To come suddenly into view. Revelation. Phainein - to show, a phantasm.
Quote :
"Those moments when the connection is made, that, is my keenest pleasure.
Knowing.
Not feeling, not thinking.
Success comes as a result of inspiration.
Revelation is the development of an image, first blurred, then coming clear.
A moment of epiphany." [Hannibal, 3.2]
Brooding is to be Trans-Fixed. A state of suspension where there is "neither feeling, nor thinking" - neither emotion, nor intellect... but a "Knowing".
Knowing is a Creating.
(Hannibal keeps re-creating the art he sees trans-fixed; and makes it come Alive literally in the corpses he arranges...)
Nietzsche wrote:
"Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say "thus it shall be!" They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their "knowing" is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power. Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers yet? Must there not be such philosophers?"
The moment of epiphany is a re-Cognition... like a broken tea-cup coming together again... What is scattered and dispersed comes together in a moment of Revelation...
Quote :
"There is a passage in the novel Hannibal where Hannibal watches A brief history of time and listens to Stephen Hawking talking about the thermodynamic/cosmological arrow of time and entropy:
“You may see a cup of tea fall off of a table and break into pieces on the floor. But you will never see the cup gather itself back together and jump back on the table… The increase of disorder, or entropy, is what distinguishes the past from the future.”
The image of the shattered teacup that spontaneously reassembles, works as an homage to the series, specifically an homage to the cinematography of the pendulum scenes, where Will recreates the crimes in his fantasy.
In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the number of specific ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of disorder or a measure of progressing towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The arrow of time is the “one-way direction” or “asymmetry” of time. The thermodynamic arrow of time is provided by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that in an isolated system, entropy tends to increase with time. As a system advances through time, it will statistically become more disordered. This asymmetry can be used empirically to distinguish between future and past. The cosmological arrow of time points in the direction of the universe’s expansion. In the novel Hannibal, we learn that our cannibal is obsessed with entropy and wants to reverse time: “Hawking had once believed the universe would stop expanding and would shrink again, and entropy might reverse itself. Later Hawking said he was mistaken. For years Lecter had teased the problem, wanting very much for Hawking to be right the first time, for the expanding universe to stop, for entropy to mend itself, for Mischa, eaten, to be whole again.” He is so obsessed that he occasionally drops teacups to shatter on the floor and is not satisfied when they don’t gather themselves up;
Hannibal: "Occasionaly I drop a teacup to shatter on the floor. On purpose. I’ m not satisfied when it doesn’t gather itself up again."
Hannibal adds an element of chaos in every situation; he increases the entropy in every system. What we hadn’t yet figured out was that Hannibal is not always, an agent of disorder; he sometimes works as an agent of order, like he does when he tries to reverse entropy: he cannot bring shattered teacups together, but he sure can reassemble a shattered psyche. Remember how Hannibal describes Will in the pilot episode of the series: “I think Uncle Jack sees you as a fragile little tea-cup, the finest china used for only special guests.”? Will’s psyche is a fragile little tea-cup. I will again refer to the discussion on the Freudian psychic structures, where I posited that Hannibal’s psyche lacks superego and Will’s psyche lacks id: “Both Will’s and Hannibal’s personalities are fractured. They lack important psychic structures, for which they compensate by exaggerating their opposite structures. The reason why Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter have such great rapport, is that their psyches are complementary.(…) It might be the case that just as [Hannibal] smashed his superego and used the pieces to assemble a morality of his own, he wants to smash Will, as a symbol for superego, only to reassemble him in a way that suits him.” Which he does. He throws Will’s fragile psyche on the floor and smashes it, just like he throws these teacups of his. Will’s psyche is then painstakingly reassembled, recreated in Hannibal’s own image. One shudders at the thought of how many teacups never got to reassemble after Hannibal smashed them on the floor."
Imagine our teacup, shattering on the floor. In the isolated system of the room and the teacup, disorder can only increase. The teacup can never come together. But what if a certain psychotherapist was determined to put the teacup back together himself? What if he picked up every single piece and glued it back with such precision that the cup appeared pristine? Would that decrease entropy? Has Hannibal symbolically reversed the arrow of time? No. The laws of nature are ruthless. Even as entropy decreases in one system, allowing us to recover our precious teacup, it increases in another, as our psychotherapist has spent great amounts of energy in putting the teacup back together (not to mention there’s now glue everywhere). Thus, the total of entropy in both systems still increases, despite (and because of) his best efforts. Every time Hannibal manages to reverse entropy (by reassembling a shattered psyche), there is an increase in the system’s (the whole universe of Hannibal) entropy.
The show identifies Hannibal with the God Shiva, a popular Hindu deity of a paradoxical nature, both benevolent and fierce.
Shiva is the destroyer of the world, responsible for change both in the form of death and destruction and in the positive sense of destroying the ego, the false identification with the form. This also includes the shedding of old habits and attachments. In fierce aspects, he is often depicted slaying demons and he shares several features with Rudra, a deity associated with wind, storm and the hunt. The name Rudra has been translated to “the roarer” (which reminds us instantly of the bull-roarer, the ancient ritual musical instrument we hear whenever we see the Wendigo form of Hannibal) and has been taken as a synonym for the god Shiva – the two names are used interchangeably.
“Shiva is Kala, meaning time, but he is also Maha Kala, meaning “Great Time” or eternity. As Nataraja, King of dancers, his gestures, wild and full of grace, precipitate the cosmic illusion; his flying arms and legs and the swaying of his torso produce the continuous creation-destruction of the universe, death exactly balancing birth. The choreography is the whirligig of time.”
Destruction opens the path for a new creation of the universe, a new opportunity for the beauty and drama of universal illusion to unfold. The tongue of flames that Shiva Nataraja’s upper left hand bears, represents the final destruction of creation. Tandava, the violent and dangerous form of Shiva’s dance is associated with the destruction of weary worldviews, perspectives and lifestyles. But the dance of the Nataraja is also an act of creation, which arouses dormant energies and scatters the ashes of the universe in a pattern that will be the design of the ensuing creation, in the form of Lasya (the gentle form of dance). In essence, the Lasya and the Tandava are just two aspects of Shiva’s nature; for he destroys in order to create, tearing down to build again. Hannibal is, like Shiva, both a destroyer and a benefactor. As a therapist, he smashes Will’s psyche and then reassembles the shattered pieces and recreates it it so that it mirrors his own. But nowhere is his dual nature more evident than in his actions towards Abigail. He ends Abigail’s life, essentially destroying Will’s opportunity to become a father. But in Ko No Mono he says that he can give Abigail (or, a child) back to Will. The teacup dropping on the floor immediately reminds us of the scene where Abigail, having eaten psychotropic mushrooms, drops a teacup on the floor. The teacup shatters all over Hannibal’s kitchen floor and then Hannibal picks up the pieces.
Hannibal: Every creative act has its destructive consequence, Will. The Hindu God Shiva is simultaneously destroyer and creator. Who you were yesterday is laid waste to give rise to who you are today. Will: How many lives had to be sanctified? How many consciences devastated? Hannibal: As many as were necessary. Will: You sacrificed Abigail. You cared about her. As much as I did. Hannibal: Maybe more. But then, how much has God sacrificed? Will: What God do you pray to? Hannibal: I don’t pray. I have not been bothered by any considerations of deity, other than to recognize how my own modest actions pale beside those of God. Will: I prayed… I would see Abigail again. Hannibal: Well, your prayer did not go entirely unanswered. You saw part of her. Hannibal: Will, should the universe contract, should time reverse and the teacup come together, a place could be made for Abigail in your world. Will: What place would that be? Hannibal: You ‘ve lost a child, Will. It seems you’re likely to gain one."
Brooding and the Wind of the Furor is the "middle-edge" that is "neither feeling, nor thinking". Like the "Knowing" Daemon that is the nexus between the immortals and the mortals, a Sign first blurred but slowly becoming clear, it is finding the Link that runs through, showing the appearance of a God, the finest order, a manifestation... a moment of epiphany makes us Breath-less.
The Daemon and the Breath of Inspiration...
Quote :
"Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air." [Leonard Bernstein]
"I interpret Botticelli's painting as being centrally concerned with the motif of breath as spiritus: as alluding to a secret interior voice, here depicted as a divine afflatus emanating from the wind-god Zephyr and to the ambiguous or uncertain value of its abundant cultural fruits. I will also suggest that, for particular historical reasons, Botticelli may have imagined the spiritus or afflatus depicted in this painting as an event which was temporally specific; even, perhaps, as a breath or voice that derived its specific meanings and effects from an interweaving of the unfolding patterns of history with those of particular stars.
My starting point, however, is the question of this painting’s internal dissonance. Although this problem has been little discussed in recent years, a vivid apprehension of the painting’s internal contradictions prompted the comment of Jean Lorrain, made over a century ago, that the ‘Primavera’ was ‘satanique, irrésistible et terrifiante’ (Chastel 2). What Lorrain was presumably alluding to in this comment is created by Botticelli’s juxtaposition, alongside his lyrical evocation of a Golden Age scene, of what could also be described as a contextual frame for this scene (since restoration of the painting revealed that the three figures in question were added late in the process of composition), as Lightbown has pointed out. While the painting’s perspectival centre is a tranquil pastoral scene presided over by Venus, Roman goddess of love and representative of the Renaissance conception of humanitas, who is flanked by the three Graces, Botticelli supplemented this image, late in his composition, by the evocation of a very different mood, in the graphic convergence of superhuman force, intense fear, and exquisite beauty which is depicted in Zephyr’s rape of Chloris, the Greek goddess of nature, and her simultaneous metamorphosis into her Roman namesake, Flora.
The violent irruption of Zephyr into the painting’s idyllic and festive centre dramatises a potent combination of pleasure with anxiety that may have had a specifically contemporary referent, and that reconsideration of the function of this dissonant pictorial ‘frame’ adds an important qualification to our view of the ‘Primavera’ as an artistic evocation of the Golden Age. For not only does the pictorial group on the right of this scene evoke the question of time and timing, through these figures’ widely acknowledged calendrical associations; it also appears to allude to the activity of aesthetic production, in what I read as an oblique reference to contemporary anxieties about the rapid proliferation and dissemination of new aesthetic signs which was the hallmark of the new culture. When we look from this vantage-point, or with this perspectival detail, at the peaceful pastoral idyll that is depicted in the centre of Botticelli’s painting, it seems highly plausible that the Golden Age vision, if such it is, is conceived, paradoxically, as being both created and menaced by the troubling figure of Zephyr.
For the focal event in the painting, the action which the painting depicts as effectively inaugurating the new golden age, is the abrupt advent of what appears to be an ambivalently speechless ‘voice’. This is the inseminating – and disseminating – outbreath of Zephyr. Although usually interpreted by art historians as a representation of carnal passion, such an account of Zephyr’s function neglects his obvious connection with spiritus (as breath), and hence with creativity. My own assumption is that this striking representation of passion as breath has a figurative affinity with the highly specific conjunction of intellectual and aesthetic passions that characterised the complex cultural transition of the Rinascimento. Viewed in this context, the agent of paganspiritus, who stages a pagan equivalent to the Annunciation,2 is not simply inaugurating the archaic Golden Age, but may also be interpreted as seeding a new cultural era. For the specific result of his passion appears to be a Golden Age not of unqualified harmony with nature, but rather of superabundant creativity, of which Zephyr is as it were the presiding Zeitgeist.
Zephyr’s act of fecundation has multiple results, in the form of the diverse flowers which, from their first appearance at Chloris’ mouth, are subsequently scattered – or birthed – by Flora. Each of these flowers, as we shall see, encodes the wind-god’s act of generation with further levels of meaning. The appearance at her mouth of the first sign of Chloris’ metamorphosis affords us a clear implication, I think, that this breathy fertilisation is connected with speech. Indeed, the use of ‘flower’ as a common figure for the poetic trope during the Renaissance implies that one aspect of this Golden Age metamorphosis involves an abrupt transition from ordinary speech into poetic (or divinely inspired) modes of communication. In Lucretius' De rerum natura (a text which was much studied in Florence during the late Quattrocento) he reports that it was ‘the zephyrs [or west winds] whistling through hollow reeds’ that ‘first taught the countrymen to blow into hollow stalks’ (Lucretius 5,1382-3). And the association of the zephyrs with that vocal musicality (or music made from the breath) which ultimately produces poetry is certainly a suggestive one in the context of this painting. Yet it is also interesting to note in this connection that Flora’s attributes of flowers are depicted as textural or painted (in the highly decorated detail of her dress) as well as natural, thereby reinforcing the implication that the Chloris-Flora metamorphosis has an important tropical or aesthetic dimension, as a transition from undifferentiated nature (Chloris) to supremely refined art (Flora). It seems, in other words, as if Flora represents a coming renovatio or a second Golden Age, putatively centred on Florence, that is to be a figurative and decorative embellishment (in a mimesis which far exceeds its original model) of an earlier and simpler epoch (Chloris).
But if, in this apparently belated incorporation of the wind-god and his suggestively two-personed consort into his painting, Botticelli appears to have been celebrating the cultural flowering of his city and his time, this group also appears to personify and problematise a suggestive moment of hesitation: a reflective and reflexive pause, as it were, amidst the superabundant flowering of Renaissance culture which is so vividly represented by the pregnant and flower-scattering Flora. The religious and moral anxieties engendered by the pagan-inspired poetry, art and philosophy of the early Renaissance have frequently been commented on; poetry seems to have had an especially ambivalent place in this context, because of its condemnation by Plato in The Republic. While the production of classically-inspired verses by noble poets like Lorenzo de’ Medici and learned scholars like Politian was taken as a sign of refined humanist knowledge, uncertainty as to whether the pagan muses were angelic or demonic provoked increasing hostility on the part of the church – anxieties which Savonarola would bring to a head in the Florence of the 1490s. Even among the humanists there was persistent anxiety about poetry; Stanley Meltzhoff notes that a concept variously described as ‘theologia poetica’ (by Pico della Mirandola) or ‘theologia poetarum’ (by Coluccio Salutati) was developed by humanism in defence of its recourse to pagan sources of inspiration (Meltzhoff 6), while Michael B. Allen has recently reemphasised Marsilio Ficino’s ambivalence towards ‘popular poetry, even while he commended the ‘oratorical and poetical flowers’ that adorned Plato’s academy – in other words, poetry and rhetoric in the service of philosophy (Allen 1998,chapter 3). In the figure of Zephyr, Botticelli seems momentarily to acknowledge the complexity of this debate. The metamorphic and creative impact of the god on his environment vividly evokes the passionate enthusiasm for the hidden mysteries of the pagans, and the delight in new forms of aesthetic display derived from pagan sources, which characterised the new cultural movement. But Zephyr’s violence, and the sudden shock of its effects – so vividly expressed in Chloris’ expression as she half-turns towards her assailant and lover – also hints at anxiety about the rapidity of this cultural change, while the god’s oblique and indirect entry into the painting, through an obscure portal of vegetation, may evoke unease concerning the morally ambivalent, pagan, sources of this new cultural fertility. Through his incorporation of this pictorial element, then, I see Botticelli as framing and even qualifying his sublime vision of a restored Golden Age, in an oblique evocation of troubling questions of both cultural and historical agency: questions which were becoming increasingly prominent in the Florence of the 1480s.
Yet another, temporal, ambivalence informs Botticelli’s depiction of a Golden Age, inviting us to ask not just ‘Which golden age?’ but also, ‘What kind of Golden Age?’. This is subtly communicated by both the object and the effects of Zephyr’s desire. For in the first place, thanks to Botticelli’s inspired depiction of the mystery of metamorphosis, his consort has a somewhat troubling duality: thus the nymph whom the wind god inseminates by his breath is both Chlorisand Flora. A significant consequence of this configuration of Zephyr’s victim-spouse as two-personed is that the desire which the wind god here represents is invested with a complex temporal duality, in that it is both for a former state of undifferentiated nature (Chloris) and also for the anticipated future which it not only engenders but to which Zephyr will be wedded (Flora). A not dissimilar ambiguity informed the Renaissance desire for a renovatio of learning, as it looked back to a classical era of pristine knowledge, but also forwards, to a hoped-for restoration and embellishment of that wisdom.
