go about my life
d) it is maybe a bit about my father
e) it is connected to a kind of working class tradition (though my beard is now absent to make it easier for a mask to be present, to deliver oxygen. real working class boys in alberta have goatees or mustaches
f) because in a round about way, i don;t like my chin and my cheeks, i look better when i am less round. i also think that hair, is soft, is multitextured, is pleasing tactilly. the stubble is rough.
g) which reminds me--and this is not to be discounted, the boys i like to fuck, and the boys who like to fuck me, are bearded. there is a boy right now in front of me, wiht a beard, who is sexy mostly for it, and the guy i saw on the subway on the way to meet spencer, and the guy who was selling records last week, hipster or no, beards are sexy.
h) i am less sexy, and have less strength with my beard because my beard holds my erotic power.
it;s funny, there is a lot about my beard that's important.
a) it is a mark of my break with the lds church
b) it is symbolic of my connection to the early lds church
c) it is about the shambolic, slightly chaotic way i go about my life
d) it is maybe a bit about my father
e) it is connected to a kind of working class tradition (though my beard is now absent to make it easier for a mask to be present, to deliver oxygen. real working class boys in alberta have goatees or mustaches
f) because in a round about way, i don;t like my chin and my cheeks, i look better when i am less round. i also think that hair, is soft, is multitextured, is pleasing tactilly. the stubble is rough.
g) which reminds me--and this is not to be discounted, the boys i like to fuck, and the boys who like to fuck me, are bearded. there is a boy right now in front of me, wiht a beard, who is sexy mostly for it, and the guy i saw on the subway on the way to meet spencer, and the guy who was selling records last week, hipster or no, beards are sexy.
h) i am less sexy, and have less strength with my beard because my beard holds my erotic power.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
the entire wig stock is on youtube, so i finally saw footage of the infamous lee bowery birthing scene, and two things that were new about it for me
a) he birthed a woman (all of the problems with the word women given)
b) that it was in the middle of an audience of thousands, after an evening of other drag performances, as entertainment.
a) he birthed a woman (all of the problems with the word women given)
b) that it was in the middle of an audience of thousands, after an evening of other drag performances, as entertainment.
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Saturday, March 03, 2012
we need to talk about kevin, nearing so close to camp, and heavily aware self parody in swinton's almost meta performance, oblique, difficult, ravishingly beautiful (seamus mcgarvey)and an isolating sound track by johnny greenwood, i am not sure if it was the best movie i have seen in the last few months or the worst. (i kept thinking thru-out it how unsentimental it was, and how it refused questions about both redemption and evil; the book was startling for admitting in public how terrible in many ways mothers feel about their sons--and Tilda as a mother is often loving, but it is a love that is wry, ironic, often harsh, and intellectual)
also, i like to think in my mind, that the message of the film was that if you move to the suburbs yr teenage son will become a murderous psychopath (joking aside, Shriver's Book, the film, and the magisterial piece of long form journalism about Columbine by Dave Cullen is that all of the apologies we have for the boys; they were bullied, they were bored, they were forced by a culture of complacency, they were evil, they were crazy, are never true, that the overwhelming sense of the problem is that there is a hair breadth between the usual adolescent acting out and the acting out that results in such violence) (also, teenagers are lousy at impulse control)
one more thing--there was a scene in the doctor's office, where tilda asks if kevin might be autistic, the line of awkard cats laughed at that one
also, i like to think in my mind, that the message of the film was that if you move to the suburbs yr teenage son will become a murderous psychopath (joking aside, Shriver's Book, the film, and the magisterial piece of long form journalism about Columbine by Dave Cullen is that all of the apologies we have for the boys; they were bullied, they were bored, they were forced by a culture of complacency, they were evil, they were crazy, are never true, that the overwhelming sense of the problem is that there is a hair breadth between the usual adolescent acting out and the acting out that results in such violence) (also, teenagers are lousy at impulse control)
one more thing--there was a scene in the doctor's office, where tilda asks if kevin might be autistic, the line of awkard cats laughed at that one
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