And doesn’t the cold woman who is extremely sparing with her warmth best serve male aspirations… Life is best stimulated by distant light
You should read Serrano's Nos; I think it might interest you. If you can't get hold of a copy, let me know.
-
The sphinx is a hybrid. To hold the diverse hybridizations in a balance, of necessity, requires maintaining a very cold inert temperature - arresting of activity. Quick Heat is activity disrupting the balance, the intensity. Very slow gradual transformations.
A great consciousness is like an elephant walking slowly.... coming to consciousness slowly... till it becomes second nature. Then you have a dancer, whose gestures are enough to speak, convey everything. Communication becomes quicker. The face and the body Speaks.
My apollo-affirmative-dionysian aesthetics say, Life is an Excess.
It Is self-preservation. But it is About self-assertion, domination, appropriation, expansion, flourishing, overflow. Everything doesn't just want to conserve or preserve itself, it wants to expand and assert and dominate and flourish. Life is an urge to excess, whose real-ization demands self-preservation in the process of expanding out.
Life is the will to accumulation of force; not just conservation, but maximal economy in its activity.
Excess energies or maximum WTP or seeking the path of maximum resistance - the dionysian path, invokes self-preservation.
Life itself is a possibility, an excess, that emerged from death, chaos, randomness, whatever you call it as a reaction against disorder in its innate urge to expand, to command a max. order of itself, or to organize itself effectively.
Max. self-realization is joy (i dont mean pleasure, but joy) - aggressive self-assertion seeking more and more resistances to maximize its potential. This is joy. Pleasure therefore is the dissastisfaction of the will. To be obstructed grants a resistance against which something can strive to impose itself. The sight of resistance gives pleasure.
Strength is a measure of weakness. Pleasure is a measure of pain. Perfection is a measure of imperfection.
Joy is holding this together. It is a capacity for a Wholesome endurance without shirking, denying anything.
Dionysian Beauty is a measure of this inter-activity it evokes in us.
Beauty is a measure of this "joy".
Which is to say, Beauty, in the dionysian perception, is the measure of how much imperfection or disorder an entity can endure without collapsing the boundaries between perfection and imperfection, and yet, holding them together. Duration of maximal stress. In the example I always use, its like a dividing line in between two pages of a book,,, holding-together-yet-holding-them-apart.... similar to a bride metaphor linking two things together, yet simultaneously distancing them apart.
The dionysian is the will to unity and transfiguration...., while the apollo is the will to boundary and definitiveness.
When I look at a beautiful entity, I derive "joy" [not pleasure], in the degree, this beautiful entity manages to pull everything together as a whole... inter-linking everything.
In the Heideggerian example, a river is beautiful for pulling around it a whole ecological net-work of sun, trees, temples, people, occupations... it bestows a "world"... or unconceals it or better, brings together. A gathering. Beauty is the Holy.
Heidegger wrote:
"It is the temple-work that first joins together and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline obtain the form of destiny for human being. …The temple first gives to things their look and to humanity their outlook on themselves. [PLT 42–3/GA5 27–9]
How many things can it interlace and pull toward it?
Beauty con-centr-ates, and trans-figures.
It is a measure of the trans-formation it can evoke from us. [not just in us]. A man trans-figured by a beautiful object trans-figures the world in turn. Beauty is a measure of this power, the extent of transfiguration it can affect from us. A degree of a self-differentiating power. That is, when I transfigure the world from my fullness, I have differentiated mySelf from the world I was in before. I have differentiated mySelf like a cell differentiates itself into an organ and then an organism. Beauty is a degree of how much of this self-differentiating power it evokes from us.
It brings the world together, collapsing it, and gives us a grasp - not on it, but that infinity. We sense this possibility to real-ize that, as liberating. The horizons or the heights we can scale when that infinity is scaled down for us in that beautiful entity.
Max. resistance tempting [tempt/attempt/experiment] us to impose ourselves on that infinity.
What separates one rose from another rose, for example, involves Apollonian definitions, an eye for order, symmetry, proportion and whatever exhibits this to the max.
But is a rose a beautiful entity? Is a dog? Is a constellation?
Is Napoleon more beautiful than Tom and Harry, although Napoleon, Tom, and Harry all may have their own innate inviobility, innate dignity?
This is not relativistic or subjective, but an objective Dionysian question of a power expression.
Beauty in this sense is measured by the degree of inter-activity. How much world does it pull and so trans-figure us and in turn how much does it compel us to trans-figure the world in our image is an ex-press-ion of our power to self-differentiate more and more.
It is a measure of our "joy".
Our "joy" is max. self-assertion.
This relates to something else.
There are always going to be people held in high esteem from the past whose shadow will loom on us.
Like gods and goddesses they tower as great standards in some things.
Its easy to dismiss these figures as 'non-existent', 'the question doesn't even arise', 'they were nothing', 'shrug', etc. are all easy responses,,, and the one who is indifferent to this past, taking no note of it at all, such indifference would strike many as far more attractive, than one looking back at the past.
Indifference can be a sign of strength, but can also conceal a weakness. As I was reading somewhere, today our travels to past heritage sites are nothing more than us being mere flaneurs, mere tourists, who reminisce and buy a souvenir for memory, and instant photos circulated "I too was there"... What does that mean? What have all these travellers to old ruins and heritage sites become?
The degree to which we can acknowledge the past, to me, is a measure of self-love, although such ones may get falsely tagged as "insecure" for engaging in it. But all value judgements are comparisons and the past is where the highest order is. A lover Loves his/her way out of things, not turn a blind eye.
The more I look to the past and what was achieved, the more I realize the lag I represent. What a caricature I am of some things, of some people who have weathered time. Those who are our heroes, our heroines, those characters...
They give me heartburns, like increased consciousness always does. But I am nothing short of grateful for this knowledge of their existence.
Can we surpass a homer, a caesar?
Nevermind people. But this age.
How many still want the old times and the homeric age to return back?
How many still want the old heroes to return back?
The times we live in look shabby compared to the golden past.
And the more we attempt to bridge that lag, the more ridiculous we look perhaps.
How many women disappointed by men who can't measure up to the ideal heroes gone by? How many men disappointed by women who can't be even a pinch of inspiration?
And yet, where would we be, if a Hitler found himself to be a dwarf compared to Caesar?
Where would we be, if a N. found himself to be a dwarf compared to a Socrates?
Quote :
"We are more than the individuals: we are the whole chain as well, with the tasks of all the futures of that chain." [N., WTP, 687]
Quote :
"The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes upon himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men." [N., WTP, 872]
Our sense of self-love is a direct reflection of the tasks we Choose and are Compelled by to take up on ourselves. A force of pride that drives us.
Not everyone of us may outdo the shadow that a Hitler or a N. could, but it is in the trying, no matter the caricatures we are, that we may just set up a standard, a height, a task to confer to the future. And if not a height, but a will-to-height, that tempts them to take it as their task. Atleast thereby we bequeath, a pride in this willingness to height atleast.
Although I feel this pressure as a woman, I realize it weighs on a man more.
A man "has to" show his worth. He has to take on the past, in the middle of making a living. He is engulfed by a hundred mundane anxieties, that require him to wear pants. That require him to civilize himself. That require him to go down to the "market-place".
Satyr joked somewhere, "I have to wear pants now."
Satyr has written many beautiful essays, timeless lines, but of all that he's expressed, the above stands out for me.