If we read the finished painting from right to left, Zephyr is its first sign ofrenovatio, the harbinger of both spring and the golden age, since his passionate desire for Chloris is responsible for her dissemination, as Flora, of a veritable profusion of seeds and flowers. In his commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus, Ficino would link the imaginative and the vegetative functions, observing that, in contrast to the power that lifts the soul towards divine things, ‘There is a[nother] power in the soul dragging it downwards towards sensibles [things], namely the power responsible for imagination and vegetative functions’ (Allen 1981, 106-7). The passage aptly expresses the ambivalence which was always felt by Ficino and other Platonists towards the descent of spiritus into matter or material forms, and the dissemination and fragmentation of the One into the Many. Yet as Pliny observes just after an allusion to Favonius’ springtime arrival: ‘these matters [agriculture] do chiefly depend on the weather... Virgil enjoins first before all else to learn the winds and the habits of the stars, and to observe them in just the same way as they are observed for navigation’ (Pliny V, XVIII, lxv, 205-6). The extent to which Zephyr’s wind-like function in the painting encompasses not merely imagination but also inspiration is metonymically implied by his passage through the branches of a laurel tree in order to inseminate Chloris; while it alludes punningly to a Lorenzo (to Lorenzo de’ Medici or Lorenzo di Pierfranceso de’ Medici) the tree was also emblematic of Apollo, and hence of both poetic inspiration and prophecy.
This metonymic association of Zephyr with the laurel tree suggests that this pictorial element has fruitful implications for our understanding of the ambiguous status, within the Renaissance, of that secret interior voice that engenders artistic and intellectual inspiration. My inference is that the passionate and fecund creativity which the wind-god furiously introduces into this painting may allude to that daemonic principle of inspiration whose violent impulsiveness is so well evoked in Plato’s much-cited concept of the divinefurors or frenzies, but whose highly problematic daemonic source was only described in detail in other Platonic and Neoplatonic texts. In my assumption that the painting owes an important debt to Neoplatonism, my approach has of course been inspired by the early work of several Warburg scholars, notably Warburg, Gombrich and Wind, some of whose opinions have recently been revalidated by Charles Dempsey’s study of the ‘Primavera’. However, my suggestion that the painting is plausibly informed by contemporary interest in the problematic faculty of daemonic inspiration, as defined by Plato and the Neoplatonists, is, I believe, original. It was the meaning and ancient cultural efficacy of this faculty, understood primarily as the mediation and interpretation of hitherto secret signs and correspondences, which Marsilio Ficino was at that time attempting to recover from the texts of the ancient philosophers. (Allen 1998, chapter 4). But although humanist reformulations of the Platonic conception of inspiration would be widely influential in succeeding centuries, its attribution to a supernatural agent – to the secret voice of the daemon – was an element in the formulation by which Ficino and his contemporaries were both fascinated and troubled: understandably, given its heretical implications.4In consequence, this disturbing figure of supernatural agency is typically absent from most Renaissance accounts of inspiration, and the lacuna created by the daemon’s repression is only partly filled by use of the much more generalised poetical conception of the muse.
Ironically, the passage that is most often cited to illustrate the Platonic model of inspiration probably owes its popularity, in the later Renaissance and subsequently, precisely to its omission of any mention of daemons. In this justly famous account, from the Phaedrus, furor or mania is defined as a divine inspiration which, through its sudden and sometimes violent impact upon the gifted individual, impels them to adopt different modes of formal – and vocal – expression within a given historical context. The four furors are ranked by Plato, in terms of their moral and spiritual efficacy, as follows: poetic, hieratic or priestly, prophetic and finally that of love, or the desire for divine beauty. Plato tells us, however, that the soul which has fallen into the body ‘first requires the poetic madness’, which ‘tempers discords and dissonances ... it can arouse the torpid parts by way of musical sounds...’. (Allen 1981, 222-3.) In his 1484 introduction to his translation of the Phaedrus (a work he attributed to Plato’s youth), Ficino imagined the effects of this first furor, that of poetic inspiration, upon the young Plato; in writing the Phaedrus, he tells us: ‘Our Plato was pregnant with the madness of the poetic muse, whom he followed from a tender age or rather from his Apollonian generation. In his radiance, Plato gave birth to his first child, and it is itself almost entirely poetical and radiant.’ (Allen 1981, 9)
But although, in the Phaedrus’ description of the four madnesses, the role of the daemon is not specifically mentioned, elsewhere in the dialogue the diverse activities of daemons is a recurring topic. Most importantly, the contribution of the daemonic ‘voice’ or ‘sign’ to the most sublime workings of human intelligence and discourse is underlined when Socrates alludes (as in several other Platonic texts) to his personal daemon. Like that in the Phaedrus, several of Socrates’ references to his daemon stress its refraining power, in instructionsnot to do a certain thing; others, however, emphasise the inspirational powers conferred by this ‘voice of a god’, including its occasional bestowal of divinatory knowledge.6 The daemon of Socrates was of such interest to late antiquity that two essays were specifically devoted to the subject, by Plutarch (De Genio Socratis) and Apuleius (De deo Socratis. See also Plotinus, Enneads, 3, 4).
Plato’s best-known definition of the daemonic function is in The Symposium, where we are told by Diotima that
Daemons are the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upwards with our worship and prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or sleeping, with the gods. And the man who is versed in such matters is said to have daemonic powers ...There are many daemons, and many kinds of daemon, and Love is one of them. (Plato, 202C-203A)
Ficino’s increasing preoccupation with this concept in the last decades of his life is evidenced by the final section of his Opera Omnia, where he translates and comments on key ancients texts that discuss the function of daemons (by Iamblichus, Proclus and Porphyry); and also by the third, dangerously heretical, book of his De Triplici Vita.7 In the De vita, Ficino allies daemons to his concept of the mediating and inherently magical ‘spirit of the world’, and intriguingly, Pliny had described Zephyr/Favonius as ‘genitalis spiritus mundi’, ‘the generating breath of the universe’ (Pliny, XVI xxxix, 93). (The role of air in the transmission of the daemonic message to those able to hear it is also stressed in Ficino’s Platonic Theology, where he explains that it is the airy bodies of the daemons that enable them to insinuate themselves so profoundly into our own airy spirit[s]. But Hesiod describes Zephyr as ‘brightening’: he clears the sky, and is for that reason helpful to the navigation of ships, because in a clear night skies sailors can see the stars (Hesiod 379); and the De Vita follows several ancient texts, astrological as well as philosophical, in indicating that the daemonic faculty has a intimate connection with the stars and so (by implication) with processes of stellar timing (book 3).
Ficino’s growing interest in daemons was therefore rather more than merely an arcane topic of research, indeed, it appears to have been informed by a sense of historical urgency. Michael B. Allen has shown that Ficino believed the mysteriously creative as well as disruptive effect of the divine realm upon human history was both mediated and interpreted by certain ‘ingeniosi’: these were especially gifted men who, like Socrates (or Shakespeare’s Prospero), were able to receives the daemonic communication.9 Significantly, Ficino argues in his commentary on Plato’s Ion that the ‘furor’ or divine inspiration which possesses such men can issue not only in the expected modes of poetry, prophecy, love and priesthood listed in the Phaedrus, but also in the scholarly task of interpretation in which he himself was engaged, as a commentator upon the texts of Plato. Clearly, he regarded himself as one of these ingeniosi. In describing Ficino’s meditations upon this rare and precious faculty, Michael B. Allen suggests that:
We must imagine an exchange, as it were, of mirage-like images, of musical voices, of Ariel music, an exchange that can occur equally during wake or sleep. Ficino refers us to the theory he associates with Avicenna: that the prophets similarly communicated with the angels, “seeing” aethereal angelic forms and “hearing” aethereal voices with a common aethereal sense; intuitively sensing presences that elude ordinary sensation. (Allen 1998, 141).
Studies by Donald Weinstein, James Hankins, André Chastel, and Michael B. Allen relate this cultural and social tension to nervous expectation of a major astrological event: a Great Conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, which was to occur in the enigmatic sign of Scorpio in November 1484.10 In this climate, these scholars maintain, quasi-millennial expectations of a more or less dramatic historical transition lasting twenty years (the expected duration of the conjunction’s effects), was fuelling an intense interest, even an obsession, with prophecy, as the heterodox but Christian-based teachings of Joachim of Fiora (which had long been influential in Florence and its environs) became mingled with a new enthusiasm for pagan models of divination and prediction.
In anticipation of the Great Conjunction of 1484, the ordinary man or woman in the street, probably knowing something of Joachimist expectations of a third age of the Holy Spirit, may have expected something like the second coming. But the circle around Ficino appears to have expected a quite differentrenovatio; thus Gentile, Hankins and Allen have argued (to quote Hankins) that ‘it is difficult to believe that the appearance of Ficino’s Platonis Opera Omnia in the year 1484 was not related to Ficino’s millennial hopes for a renewal of Christianity through the pia philosophia of Platonism’; for Ficino, the ‘conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter signalled the conjoining of wisdom and power, the precondition for a Golden Age’. (Hankins I, 304). Moreover, the sign of Scorpio had an especially potent reputation, bestowing, according to the Roman astrologer Firmicus, high religiosity and prophetic gifts. Its other attributes included, more ambivalently, passionate desire and fecundity, and a secret, possibly venomous power, paralleling that of the scorpion.Yet the humanists must have noted with interest as well as relief that the conjunction was to occur in the sign’s third and last decan (or subdivision of ten degrees), which was traditionally ruled by the benevolent goddess of love and humanitas, Venus.
But what then of Flora’s flowers? To what kind of cultural flowering – or cultural process – do they allude?
Apart from the inclusion of the iris, symbol of Florence, and the rose, whose symbolism is primarily of love, it is notable that several of these flowers were often associated with the imagery of apocalypse, resurrection, spiritual fruits (the strawberry) and salvation: thus violets, strawberries, plantain, cornflowers, daisies and carnations all figure both in this painting and in The Last Judgement of Roger van der Weyden, painted for the Hotel-Dieu in Beaune between 1453 and 1454. Cornflowers, or centaurea, which are the most prominent flowers on Flora’s clothing and headdress, were also used by Dante, in the Purgatorio, to crown the heads of the 24 elders of the Apocalypse. Yet by metonymic association (which seems to be an important aspect of Botticelli’s use of floral and vegetable detail), it is the centrally positioned violet on Flora’s forehead that seems to assume heightened significance: like the rose, the violet is a flower of love, but it also has a funerary association, being linked with the passage between life and death as well as with the latter stages of alchemical transmutation. This suggests that Flora may be intended to represent a pagan image of the fruition of spiritual wisdom, and as engendering not simply a process of birth but one of regeneration. The hypothesis would account for Flora’s gesture of scattering flowers: the funerary associations of this gesture have often puzzled critics. That there is anxiety associated with the process of cultural regeneration as well as hope is further suggested by the traditional vulnerary application (to wounds) of several of these flowers, most notably the cornflower; indeed, in possible connection with the astrological event I mentioned earlier, the grains of the lychnis and the violet are recommended by Pliny as remedies against the sting of scorpions. The hellebore and violet were also said to be remedies against the black bile or melancholy, the inspirational but also potentially negative state attributed to the influence of Saturn. Interesting also is the comment of many ancient authorities that the hellebore could cure madness or a bacchic frenzy.
The connection of the pregnant Flora with these floral tropes suggests that Zephyr’s fecundation is a more subtle process than many initially appear, producing a mass of beauty and fecundity certainly, but with hidden layer of potentiality that can be revealed only if the deeper meaning of beauty is understood. The skyward-gazing Mercury on the other side of the picture, who thereby seems to act as an important complement and antithesis to the earth-bound fecundity of Zephyr, reinforces this theme of the observation of signs, just as he hints at the relationship of inspiration’s fruits (possibly symbolised by the oranges about his head) to the movements of the stars: not only to the movement of the year from spring into summer and autumn, but also, perhaps, to the arrival of the conjunction from which Ficino and his fellows Platonists appear to have expected so much. Finally, minute observation of the painting has found tiny seeds scattered around Mercury’s feet and groin. Like the still pregnant, yet already flowering Flora, these seeds reinforce the implication that Botticelli conceived of this golden age flowering as a process whose ultimate meaning – whose spiritual fruits, as opposed to its poetical flowers – was yet to be revealed." [Philippa Berry, Inspiration and the poetic arts in Boticelli’s ‘Primavera’]
"Why is this piece not a psychomachia and why is it non-dual? “Zephyr, the winged male on the right, personifies human love and the life-force of nature, he seizes Chloris, who is whence transformed into Flora. Venus, the central figure, with the assistance of Cupid kindles this carnal love and guides it, via a process of intellectual sublimation – shown by the grouping of the three Graces – towards a final goal of contemplation, Mercury.” (Newland)
If one were to stop their analysis at this point, they would only be honoring the first half of Plato’s philosophy: the ascension of the many towards the One, towards the Good, and they would miss the second half of Plato. The result would be a full blown example of psychomachia. The social circle of the Medici, in whose company the Primavera was created, however, was composed of full blown Neo-Platonists; to them the finer details of the second half of Plato would certainly not be lost. In speaking of Plato’s philosophy, Lovejoy notes that “the most notable-and the less noted-fact about his historic influence is that he did not merely give to European otherworldliness its characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic, but that he also gave the characteristic form and phraseology and dialectic to precisely the contrary tendency-to a peculiarly exuberant kind of this-worldliness.” In other words, Platonism is the integration of Ascending and Descending currents; “because both were grounded in the unspoken One of sudden illumination.” (Wilber 330)
In this light, the narrative of the Primavera takes on new dimensions. The words of Plato are relayed through the genius of Plotinus and fall thunderously upon the ears of the Medici circle. Zepher can be read as Thanatos, in this case exhibiting carnal desire, abduction, and rape, but maybe it is just a miss understanding on the part of Chloris? Zepher can also be read as Agape, heavenly love reaching down to the mortal realm (descending). The result? Chloris is transformed by Agape and becomes a Goddess herself! Mercury represents Eros, ascension, self-transcendence. “`The two together make a vast circle of love through the universe.’ The Great Circle, that is, of refluxing Eros and effluxing Agape.” (Wilber 349)
With the descriptions given thus far, a dualistic reading could still be gleamed. Where is the glue that unites Eros and Agape or Eros and Thanatos in this composition? Freud found that “human misery could be reduced to a battle and disharmony between the Path of Ascent and the Path of Descent… … and that the only solution to our suffering is the union of Eros and Thanatos.” (Wilber 341) Hillman, it appears, would be in agreement with Wilber. When speaking of the “delicious divinities whom Botticelli painted” and the “obsessive preoccupation with love and beauty” in the Renaissance, Hillman says that we should “regard these events from the perspective of the soul-making that takes place through the intercourse between anima and eros… …They are something we each do. They are inherent in the movement of soul, the activity of the anima, which seeks eros. For the corollary reason, for an eros with soul, for a psychological eroticism which has been correctly called platonic, we may turn to these writings and paintings. This style of love-dialogue and obsession with beauty is no longer our fashion. Indeed we suffer from the division between eros and psyche, a soulless eroticism, and an unloved desexualized soul.” (Hillman 211)
The element that cuts through any dualistic reading of the Primavera is Venus. Standing between Zepher and Mercury is the Goddess of Love: Venus. She embodies Eros and Thanatos, Eros and Agape, and she stands alone, untouched in a radiant bliss, and timeless. She, of all characters in this scene, is given the most serene face and is surrounded by a halo created by arching tree branches. Another clue to the non-dualistic message of this piece is the line of action in the postures of both Mercury and Zephyr; They both create arcs leading the eye towards the head of Venus. The Primavera is just as The Mask of Eternity seen in the Power of Myth TV interview of Joseph Campbell. This mask has three faces, one in the middle looking at the viewer and one on each side facing away from each other. As Campbell says, “the dual principles emerge from the transcendent.”
In order to manipulate these mythic symbols into a statement of the all pervading divineness of reality, it was necessary for the men of the Renaissance to have been at the rational level of development. “In other words, a myth is being a “real myth” when it is not being taken as true, when it is being held in an “as if” fashion. And Campbell knows perfectly well that an “as if” stance is possible only with formal operational awareness. Thus, according to his own conclusions, a myth offers its “release” only when it is transcended by, and held firmly in, the space of possibilities and as-ifs offered by rationality.” (Wilber 247)
This rational level of development would have been useful when trying to incorporate subtle references to harmonics into a work of art. Newland makes a case for the Primavera as Hermetic Octave. “…Looking at the movement of these two deities in the `Primavera’, Zephyr literally blows into the painting and initiates the octave, while Mercury indicates through his upright stance the end of the octave, but also with his gesture and look that he begins an octave at a higher scale.” So while Venus in the Primavera represents the One; timeless, and available instantly in this very moment of experience, the ascending narrative of the piece can be viewed of in terms of developmental psychology. This is a cycle of soul-making in which each level of development has its inception and its omega… but just as in music, the omega of one octave is the alpha of the next. “As Inge puts it: `Nature presents us with a living chain of being [holarchy], an unbroken series of ascending or descending values. The whole constitutes a harmony, in which each grade is “in” the next above. Each existence is thus vitally connected with all the others, a conception that asserts the right of [all] existences to be what and where they are.'” (Wilber 347)"
If the beast is released, unity in chaos. If it is killed an amputated, Alexandrian, man – half-awake, schizophrenic, lobotomised, living in the structured, artificial, regimented order of a sanatorium – the institutionalized man, seeing himself in every surface, admiring himself in every other – lost, with no string (continuum) to find his way out. The illusion of having existed the labyrinth after the kill – completion in a female.
Hannibal is a sophisticated form of the Joker in the Batman mythology. A constant reminder of what lies hidden, as if not there; a constant reminder of chaos, in human preserve, an noetic order, projected as technique/technology as prosthesis of "self" ordering. To the delusion that everything hides order, Hannibal, and Joker, recall what was lost and denied.... chaos. To God they are the Devil who doubts His supremacy, his value, his "goodness". Against them, the Batman character is taken by Will, representing the human world of noetic artifices – the civilized, supposedly, world of man. Overmen, because they have overcome their resentiment for time, for the necessity of chaos; Dionysian worshippers standing before Apollonian delusion. Hannibal has an aesthetic issue with Will’s world. Failing to include chaos in tis “order” it is an imperfect order, a fake order. Hannibal “forgives” those who trespass on his aesthetic tastes, his more refined order which does not ignore chaos but accounts for it. Hannibal forgives by consuming the one who has been rude to his refinement; he incorporates what remains in the other to be salvaged, into a higher order. He does not coerce, he consumes, if he fails to convince. He need not coerce because his awareness is superior and cannot be escaped. He is simply a representation of the undeniable in the world. The world will not listen to human words, to reason, to please… it cares not if it is denied or forgotten or dismissed, or covered over.
Hannibal is this force of nature made flesh and blood – the Minotaur; a “monster”, incomprehensible to the “civilized” ones who have forgotten about chaos.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
If the beast is released, unity in chaos. If it is killed an amputated, Alexandrian, man – half-awake, schizophrenic, lobotomised, living in the structured, artificial, regimented order of a sanatorium – the institutionalized man, seeing himself in every surface, admiring himself in every other – lost, with no string (continuum) to find his way out. The illusion of having exited the labyrinth after the kill – completion in a female.
Hannibal is a sophisticated form of the Joker in the Batman mythology. A constant reminder of what lies hidden, as if not there; a constant reminder of chaos, in human preserve, an noetic order, projected as technique/technology as prosthesis of "self" ordering. To the delusion that everything hides order, Hannibal, and Joker, recall what was lost and denied.... chaos. To God they are the Devil who doubts His supremacy, his value, his "goodness". Against them, the Batman character is taken by Will, representing the human world of noetic artifices – the civilized, supposedly, world of man. Overmen, because they have overcome their resentiment for time, for the necessity of chaos; Dionysian worshippers standing before Apollonian delusion. Hannibal has an aesthetic issue with Will’s world. Failing to include chaos in tis “order” it is an imperfect order, a fake order. Hannibal “forgives” those who trespass on his aesthetic tastes, his more refined order which does not ignore chaos but accounts for it. Hannibal forgives by consuming the one who has been rude to his refinement; he incorporates what remains in the other to be salvaged, into a higher order. He does not coerce, he consumes, if he fails to convince. He need not coerce because his awareness is superior and cannot be escaped. He is simply a representation of the undeniable in the world. The world will not listen to human words, to reason, to please… it cares not if it is denied or forgotten or dismissed, or covered over.
Hannibal is this force of nature made flesh and blood – the Minotaur; a “monster”, incomprehensible to the “civilized” ones who have forgotten about chaos.
Quote :
"Bedelia: You're no longer interested in preserving the peace you found here. Hannibal: You cannot preserve entropy. It gradually descends into disorder." [Hannibal, 3.3]
In the myth, the minotaur is a hybrid born of love and betrayal. It is a bull of contra-diction. Of the breakdown of law and broken contract, of promises. It is Ariadne's half-brother, the goddess who is the keeper of the labyrinth. She betrays her half-brother to Theseus with the thread that traces the exit. Theseus in turn betrays her, and not only the Minotaur with whom Theseus and Athens had a peace pact. They both betray the minotaur.
In the series, Bedelia likens Mischa to Will. They are both love, "a force of mind and circumstance" - two people who made Hannibal show his real self with no control over predictability.
Hannibal wrote:
"You cannot control with respect to whom you fall in love." [3.3]
Bryan Fuller comments that throughout his series, Hannibal will go through a "repeat compulsion" to keep finding substitutes of Mischa - Abigail, Chiyoh, and more to come.
The memory palace is his labyrinth, where the Minotaur hides, and Mischa [Ariadne] holds the key that Will [Theseus] wants to unlock.
In the series however, Hannibal assures,
Hannibal wrote:
"Mischa didn't betray me. She influenced me to betray myself but I forgave her that influence." 3.3]
Will continues that Mischa does not quantify Hannibal; this is not a revenge kill that chiyoh claims she "understands", a behaviourism, but it is about attaining "elegance" beyond "suffering" that is God's design...
Elegance is Hannibal's design. The tea-cup cannot be pieced back, but it can be remade.
Bedelia too says,
Bedelia wrote:
"If you think you’re about to catch Hannibal, it’s because he wants you to think that. Don’t think you’re in control." [Hannibal, 2]
"The Hunter becomes the Hunted" because he wants that.
It is not a case of Theseus hunting the monster, but the monster drawing him in, into its labyrinth.
The murders are a bait, but how does the monster compel? Revelation and self-exposure is a self-sacrifice. Knowing is the moment of connection; neither thinking [Hannibal], nor feeling [Will].
Will wrote:
"I’ve never known myself as well as I’ve known myself when I’m with him." [3.3]
Bedelia wrote:
"Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love." [3.3]
Dionysos to Ariadne wrote:
"Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself?.. I am your labyrinth..." [Nietzsche]
Deleuze interprets:
Deleuze wrote:
"The labyrinth is a frequent image in Nietzsche. It designates firstly the unconscious, the self… In the second place, the labyrinth designates the eternal return itself: circular, it is not the lost way but the way which leads us back to the same point, to the same instant which is, which was and which will be. But, more profoundly, from the perspective of the constitution of the eternal return, the labyrinth is becoming, the affirmation of becoming. Being comes from becoming, is affirmed of becoming itself, in as much as the affirmation of becoming is the object of another affirmation (Ariadne’s thread). As long as Ariadne remained with Theseus the labyrinth was interpreted the wrong way round… the thread was the thread of the negative and ressentiment, the moral thread. But Dionysius teaches Ariadne his secret: the true labyrinth is Dionysius himself, the true thread is the thread of affirmation. ‘I am your labyrinth.’ Dionysius is the labyrinth and the bull, becoming and being, but becoming is only being insofar as its affirmation is itself affirmed. Dionysius not only asks Ariadne to hear but to affirm affirmation: ‘You have little ears, you have my ears: put a shrewd word there.’ The ear is labyrinthine, the ear is the labyrinth of becoming or the maze of affirmation. The labyrinth is what leads us to being, the only being is that of becoming, the only being is that of the labyrinth itself. But Ariadne has Dionysius’ ears: affirmation must itself be affirmed so that it can be the affirmation of being [as well as becoming]. Ariadne puts a shrewd word into Dionysius’ ear. That is to say: having herself heard Dionysian affirmation, she makes it the object of a second affirmation heard by Dionysius.” [Nietzsche and Philosophy, 188]
Dionysos is this Hybrid, this labyrinthine being of the most terrifying and maximal contradictions, the pain of existence that proliferates into the Minotaur, into the Bull of Contradictions. Theseus’ slaying of the Bull by Ariadne’s catoptromancy re-inaugurates the Titanic tearing to pieces of the child Dionysos lured by the mirror. Yet Dionysos, as the promise of the one who keeps on coming, keeps on returning, keeps on re-membering, re-appears before Ariadne to inform her almost uncannily, to be “clever”, to be “vigilant”, to “awake” to the fact that He is the Labyrinth, the Bull cannot be slayed. There is no exit, no escape. The labyrinthine Bull of the ER goads the Soul to affirm Affirmation.
The past cannot be eradicated, no matter if Ariadne betrays her half-brother.
Hannibal wrote:
"Nothing happened to me. I happened." [3.3]
Again and again, it returns.
The labyrinth devours those who cannot understand the contradiction it -life, IS - the necessary entwining of love and betrayal, and betrayal and forgiveness... it breaks at those who try to break it.
Ariadne is the witness, the key, through which one will come to understand, the Monster Is the God, the minotaur is the superhero Dionysos who makes a home for them under a 'safe circle' of stars, a towards-completion.
Apollo and Dionysos are brothers, 'nakamas' who wear each other's masks, sometimes so entwined beyond distinction.
Dionysos is in need of the illusion of stability, of self-love; Apollo is in need of the reality of entropy, of self-knowledge.
If Knowing is Love, an epiphanic moment of connection that is neither thinking [Hannibal], nor feeling [Will], it has to be attained beyond them both, at the price of betrayal that forgiveness makes possible...
Hannibal wrote:
"The god betrayal presupposes the god forgiveness..." [3.3]
1. Will/Chiyoh: The Sattvic/Rational kind of Revenge.
2. Crawford/Pazzi: The Rajasic/Passionate kind of Revenge.
3. Bloom/Verger: The Tamasic/Slothful Appetitive kind of Revenge.
1.
In the first case, revenge is motivated by deep empathy and deep affinity, so much so Will fears he would become Hannibal, he would become a Therapon, if Hannibal isn't killed. There is a rational order that needs to be maintained, he fears will disappear.
Hannibal wrote:
"Will agaonizes over inevitable change." [Hannibal, 3.5]
Here the senses have been trained and disciplined - smell, touch, sight, auditory receptivity, taste all have a hyper-sensitivity, be it Will or Chiyoh. There is a deep kinship and loyalty in the both towards Hannibal. One is so fluid, and the other hasn't moved at all. Discipline here shows how Action and Contemplation can amount and coincide at the same place.
One need not move anywhere [Chiyoh] or one may everywhere [Will], and arrive at the same understanding.
The Hunted is traced using intuitive self-discipline [read]. Patterns of the mind. Revenge is bought with Discipline.
2.
In the second case, revenge is motivated by Greed and desire for money, for fame, for name. Passion has caused both to transgress the codes of their duties, to even step outside of the law and do what it takes by hook or crook. Passion has been the downfall of both, who have become outcasts from their own professions, from their own duties.
Pazzi thirsts after a "score", and Crawford is emotionally motivated by loss and aroused to go after Hannibal.
Quote :
"Hannibal: How would you feel if I'm gone?
Crawford: Alive."
What has been killed is the Ego. There has been an affront to the Skill and professional acumen of being outdone in their own capacities as law agents. This is vengeance motived by desire and ego.
The Hunted is traced using Activity. Following up and detail to detail procedure. Patterns of the passion of the heart - epiphanic connection via art - Botticelli's painting... Revenge is bought with Work.
3.
In the third case, revenge is motivated by sloth (perversion), dullness (blindness) and inertia (one's own C/rude stupidity).
Verger and Alana qualify their revenge as old Testament style - cold and ressentimental.
The Hunted is traced using Appetitive methods - of food, wine, purchases, earthly/domestic lifestyle patterns of the Body. Revenge is bought with Money.
Here we also see 3 kinds of morality:
1. Will/Choi exhibit Amorality: They have moved Beyond good and evil, but not beyond good and bad.
2. Crawford/Pazzi exhibit Slave Morality: They are subscribed to and within the slavish herd morality Of good and evil.
3. Bloom/Verger exhibit Immorality: They operate with the unscrupulous brutishness that Alana remarks YHWH institutionalized into Judaism.
And Hannibal/Maurier?
Extra-Moral.
Hannibal wrote:
"Better to live true to yourself for an instant than never know it." [Hannibal, 3.5]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Great health - a health that one not only has but constantly acquires and must acquire, because one again and again relinquishes it, must relinquish it!" [JW, Colli M, ed. KSA 2]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Against the value of that which remains eternally the same (vide Spinoza's naivete; Descartes' also), the values of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita -" [WTP, 577]
Integrity is not a question of eternity, but even of the briefest immortality. Not self-preservation.
Nietzsche wrote:
"To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief . . . or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet." [JW, 12]
Perspectivism is not a relativism. Complexity is the vitality to endure a "long logic: hard to survey because of its length"... it is the Tautest bow that is tensed with nuance everywhere. The hedonist would find the fatigue painful and collapse in a simplistic yes and no and call it his simplification.
1. Will/Chiyoh: The Sattvic/Rational kind of Revenge.
2. Crawford/Pazzi: The Rajasic/Passionate kind of Revenge.
3. Bloom/Verger: The Tamasic/Slothful Appetitive kind of Revenge.
Corresponding to the triad, Father/Son/HolyGhost of Nihilism.
1 = Jesus...he fears he might become Hannibal, the Devil. Temptation of Christ.
2 = Father, acting via the Holy Ghost. He beats up Hannibal. Crawford is essentially God's emissary; the angel of vengeance.
3 = Holy Ghost the Father's dominion over the world represented by wealth (Verger), science (Bloom) and law (Pazzi).
The three expressions of Nihilism: Intellectual, Spiritual, Physical.
All three are resentiment for nature, represented by Hannibal: cold, indifferent, cruel, all consuming nature = Satan. He makes himself the scapegoat to bring out the true essence of the triad, exposing them from behind their facades, forcing them out, into the light.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37248 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Will/Chiyoh are not necessarily going to avenge themselves against Hannibal. They are on a pilgrimage into the desert, to be tempted, to confront the devil, testing their faith. Chiyoh, seems to be a dark angel, trying to make it harder on Will, the Christ figure.
Is Chiyoh god's emissary, there to help Will in his confrontation with himself, in Hannibal, or is she a Satanic emissary?
Will is only thinking of killing Hannibal so as to erase the temptation he represents; to kill him inside of himself. Did he not warn Hannibal wanting him to escape?
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Fri Jul 03, 2015 7:36 pm; edited 1 time in total
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Apollo and Dionysos are brothers, 'nakamas' who wear each other's masks, sometimes so entwined beyond distinction.
Dionysos is in need of the illusion of stability, of self-love; Apollo is in need of the reality of entropy, of self-knowledge.
If Knowing is Love, an epiphanic moment of connection that is neither thinking [Hannibal], nor feeling [Will], it has to be attained beyond them both, at the price of betrayal that forgiveness makes possible...
Hannibal wrote:
"The god betrayal presupposes the god forgiveness..." [3.3]
It is starting over again and again...
The meme *Ar of the Aryan is related to the plough - of "turning over" again and again.
Hannibal 3.6 was largely about hybrids and entwined entanglements trying to turn each other over...
Quote :
McLuhan wrote:
“Physiologically, the central nervous system, that electric network that coordinates the various media of our senses, plays the chief role. Whatever threatens its function must be contained, localised or cut off even to the total removal of the offending organ." [Understanding Media pg.64-65].
"For McLuhan, ‘autoamputation’ is that function through which all media and technology are created. That due to some irritation of the nervous system, some organ of that system would be projected out into the world to ease and soothe that irritation. Autoamputation was the process by which aspects of our bodies and selves were extended into the world as technology to counter certain nervous disruptions. Discursive technology, for instance, might be extended to isolate and examine a particular problem, to produce new freedom for a nervous system, to escape some sort of pain. By such a definition, this article is an autoamputation of a disquieted nervous arrangement.