Taken out of its particular context, I found it poignant somehow.
To another, no doubt, it might appear corny, or comical, or just rubbish, but to me it sums up a human's, esp. a man's existential plight in that most non-chalant lighthearted way Satyr does it with ease. If there are any good writers on this forum, Satyr included,, they should make note of this line as a great title for what could be a wonderful existential book. Woody Allen or Derrida would grab such a line... they would understand. No one better than them, their eyes trained to pick up the bleak and the humour and the agony together from just about anywhere and in any form. They feed on it;
Quote :
"In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), the character Alvy Singer says to his girlfriend Annie, “I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.” This is one of the most quotably funny bits in Allen’s movie, which was originally titled “Anhedonia,” the psychopathology that places Alvy among the miserable. Clinically, anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure." [Ligotti, conspiracy]
They would understand the poignancy in that line.
How much freedom can a man find, how much height can he manage to set, how much pride can he afford to let lose on this world?
How much?
So on the subjective note, I wish to say, I find beauty in what is imperfect, what is incomplete striving to become perfect... more than the end product itself. The striving spirit, so frail and yet strong also, under the shadow of the past fighting dragons, is so moving, and a work of art in itself, than a complete piece, looking 'perfect' by the strict definitions we give.
Quote :
"The effectiveness of the incomplete. - Just as figures in relief produce so strong an impression on the imagination because they are as it were on the point of stepping out of the wall but have suddenly been brought to a halt, so the relief-like, incomplete presentation of an idea, of a whole philosophy, is sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization: more is left for the beholder to do, he is impelled to continue working on that which appears before him so strongly etched in light and shadow, to think it through to the end, and to overcome even that constraint which has hitherto prevented it from stepping forth fully formed." [HATH, 178]
Dead ends, the unfinished, the incomplete, the imperfect is what he chooses to work on and bring to life.
I find pride in wanting to take the most hopeless and unpromising, and breathing life into it; its an artist's pride to give his shape to a dead end.
There are many ideals and dreams that are such dead-ends.
A dionysian aesthetic would have us not throw away the useless, but to give it purpose, form, meaning, as a question-mark at our own power. Its not enough to be erect, there should be a pride to erect what is lying down.
Psyche - a word originally meaning "breath" came to designate the soul.
To breathe your soul into another, a dead end, a dead ideal, a dead dream is to give life, and to give life is to be God.
If there is a laughter that laughs at such a man, I don't know it, because man Is god to me. I live in a world where many such Gods have existed, and continue to exist in our midst.
Dead ends, the unfinished, the incomplete, the imperfect is what he chooses to work on and bring to life.
I find pride in wanting to take the most hopeless and unpromising, and breathing life into it; its an artist's pride to give his shape to a dead end.
There are many ideals and dreams that are such dead-ends.
A dionysian aesthetic would have us not throw away the useless, but to give it purpose, form, meaning, as a question-mark at our own power. Its not enough to be erect, there should be a pride to erect what is lying down.
Psyche - a word originally meaning "breath" came to designate the soul.
To breathe your soul into another, a dead end, a dead ideal, a dead dream is to give life, and to give life is to be God.
If there is a laughter that laughs at such a man, I don't know it, because man Is god to me. I live in a world where many such Gods have existed, and continue to exist in our midst.
Quote :
"Probably the greatest oversight of many historians of Greek art is to forget the fact that most of what we call Freek 'works' of art' were fashioned for dedication ex vote. Once in museums, and detached from their original dedicatory inscriptions, these votive objects are too easily absorbed into an art history that stresses the skills of those who made them, while ignoring the pieties of those who commissioned them. It is true that public credit may have attached to certain votive gifts on the grounds that they were made by the most highly regarded artists of the day. To achieve votive memorial with maximum artistic akribeia, or finesse, may have been as valuable as having it executed in solid gold.
'Some of the gods whom we honor we see clearly, but of others we set up statues as images, and we believe that when we worship these, lifeless [apsychous] though they be, the living gods [empscyhous theos] beyond feel great goodwill towards us and gratitude.' Plato thus struggled to account for the image-making machinery of Greek cults… Most Greek worshippers must have preferred to accept what their own language implied: that a statue served as the 'seat' or hedos of a deity, and the temple it stood in could properly be regarded as the god's home or oikos…
They were also regarded as having prophylactic powers. Greek art and literature are packed with examples of such credence. Cassandra clutching at a statue after the fall of Troy (ill.22) is a common vignette on Greek vases, and Aeschylus, in his Sven Against Thebes, dramatices the effort made by the Theban women to save their city from a siege by appealing to the 'regiment' (strateuma) of the city's statues (archaia brete).
When a mythographer records that Daedalus was the 'first to represent the gods', he charts not only a pioneering artistic ambition, but also the means for an artist to gain public veneration. The artist displayed skill, techie, by his representation of the divine; he also thus demonstrated a semi-divine status, since to be able to represent the gods he must also have seen them, if only in his mind's eye. Hence the near-magical attributes in literary anecdotes concocted around Greek artists, which would later pervade the Renaissance hagiographies of Giotto, Michelangelo et al.: the artist was a vehicle for divine communication, therefore a 'divine maker' (deus artifex).
In modern parlance it is still possible (though mannered) to exclaim, 'How divine!' in front of a work of art. In ancient Greek usage, to declare a sculpture 'godly' (entheos) was not a simply aesthetic response, but an article of faith. And this is how Greek sculpture was invested with its ennobling qualities. The viewers of divine or heroized forms believed that their sculptors had done more than provide souvenirs of greatness. A spirit, an animated power, had been caught in the stone, clay or bronze. This spirit - be it of a deity, a Homeric warrior, a deceased priestess or a prematurely lost infant - reserved a message for all who gazed on its sculpted form. Thus Greeks cukptures served a genuinely vicarious function.
To those who are culturally unfamiliar with it, the sight of a collection of Greek sculpture can be a shock, and that must also have been the case in antiquity. Some non-Greeks - Jews and Christians especially - abhorred its idolatrous significance; others - certainly the Etruscans and perhaps, too, the Buddhist peoples of Gandhara, in northwest India - altered their own traditions of image-making as a result of it; and of course, one or two greeks - notably plato - remained suspicious of the illusionistic obsessions endemic among the sculptors of their day. To Muslims, Jews and some Christians, the worship of graven images is an abomination. To the greeks, the absence of graven images in religious practice was equally repugnant, or at best curious. Herodotus, a tolerant observer, noted that the persians conducted their cults in an open landscape, worshipping without the paraphernalia of altars, statuary or temples: they do so, he suggests, because 'they do not believe the gods to share the same nature with men, as we Greeks imagine' (Histories I.131).