Under the prevailing conditions of the Western World, lust has become increasingly problematic:
“Android robots appeared on the market equipped with a versatile artificial vagina. A high-tech system analysed in real time the configuration of male sexual organs, arranged temperatures and pressures; a radiometric sensor allowed the prediction of ejaculation… It had a curiosity value for a few weeks, then sales collapsed completely… The event was commented on by some as a desire to return to the natural, to the truth of human relationships; of course nothing could be further from the truth… the truth is that men were simply giving up the ghost.” (Houellebecq: The Possibility of an Island, 28)
An autoamputation of lust and sex through the idealised robotic sex-doll, and yet in this artificiality is the death of contact, the human relationship and the necessary conflicts which perhaps make that relationship meaningful.
In language today, in our hyper-analytical and rationalist moralisation of all things, we have infected everything with the extensions of language: negotiation, responsibility, consent, fundamental equality – all autoamputations resulting from the invention of speech and writing, discursive models meant to alleviate particular sufferings. As such we have sterilised every dimension of human contact which necessarily contained, organised and codified violence and conflict. At the very least, relationships contained a freedom of irrational impulses which were unaccountable, non-linguistic and yet in possession of a sort of sensory truth that cannot be derived by syllogism. Political and moral languages have divorced, exhausted, extinguished and divided us.
The consequent banalisation of the soul combined with the heat-death of contact within relationships leads us towards the autoamputation of lust. That is, the trauma caused by lust’s non-linguistic, irrational complexity leads us to extend it, discursively and technologically, into the world around us in an attempt to negotiate these conflicts. Two examples that would appear to testify to this process: BDSM and the virtual world. BDSM is itself a means of synthesizing a hybrid of conflicted extensions – lust, violence, power, love, sex and consent. A machine for producing linguistically acceptable systems of abuse, exploitation and mutuality. Virtual worlds and/or cybersex are similarly extensions of the same sort, only here we also do away with the relational dimension. Certainly, there are relationships, but they are by no means complete and more certainly they are not necessary. A contact is made, but with no cumbersome physicality or any guarantee of reality or accountability. In fact, part of their meaning is to escape accountability and the prevailing ‘reality’.
Both systems are artificial – the virtual world, obviously so, yearning at its limit for the Houellebecqian robot. BDSM less obviously in that it appears to assimilate more conventional forms of relationship; however, by virtue of language’s presence (in that it produces sex through the medium of a lifestyle which acknowledges choice and thereby protects its constituent members) it risks an artificiality and produces unexpected artificiality through the concept and image in which it realises itself. There is for certain no way back to ‘naturalness’ as Houellebecq rightly supposes and in truth, we likely don’t want to go back. The fundamental problem however persists – at the end of this artificial autoamputation of sensation is extinction; moreover, at the heart of this obsessive production of sex and relationships is the fear or fact that such sensuous contacts are already impossible."
Hannibal 3.7 marks the most prominent difference between a beast and a swine.
Hannibal wrote:
"I always keep my promises." [Hannibal, 3.7]
The swine will deny you its promise, Hannibal forewarns.
And did not Nietzsche also foresee this, in this beautiful passage on the Blond Beast...
Nietzsche wrote:
"The actual work of man on himself during the longest period of the human race, his whole prehistoric work, finds its meaning, its great justification (in spite of all its innate hardness, despotism, stupidity, and idiocy) in this fact: man, with the help of the morality of customs and of social strait-waistcoats, was made genuinely calculable. If, however, we place ourselves at the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally matures its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, that resembles only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive terms), — in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, competent to promise, — and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of what has been at last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general.
And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really competent to promise, this lord of the jree will, this sovereign — how is it possible for him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes — he "deserves" all three — not to know that with this mastery over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery over circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters? The "free" man, the owner of a long unbreakable will, finds in this possession his standard of value: looking out from himself upon the others, he honours or he despises, and just as necessarily as he honours his peers, the strong and the reliable (those who can bind themselves by promises), — that is, every one who promises like a sovereign, with difficulty, rarely and slowly, who is sparing with his trusts but confers honour by the very fact of trusting, who gives his word as something that can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to keep it even in the teeth of disasters, even in the "teeth of fate," — so with equal necessity will he have the heel of his foot ready for the lean and empty jackasses, who promise when they have no business to do so, and his rod of chastisement ready for the liar, who already breaks his word at the very minute when it is on his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct — what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? But there is no doubt about it — the sovereign man calls it his conscience.
His conscience? — One apprehends at once that the idea "conscience," which is here seen in its supreme manifestation, supreme in fact to almost the point of strangeness, should already have behind it a long history and evolution. The ability to guarantee one's self with all due pride, and also at the same time to say yes to one's self — that is, as has been said, a ripe fruit, but also a late fruit: — How long must needs this fruit hang sour and bitter on the tree! And for an even longer period there was not a glimpse of such a fruit to be had — no one had taken it on himself to promise it, although everything on the tree was quite ready for it, and everything was maturing for that very consummation.
''How is a memory to be made for the man-animal? How is an impression to be so deeply fixed upon this ephemeral understanding, half dense, and half silly, upon this incarnate forgetfulness, that it will be permanently present?'' As one may imagine, this primeval problem was not solved by exactly gentle answers and gentle means; perhaps there is nothing more awful and more sinister in the early history of man than his system of mnemonics. "Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory." This is an axiom of the oldest (unfortunately also the longest) psychology in the world. It might even be said that wherever solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colours are now found in the life of the men and of nations of the world, there is some survival of that horror which was once the universal concomitant of all promises, pledges, and obligations. The past, the past with all its length, depth, and hardness, wafts to us its breath, and bubbles up in us again, when we become "serious."
When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a memory, he never accomplishes it without blood, tortures and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures (among them the sacrifice of the first-born), the most loathsome mutilation (for instance, castration), the most cruel rituals of all the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom systems of cruelty) — all these things originate from that instinct which found in pain its most potent mnemonic." [GM]
The Swine needs to rely on cruelty and pain, without which it would be unable to keep promises - it makes of its conscience - a machine, a technique, a mnemonics. The Sovereign demands it of himself.
For the sovereign, keeping the memory alive, a promise to memories, need not involve taming by pain; need not involve cages;
Chiyoh wrote:
"Some beasts should not be put in cages." [Hannibal, 3.7]
What drives Chiyoh is the "plight of Mischa" - the memory of an innocent butchered by swines.
Promises to never forget such swines, need not involve punishment. One confers it from out of one's own honour.
Hannibal wrote:
"The most stable elements, Chiyoh, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you." [Hannibal, 3.7]
"Stability with a lustrous shine A hint of preciousness Coursing through the stuff of life
Common as folks, rare as star shadows Forged firmly in the flames of right Cast into finery, befitting jewels
You are found between iron and silver, Strong, stable, and beautiful." [Robert Hiers]
The original quote in Thomas Harris was remarked at Clarice, but what Chiyoh and Clarice share in common is their Unwavering obsession dominated by a sense of justice, a tireless hunt.
Iron corrodes easily and is plentiful and part of our blood-stream, silver conducts easily but is scarce and too precious to find. High Plutonic Inertia are alloys of the two, a flexibility that can merge with either border and shift from one to the other. A sniper acts quick as lightning, but is also enduring of slow, almost non-reactive periods of tracing and waiting in solitude.
In between Iron being as close as one's own blood [kinship] and silver being far as a foreigner, is Chiyoh, and recalls the song by Metallica on Trust and Promises...
"So close no matter how far Couldn't be much more from the heart Forever trusting who we are And nothing else matters
Never opened myself this way Life is ours, we live it our way All these words I don't just say And nothing else matters
Trust I seek and I find in you Every day for us something new Open mind for a different view And nothing else matters
Never cared for what they do Never cared for what they know But I know
So close no matter how far Couldn't be much more from the heart Forever trusting who we are And nothing else matters."
Hannibal 3 has been riddled with doubles and "to watch over someone" as Chiyoh promises she will, has the double meaning of both the hunter and the guardian. Among the I.Es, the guardian double was called the genius... the vitality of a person, a place, a memory.
Likewise, the thing with promises as Hannibal remarks, is that,
Hannibal wrote:
"Its dangerous to get exactly what you want." [Hannibal, 3.7]
The 'face-off' between Hannibal and Verger is very literally a "face-off". The swapping of identities and getting oneself a face-lift, hardly changes the dog-food one is, underneath it all. Jesus "Risen" with a face "Lift" and the Resurrection of the Promise he "is" to himself and the believers cannot change what it is underneath - a vast machine of "conscience vivisection", of creating morals, domestication is this different "bite of conscience" - self-mutilation and the masochism that Jesus/J.-Xt. is.
But it doesnt stop with Verger.
Face-offs are plenty here. Chiyoh gives Mischa a face-lift, Will putting himself in the place of Hannibal finding him victoriously, Pigs becoming surrogate mothers, lesbians coupling over feeling betrayed by those they blindly trusted, procreation becoming as easy as sperm-donors and test-tube babies.
But what is the ultimate liberation?
Nietzsche wrote:
"To stand unashamed before oneself."
Will is ashamed of his own nature; he has no appetite for such cor-ruption between man and beast. Yet, from a positive perspective, Will stands against Might is Right. Just because one is capable of doing something, and can do it, one need not do it.
Still yet, Hannibal is the reminder/remainder, the derridean Trace of the reality principle. Indifference to the beast, does not make it disappear. Right at the heart of the "justice system" will sit Hannibal, surrendering himself to the "cage", to be watched, to be surveyed, to be analyzed... as he did on others. The Minotaur inside the labyrinth of modernity.
While Jesus resurrects and J.-Xt transmutes into various face-lifts to escape itself,, Hannibal wants to stay off disorder in his obsessive pre-occupation with putting back the tea-cup.
This is not resurrection.
This is not self-deceit or deceit.
But its about keeping a promise to oneself, and a memory of a wholesomeness. To be a Blond Beast is the bottoms-up Appetite taking one's own Penis as Guarantee to create a world faithful to one's own vision.
"Promise," from pro- "before" (see pro-) + mittere "to put, send" (see mission)."
To put a mission before oneself.
The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was where the Germanic warriors boasted promises ahead of one's self...
Hannibal wrote:
"Hannibal: "Would you have done it quickly or would you have stopped to gloat?"
Will: "Does God gloat?"
Hannibal: "Often""
"You could have it all My empire of dirt I will let you down I will make you hurt If I could start again A million miles away I would keep myself I would find a way..." [NIN]
i conducted my own version of the drinking ritual with my son...he was six, but I used a small amount of wine to perform the ritual of honour, gratitude and forbearance. we raised our glasses, after clinking them together, towards our gods, and we drank...then we spilled a little to the earth, for our dead, our ancestors, our blood.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Anfang
Gender : Posts : 3989 Join date : 2013-01-23 Age : 40 Location : Castra Alpine Grug
"And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth." [Rev.12:3-4, KJV]
"Energy is the only life, and is from the Body.... Energy is eternal delight."
Blake wrote:
"As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences."
Blake wrote:
"Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?" He, laughing. answer'd: "I will write a book on leaves of flowers, if you will feed me on love thoughts & give me now and then A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so, when I am tipsie, I'll sing to you to this soft lute, and shew you all alive The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy."
Quote :
"A group that was active in the 1950s, called Synectics, developed several mental procedures that they found to be useful in teaching people to solve problems creatively. These included ways to improve thinking by analogy, to get people out of the ruts of conventional thinking. Personification, fantasy, biological imagery, “making the familiar strange,” they found, seemed to tap into natural biological and mental processes to increase the ability to direct energy toward valid solutions to practical or artistic problems.
It’s important to remember that Rationalism, as used here, isn’t simply a “love of reason,” which is what is often meant when people speak of “rationalism.” In its historical use among philosophers, rather than being just a devotion to rationality, it is a specific doctrine which denies that experience is the source of knowledge. Historically, Rationalism has been closely allied with mysticism, as an affirmation that knowledge comes from a source beyond the ordinary world of experience and beyond the individual. At the present time, it serves authoritarian science rather than authoritarian theology, though the basic doctrine is the same.
Blake took a much simpler, but more radical position, in saying that “Reason isn’t the same that it will be when we know more,” and that reason is only the ratio of things that are presently known, and not the source of new knowledge.
Blake kept the idea that experience is the source of knowledge, without reducing “experience” to the “senses.” Blake didn’t deny the existence of some innate ideas; he didn’t think we were born as a “blank slate,” but there is more to the mind than what we are born with. Imagination and invention and mental striving were able to generate new forms. This commitment to experience as the source of knowledge, rather than just analyzing a stock of “innate ideas,” made Blake’s world one that was oriented toward the future, toward invention and discovery, rather than to memory, established knowledge, and tradition. In its essence, it was antidogmatic.
He recognized that Descartes, Locke, Hume, Newton, had inadequate ideas about the nature of “matter,” but he didn’t accept the simplistic doctrine of extreme rationalism that matter doesn’t exist.
While Blake discussed the importance of perception in understanding the world, he was remarkable in the care he took to make it clear that he saw the world “all alive,” in which grains of dust or sand, birds, worms, ants, flies, etc., perceived and experienced in ways that were not different from those of human life.
The animal poems are expressions of Blake’s evolutionary, vitalistic, cosmology. The tyger, at least, would be too much for a creationist doctrine to handle. If worms and flies and ants are conscious and in the same situation as human beings, the bonds of sympathy and forgiveness are universal.
In a world that’s alive and developing, new knowledge is always possible, and imagination has the prophetic function of reporting the trends and processes of development, illuminating the paths toward the future. Reason is subordinate to invention and discovery.
Although the idea that “contradiction produces change” is associated with Hegel’s “Dialectic,” it was an old and well known theme in philosophy. When Blake’s idea, that “without Contraries there is no progression,” is seen in context, I think it is appropriate to think that to a great extent, Blake derived the idea from a consideration of the sexes.
The dualistic conception of matter as distinct from energy and consciousness is a constrictive illusion put in place by the forces of empire, and the living reality would be freed from the inert husks of the wrongly conceived natural world, when in the future the world was freed of tyranny. After Blake, it would be nearly another century before others would see that the crude materialism of Newton and the Natural Philosophers was essentially a life-denying culmination of the worst trends of official religious dogma.
"And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength
They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil
From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing
This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation"
[Jerusalem, 10]
For Blake, the dialectical principal was a feature of the world itself, but it also informed his method, his technique, and his “rhetoric.” One of Blake’s powerful insights was that intellectual clarity is achieved by contradiction, opposition, contrast, making distinctions as well as comparisons. The principle of intensification through opposition had special features when it was developed in his painting and writing. Blake gave much of the credit for his style of thinking to the process of spending thousands of hours in the practice of etching. The image you create in the conventional etching technique is made when acid “bites” into the lines that will be inked; in Blake’s new technique, the image is made permanent by the acid’s corroding away of everything except the sharply defined image. The decisive, dividing, line is essential. Anyone who has spent even a few hours of intense effort working in dry-point or etching understands that, when you stop, the appearance of the world is altered by changes that have taken place in your eyes and brain. Often, his “metaphors” are literal imaginative insights that have great generality. This kind of knowledge distinguishes the work of a craftsman from that of an academic. The probability is that Blake’s art led him to appreciate compatible ideas when he found them, and it doesn’t seem likely that he was “influenced” by them the way an academic is influenced by books, since Blake had his own “sources” that are generally neglected by intellectuals.
Blake found that contrasts made meanings clear, and made language vivid. Heaven and Hell, Clod and Pebble, Lamb and Tyger, Angel and Devil, Greek and Jew, Innocence and Experience, presented contrasts that encouraged the reader to think about the range of possibilities Blake had in mind. He was always consciously trying to energize the reader’s mind to get out of dogmatic ruts, to look at things freshly, so he often used the polarities in ways that would surprise the reader, ironically reversing familiar references.
Rather than elevating any of the ideas of Christianity to an absolute doctrine, Blake used them as parts of an organic whole. The principle of forgiveness was presented as the appropriate response to a world which is always new. The desire for vengeance comes from a delusive commitment to the world of memory. Virginity is constantly renewed in the world of imaginative life."
"The central brick in the foundation for this understanding comes from The Marriage of Heavenand Hell. All of the text on plate 14 refers to the expansion of vision which “will come to pass by animprovement of sensual enjoyment". The last lines of the plate specifically speak to this expansion of vision and movement from a closed up world (of death/sleep) to one of infinite connection: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. / For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Most often this passage is read a srevealing that the visionary experience will be brought about by a sensual experience, a gentle andpleasurable wakening to the true state of nature and the universe. However, intervening lines state:
“But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, byprinting in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”
These lines have often been interpreted as Blake’s own commentary on his printing method of acid and copper, and it most likely does refer to that. However, the literal violence of his engraving method has often been connected metaphorically to bodily violence, most clearly in Connolly’s work. For example, talking about Blake’s process in thechapter “Graphic Bodies” Connolly says, “Blake was aware of the violence of his process, and thecloseness of creation…to death; or murder, since it is an intentional act of the artist….Relief engraving requires more corrosion, more surface to be excised because not the thin lines but the surrounding negative space is eaten away….Relief printing is thus, even more than intaglio, like skinning ananatomical subject to reveal the systems that lie beneath".
She goes on to state that Blake’sdescription of his engraving process on plate 14 “is given in violent terms explicitly connected with thebody….this is a kill-or-cure method”. In her discussion of the design of this plate she further emphasizes the connection to bodily violence, saying, “Since the design accompanying this passage canpersonify the process, the upper figure representing the forces of corrosion acting on the body of theplate, the plate being (en)graved is placed in the position of a corpse undergoing the violence of anatomization".
While Connolly focuses much of this discussion of plate 14 on a metaphorical orrhetorical violence to the body, this discussion is contained in her book Blake and the Body in which she addresses Blake’s actual treatment of the body in his work and comments on how his work is embodied.I believe we can easily extend and apply her metaphor and philosophy to conclude that the violence/corrosion of one’s perception reveals the political and ideolo gical systems that lie beneath, justas the skinning of the anatomical subject reveals the bodily systems.
Before the world can appear infinite because of “an improvement of sensual enjoyment,” “the notion that man has a body distinctfrom his soul, is to be expunged” which will be accomplished through “printing in the infernal method,by corrosives”.
These corrosives melt away the apparent surfaces so that the infinite can be accessedand sensual enjoyment can be had. Following the causality of the plate we have not just a contrast of alternatives for reaching this infinite vision but the idea that the corrosion must come before thesensual enjoyment – either the books created through the corrosive method lead to the way toimprovement or, more horrifically, violence or a corrosive experience leads to the improvement of sensual enjoyment. This does not lessen the horror of the disturbing reading of the rapes in Blake’s works in which the violence of the sexual act leads to its enjoyment which leads to a new perspective.
Memorable Fancy before the Proverbs of Hell on plates 6 and 7 states:
"When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over thepresent world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'dby your senses five? (E35)"
The Devil uses corrosion to cut into the sides of the abyss of the five senses and reveal that the sensesare narrow – the wisdom is revealed through cutting into and enlarging the senses. Orc too reveals similar expansive powers of corrosion and fire. For example, in The Song of Los, “Asia”, Orc’s fires aredescribed as “thick-flaming, [and] thought-creating” (6:6 E68). Implied is that these fires, through theirburning, create thought – perhaps corroding away unnecessary ideas and blinders, or burning/cuttingnew thoughts.
The description of the manacles as “mind - forg’d” are particularly important for understanding their strength and the power it may take to break free from them. These manacles have been created by the victim’s own mind, perhaps even unknowingly, and not entirely by an outsidesocietal force. Instead it is through the acceptance of society’s rules, definitions, and constraints that the manacles are created in the first place. This self creation, this belief in the constraints and rules of society, makes the manacles harder to break because one may not even be aware of their existence.
Blake writes, “Knowledge is not by deduction butImmediate by Perception or Sense at once” (E664). In other words, one does not gain knowledge through observation but through experience of senses. This knowledge, this perception of truth, isimmediate. While violence is not mentioned in this annotation or its context, it could be that theimmediate experience of violence opens one’s mind to the violence and oppression of the world when a distant observation or discussion doesn’t because the oppression can be forgotten or excused ashappening only to others. Knowledge is gained through experience and perception – immediate expansion of perception due to corrosive agents perhaps. Understanding is related to knowledge in this way. In Blake’s Annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom Blake writes, “Understanding or Thought is not natural to Man it is acquired by means of Suffering & Distress i.e. Experience” (E602).
The tigers of wrath are not only wiser – perhaps because they understand the power of violence itself – but also spark action when a horse of instruction cannot. A narrowly focused person, one with blinders on or mind-forg’d manacles not yet broken, may listen to a horse of instruction and yet not act. However, when confronted by a tiger of wrath, what can one do but listen and act?
“The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God./…/ The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,/and the destructive sword. are portions of eternity too great forthe eye of man” (Plate 8 E36)."
"Pictorially, Blake reveals that a perceiver endows the visionary object with its character; the visionary act constitutes the visionary object.
"...the apocalyptic moment narrated, for instance, in The Four Zoas, where hun1an souls "cry out to be delivered" under the "Dragon form". The visual ambiguity of these figures, moreover, is precisely Blake's strategy for depicting materialism: he portrays human forms turning into earth or the elements. Thus on plate 11 of The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell, Blake's illumination shows human beings turning into earth and water; on plate 3 of Jerusalem, a human form falls into the dead trunk of a tree, and another human form becomes the tree itself. The Marriage o fHeaven and Hell places the rela- tion in a theological framework: "The ancient Poets animated all sensible ob- jects with Gods or Geniuses," but then "a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood." For Blake, "All deities reside in the human breast" (Marriage, plate 11); this theology is a cor- ollary of his principle, "All Things Exist in the Human Imagination" (Jerusalem 69:25). The externality of matter and of deity are tyrannical illu- sions. To succumb to them is to die, to turn to stone, like those figures in the "Great Red Dragon," where Blake depicts what in the Four Zoas he had called the "stony form of death a dragon of the Deeps" (p. 389). Materialism and the concomitant God of externality form therefore one vision, whose effect on human beings who entertain it is depicted in the watercolor.
Giovio's distinction suggests what Blake's work also makes obvious: the pictorial presentation cannot simply reproduce the concepts of the verbal work, but must transform them: "Between word and image, between what is depicted by language and what is uttered by plastic form, the unity begins to dissolve; a single and identical meaning is not immediately common to them," says Michel Foucault, whose argument may be applied here to Blake's transformations of scriptural themes - "By its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme." Specifically, Blake's painting, taking as its subject the act of vision, directly engages its viewer in that act, and Blake allows this property of the visual medium to affect his theme. Presenting a portrayal of visionary imagination as a constitutive act ofthe beholder, as a human psychological process, Blake simultaneously involves his own audience in exactly that act of visualization. Blake's audience must see the portrayal of vision; John's audience can only hear of it after the fact, as John reports, "I John saw these things" (Rev. xxii, 8 ). Each beholder ofBlake's design is immediately involved in the vision; John's reader must rely on the hearsay authority of the visionary, being denied direct access to the vision itself.
Arising from the visual medium, this fact of audience engagement returns us to the theme of conceptualization. Blake insists repeatedly on the conver- sion of tangible to intellectual terms. Thus he says, in his preface to his il- luminated prophecy, Milton, "I will not cease from Mental Fight," emphasiz- ing what he says again in A Vision ofthe Last Judgment: "the Writings of the Prophets illustrate . . . conceptions of the Visionary Fancy by their various sublime & Divine Images as seen in the Worlds of Vision'; (p. 555). Explicitly here, Blake identifies the act of conceptualization as the subject of the pro- phetic work; his visual art, interpreting the scriptural passage even while il- lustrating it, serves at once as an instance of that intellectual act and also as a commentary on it. That dual function of prophecy, as vision and as commentary, was also traditional. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, had observed that each biblical prophecy comprises vision and concept, picture and interpretation. Prior to Newton's commentary, Joseph Mede had popularized an understanding of the prophecy's structure as pal1ly pictorial and partly verbal: some visions there were "painted in certain shapes," and some were written in language; vision and exposition are ''joyned together." This structural concept is obviously germane to the conlposite art of Blake's illuminated poems, which culminate in the greatest of his works, Jerusalem, a poem which is itself a visionary interpretation of the Apocalypse.
According to these chiliastic inter- pretations, the seven-headed beast is a type of the political tyrant, and the Whore of Babylon is his ecclesiastical counterpart. Thus was Antichrist among the seventeenth-century Puritans, and thus implied Durer, much earlier, when he portrayed bishops, not devils, overcome by heavenly angels in the War in Heaven. Blake implies this same identification when he writes that "The Beast & the Whore rule without controls" (p. 611). Consistently with his stated doctrine on the Book of Revelation - that "Mental Things are alone Real"(A Vision of the Last Judgment ,p.565)- Blake goes on to intellectualize the beast and the dragon, and in fact all prophetic symbolism. He finds authority in (for example) John Wesley's Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, where Wesley explicates the dragon as an idea (hatred of faith). Blake also found support for his idealist reading in Swedenborg, who states in one of his commentaries on the Apocalypse that "every truly spiritual meaning is abstracted from the idea of persons, places, and times." Blake opposes the interpretations of Isaac Newton, who argues that the dragon is specifically a "type of the numerous armies of Arabians invading the Romans." Whereas Newton identifies the four beasts of the Apocalypse as geographical regions in Mesopotamia, Blake locates them "in every Man" (The Four Zoas, p. 300).
Accordingly, the "Great Red Dragon" embodies two of the themes of Blake's life-work and of his century: first, "Human thought is crushed [or threatened] beneath the iron hand of Power" (Milton, 25:5), and this is the political dimension of the watercolor; second, redemption (both political and spiritual renewal) is to be achieved by visionary means: "All of us on earth are united in thought" (p. 600); it is "Thought [thatJ chang'd the infinite to a serpent" (Europe, 10: 16), and which changed a mental power of the universal Man to a "stony form of death [aJ dragon of the Deeps." And thus we can recover infinity: "Man is All Imagination God is Man & ex- ists in us & we in him" (p. 664). The "Great Red Dragon" in the watercolor is a vision, then, like the materialistic Elohim who created Adam; it is the action of the "Woman Clothed with the Sun" first to perceive this vision, and then to oppose and to overcome it. This rendition of the Apocalypse of John is therefore no rendition at all, but a new work that challenges the old, embracing its imagery to transform it. The Christian prophecy provides for Blake's work what he ascribed to apocalyptic art: not a master text suitable for imitation, but rather an imagistic and symbolic language, suitable for the sublimer task, the "Visions of Regeneration" (Jerusalem, 24:45)."
In the last bolded part, we then understand why Dolarhyde has to place glass mirrors in the eyes of his victim... the object of transformation [the self] is constituted by the very visionary act, prehending the very seeing of oneself to effect a transformation.
The idea of acid-corrosion in Blake's methods of creating his templates, that "bites into" and "eats away" the useless, making the vision underneath surface up is opposite of Hannibal's Epiphanic technique.
Blake's war is against memory.
Imagination creates the object/subject.
Hannibal's Epiphanic technique is to draw over and recreate the same scene again and again... till patterns "click". Knowing is creating. It is application of one's power of Instinct.
The Red Dragon is an eating away... the corrosion of Time itself... and an experientialist method, that tries to prehend ever present "virgin substrates"... "souls crying to be rescued in the death forms of the dragons of the deep"... the encrustation of heavy, rigid materiality that needs to be eaten away. "Energy is eternal delight and only from the Body"... the ever-renewing vitality must be accessed to effect self-emergence.
Hannibal carves his victims and wants to transform the other.
The Red Dragon carves into itself and wants to transform itself.
Blake was decidedly for the corrosion of the past, and Hannibal is all about bringing the broken tea-cup together.
i conducted my own version of the drinking ritual with my son...he was six, but I used a small amount of wine to perform the ritual of honour, gratitude and forbearance. we raised our glasses, after clinking them together, towards our gods, and we drank...then we spilled a little to the earth, for our dead, our ancestors, our blood.
A symbel is a combination of boasting as well as gloating... both of deeds accomplished, but even more of deeds yet to be done.
Warriors would raise a toast and boast of what they Would accomplish, they gave their Word and then set about accomplishing it... Its a sacred rite that tied one's actions to one's word, or one's word in the drinking hall was one's action.
"Family values may have declined over the last century, but we still help our families when we can." [Hannibal, 3.10]
Hannibal 3.10 is a pause on the theme of Dignity.
From strangled dogs and parasitic violations into the empathetic brain, the "innocents" on behalf of the law like Crawford are exposed as more cannibalistic than the one condemned for it. The accent on dignity becomes distinct in the exchange between Alana and Hannibal.
Whereas Hannibal speaks of unconditional help to families, Alana speaks of conditional courtesies. The immaculate suits and trousers are now upon Alana as much as the pale prisoner's uniform is on Hannibal.
Taste has been purchased by a merger with the verger...
Self-Dignity has been purchased with a partnership, a 'family'... than the other way of upholding the dignity of a family through one's self.
It is perfectly fitting as her suits, that no one more than Alana should psychoanalyze what Hannibal fears... as it is where she feels her violation. His intrusion into her body, into her dignity... And she threatens to "rape" him the same way...
A man threatens with penetration.
A woman threatens with withdrawings.
Hannibal wrote:
"Hannibal: "You've got Will dressed up in moral dignity pants. Nothing is his fault."
Alana: "I know what you are afraid of. Its not pain or solitude... but, its indignity. I'll take your books. I'll take your drawings. I'll take your toilet. You'll have nothing but indignity."" [Hannibal, 3.10]
Innocence and dignity are braided and knotted differently in the mouth of the Xt. and that of the pagan.
Blake was still within the paradigm of the J.-Xt. good and evil... his songs of "Innocence" are about the "Immaculate Perception" of "Dignity" before the "fall from grace". Satanic energy was the needed revolution to counter the indignity of rationalistic civilization to recover that state of edenic bliss, of original happiness. The Red Dragon is a regressive state into retardation and envy of a childhood numbness, it takes for happiness... the murder of "happy families"...
The word "pure" akin to the childlike state of "innocence" is really ignorance that the Xt. means by it;
Nietzsche wrote:
""Innocence": that is their name for the ideal state of stupefaction; "blessedness": the ideal state of sloth; "love": the ideal state of the herd animal that no longer wants to have enemies. Therewith one has raised everything that debases and lowers man to an ideal." [WTP, 335]
Nietzsche wrote:
"When Jews step forward as innocence itself then the danger is great: one should always have one's little fund of reason, mistrust, and malice to hand when one reads the New Testament. Simply-Jews: with an instinctive ability to create an advantage, a means of seduction out of every superstitious supposition, out of ignorance itself..." [WTP, 199]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The great crimes in psychology: Pain has been robbed of innocence." [WTP, 296]
The Dignity of the Xt. is his/her InDignation:
Nietzsche wrote:
"Precisely those apostles of revenge and ,essentiment, those pessimists from indignation par excellence,who make it their mission to sanctify their filth under the name of "indignation."
We others, who desire to restore innocence to becoming, would like to be the missionaries of a cleaner idea: that no one has given man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself-that no one is to blame for him.
There is no being that could be held responsible for the fact that anyone exists at all, that anyone is thus and thus, that anyone was born in certain circumstances, in a certain environment.- It is a tremendous restorative that such a being is lacking.
We are not the result of an eternal intention, a will, a wish: we are not the product of an attempt to achieve an "ideal of perfection" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of virtue"-any more than we are a blunder on the part of God that must frighten even him (an idea with which, as is well known, the Old Testament begins). There is no place, no purpose, no meaning, on which we can shift the responsibility for our being, for our being thus and thus. Above all: no one could do it; one cannot judge, measure, compare the whole, to say nothing of denying it! Why not?- For five reasons, all accessible even to modest intellects; for example, because nothing exists besides the whole -
And, to say it again, this is a tremendons restorative; this constitutes the innocence of all existence.'" [WTP, 765]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Only the innocence of becoming gives us the greatest courage and the greatest freedom! To restore a good conscience to the evil man - has this been my unconscious endeavor? I mean, to the evil man in so far as he is the strong man?" [WTP, 787, 788]
The root of Xt. courtesy and indignation at the imperfection man is, was transposed onto woman idealized to the level of the pure, innocent virgin... the Immaculate Lady. From here on, any slight at "dignity" would be a "moral affront" arousing "indignation at the Rude".
Alana shows this inversion like a mirror.
Lastly, we also "see" the dignity and bearing of the one without eyes...
To be blind to man or monster... and provide hospitality Irrespective... is that constitutive of human dignity?