Later writers went further than Herodotus, and condemned iconoclastic cultures as uncivilized. It took sophistication, according to this argument, for the gods to be figured; and as a second-century AD philosopher would put it, 'the greek manner of honoring the gods recruits whatever is most beautiful on earth [en he toys kallistois], whether in terms of raw materials [kathara], human shape [morphe de anthropine] or artistic precisen [techne de akribei]' (Maximus of Tyre, Orations II.3). The most interesting clause of this statement by Maximum concerns humans shape. The best human bodies, he is saying, are vehicles of the divine. Such is the basis of ancient Greek anthropomorphism. Tracing the ripples created around the world by 'the greek Revolution' is a study in itself." [Nigel Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture]
The most famous classical example of the speaking head is in the story of Orpheus, referred to earlier, and a comparison of the figure of this pagan poet with St Denis indicates that his relation to the Christian saint is more extensive than the single theme of decollation. Orpheus’ murder and dismemberment occurs after his descent to the underworld, his loss of Euridice through lack of faith, and his subsequent founding of the Eleusian mysteries based on his experiences in the otherworld. Indeed it was in vengeance for having excluded women from the celebration of these mysteries that the women of Thrace, members of the Dionysian cult called Maenads, assassinated the patron of music. Everything about Orpheus identifies him with the mystical, and it is precisely because of his own passing into the otherworld that Orpheus is able to bring back to earth the secret understanding that he then begins to teach: “It is on the basis of this myth that Orphic theology is constructed. From his descent into the Underworld in search of Eurydice, Orpheus is supposed to have brought back the knowledge of how to get to paradise and to eschew all of the obstacles and traps that await the soul on this journey after death.”
It is this suprahuman knowledge that the disembodied head of Orpheus expresses as an oracle at Lesbos in a discourse so far beyond the mundane that its author is honoured by poets as the inventor of their art. The understanding possessed by Orpheus is gained through transmissions associated with death, as reflected in his descent into the land of the dead in search of Eurydice. He speaks “from the other side,” as it were, and the disembodied head signifies at one and the same time the world of the living – in that it speaks – and the world of the dead – in that it is lifeless. Thus the severed head becomes a medium through which the otherworld communicates to this world and through which its special language is translated into the discursive language of humankind.
Credit for the inauguration of the Eleusian mysteries – rituals which, we might note, address death and the afterlife – Orpheus shares with the god Dionysus. The relationship of the two is one of identity through opposition. Orpheus refuses to honour Dionysus and, in opposition to the Dionysian cult, preaches the serene, ordered rational, “Apollionian way.” This opposition, some say, caused the jealous god to inspire the Maenads to tear Orpheus to pieces. The narrative itself is an encodement that uses the story of enmity between a man and a god to veil the theophany of that god through coincidentia oppositorum. Proclus breaks through this code, as Robert Graves explains: “Thus Orpheus did not come in conflict with the cult of Dionysus; he was Dionysus, and he played the rude alder-pipe, not the civilized lyre. Thus Proclus (Commentary on Plato’s Politics: p.398) writes: ‘Orpheus, because he was the principal in the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered the same fate as the god,’ and Apollodorus (i.3.2) credits him with having invented the Mysteries of Dionysus."
Just as Orpheus may be seen as the man “twice perishing,” so Dionysus is known as the god “twice born,” having been torn from his mother’s womb at six months, having been planted in Zeus’ thigh and having been “born” again three months later. The story of Orpheus’ descent to death to rescue his wife is a version of the story of Dionysus’ descent into Hell to bring his mother back to life. Dionysus and Orpheus are the principal figures representing mystical ecstasy in both the initial approach to that ecstasy through calm reason the eventual attainment of it in orgiastic derangement of reason. Thus Dionysus bears the title “god of the vine” and is credited with the invention of win and the euphoria of its intoxication – the divine unreason that loosens the tongue and makes possible the ethereal discourse of poetry, Orpheus’ art.
Quote :
In addition to the nominal similarity of the Christian mystic and the pagan god of divine mysteries, the mediaeval authors would likely have been encouraged by the feature of Orpheus’ speaking head to see in the myths a parallel to the story of St Denis of Paris who, of course, was thought to have been the Areopagite. Orpheus’ death is brought about for a particular reason and in a particular manner, symbolically expressed; his propagation of the rational, orderly process of understanding provokes the opposite procedure of the dismantling, undoing, and negating all of the assertions brought about through similitude and relation. This procedure is figured in the Maenadian frenzy that dismembers Orpheus, unconstructing, as it were, piece by piece, the physical structure of the body and negating, part by part, the architectural whole that signifies being and form: except the head!
Orpheus’ head, like St Denis’ and those of all the many other cephalophores, remains in the world of human construction, producing a discourse unlike any other, as a token of the reality perceived only though the transcendence of human discourse. While Orpheus’ head, placed in a cave sacred to Apollo, speaks for that god as oracle, St Denis’ head, carried to a sacred place by the saint himself, expresses nothing informative at all, but only sings repetitively ritual praises of God and, through such divine pleo-nasm, functions likewise as divine spokesman.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"They wish to "cultivate" her in general still more, and intend, as they say, to make the "weaker sex" STRONG by culture: as if history did not teach in the most emphatic manner that the "cultivating" of mankind and his weakening--that is to say, the weakening, dissipating, and languishing of his FORCE OF WILL--have always kept pace with one another, and that the most powerful and influential women in the world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just to thank their force of will--and not their schoolmasters--for their power and ascendancy over men. That which inspires respect in woman, and often enough fear also, is her NATURE, which is more "natural" than that of man, her genuine, carnivora-like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove, her NAIVETE in egoism, her untrainableness and innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights--What? And all that is now to be at an end? And the DISENCHANTMENT of woman is in progress? The tediousness of woman is slowly evolving? Oh Europe! Europe! We know the horned animal which was always most attractive to thee, from which danger is ever again threatening thee! Thy old fable might once more become "history"--an immense stupidity might once again overmaster thee and carry thee away! And no God concealed beneath it--no! only an "idea," a "modern idea"!" [BGE, 239]
You could also compare her [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] nature to your earlier comment,
Perpetual wrote:
The male form arouses the feeling of temperance itself. It's more concrete, angular and statuesque in appearance. A woman's form seems more deceptive, necessarily, and arouses the most extreme emotions. Everything about a woman's form is meant to draw you in and spit you back out. It can be both the most intoxicating and most abject thing. A man's form is more reflective. A man's form build's to a peak and this is part of its beauty (short-lived as it may be). It would seem nihilistic to divorce philosophy from a love of physical beauty considering European beauty runs side by side with it.
The Feminine Carnivore...
Quote :
"Her body is a vessel of death. Her beauty is a lure. Her charm a trap. She is irresistible. Her voice is deceit. Her word a plot. Her gesture a snare. She plans her seduction. She cannot help herself. Her mind is a theater of seduction. She is incapable of other thought. Her body was made for seduction. For her all other thought is a mask, a guise for her single purpose. Her skill is ultimate. She will stop at nothing. Underneath grace, she is grasping; beneath her singing is a siren. Her mouth sucks. The air around her becomes a whirlpool. She is treacher ous. Closeness with her is drowning, intimacy suffocation. She blinds.
The innocent cannot see her real shape. Behind her suppliant flesh is a maw, a devouring hole, an abyss. Death. Destruction. Darkness without light. Nothingness. She will eat the flesh she appears to love. Her hunger is never satisfied. To yield to her one demand is to yield to endless demanding. In her is a depth so profound, she darkens all light. The voyager never finds his way out. She is an infinite ocean. Inside her body is hell. Burning.