Hannibal remarks in 3.10, there are many kinds of love and many kinds of loving that is peculiar to each family... and one must permit oneself this, with no shame. While Will has escaped facing his demons, the terrible aspects of himself reflected in his genetic child, by getting a "ready-made" wife and son,, Hannibal and Alana are at opposite ends.
Hannibal's love of Abigail almost re-enacts the pagan voluntary sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father. Myth claims, she was in fact the goddess of the hunt Artemis, and in other versions, saved at the last minute by being replaced with the head of a deer, or a goat...
"Iphigenia is a daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Greek mythology, whom Agamemnon is commanded to kill as a sacrifice to allow his ships to sail to Troy. In Attic accounts, her name means "strong-born", "born to strength", or "she who causes the birth of strong offspring.
Some sources claim that Iphigenia was taken by Artemis to Tauris in Crimea on the moment of the sacrifice, and that the goddess left a deer or a goat (the god Pan transformed) in her place. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women called her Iphimede and told that Artemis transformed her into the goddess Hecate. Antoninus Liberalis said that Iphigenia was transported to the island of Leuke, where she was wedded to immortalized Achilles under the name of Orsilochia."
Hannibal is a 'monster' who doesn't hesitate to kill his own. The Hunter offers his best and precious to keep his word. She is literally, his bound word.
At the other end is Alana, who doesn't hesitate to surrogate a monstrosity to fulfill a contract to the judicial law.
Kierkegaard contrasted the killing of Iphigenia and Issac in his Fear and Trembling to highlight the superiority of the Xt. Faith. The J.-Xt. god saves the faithful...
Quote :
"The social norms are seen to be the highest court of appeal for judging human affairs—nothing outranks them for this sort of ethicist. Even human sacrifice is justified in terms of how it serves the community, so that when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia he is regarded as a tragic hero since the sacrifice is required for the success of the Greek expedition to Troy (Fear and Trembling).
Kierkegaard, however, does recognize duties to a power higher than social norms. Much of Fear and Trembling turns on the notion that Abraham's would-be sacrifice of his son Isaac is not for the sake of social norms, but is the result of a “teleological suspension of the ethical”. That is, Abraham recognizes a duty to something higher than both his social duty not to kill an innocent person and his personal commitment to his beloved son, viz. his duty to obey God's commands.
From Kierkegaard's religious perspective, however, the conceptual distinction between good and evil is ultimately dependent not on social norms but on God. Therefore it is possible, as Johannes de Silentio argues was the case for Abraham (the father of faith), that God demand a suspension of the ethical (in the sense of the socially prescribed norms). This is still ethical in the second sense, since ultimately God's definition of the distinction between good and evil outranks any human society's definition. The requirement of communicability and clear decision procedures can also be suspended by God's fiat. This renders cases such as Abraham's extremely problematic, since we have no recourse to public reason to decide whether he is legitimately obeying God's command or whether he is a deluded would-be murderer. Since public reason cannot decide the issue for us, we must decide for ourselves as a matter of religious faith.
Kierkegaard's ultimate advocacy of divine command metaethics is tempered somewhat by his detailed analyses of the nuanced ways individuals need to relate to God's commands. These analyses amount to a subtle moral psychology, which borders on virtue ethics. It is not enough simply for God to issue a command; we need to hear and obey. But obedience is not straightforward. We can obey willingly or begrudgingly. We can refuse altogether. We can be selectively deaf, or be so filled with our egotistical desires that we are altogether deaf to our duties. In order to obey we first need to cultivate faith, since obedience to a divine command is nonsense unless we at least believe the command has come from God. To cultivate faith in a transcendent, eternal, omnipresent God, who allegedly became incarnate in the form of a particular human being who was put to death, requires one to overcome the offense to one's reason and to adopt a tolerance for paradox. To imagine the enormity of the consequences of sin, yet to relish the possibilities of freedom, engenders anxiety. We need to learn to navigate the treacherous maelstroms of despair, to recognize the self-absorption of demonic states, to veer away from prudence and vanity, and to avoid mere conformity to social mores. We also need to cultivate hope, patience, devotion, and above all love. We also need to be vigilant about our capacity for self-deception and be prepared to suffer for love and for our ultimate spiritual identity.
The type of Christianity that underlies his writings is a very serious strain of Lutheran pietism informed by the dour values of sin, guilt, suffering, and individual responsibility."
Technology is the new surrogacy for religion, and the federal law, that of god. Obligations to the law can now easily be met by the Faithful. The saving of a child that was sacrificed can now be undone. Many Issacs and "heirs" can be saved. Xt. Was the promise to end all sacrifice, and technology fulfills it.
On the other side, the hunt is still a sacred domain and love is not the winged angelic eros, but also of thanatos... "holy blood rites", that Hannibal says, initiate one to,
"Jake Horsley is one of the very few people writing on the Matrix who has asked, “Where is the glory of nature in the Matrix?” He notes that “I don’t believe I saw a single tree throughout the movie.” This observation returns us to the central question, here rephrased: If escaping from the simulated world of the Matrix does not take us back to the natural world where we as a species originated, where will it take us?
Alluding to the Romantic poet William Blake, Horsely compares Neo’s heroic quest in the Matrix to “Blake’s liberation of perception into the Imagination.” It remains to be seen if the imagination of the creators of the Matrix trilogy is up to this high standard of achievement. Whatever the case, this cinematic story challenges us to break out of the fierce technological spell of simulation and to recover our humanity through the realization of our imaginative powers. The Gnostics held imagination to be part of our divine endowment, that which distinguishes us from other mammals."
"Vision 'Why do my eyes hurt ?' asks a newborn Neo.
'You've never used them before,' answers a paternal Morpheus.
Leaving the matrix entails bursting the bubble of self-reflection and learning to see life as it really is. Matrix sorcerers have blasted the doors of perception off their hinges. They can no longer indulge in the luxury of filtering experience through the ego-construct of the matrix consensus reality. They must learn to see as Blake saw, 'a world in a grain of sand'. By reducing themselves to nothing, matrix sorcerers are able to see the world without thinking about it. They become pure perception, and as such, the means by which the world is created. The responsibility is immense. Matrix sorcerers uphold their reality by the act of perceiving it. They know there is no matrix without their attention to maintain it; the moment they let their attention slip, the whole program collapses. Hence 'vision' is not merely a receptive but a creative faculty. The prophet or seer (Lucid) is one who shapes the world according to his or her will. To the Lucid, everything is a component or vehicle of his or her consciousness: everything is alive. Hence every single moment is the moment of creation. Most humatons prefer to die than to shoulder such a crushing responsibility. That's what makes them humatons."
"Neo is a natural born sorcerer, one might say. He has the ability to suspend disbelief, along with those twin bugaboos, fear and doubt, and hurl himself into the unknown, trusting his wings to sprout in time to carry him across the Abyss, and into the fourth dimension. The film makes dramatic use of an actual, physical leap—Neo tries to jump from one building to the next—to represent the proverbial leap of faith. This is Blake’s liberation of perception into the Imagination, and it is perfectly a propos here."
"Ghost mentions Kierkegaard explicitly in the Enter the Matrix during his dialogue with Trinity:
"Trinity: Do you believe that Neo is going to end the war? Ghost: Yes, I do. Trinity: So do I ... but I can't explain how or why Ghost: Kierkegaard reminds us that belief has nothing to do with how or why. Belief is beyond reason. I believe because it is absurd. Trinity: You think it’s crazy to believe it? Ghost: To believe what ? That a single man can defeat an entire race of machines and end a war that has endured for over a hundred years? Of course. It’s complete lunacy and that’s why we must believe it will happen. Faith, by its very nature, must transcend logic.""
"This ties very neatly into Rovira’s account of classical models of personality that flourished in both Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s day, which in chapter three are related to the dialectical process in Kierkegaard’s transition from aesthetic to ethical personalities, as well as the movement in Blake from innocence to experience."
"The primal rejection of weakness, which is every bit as natural as the nurturing instinct..." [Hannibal, 3.10]
The rejection of weakness takes two forms, and consequently two phases/faces of nihilism.
1. When vulnerabilities are left unchecked, they mutate. Weakness and weaklings accelerate. The religion of compassion that feels its first urge in nurturing vulnerabilities have resulted in what we know as dysgenics. Modernity, which can be defined as the rejection of rejection of weakness, is unnatural. The human side of the red dragon attempts to reject and literally devour the 'mana' or the energy of a red dragon painting sapping it of its sanity and mutating stronger and stronger...
Nietzsche wrote:
"Nihilism represents a pathological transitional stage (what is pathological is the tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at all): whether the productive forces are not yet strong enough, or whether decadence still hesitates and has not yet invented its remedies.
"Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the values. The measure of unbelief, of permitted "freedom of tbe spirit" as an expression of an increase in power. "Nihilism" an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of the spirit, the over-richest life-partly destructive, partly ironic." [WTP, 13, 14]
2. The other form is when vulnerabilities are rejected from the inability to sustain the reality of our limitations. We see and fear our own niceness, our very mortality as a weakness... and we resort to scientology, schizophrenic beliefs of hypernatural strength, transhumanism and prosthetics... "Behold the great red dragon..."
The red dragon is ashamed of its own humaneness, its vulnerabilities, its mortality... it feels slandered by perceptions of a frivolous title "tooth-fairy"... Hannibal finds the word "distortion" used by the red dragon "startling", when it assumes the former's ego, the I can be distorted by "words"..., but yet words do distort... Perhaps then there is no difference between jesus foreseen by john the baptist, and satan the 666? Bedelia remarks, righteous violence of the compassionate [jesus] and cruelty [satan] co-exist only together...
Nietzsche wrote:
"Why did I startle in my dream, so that I awoke? Did not a child come to me, carrying a mirror?
"O Zarathustra"—said the child unto me—"look at thyself in the mirror!"
But when I looked into the mirror, I shrieked, and my heart throbbed: for not myself did I see therein, but a devil's grimace and derision
Verily, all too well do I understand the dream's portent and monition: my doctrine is in danger; tares want to be called wheat!
Mine enemies have grown powerful and have disfigured the likeness of my doctrine, so that my dearest ones have to blush for the gifts that I gave them..." [TSZ, Child with the mirror]
The red dragon seeks recognition from the Devil, of its dia-bolical strength.
Quote :
"The Late Latin word is from Ecclesiastical Greek diabolos, in Jewish and Christian use, "Devil, Satan" (scriptural loan-translation of Hebrew satan), in general use "accuser, slanderer," from diaballein "to slander, attack," literally "throw across," from dia- "across, through" + ballein "to throw" (see ballistics).
In Vulgate, as in Greek, diabolus and dæmon were distinct, but they have merged in English and other Germanic languages."
It assumes strength is an emanation from the slandering and devouring of all that is weak and frivolous and judgemental.
Nietzsche wrote:
"The concept of decadence.- Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life: one is in no position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it. It is a disgrace for all socialist systematizers that they suppose there could be circumstances-social combinations-in which vice, disease, prostitution, distress would no longer grow.- But that means condemning life.- A society is not free to remain young. And even at the height of its strength it has to form refuse and waste materials. The more energetically and boldly it advances, the richer it will be in failures and deformities, the closer to decline.- Age is not abolished by means of institutions. Neither is disease. Nor vice." [WTP, 40]
The consciousness of diabolical power from the slandering of weakness, limitations, life is a false strength - and more properly, it is a self-hatred.
To eliminate one's weakness, and slander oneself and life for it, and grow in the positive alone, and where mirrors replace reality and show you only what you want to see in increasing narcissistic solipsism, has the aura of a "spectacular" beastial sexuality... the colossal nature of such a self-specting solipsism is why Hannibal calls it magnificent, and it is called the "great" red dragon..
Narcissus looks reflects into the flow of time, into the flux... the Great red dragon looks into petrified images on mirror shards "throwing-across" [dia+bolical] reflections of itself...
Quote :
"the metaphor of the mirror as matter, an image that has an important function in Marsilio Ficino’s highly influential explication of Platonism. Apart from being yet another powerful metaphor, the image of the mirror is also connected with the image of the materia meretrix. There was, for example, a widely held belief that mirrors belonging to prostitutes had the power to infect decent people with physical disease and immoral behaviour. This belief underscores the idea that mirrors not only reflect images, but can also retain the forms they “catch.” The metaphor also illustrates the specific anxiety that mirrors could reflect these dangerous images back and thus contaminate and corrupt the environment, both morally and physically."
According to the neoplatonists, pure matter has no contraries. Xt. is the absolute real-ization and materialization of the spirit [christ incarnated/Hegel]; Satanism is the absolute spirit-ualization of all matter and bonds, bondage, limitations [Marx].
Red lasers from the infernal need to dilate, enlarge, materialize...
Quote :
"early 13c., from Old French dragon, from Latin draconem (nominative draco) "huge serpent, dragon," from Greek drakon (genitive drakontos) "serpent, giant seafish," apparently from drak-, strong aorist stem of derkesthai "to see clearly," from PIE *derk- "to see." Perhaps the literal sense is "the one with the (deadly) glance."
As metaphor, the dragon as the devouring eye, that locks up the sun [displaces the whole reality principle, the light of nature], the hoarder of the treasure, is another way of saying it is what disrupts circulation.
Distribution and Free-movement that Is life. The constellation draconis represents the north polar belt, some say, 66.6 degrees above the equatorial belt...
Quote :
"Astronomer David Pratt confirms this: “The north ecliptic pole lies in the constellation Draco, and has the equatorial coordinates 18h (270°) RA, +66.6° decl.""
The slaying of the Unlimite Dragon with no end to its "magnificent" appetite[chaos], prompting its frighteningly fiery, conflagrant sexuality, released the sun - the Limiter.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Jerusalem - The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Plate 6 [Detail] - William Blake
Francis Dolarhyde wrote:
"I am the Dragon. And you call me insane. You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing. To me, you are a slug in the sun. You are an ant in the afterbirth. It is your nature to do one thing correctly. Before me, you rightly tremble. But, fear is not what you owe me. YOU OWE ME AWE." [Harris, Red dragon]
Hannibal wrote:
"A magnificent thing, to watch the world through his red haze." [Hannibal, 3.10]
"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? And what shoulder, and what art. Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? And what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?" [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Goethe wrote:
""Who are you then?" "I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good." [Faust, I]
Quote :
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Carl Carus, Faust in his Study
"Faust, the dramatic character, was ready-made for Goethe as a vehicle through which to express the new situation: of the Individual attempting to pierce single-handedly the fabric of the Universe. Based on a vaguely historical character, Dr Faust of Bamberg (1520), recorded also in Ingolstadt (1528), and Nuremberg (1532), astrologer, and probably charlatan, who likely died at Staufen near Frieburg in the early 1540’s, Faust is nevertheless essentially a literary character from the beginning. His story was told in anonymous chapbooks (The History of Dr Johann Faust, published by Spies, Frankfurt, 1587, was followed by Widmann’s version in 1599, edited in 1674 by Pfitzer) that introduced the restless scholar dissatisfied with the limits of human knowledge, making a pact with the devil, journeying through possible human experience, and reaching a dismal end.
The theme was a gift. Faust traditionally was the isolated scholar-magician, dabbling with arcane knowledge, therefore the lone Individual. The character’s restless intellectual curiosity and desire for truth was in embryo that of the more-developed Renaissance and Enlightenment-driven eighteenth century. Goethe’s challenge was to take the conventional Christian framework of the story, and its accompanying moral values, and make it carry the weight of pre-Romantic and ultimately Romantic angst, while also achieving a more modern resolution.
If Faust does embody the Romantic paradigm in Part I, then we should expect to find him a restless spirit, dissatisfied with the inadequacy of the world and society, seeking inside himself the powers of the Individual soul to penetrate to a deeper or higher level of knowledge, emotionally frustrated, yearning, suffering from claustrophobia and intellectual doubt. His energy will be powerful but undirected. He will be attracted by power, and the possibilities of manipulation, but find relationship difficult. He will be self-centred, isolated, easily bored, outwardly harsh, but also capable of deep feeling for anything that offers an alternative to accepted constraint, and a possibility of purer and truer knowledge: therefore for Nature, innocence, beauty, freedom, fresh experience, and arcane knowledge.
He is possessed of frustrated yearning, and a feeling of claustrophobia. This is indeed the Romantic, and to some extent the Modern position. He follows a path of directed energy or ceaseless activity to which Mephistopheles, with Divine consent, spurs him, seeking to achieve satisfaction and contentment in achievement. His self-centredness makes him effective at manipulation rather than relationship, solitude rather than engagement, and also means that while not intending to cause harm or pain, he is lacking in foresight and careless of the consequences to others. There is evidence of deep powers of feeling, and an ability to empathise particularly with Nature, but in his selfish mode he is destructive of human values. The pact has established that he does not expect to find lasting fulfilment, and undertakes to strive endlessly.
We then have a piece of pure Romantic yearning, as Faust longs for wings of the spirit to lift him above the Earth and let him follow the Light. Wagner in turn dismisses Nature in favour of learning, allowing Faust a speech identifying his dual nature in true Romantic fashion, his earthbound persona and his restless spirit, where he longs for a magic carpet, something that Mephistopheles will eventually provide..."
"You are aware of only one unrest; Oh, never learn to know the other! Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, And one is striving to forsake its brother. Unto the world in grossly loving zest, With clinging tendrils, one adheres; The other rises forcibly in quest Of rarefied ancestral spheres. If there be spirits in the air That hold their sway between the earth and sky, Descend out of the golden vapors there And sweep me into iridescent life. Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands To carry me to distant lands, I should not trade it for the choicest gown, Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown." [Faust, I]
/
"Thy heart by one sole impulse is possess’d; Unconscious of the other still remain! Two souls, alas! are lodg’d within my breast, Which struggle there for undivided reign: One to the world, with obstinate desire, And closely-cleaving organs, still adheres; Above the mist, the other doth aspire, With sacred vehemence, to purer spheres. Oh, are there spirits in the air, Who float ’twixt heaven and earth dominion wielding, Stoop hither from your golden atmosphere, Lead me to scenes, new life and fuller yielding! A magic mantle did I but possess, Abroad to waft me as on viewless wings, I’d prize it far beyond the costliest dress, Nor would I change it for the robe of kings."
"Erich Heller cunningly writes, "What is Faust's sin? Restlessness of spirit. What is Faust's salvation? Restlessness of spirit."
Hermann Weigand, although he concedes that "Faust's salvation is a highly unorthodox affair", ascribes the heretical redemption to the hero's "ceaseless striving to expand his personality", which was certainly the quest of Goethe himself.
Nothing in Goethe is more Homeric (or more a grotesque parody of Homer) than the absence of any notion of a human spirit apart from the forces and drives of nature. Faust, like the Homeric heroes, is a battleground where contending forces collide. This is his largest difference from Hamlet, who is in the Biblical tradition of a human spirit. Faust could never say, with Hamlet, that in his heart there was a kind of fighting. Rather, his heart, his mind, and is perceptions are strictly divided from one another, and he is the more or less arbitrary site where they clash."
"Without our imaginations, we'd be like all those other poor dullards. Fear is the price of our instrument. But I can help you bear it." [Harris, The Red Dragon]
"The Great Red Dragon is freedom to him, shedding his skin, the sound of his voice, his own reflection. The building of a new body and the othering of himself, the splitting of his personality, all seem active and deliberate. He craves change..." [Hannibal, 3.11]
Quote :
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] [Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Plate 100’ - William Blake]
"Faust seeks freedom both in himself and in the world, but as a practical construction his independence is something wholly formal. His inner, spiritual soul is opposed to his outer, earthly soul, and the tension is unbearable.
Back in his study, Faust is as restless as ever but feels exhausted and empty of ideas. He turns for inspiration to the Bible, and tries to render into his own language the opening line of the Greek text of the Gospel of St. John, translating the word Logos in a number of ways – first as ‘Word’, secondly as ‘Mind’, thirdly as ‘Force’ and finally as ‘Deed’ (Sc. 6, lines 1224-1237). Now the spiritual as well as secular implications of all this are huge. Faust is giving us not an arbitrary succession of terms, but rather a concentrated critique of his own onesided, finite understanding. Each translation of Logos reveals its own limitation and gives way to the next until we have the real and true as opposed to the external image of a thought.
The primal Deed is the first act of divine creation, as in Genesis, ch. 1, when God says, ‘Let there be light’. But the active self, the will, is the essence of all creation, whether divine or human. The willing of the self in action is the creative event both in God’s consciousness of the world and in ours.11 In both cases, it is not ‘mind’ but the spontaneous freedom of the will that ‘sets worlds on their creative course’ (Sc. 6, line 1232).
In this reflection on will, Faust overcomes his own onesided understanding and comes to see the external world in its own being and movement. He gives action and creativity an objective form. By contrast, Mephistopheles gives mind and will a thoroughly subjective shape, and so can only oppose them to the external world: ‘I am the spirit of perpetual negation’ (Sc. 6, line 1338). Whereas Faust’s vision of creation brings thought and life together and unites them, Mephistopheles can only divide and oppose and negate.
The angels who carry Faust’s ‘immortal part’ up to heaven put it this way: ‘He who strives on and lives to strive can earn redemption still.’ In short, Faust denies the ‘Beautiful moment’ (Sc. 7, line 1700)."
"If ever I lay down complacent on a bed of indolence, Then let me be finished in that same moment. If by flattery you can deceive me Into complacent self-admiration, And trick me with enjoyment, Then let that be my last day! That is the bet I offer you!"
"In Goethe's telling there is no Faustian bargain... but a bet that Faust offers the devil - never to find rest in pleasure and to surrender his soul to the devil should Faust ever say to some moment: "Abide, you are so beautiful" (lines 1699-1706)."
"Blake, says Frye, "wanted to recover the mythological universe for the human imagination, and stop projecting it on an objective God or similar analogy of the external order. No contemporary poet made a comparable attempt to do this, except perhaps Goethe"…
Mephistopheles and Urizen, the Great Negators in the Goethe and Blake myths, are two of the profoundest character creations in Western literature, and in crucial respects their mentalities are virtually identical. The dream-quests in the two poems, the Classical Walpurga's Night of Faust Part Ii and Night VIIA of the Zoas, are the two most diversified experiences of imaginative initiation in Romantic poetry. Yet both episodes, in their rich exuberance, express a shared conviction of the need for complex contrariety, for balances intensities in mental life.
The first paradigm the dialectic of self-affirmation and self-transcendence, is embodied in the creative tension between a self-transcending God-figure and a self-affirming Devil-figure. The second Blake-Goethe philosophic concern, an ontological psychology of negation, is expressed in the dramatic characterization of this same Devil-figure, a Devil quite human while still deeply threatening. And in the fourfold model that represents each poet's final redeeming vision of the integrated psyche, the Devil-figure is in both cases promoted to the status of a coparticipant in the fourfold creative colloquy of immortals, of mutually contrary mental forces.
By dramatizing problems through encounters of cosmic-scale supernatural forces, Blake and Goethe not only emphasize the world-wide consequences of these problems but also attempt to convey a cosmic scale meliorism, a faith in the eventual reintegration of Universal Humanity expressed in the vision of an ultimate cosmic balance. This faith in the victory of creative contrariety over destructive negation is problematic and troubled. But is is inherent in the pattern of the poets' Devil-redeeming myth. And this myth is the crucial one in both men's imaginative worlds.
The God-Devil polarity is now a creative tension, not a mutual exclusion; beneath all contraries lies the unity of mutual indispensability. In addition, the Devil undergoes a process of growth and learning. In their new Books of Job (Faust and The Four Zoas), they hope to overcome what are felt to be unfruitful elements of unreconciled dualism, stasis, or otherworldliness within received tradition… with a new feeling of unity, process, and immanence.
For Goethe as well as for Blake, fruitful competition between opposing forces is the law of life in both mind and world. The contraries are in mutual opposition, but their creative tension is the life-giving power that paradoxically unites them. As Goethe says in one of the "Talismans" from the "Singer's Book" of the West-East Divan:
"In the act of breathing there are two gifts of grace: Taking in the air and being relieved of it. The former oppresses, the latter refreshes; Life is so wonderfully mixed. Thank God when he burdens you, And thank him when he sets you free again." [Talisman, II.17-22]
Or, as Blake puts it: "Without Contraries is no progression. Atraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence" [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Pl.3]
The "devilish" or destructive potential of negation must be counteracted at each stage of our oscillation or respiration, our symmetric movement back and forth between the two contraries of selling and unselling. Thus our basic humanness is preserved, the "Devil" in us redeemed. Each swing of the selving-unselving pendulum is necessary to maintain a creative tension between contraries, but each swing of this pendulum also carries with it the danger of an unbalancing negation. Blake and Goethe associate the "Devil" explicitly with negation through excessive self-transcendence as well, even if the dangers of this are not as readily apparent. In the broadest sense, any negation becomes "devilish" once it insets the selving-unselving balance that constitutes our healthy spiritual breathing, or "authentic pulse of life", as Goethe calls it in his prose myth of Lucifer and the Elohim. If these mental forces become mutual negators on a grand scale, they can also destroy a universe.
Conflicts between reason and desire arise from deeper tensions between einga nd Becoming. To keep these tensions creative rather than destructive is imagination's crucial task. Faust and The Four Zoas are poetic ventures in ontological psychology. Ontological negations are related to the fear of change as the psychological negations just studied are related to the fear of desire. In both cases, fear generates preemptive, aggressive defenses, disrupting the selving-unselving dialectic. The resulting complexities can easily make ontological negations as subtly deceptive as psychological ones: a promising venture in Becoming can unexpectedly terminate in a form of static Being, which in turns conceals a Nothingness. The two poets explore these perils.
In the two poets' nights of imaginative initiation, Romanticism's pioneering introspective mythopoeia attains a triumph of exuberance. Imaginative unselving, we discover, requires a rich diversification of consciousness."
""God, in Jesus, assumes the world’s restless desire for God, so that the world can come to share in God’s restless desire for the world."
According to Aquinas, the creature desires God implicitly in everything that it desires.1 Desire, moreover, is not simply one among the variety of the creature’s operations, but represents the essence of the creature, for, as Aristotle affirms, nature is a principle of motion,2 and motion—understood here in the broadest sense as including all varieties of change—is intelligible only as ordered to an end, which means, as an analogous appetite. If nature founds the intelligibility of things, if it is what identifies them as the things they are, then all things are ultimately defined by their desire: on the one hand, explicite, by that which specifically actualizes them as the beings they are, and on the other hand, implicite, by the God who is the perfection of all their perfections, and the end of all their ends. For the classical mind, the world is intelligible as a whole precisely because it is shot through with desire (God moves all things—again: this includes every single change that occurs in the universe—by being the universal object of desire, and only because this desire has a single destination (“Our hearts are restless until they rest in you”), which gathers its multiplicity into unity.
Desire always implies that something is missing, and thus sets in motion the effort to remedy this deficiency. In order to avoid a common misinterpretation, however, it is important to note that lack does not suffice on its own to explain desire, such as Plato understands it. Rather, desire arises from the lack of what one knows to be good, of what one is made for, and thus of what belongs already in some sense to one. For Plato, love is the child of both Poros (plenty) and Penia (poverty), both presence and absence: pure absence (ignorance) and pure presence (wisdom), he says, are equally static and fruitless. The drama that characterizes love requires the space between these two poles.
It is interesting to consider one of the pictures of God that emerges in late modernity, namely, the God of German Idealism who has so to speak internalized the disjunction between freedom and nature. Thus, since God represents the perfection of all perfec- tions, and since contradiction becomes an expression of perfection, this God stands as the paradigm of tragic restlessness. An ancient gnostic theme returns here, insofar as God is viewed, for example by Jacob Boehme, as containing within himself a deep, opaque darkness. Schelling claims that this internal darkness is necessary for God’s freedom: God shows his sovereignty most definitively by overcoming himself and thereby revealing the triumph of freedom over nature. For Hegel, who follows a similar path, negativity becomes the essential element of spirit; without negativity, spirit would be inert like matter. An inert spirit, however, could hardly claim divinity when compared to the thunderous stirrings of human spirit in history. Thus, the fullness of spirit, concrete spirit, cannot but include within itself contradiction in its supreme form, namely, the contradiction of complete self-alienation, i.e., of hell. One wonders what relationship Hegel’s God has to that of Luther, who likewise shows his divinity by embracing, and so reconciling, within himself pure contradiction: simul justus et peccator. However that may be, Hegel envisions God in precisely the terms in which Goethe describes the devil: der verneinende Geist, the spirit that negates. The replacement of beauty by the sublime entails a God who “proves” his divinity by refusing to be at rest. Tellingly, Faust, as he translates the Bible, rejects the phrase “In the beginning was the Word” as too passive (i.e., “restful”), and writes instead, “In the beginning was the Deed (Tat).
What characterizes the postmodern thought that follows is above all just this collapse, which rests in restlessness alone and makes the endless its end. In the place of late modern drama, we have a “perpetual rehearsal,” in which meaning is endlessly deferred.48 It does not seem accidental that postmodern philosophy coincides with a movement in (sophisticated) art toward the wholly non- representational—unnatural—and the tendency to replace beauty by the sublime. Popular art, by contrast, has little of the sublime’s gravitas: it becomes wholly “beautiful,” or perhaps better, “pretty,” in the sense of offering immediate gratification; in this respect, it becomes a simple token of capitalist exchange, which earns still more contempt for beauty. Because nature is not viewed in its depths as metaphysical desire for what is genuinely transcendent, we are left in the end to choose between the trivial and the tragic. In postmodern philosophy, of the Continental variety at least, we are scarcely given a choice, for the desire for clear sense, for reliable meaning, and for access to “truth,” is pathologized as an infantile fetish, and dismissed under the name of a “metaphysics of presence.” It is claimed that, behind this metaphysics, lies a totalizing desire to master, and this desire itself arises from a deep-seated insecurity. Nature has, indeed, begun to seem wholly depraved.
In reaction to this tendency to totalize, desire gets wholly detached from any determinate object, which then gives it a mysterious infinity that provides an Ersatz for the ancient, “determi- nate” infinity of God. Desire can in this regard become its own object, because it takes on an essentially religious quality, even though it remains wholly without any content (religion without religion)."
"When I say to the Moment flying: 'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' Then bind me in your bonds undying, And my final ruin I will bear!"
Faust tells Satan that he'll never settle down on any one good thing. He, Faust, will never be satisfied. The devil says, "Oh, yes, you will."
Faust's claim was a primary Romantic sentiment: Driving restlessness is the mainspring of the creative person. Faust snaps back at Satan, "When did the likes of you ever understand a human soul in its supreme endeavor?"
"The exposition of Atrocious Torture Instruments could not fail to appeal to a connoisseur of the worst in mankind. But the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd." [Harris, Hannibal]
Goethe wrote:
"What is apportioned to all humankind, Would I enjoy in my inmost self, Grasp the highest and lowest with my spirit, And bring their weal and woe into my own breast."
/
"Whatever is the lot of humankind I want to taste within my deepest self. I want to seize the highest and the lowest, to load its woe and bliss upon my breast, and thus expand my single self titanically and in the end go down with all the rest." [Faust, I]
William Pierce wrote:
"The Faustian urge in our race-soul says to us: “Thou shalt not rest or be content, no matter what thy accomplishments. Thou must strive all the days of thy life. Thou must discover all things, know all things, master all things.”
European man’s Faustian urge is quite different from the urge in the Levantine soul to accumulate, to possess, the craving to pile up money beyond all reason, the lust for personal aggrandizement. And it is, of course, antithetical to what might be called the mañana spirit of the Latin peoples, which says to them: “Enjoy life. Don’t hurry. You don’t need to know what lies beyond the next ridge.”
It is the source of both our basic restlessness as a race and our basic inquisitiveness. It is what makes adventurers of us, drives us to risk our lives in ventures which can bring us no conceivable material benefit—something which is totally foreign to other races, accustomed to judging everything according to its utility only.
It is the Faustian urge which has made our race the pre-eminent race of explorers, which has driven us to scale the highest mountains in lands inhabited by men of other races who have been content to remain always in the valleys. It is what, more than intellect alone, has made us likewise the pre-eminent race of scientists—especially in those days before the practice of science became a well-paid profession. It is what sent us to another world and has us now reaching for the stars.
But the Faustian urge is also more than all these things. It raises those imbued with it above the economic men, who, in the eyes of Western politicians and Eastern commissars, of labor bosses and captains of industry, of neo-liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, are the sole denizens of the earth. It makes of man more than a mere consumer or producer. It is, more than anything else, the manifestation of the Divine in man’s soul."