When she is angry all life stands still in terror. At the gate of her womb is a wound which bleeds freely. It is a wound that will never heal. She is mutilated. She is damaged. She will never forgive existence for this. Her every act is an act of mutilation, of distortion. She is a plague. A disease. The blood from her wound will sour milk. It will spoil fruit or the fermentation in wine; it will break the strings of a violin; it will poison food; cause disease, death in battle, impotence and shrinking. The color of her blood is the color of calamity, of fire, of evil. The smell is offensive, the smell is a warning. She loves blood. She asks for slaughter. She asks for sacrifice. Her sinister wish is for castration. For more wounding, for endless mutilation. Her vulva has teeth. Her stare can petrify. Her womb is a grave. She cannot help herself. She devours even herself. Her passion is endless, without reason, without boundary, existing only for itself, careless, arrogant, lavish, indulgent, mindless, inexorable, cruel, selfish, she will not stop of her own will; her body will not stop being; if she were set free, to do as she willed, her body would never stop, all being would be destroyed except her being, which at last her hunger would not spare, she would consume herself; in her body is the seed of nothingness." [Griffin, Woman and Nature]
"It was possible to create these "descent groups" because agnation was cultic rather than physiological. Sacrificing, not birth or begetting, maintained agnatic continuity .... Physical paternity was not entirely irrelevant: an adulterous woman, a terrible threat to agnatic purity, was excluded from sacrifices of every kind, under threat of terrible punishment from any and every hand. (Jay 1992:45)"
Orpheus is a powerful and enduring mythological figure precisely because he is so inextricably caught up in this new negotiation of radically dichotomous categories-soul and body, life and death, Apollo and Dionysos, male and female. He is called a priest and the initiator of "the Orphic brotherhoods," priests of the sect that L. R. Farnell calls "perhaps the strongest religious influence in the Hellenic world" (1912: 137-39). And what does a priest do? He sacrifices. Here I call upon the work of the late feminist anthropologist Nancy Jay:
"Sacrifice joins people together in community, and, conversely, it separates them from defilement, disease, and other dangers. This opposition of joining and separating is so widespread that one of the clearest indications that a ritual killing is properly sacrifice is that it is part of a religious system of this kind. (1992:17, emphasis added)"
Orpheus is remembered as the archetypal poet-musician, but he is also a sacrificer. As Jay's remarkable book amply demonstrates, "It is a common feature of unrelated traditions that only adult males-fathers, real and metaphorical-may perform sacrifice" (xxiii). Guthrie, citing Apollonius Rhodius, Diodoros, and other ancient writers, enumerates the instances in which the Thracian bard, the putative father of a priestly lineage, acts in this capacity for the crew of the Argo:
"[In the Orphic version of the Argonaurica] we find him performing the inaugural sacrifice before the start, persuading the Argonauts to become initiated at Samothrace ... sacrificing after the accidental killing of King Kyzikos, performing the purificatory rites at Malea on the return journey ... and finally, his last act before returning to his home in Thrace, staying behind alone to offer sacrifice at Tainaron (believed to be one of the entrances to Hades) to the rulers of the world below. (1993 [1935]:28)"
In short, Orpheus' pre-descent legends are characterized by sacrifice, literally from beginning to end. And at the end, he performs his priestly function alone at the very Tainarian Gate which will close upon him forever after his famous-if failed-adventure in Persephone's realm, undertaken in the guise of a bereft lover. I submit that it was upon this very threshold, the one that separates the living from the dead, that another revolutionary concept-now soteriological rather than eschatological-came to be expressed in the mythic narrative of Orpheus' descent for EurydikC."
Quote :
Who Pays the Penalty?
"Probably Orpheus himself was the hero of the Orphic poem on the Descent into Hades, but it is very difficult to find a connexion between the myth and Orphic belief. (Nilsson 1935:212)"
EurydikC is not so named when we first encounter the story of Orpheus' bride. She is instead called Agriope, "Wild-Eyed" or "Wild-Voiced (Nilsson 1935:30). However appropriate the name for a Thracian nymph in the wild retinue of Dionysos, it stands in diametrical contrast to Orpheus himself, who through music and Muse-inspired poetry tames and civilizes what is wild. He knows that the wild (Adikia, Disorder) must be brought under control, made human, useful. One of the most outstanding and time tested ways to bring the uncontrollable under control is by means of sacrifice. Control, by definition, requires the eradication of wildness, or at least its transformation into Order (DikC). Through sacrifice, wildness is expunged, but so too is the Being who embodies it. "The victim has indeed been brought under a kind of analytic control, but in the process it has been killed" (Jay 1992:xxvi).
Classics scholars and poets, as well as comparative mythologists and other folklorists, have made a virtual industry of guessing at why Orpheus disobeys the injunction not to turn, not to look back. But his function as a sacrificer has never been brought to bear on the issue. What if the killing of Agriope, literally accomplished in the eyes of a priest, is the act that transforms wildness (adikia) into justice (dikd)? What if, at the moment before Orpheus acts on Persephone's tearful good will and robs her of the penalty that all men must pay, he stops at the threshold, frozen in the insight that he might pay the penalty of ancient guilt not with his own life on earth as was always demanded before his own religious doctrine delayed the requisite payment until after death, but with the life of another? And that with his turning to sacrifice Eurydikt, whose name means "Wide Justice," he could thereby win redemption for all those sacrificers (fathers and sons) who would come after him?
There are two kinds of humans: those who pay the penalty of the ancient grief and those who do not. The first group is comprised of beings eligible for immortality and bliss; the second will spend eternity in the dark recesses of the Underworld, never to be raised again into the sun, never to be heroized by men. Additionally, there are two kinds of humans: males and females. And only males are in a position to pay the penalty (dikC) because they are the only variety of human to whom initiation in the rites of atonement are available. But with what might the penalty be paid? Why not with something of essential, but profoundly ambiguous, value: Being-in-Time personified, that is, the body of a woman. With DikC, or better yet, with EurydikC, "Wide Justice," All Justice once and for all, all the justice and atonement that Persephone could ever demand from men. Given that her "body" is already that of a bloodless wraith (and hence would not implicate the forbidden practice of blood sacrifice) why not administer to it the sacrificial look that kills?
Bewailing the loss of Bion (a bard in the lineage of Orpheus), the inheritor of his musical prowess, Moschus, identifies Orpheus' wife for the first time as EurydikC (Lang 1932 [ 18801 : 169). The section of the poem that carries her new name begins: "But justice hath overtaken them all."
It goes on: "Not unrewarded will the singing be; and as once to Orpheus's sweet minstrelsy she gave Eurydice to return with him, even so will she send thee too, Bion, to the hills". Persephone will send Bion, as she did Orpheus after his death at the hands of the Maenads, to the hills, otherwise known as the Isles of the Blessed. He takes EurydikC with him only in the sense that now all men take her with them when they die-as ransom. As it was later understood in the cases of Jesus and Custer, the sacrifice of the one came to be understood as redemption, as payment of the penalty for the many.
Is this why Orpheus is dismembered by the female followers of the original One, the god Dionysos? Is Orpheus' payment-by-proxy understood by the Maenads as the ultimate betrayal of the pact made with Persephone by Orpheus himself in his own doctrine of atonement to the Queen of Death, Phanes-Kore herself, the mother of Zagreus-Dionysos? Did he carry the valuation of the male over the female, Timelessness over Being-in-Time, one step too far? Did his innovative act of sacrificial justice change forever the concept of death and redemption for the generations of humans to follow?
Now, long after all the Orphic poets who knew the secret rites of initiation have gained immortality in the Western Lands, subsequent Western religious consciousness seems to have passed its own judgment on this trick played by human men against the gods: it accepted it wholeheartedly as correct. It adopted this essential function of sacrificial mythology into its living religion. All of this means to suggest that EurydikC may hold a more important place in the history of religious thought than was previously suspected. Rather than merely biding her time as a sign-woman (a female whose role is always to signify something beyond herself) in Hades, she may have eventually been replaced with another, more enduring sign, that of a male redeemer; the Styx with another, a brighter river; the Isles of the Blessed with a new home for those who can sustain the judgment of death, that is, the redeemed, the conquerors of Being-in-Time, the cosmic enemy without which no redemption is possible, or indeed, required.
Allow for a moment the possibility that the best of all possible worlds, for all varieties of human Being, is not a world without women-without whom Being-in-Time is unthinkable and unknowable-think of EurydikC, and in the spirit of the eighteenth century American hymn "Free Grace," sing:
"Hallelujah to the man who purchased our pardon. We'll praise him again when we pass over Jordan."
Cosmological myths are not without consequences. Ask a woman."
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Woman is at ease being touched by the hand that is at ease touching - the woman feels the accuracy of the hand shaping her form, posture, movement, being - she revels in being made to see from all angles at once - her whole being is oriented on being made to spin and be viewed, her life is one great theatre play -- the center of the stage, as she still is among those living amidst remnants of ancient cultures. Men flutter around her like children. And yet, the boys are away, driving, digging, destroying, designing - where manhood is incomplete, woman becomes her own hell. Where man doesn't carry the weight of his lust in the open, woman must carry the whole load. Woman never shirks back - this is why she is considered lowest. "the dark mother" is she who gives birth even to the unfortunate. The bitter sea.
Some girls are chosen. All envy and prowess is her share, she dances amidst the hatred and the failure, and she beckons him who risks his well being for her, and depending on his charm, she will prove to the world that it isn't as wretched as it sometimes would like to be.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
I add only that it is worth asking why experience of the underworld turned Orpheus into a devotee of the sun. The answer is, I think, provided by the amazing light that frequently marks the unforgettable transition from anxiety to joy for the mystic initiand, as it does also in the modern near-death experience. This light was, in mystery-cult, sometimes envisaged as the sun (cf., e.g., Aristophanes Frogs 155, 454-5). Mystery-cult was a rite of passage that had to be kept secret from the world at large: it often involved the imagined death of the initiate as a rehearsal for real death, as well as transition from ignorance to knowledge and from anxiety to joy. At Bacchae 629-30, in a passage full of correspondences with mystic initiation, Dionysus makes a “light” (this is the word in the manuscript, which scholars have mistakenly altered) which Pentheus attacks – an extreme expression of the individualistic obstinacy of his resistantance to mystery-cult. And Sophocles, perhaps influenced by Aeschylus, made Lycurgus “put…out the fire” (Antigone 964). Orpheus is in myth associated with both Dionysus and Apollo. His choice of the sun (Apollo) implies the superiority to the mystic light of Dionysus.
- "A Companion to Tragedy - Rebecca Bushnell"
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
"Alternations between light and darkness, sky and earth, reassert themselves in literary portrayals of Apollo. John Gould points out that in the Iliad Apollo is shown as giving “hints of a darker, altogether more uncanny aspect of divinity than that seen in the divine assemblies of Olympus.” In Book One, for example, Apollo “comes like the night” to punish the Greeks for Agamemnon’s insult to Chryses, the devoted priest of Apollo (44-47):
"Down from the peaks of Olympus he strode, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders his bow and covered quiver. The arrows rattled on the shoulders of the angry god, as he moved; and his coming was like the night."
“Even further from the image of socialized humanity,” Gould continues, “is the unseen Apollo who begins (the sacrificial image is almost inevitable) the slaughter of Patroclus in Iliad 16.” In lines 787-796, Patroclus is attacked by Apollo, who strikes him in the back, stunning him; the god then knocks his helmet off, leaving Patroclus with neither sense nor means of defense. Patroclus has been touched by Apollo and is now doomed; with tragic irony, it is just as Patroclus is attacking the Greeks “like a god” that Apollo intervenes, and the end of the hero’s life is “shown forth” (787).
Despite Homer’s words in Iliad 1 comparing the advent of Apollo to the onset of darkness, it is the god’s connection with light and the sun which has seemed to predominate, especially as a result of 19th-century German scholarship. We must be cautious not to give undue emphasis to the alleged link between Apollo and the sun. Bremmer points out that this association originated with “an intellectual, sun-venerating sect in the fifth century BC. It had little influence, except that Roman poets found the name Phoebus a convenient synonym for Sol.” As Carlier observes, the linking of Apollo and the Sun does not occur in surviving texts before Aeschylus. Moreover, “the myths often pit him against nocturnal and chthonic forces: against Gaia, mistress of nocturnal Dreams, in Iphigenia in Tauris, and especially against the Erinyes (Furies), those daughters of Night, in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” The Python which Apollo kills at Delphi is a snaky, earthy creature, as is the earth-born giant Tityos whom he defeats. Apollo has sons who are, as Carlier points out, “similar to himself, such as Aristaeus, physician-purifier and killer of serpents, but also children who are very different from him: Asclepius and Trophonius, hero serpents, soothsayers marked by their complicity with the earth and its mantic powers.” These chthonic associations, especially when seen alongside of the god’s close links to homicide and appeasement of the furious dead, form “a dark side to the luminous and celestial Apollo.” Carlier points out that the fire of Apollo is neither the flame of the artisan nor the “peaceful and supernatural light” associated with him by philosophers; rather, Apollo’s fire is blazing, violent and frightening:
"Then, like a star at noonday, the lord, far-working Apollo, leaped from the ship: flashes of fire flew from him thick and their brightness reached to heaven. He entered into his shrine between priceless tripods, and there made a flame to flare up bright, showing forth the splendor of his shafts, so that the radiance filled all Crisa, and the wives and well-girded daughters of the Crisaeans raised a cry at that outburst of Phoebus; for he cast great fear upon them all. (Homeric Hymn to Apollo 440-447)"
Carlier sees in this passage “blast, immediacy, possession, terror, cry.” Apollonian light, she concludes, “has been described since the Homeric Hymns in terms that evoke the violent nature of the bow——the bow being the characteristic weapon of the god, which gains him access to Olympus.”
Quote :
“The song of the most alert of all gods does not arise dreamlike out of an intoxicated soul,” Otto concludes, “but flies directly towards a clearly seen goal, the truth and the rightness of its aim is a sign of its divinity. Out of Apollo’s music there resounds divine recognition. . . . This music is thus the great educator, the source and symbol of all order in the world and in the life of mankind. Apollo the musician is identical with the founder of ordinances, identical with him, who knows what is right, what is necessary, what is to be.” This clarity of vision, this unerring perception, Otto claims, is only possible with distance: “Apollo rejects whatever is too near——entanglement in things, the melting gaze, and, equally, soulful merging, mystical inebriation and its ecstatic vision.”
-
Quote :
"Apollonius of Rhodes, in Argonautica 2.680ff., describes a glimpse of Apollo granted at dawn to the Argonauts as the god moved away to the remote land of the Hyperboreans:
"They were awe-struck at the sight and no one dared to face the god and meet his lovely eyes. They stood there with selfbowed heads while he, aloof, passed through the air on his way across the sea."
The god makes no direct contact with the adventurers, and certainly offers them no intimate, personal assistance such as that granted to Odysseus by Athena in the Odyssey. Apollo, Carlier concludes, was for the Greeks distant, formidable, and a readily-available symbol of divine transcendence."
"We ask no flowers to crown the blushing- rose, Nor glittering gems, thy beauteous form to deck ; The pearl, in Persia's precious gulf that grows, Yields to the dazzling whiteness of thy neck : Gold adds not to the lustre of thy hair, But, vanquish 'd, sheds a fainter lustre there. The Indian hyacinth's celestial hue Shrinks from the bright effulgence of thine eye ; The Paphian Goddess bathed thy lips in dew, And lent thy form ambrosial harmony. My soul would perish in the melting gaze, But for thine eyes, where Hope for ever plays." [The Greek anthology]
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
It is all the more surprising, then, for Miss Harrison to say, " No one could doubt, on looking at Orpheus and Eurydice, that this is an instant of irrevocable separation." 2 In fact, many have doubted, and on good evidence, that this is the tragic moment when Orpheus turned to look at Eurydice and lost her. Bowra says "the relief displays too little distress for so tragic a catastrophe." 3 Guthrie notes that other representations of the descent " show an Orpheus who might well be supposed to be at home in the underworld, without the necessity of any conjugal errand to account for his presence." 4 More important still is the fact that in every literary reference to the myth antecedent to, contemporary with and for at least three centuries subsequent to the relief, there is no second loss of Eurydice. In Euripides (Aic., 357-362 with scholiast), Isokrates (Busiris, XI, , pseudo-Heraclitus (De Incred., 21), Hermesianax (Athenaeus, Deipn., XIII, 597b-c), Moschus (III, 115-25), Diodorus Siculus (IV, 25, 4) and the Orphic Argonautica (40-42), Orpheus is clearly thought to have been successful in resurrecting Eurydice. In Plato's version (Syrmp., 179d, a classic example of his bias against musicians and penchant for private mythmaking), Orpheus is not given his wife at all; he is shown a phantom and sent away. Not until the Culex and Virgil's Georgics does the story of Orpheus' backward glance occur in literature. This has been noted many times,5 and the philologist is understand-ably confused when the archaeologist persists in applying what appears to be a first-century or at best Hellenistic interpretation to a fifth-century monument.
It will be objected that the details of the relief will fit only the Virgilian story: Orpheus has turned, he has gently brushed the veil from Eurydice's face; she looks into his eyes and tenderly lays her left hand on his shoulder, while her right is firmly clasped by Hermes, the winged escort of the dead. To this one can reply that the relief may have prompted the story, and not vice versa.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Orpheus and Eurydice, “two forms / of the one love,” are, following Orpheus’ death, “restored and mutual.” The sense here is of the nature of romantic love as union (e.g. “my better half,” “soul-mates,” and other common expressions), a union done violence to by the fitfulness of life – and solved by death, which removes the catastrophic risk of one hurting or dying without the other. Donna Tartt illustrates the experience of a circumscribed and mortal self:
"But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own."
On the one hand Eurydice, dying without her husband, suffers most from this phenomenon. But the other side of the predicament of singularity – that no other is or can be aligned with oneself to the point of sharing experience and pain – is that the other, even and especially the beloved other, is unforgivably liable to pains and loss that leave the lover lonely in the limits of his empathy.
Quote :
In the Orpheus myth, only Orpheus is present (literally, on earth, and figuratively as a character) enough to be wounded by the phenomenon of singularity. In fact, his life, from the point of Eurydice’s first death to his only one, is a tribute to this wound and his attempts both to correct it and come to terms with it. The risk of separation and disconnection characteristic of love between two people is not loss of self, but loss of the other. So the reader experiences the loss of Eurydice with Orpheus, not with Eurydice: we do not grieve for her losing her life, but for Orpheus losing her presence. Eurydice, loved, may lose her life – but Orpheus, loving, must be prepared at every moment for the distance, alienation, and loss of his lover. Less terrible than the self in isolation is the other in isolation: one must cope with sensation and even death affecting one’s lover alone; one must survive them.
Maurice Blanchot, in his essay “Literature and the Right to Death,” articulates this danger:
"When I say, "This woman," real death has been announced and is already present in my language; my language means that this person, who is here right now, can be detached from herself, removed from her existence and her presence and suddenly plunged into a nothingness in which there is no existence or presence; my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction; it is a constant, bold allusion to such an event."
Blanchot describes not the experience of loving a person – a woman, specifically – prone to the threats of mortality, but something more insidious: the route by which the death of the other is conceptualized, made possible and likely within the framework of one’s worldview. In this sense, the task with which Orpheus grapples is not his wife’s death but the fact that he lives within a world in which his wife can die. This is where Barthes’ statement comes in, that “an always present I is constituted only by a confrontation with an always absent you . . . the subject’s place and the other’s place cannot permute.” In this way the experience of the lover becomes synonymous with that extreme solitude: to love is to come to terms, or to be forced to come to terms, with the distance and danger of the other, the impossibility of union. Jean-Paul Sartre describes the fundamental rupture between the self and what exists outside of it: “The reality of that cup is that it is there and that it is not me. We shall interpret this by saying that the series of its appearances is bound by a principle which does not depend on my whims
Marcel Proust, while cognizant of the dangers that adhere to the phenomenon of loving something not oneself, marks these dangers as, also, one great strength of it. According to his view, the act of loving can be an attempt to overcome the pain of singular existence described by Tartt. Loving another admits access to those parts of the world unknown – that is, everything outside of the self. Aligning oneself with another human being allows one to conceptualize what it is like to exist as something not oneself: an awareness that the singularity of existence can make, or make appear, absolutely untenable. The ultimate task, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke phrases it, is to “love life in a form that is not your own”: a visceral coming to terms with the extent of the world and those within it that are ultimately alien and ultimately perishable.76 Friedrich Nietzsche describes love, ideally, as the internalization of this truth, arguing that it amounts to “the understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do.” Similarly, Erich Fromm says that “love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.” Interaction between two people implies, without fail, an encounter with a different perspective, set of experiences, and way of existing in the world. Here, to an extent, the benefit of love: a coming to terms with the fact that others are not oneself, are fundamentally distant from oneself, that their existence is not a function of one’s own. A way out of the too-circumscribed self, a transcendence of it, is made tentatively possible.
Roland Barthes notes further, in his discussion of absence, that: “This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival; for if I did not forget, I should die. The lover who doesn’t forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory.” Orpheus does exactly this. He never forgets the grief of having lost Eurydice; his inability to move beyond it and accede to the Maenads’ request for sex is what costs him his life. The Maenads, followers of Dionysus consumed by the abandon of bacchanalia, are attracted to Orpheus and demand that he join them. Since the second loss of Eurydice, however, Orpheus has sworn off sex with women, and he denies the Maenads. Infuriated, they tear him to pieces.
According to Barthes’ reading, it seems almost that Orpheus is guilty of loving too much. His love is an unlivable one, irreconcilable with the mortal world. Emmet Robbins, detailing the progression of the myth, notes that, “to the Romantics and to [thetwentieth] century he has been the eternal seeker beyond the threshold.”81 If we return to Blanchot’s remarks on “this woman” and her death, it might be said that Orpheus never actually metabolizes these ideas: his love admits no possibility of the death of the other, and that gives rise to both his successes and failures as a lover. Refusing to acknowledge death allows him to descend into hell and earn back Eurydice’s life. His success as a lover is indicated by his continued popularity as one of the great mythical lovers – even his look behind as, sometimes, proof of love without limit. He fails, though, in that there is no room in his love for trust of Eurydice as a separate and distinct human being: the ultimate task, it turns out, for which he has failed to prepare. He loves her so much that he cannot come to terms with a world in which either of them can exist outside the sight or the life of the other.
It is for this reason that he descends to the underworld to rescue his lover (the only hero in mythology to embark on a katabasis for that reason): he has not capitulated to the possibility of her dying while he lives. He goes to the underworld because he loves Eurydice so much that he refuses to recognize a world in which he can be parted from her, separable – the separation for which he is named – and not unified. But then the tables are turned, and limitless love can no longer help him: success, during that critical ascent, is for Orpheus contingent upon the restraint of sight and impulse. The act of believing that the loved and mortal other exists outside one’s scope of sight and certainty is presented as both his best hope and beyond his capability. The consuming passion of Orpheus, the over, aggravates the perils of mortality. Trust in the life of the one’s beloved is, it may be, offered as a solution to the problem of lovers existing in separate and mortal bodies.
Quote :
The prescript of the gods – that Orpheus not, at all costs, look behind him – amounts to an injunction for him to trust, fundamentally, that Eurydice exists as separate from him: a being capable of existing while he is not looking at her. “Everything is at stake in the decision of the gaze,” writes Blanchot in his essay “The Gaze of Orpheus.” Orpheus and Eurydice could be happy, by Nietzsche and Fromm’s definition of love, if he can make it up to the mortal world without looking. All he has to do is make it to the top believing that Eurydice is alive, that both can be alive outside of the sight of each other: that loneliest and most redeeming aspect of love. But – ultimately, fatally, understandably, irrevocably – he has to check, and make sure. His trust in her existence as not contingent to his own fails him; and so he loses her. We know as little as we do about Eurydice because Orpheus knows that little: because he loves without admitting strangeness, without acknowledging and accepting the necessary horror of solitude.
Quote :
But the myth has endured, in its permutations and repossessions, out of a desire to read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as true to our lived experience – and, when it is not, to create it anew. There is little interest evidenced in allegory; the story enthralls, the story survives, out of an indomitable and unconscious will to treat Orpheus and Eurydice as real people about whom we know relatively little. Rather than allegory, the myth gains its greatest resonance and possibility, as a bridge between individuals and the stories and forces that buffet them, as a true story, obscured. True how? However you like; however you wish to extract what details are obscured. The myth is ours now.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
One thing is certain: the ancient artists had as much knowledge of Nature, and as sure an idea of what can be represented and of how it should be done, as Homer himself. Unfortunately, works of art of the highest order are all too few. But when one contemplates them, one's only desire is to get to know them rightly and then to depart in peace. These supreme works of art have been created by men as the highest products of Nature in accordance with true natural laws. Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.
Goethe wrote:
Beauty is a manifestation of Nature's secret laws, which would otherwise remain forever hidden.
_________________ Life has a twisted sense of humour, doesn't it. . . .
* * *
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
I have described the evolution of thought from the age of Plato to that of Kant in order to be able to show the impressions which Goethe was bound to receive when he turned to the outcome of the philosophical thoughts to which he might have adhered in order to satisfy his intense desire for knowledge. He found in the philosophies no answer to the innumerable problems which his nature impelled him to face. Indeed, whenever he delved into the world-conception of some particular philosopher, he found an opposition between the drift of his questions and the world of thought from which he would have liked to get counsel. The reason for this lies in the fact that the one-sided Platonic separation of idea and experience was repugnant to his being. When he observed Nature the ideas lay there before him. He could therefore only think of Nature as permeated by ideas. A world of ideas that neither permeates the objects of Nature nor brings about their appearance and disappearance, their becoming and growth, is to him nothing but a feeble web of thought. The logical fabrication of trains of thoughts without penetration into the life and creative activity of Nature appeared to him unfruitful, for he felt himself intimately one with Nature. He looked upon himself as a living member of Nature. In his view, all that arose in his spirit had been permitted by Nature so to arise. Man should not sit away in a corner and imagine that from there he can spin out of himself a web of thoughts which elucidates the true being of things. He should rather allow the stream of world-events to flow through him perpetually. Then he will feel that the world of ideas is nothing else than the active, creative power of Nature. He will not then want to stand above the objects in order to reflect upon them, but he will sink himself into their depths and extract from them all that lives and works in them.
_________________ Life has a twisted sense of humour, doesn't it. . . .
* * *
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
Soul and body are one; interconnected with each other; hence we judge behaviour patterns through the outer appearance. Beauty in a person is symmetry; in art it is the representation of reality or dreams expressed as if they are real.
Statues represent a moment; and when perfectly beautiful, they express this moment in full capacity in regards with health, virility, strength and fertility - in the moment of courage, grieve, loss, joy, love, rage. Beauty in a person is the expression of health, vigor, fertility, youthfulness, endurance, will power, balance / proportion - traits appreciated through means of biological needs and a expression of one's overall behaviour (mind over body or the path of least resistance).
Fat unhygienic people do have a claim upon ''blaming'' their genes, not that their genes have more influence upon the body in regards with becoming faster fat compared to others - but their laziness and lack of will power and low quality minds have much to do with their genetics. I judge the mind upon the outer appearance and his/her overall behaviour and expression.
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
Physical symmetry and beauty imply genetic fitness, genetic fitness implies superiority, and superiority implies the existence of inferiority. Thus, Subjecting what SHOULD be subjected as unfit or inferior is precisely what the modern liberal agenda fervently wars against, as that guy accurately explains.
This exaltation of defective physical beauty is another piston in the modern engine of cultural degradation. Francis Yockey called them “Culture Distorters”; the insidious agents who contaminate the quality of culture, and a higher life, by turning its strengths into negative anachronistic indulgences that should be replaced by smaller and smaller superficial refinements (atomistic progress) that are more indirect and innocuous to avert the social objective away from quality to quantity.
The sub-sect of the so deemed “Plus-Size Model” trend is also gaining momentum; professional modeling that emphasizes the female attractiveness in what they enjoy reasoning as “luscious curves” “a man loves a woman with meat on her bones”, and any other pop-cultural insecure quip to promote physical inferiority. What these clueless morons do not understand, is that this positive fat appearance is only marketed and praised within reason(which would indicate a prejudice of superiority) of its appearance. They would probably cringe in disgust at a fat model on the cover of a men’s magazine with unsightly stomach rolls and cellulite riddling her thighs, but they would approve of one with smoother more shapely fat endowments. Thus, these messages of the sanctity of weakness comes with its own hypocritical correlation to the very superior tenets they chastise.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37196 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
They call themselves "free" when they've detached from reality, comfortable in the artificiality they call "world", and which always implies a manmade system some of them cannot adapt to.
They flipped the definition of Nihilism to now mean anything that lacks the human constructs of meaning, morality, purpose, and having succeeded in this they then proceed to detach all words from reality, "freeing" them to now mean anything for anybody. So, "freedom" ceases to be a degree of dependency, displaying strength and quality, and becomes a form of delusion, and beauty is disconnected from its references to symmetry and the fitness it insinuates, and now means something ambiguous, spiritual, mystical, which anyone can possess and claim as his/her own.
Perspectivism, where all perspectives are respectable, if they respect, in turn, all other perspectives. A kind of social agreement; an unstated tolerance of lies, and pretenses, if the other reciprocates...creating a hypocritical (inter)action.
If you search you will find many examples of words being redefined so as to disconnect them from all references to the world, or to phenomena. Why? Because the world is indifferent to human bullshit. Detaching the word frees the concept from this unforgiving phenomenal world, and makes it another toy in the hands of desperate, cowardly, imbeciles, wanting to pat themselves on the back, or exploit some other stunted mind's feebleness.
Looked what those other morons did with the word "value". Having detached it from reality they could now give it its own ontology. Value not as appreciation, evaluation, judgment, but value as existing outside space/time, and life.
The one who tells you something that hurts your feelings, is evil, is ill; the one who buys into your lies, and delusions, or, at least, pretends to, opening the door for you to be "nice" in return, is upholding this unstated agreement and so is "good" and "healthy".
The message is clear: If you cannot offer a solution to the predicament you are exposing, then you must keep silent. If you do not keep silent you will be treated as would a herd an unwelcome interloper.
Because sheltering leads to rapidly increasing numbers, and the mutations they carry, protected from natural culling mechanisms, what happens is the social contract becomes stricter, and the punishment more severe. This is what political-correctness is. We can hardly comment on anything anymore, and the subjects where opinions outside the official, popular, narrative are tolerated is shrinking. Eventually we'll be left with platitudes and chatter about trivialities, like movies and sports statistics.
This is dumbing-down.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
As a black girl growing up, I found it very hard to appreciate my body and its African Trademark(s) because of what the media told me ‘beauty’ was. All the sexy ads, TV superstars, music videos and basically everything that was about ‘hot girls’ had an image of a tall, skinny woman. Being a young black girl, with a bit more curves (even at that age) than most of the women who were celebrated as beautiful; it was hard to look into the mirror and accept that I was also beautiful. In fact, I spent many of my primary school days thinking I was fat. Having been short my whole life didn’t assist in dispelling the notion of my roundness at all either! Although I never tried drastic weight-loss mechanisms because I was fortunate enough to have a strong personality and the will to be great in other things that don’t include my body; it was still very hard to have to wrap my head around the fact that I will never be ‘beautiful’. Even when I did lose weight, because I went through a very sporty few years, I was still ‘thick’ (as they now call it). I never got skinny. The humps and bumps were always there. It was just who I am, and the media was telling me it wasn’t beautiful. It was a bit frustrating.
It’s only in recent years that the black woman’s body is celebrated and accepted to represent beauty. I got introduced to Nicki Minaj and her music in grade 10 when she was still dropping sick mix tapes and one of the most notable things about her was how she brought the ‘big booty’ to our media and forced the media to accept that as ‘beautiful’ as well. Anaconda captures that whole journey in one muvid. This is revolutionary. Ironically many women saw this video and wanted to look down on Nicki as tasteless and without morals because she’s showing her ass the world. These same women see your Paris Hiltons and whoever else is supposed to be a hot super model doing the same thing on public platforms and don’t even flinch because it’s ‘normal’. So it is more acceptable for a woman with no ass to be showing ass, but if you have ass then you must be ashamed of it? Now I am not promoting the idea of less clothing and just flaunting yourself with bare minimums, I am just saying that if you can accept such from small assed women, why can’t you accept it from bigger assed women? If its 2014 and you still watch music videos it means you see ass all the time and have accepted it, don’t act so touched when it’s a bigger ass. This is pretty much the response Nicki gave in all her interviews about this. It shouldn’t have even been an issue in the first place, we see ass all the time. We are even used to it now, but when it’s big we must question the morality of displaying your body on public platforms? If we are going to have standards, let them be universal!
Personally, I have felt so much more liberated. I have even been rocking proper shorts for the past few weeks without worrying that they highlight my ass too much; something my thinner friends have been doing for years, without having to think twice. It is not my fault that I have semi exaggerated hump and bumps, I shouldn’t have to feel apologetic about how certain clothing enhances those features, if it is not a universal woman struggle.
On the contrary, Anaconda was not a license to make women who have smaller asses insecure about themselves. The whole “Fuck the skinny bitches”, “Fuck you if you’re skinny” part is really unnecessary and backwards. (Yes she didn’t have to grind on Drake like that :””D)
I feel that as women, we have soooo many struggles as it is, can self-appreciation please not be one. We have different physiques that I believe we should all love and appreciate.
I work hard for my body and if I want to show it off I will! That gives nobody the right to look down on me as a seeker of male attention or cheap or whatever else people say when women with shape wear shorts, but not when skinny women do.
I will feel beautiful in any and everything I wear because flawlessness is not a look; it’s a feeling that I will be embracing a lot more often. So ladies, let’s do ourselves a favour and start feeling beautiful for ourselves instead of looking at other ladies and how WE feel they look…that is none of your business. Our business is our own bodies. Our temples, ours asset, gifts…beauty! Let’s cherish that.
Asses detached from the person, twerking and forcing themselves upon our senses. How beautiful..
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
''Those who look for beauty in art are simply out of touch with Modern realities.'' As the Moderns will say.
Interesting documentary; from Beauty to Originality. From Beauty to Utility; if reversed, thus merely for utility, economic purpose, than it will lose all its purpose. Beauty reminding us of non-economic purpose.
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
@Perpetual, I haven't managed to read all your links yet, but speaking of Woman as Be-ing, and Eurydice, more properly, Eury-Dike - "great Justice", Heidegger uses the Anaximander idea of flux or "becoming as a penalty paid" with Orpheus' dis-memberment in the "face" of eury"Dike"; interesting paper:
Through art you direct the people upon an Ideal, never to fullfil but as a means to live up to, investing your mental and bodily energies upon the reminding inheritance and future desire.
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
OhFortunae
Gender : Posts : 2311 Join date : 2013-10-26 Age : 30 Location : Land of Dance and Song
"Symmetry is the opposition of equal quantities to each other; proportion, the connection of unequal quantities with each other. The property of a tree sending out equal boughs on opposite sides is symmetrical; its sending out shorter and smaller towards the top, proportional" (4.125-126). Proportion, a relationship of changing, developing things, creates the unity of sequence, while symmetry, which is static, creates opposition and balance. In other words, proportion is kinetic order, symmetry static order. Ruskin emphasizes that this necessary "reciprocal balance" is formed not by the opposition of identical things, but by things which balance each other: "Absolute equality is not required, still less absolute similarity. A mass of subdued colour may be balanced by a point of a powerful one"
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
, pseudo-Heraclitus (De Incred., 21), Hermesianax (Athenaeus, Deipn., XIII, 597b-c), Moschus (III, 115-25), Diodorus Siculus (IV, 25, 4) and the Orphic Argonautica (40-42), Orpheus is clearly thought to have been successful in resurrecting Eurydice. In Plato's version (Syrmp., 179d, a classic example of his bias against musicians and penchant for private mythmaking), Orpheus is not given his wife at all; he is shown a phantom and sent away. Not until the Culex and Virgil's Georgics does the story of Orpheus' backward glance occur in literature. This has been noted many times,5 and the philologist is understand-ably confused when the archaeologist persists in applying what appears to be a first-century or at best Hellenistic interpretation to a fifth-century monument.