"MY VIEW IS that Europeans were not only exceptional in their literary endeavors, but also in their agonistic and expansionist behaviors. Their great books, including their liberal values, were themselves inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism. There is no need to concede to multicultural critics, as Davies does, “the sorry catalogue of wars, conflict, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the [Western] tale.”5 The expansionist dispositions of Europeans as well as their literary and other achievements were similarly driven by an aggressive and individually felt desire for superlative and undemocratic recognition.
It has been said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization he answered, “I think it would be a good idea.” Academics today interpret this answer to mean that the actual history of the West—such things as the conquest of the Americas and the expansion of the British Empire— belie its great ideas and great books. I challenge this naïve separation between an idealized and a realistic West borrowing Oswald Spengler’s image of the West as a strikingly vibrant culture driven by a type of personality overflowing with expansive, disruptive, and creative impulses. Spengler designated the West as a “Faustian” culture whose “prime-symbol” was “pure and limitless space.” This spirit was first visible in medieval Europe, starting with Romanesque art, but particularly in the “spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals;” “the heroes” of the Scandinavian, Germanic, and Icelandic sagas; the Crusades; the Viking sailing of the North Atlantic Ocean; the Germanic conquest of the Slavonic East; the Spaniards in the Americas; and the Portuguese in the East Indies.6
“Fighting,” “progressing,” “overcoming of resistances,” struggling “against what is near, tangible and easy”—these are some of the terms Spengler used to describe this soul. This Faustian being is animated with the spirit of a “proud beast of prey,” like that of an “eagle, lion, [or] tiger.” Moreover, the seemingly peaceful achievements of the West, not just its warlike activities, were infused with this Faustian impulse. As John Farrenkopf puts it:
[T]he architecture of the Gothic cathedral expresses the Faustian will to conquer the heavens; Western symphonic music conveys the Faustian urge to conjure up a dynamic, transcendent, infinite space of sound; Western perspective painting mirrors the Faustian will to infinite distance; and the Western novel responds to the Faustian imperative to explore the inner depths of the human personality while extending outward with a comprehensive view.
IN MY BOOK, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, I trace the West’s Faustian creativity and libertarian spirit back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers who began to migrate into Europe roughly after 3500 BC, combining with and subordinating the ‘ranked’ Neolithic cultures of this region. Indo-European speakers originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. They initiated the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the riding of horses and the invention of wheeled vehicles in the fourth millennium BC, together with the efficient exploitation of the “secondary products” of domestic animals (dairy goods, textiles, large-scale herding), and the invention of chariots in the second millennium. The novelty of Indo-European culture was that it was led by an aristocratic elite that was egalitarian within the group rather than by a single despotic ruler. Indo-Europeans prized heroic warriors striving for individual fame and recognition, often with a “berserker” style of warfare. In the more advanced and populated civilizations of the Near East, Iran, and India, local populations absorbed this conquering group. In Neolithic Europe, the Indo-Europeans imposed themselves as the dominant group, and displaced the native languages but not the natives.
I maintain that the history of European explorations stands as an excellent subject matter for the elucidation of this Faustian restlessness."
"At its core, this new Faustian age and civilization believes in the self and the self's right and ability to control the conditions of its own existence. It exalts reason, but it is practical or "instrumental" reason, which is seen as a tool that humanity can use to manipulate the world.
Faustian society includes at least four elements that define the individual's changing relationship to the world of limitation:
* It uses science and technology to overcome the limits of the physical world.
* It brings together high technology and art to create simulations that can be used as substitutes for what can't be extracted from the physical world. The most important of these simulations are imitation realities, which provide people with experiences not available in the rest of life.
* It adheres to an aesthetic philosophy, which sees the acting out of fantasies that express our fears and desires, as a form of art, entertainment and liberation.
* It views matter, life, culture and mind as deceptive appearances, which makes them simulations or something similar to simulations.
In addition, Faustian societies are characterized by the pervasive use of deceptive simulations to manipulate large numbers of people."
"As the angels say in the last scene as they carry Faust's soul to heaven:
"Who ever strives with all his power, We are allowed to save." [11936-37]
Faust is modern precisely because he strives - but with no memory, no continuity with the past. In the beginning of Part Two, the opening theme (by Ariel, the spirit of nature) is to "bathe him in the dew of Lethe's spray." Nature has no memory; forgive yourself and you are forgiven."
Faust's first words (after 60 years) are:
"Enlivened once again, life's pulses waken To greet the kindly dawn's ethereal vision; You, earth, outlasted this night, too, unshaken…"
He has not grown better or become more aware of the world. He simply starts afresh, seeking the new once again, but on a broader stage, that of history and civilization. "His old loves have blown over, like the storms of a bygone year, and with only a dreamlike memory of his past errors, he goes forth to meet a new day."
But without memory, there is no maturity. For a human being this romanticism, this endless life without fulfillment, is only arecioe for tragedy or black comedy. There is only the constant search for new interests, new pastimes, new sensations, new adventures, new revels, new revolutions, new joys, new terrors, new…
This is not Prometheus but Proteus, and a Proteus who never stops long enough for us to know his true shape or his ultimate purposes. And since there is noe sit, we know, in the end, that the life of Faust on earth, and of those like him, is only the reflection of the seven divisions of hell."
"The Faustian soul with its endless aspirations, with the distance opening up before it, is the soul of the Christian period of history. This Christianity shatters the boundaries of the ancient world, with its delimited and narrowed horizons. After the appearance of Christianity in the world, an infinity opened up. Christianity rendered possible the Faustian mathematics, the mathematics of the endless."
"The history of mankind as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the catastrophe of the Faustian are greater than all others, greater than anything Æschylus or Shakespeare ever imagined. The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him — forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not — to follow its course. The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team." [Man and Technics]
"Faustian man, detached from the earth, is on course to share the fate of Icarus. The fruits of the Faustian mind — rationalism, universalism, liberalism, industrialism, and globalization — threaten identity and heritage on a global scale.
While it is true that all civilizations, no matter what their particulars are, are bound to die as all living organisms are bound to die, the unique characteristics of the Faustian decline are uniquely disastrous. Whereas the ethnic Romans and Persians survived the collapse of the Roman and Persian empires, Western man’s dying civilization threatens to physically eliminate him, while also spreading the contagion of liberalism to non-Western cultures.
The Faustian tendency to break down barriers has transmogrified into the toxic global homogenization of cultures and peoples in the waning stages of Western civilization, that enables foreign and internal threats to multiply. The Faustian mindset must be discarded if Western Europeans and their descendants ever hope to create another great civilization in the ruins of this one.
One of the root causes of the current situation is universalism, which does not respect the particular qualities of an ethnos. The Faustian concept of space necessitates universalism. We may take the Faustian embrace monotheism as a starting point for this tendency. As Spengler wrote, “The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon — hence the antique polytheism. The single world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as space, demands the single god of Magian or Western Christianity.”[2] Instead of separate moral universes, the Faustian worldview accepts only one.
While this monotheistic worldview is not unique to Faustian civilization, the Magian soul’s cavern infers a certain limit to its sovereignty, as we see in Islamic theology, where the world is divided separate houses, one of which is the house of Islam, Dar al-Islam. The unbounded space of the Faustian soul merges seamlessly into the Hebrew Bible’s conception of space. In On Being a Pagan, Alain de Benoist characterizes the latter, “The universe is thus conceived in the Bible as a world with no spatial boundaries.”[3]
National borders, borders between religions, between ethnic groups, are erased in the Faustian mind, indeed no group has embraced biblical universalism to the extent that Faustian civilization has. No other civilization has ranged so far and so wide in their efforts to impose their morality upon the entirety of the world. Even the most ferocious of the Islamic expansions, including the Salafist trends of our day, pale in comparison to the sustained attempt of the West to convert the rest of the globe. We see these efforts in the Crusades of the Teutonic Knights against the pagan Balts, the Swedes waging war on the Orthodox Slavs of Novgorod, the Spaniards’ attempts to convert the Indian populations of the Americas, the civilizing mission of the British Empire, and into this day and age with America’s global War on Terror.
While some men may look upon these events as great triumphs of Western Civilization, they are really milestones in a trend of globalization reaching its pinnacle now. Faustian civilization, in many ways like the most Salafist strains of Islam, sees the need to impose a single moral vision upon the world, whether it be a colonial nation’s particular strain of Christianity, or liberal democracy.
Under Roman rule, different customs and beliefs could coexist within certain moral boundaries, a cosmos of separate moral planets. In contrast, the Faustian man believes that his particular morality extends to the ends of the earth. Hence Kant’s dictum, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.”
Thus international organizations and courts trample upon the sovereignty of peoples. The particulars of a man himself are stripped away, he is no longer German, an English, or Chinese, he is “man,” in the abstract. Any attempts to resists this alleged universal morality common to mankind are deemed criminal. Those who do not fall into line are primitives, heretics, or, to use more modern parlance, rogue states.
On the opposite end, the Faustian civilization is rendered rootless. There is nothing that could stand in the way of limitless space for there is no law without a universal character according to him. There can no longer be different standards of morality for different classes, genders, or any other social division. No longer is there a way of action and a way of contemplation, a way of kings and a way of priests, a way of men and a way of women, there is simply a universal way. Faustian civilization turned towards egalitarianism.
Political liberalism can be seen as the extension of a certain Anglo-Saxon mindset that grew under Christianity. Alain de Benoist states in The Problem of Democracy, “liberal democracies are rooted not so much in the spirit of ancient democracy as in Christian individualism, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant spirit. In these democracies, the ‘citizen’ is not he who inhabits a history and a destiny through his belonging to a given people, but a rather an abstract, atemporal, and universal being, which regardless of any belonging, is the holder of ‘human rights’ decreed to be unalienable.”[4] Hence, politics ceased to be defined by the conditions of the polis itself. In the democracies of Ancient Greece, political freedoms were derived from being a member of a specific community, generally that which one was born into from autochthonous stock. In contrast to Classical civilization, Faustian civilization invented the universal rights of man, which appear to guarantee freedom from the bonds of community. Once again the theme of the replacement of the particular by the universal is evident. The rooted pillar of classical civilization is replaced by the infinite field of the Faustian.
The rootless political existence develops into rootless personal existence. The Faustian tendency towards uprooted modes of existence finds expression in postmodern philosophy. The boundless space of Faustian man is the home of the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, “It has neither beginning nor end.” The rhizome shares with Faustian physics a focus on motion and dynamics as opposed to discrete static objects, “It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion.” Compare this with the Faustian focus on force, “There is no Western statics — that is, no interpretation of mechanical facts that is natural to the Western spirit bases itself on the ideas of form and substance, or even, for that matter, on the ideas of space and mass otherwise than in connexion with those of time and force.”[5] In both cases, the focus on actual substance, being, is reduced.
The criticism of being in their seminal text A Thousand Plateaus, displays certain Faustian characteristics as well. Here the rhizome is contrasted with the tree. Once again the symbol of rootedness is attacked by Faustian thought, with its additive and expansive qualities. “The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’. This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’.”
The contrast between the dynamic and the static becomes open conflict in the postmodernity of declining Faustian civilization where its expansiveness becomes full deterritorialization. What seems like abstract philosophy has a very real presence in the world. In the nomadic lifestyles imposed by many careers, where relocation across the face of the globe has become normal, in the fluid identities and fragmented subcultures of American youth, in global electronic networks, in globalization’s erosion of local economies, the rhizome dominates. Faustian dynamism and limitlessness has resulted in a world of scattered and broken spirits.
Due to the inherently limited nature of the physical world, the Faustian mind tends toward abstraction. Spengler’s discussion of the different conceptions of mathematics in instructive in this instance. “The beginning and end of the Classical mathematic is consideration of the properties of individual bodies and their boundary-surfaces; thus indirectly taking in conic sections and higher curves. We, on the other hand, at bottom know only the abstract space-element of the point, which can neither be seen, nor measured, nor yet named, but represents simply a centre of reference. The straight line, for the Greeks a measurable edge, is for us an infinite continuum of points.”[6] Classical mathematics is rooted in physical reality. It focuses on measurable quantities and physical shapes and surfaces. In contrast, Faustian mathematics is not constrained by what humans can touch, measure, or observe. We cannot count an infinite number of objects, nor have i (the square root of -1) of them, yet these concepts are integral to our mathematical system.
This retreat into the mind exacerbates the conflict between the physical and the intellectual. Instead of balance between mind and body, the Faustian mind gravitates towards logocentrism, a term most would associate with Derrida, but was coined by Conservative Revolutionary philosopher Ludwig Klages in his work The Intellect As Antagonist of the Soul.[7]
This movement towards the mental abstraction moves man away from the instinctive, the vital. Thus the Faustian tendency towards starry eyed idealism. Otto Reche speaks of “the powerfully rousing and simultaneously tragic song about the Nordic race and its idealism.”[8] At its worst it becomes a world denying tendency. Instead of experiencing the world in its mystery and majesty, we reduce it to what D. H. Lawrence termed a “thought form” a construct of abstract laws and facts existing only in our minds. As he says in “Introduction to the Dragon,”
. . . our sun and our moon are only thought-forms to us, balls of gas, dead globes of extinct volcanoes, things we know but never feel by experience. By experience, we should feel the sun as the savages feel him, we should ‘know’ him as the Chaldeans knew him, in a terrific embrace. But our experience of the sun is dead, we are cut off. All we have now is the thought -form of the sun. He is a blazing ball of gas, he has spots occasionally, from some sort of indigestion, and he makes you brown and healthy if you let him.[9]
Nietzsche correctly identified the retreat into the world of reason as a symptom of weakness. He states in the essay “Reason in Philosophy” from Twilight of the Idols, “To divide the world into a ‘real’ and ‘apparent’ world … is only a suggestion of decadence – symptom of declining life.” It is no great surprise that the West has wholeheartedly endorsed the Enlightenment program of rationalism, and its political emanation, liberalism. While rationalism is the mark of all declining civilizations throughout history, it aligns most intensely with the Faustian, whose affinity for abstraction was present at its birth. Indeed, we see in no other civilization an ideology like Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is a uniquely Western illness emerging from the Faustian decline.
Related to the Faustian tendency towards abstraction is the technical sophistication of Faustian civilization. Inventions spring from the unbounded Faustian mind. From the tools of abstract mathematics Faustian man has constructed the most precise and powerful theories of physical forces known to man. The combination of unlimited thought and dynamism enabled never before seen technological breakthroughs.
Indeed, not content with being in the world, Faustian man sought to create an artificial paradise. Spengler characterizes this attitude in Man and Technics “To build a world oneself, to be oneself God — that is the Faustian inventor’s dream, and from it has sprung all our designing and re-designing of machines to approximate as nearly as possible to the unattainable limit of perpetual motion.”
Spengler was keenly aware of the consequences of this mechanical world. In industrial societies the rise of alienation is seen, “And now, since the eighteenth century, innumerable ‘hands’ work at things of which the real role in life (even as affecting themselves) is entirely unknown to them and in the creation of which, therefore, they have inwardly no share. A spiritual barrenness sets in and spreads, a chilling uniformity without height or depth.”
No longer is the producer a traditional craftsman who handles the creation of goods from start to finish. He is merely performing one action of many required for the assembly of an object. The laborer’s dignity is diminished on the factory floor. This in turn breeds social conflict between the laborers and the managerial class. “The tension between work of leadership and work of execution has reached the level of a catastrophe. The importance of the former, the economic value of every real personality in it, has become so great that it is invisible and incomprehensible to the majority of the underlings. In the latter, the work of the hands, the individual is now entirely without significance.”
In addition to the social consequences, there are irreversible and wide-ranging ecological consequences. The depletion of natural resources, the elimination of species, the poisoning of our food, and water supplies, anthropogenic climate change. It is not alarmist to state that technology threatens life on earth. Spengler noted in 1931, “All things organic are dying in the grip of organization. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural.”
In addition to the existential threat posed by technology, it greatly enhances the foreign threats against Faustian civilization. The expansive nature of Faustian man to spread to all the corners of the map, is mimicked by his technology. In the quest for ever greater profits and power, industry has spread all over the world. We may think this to be a late 20th-century problem linked with globalization, but it was already in motion in Spengler’s time, with Japan emerging as an industrial power in Asia. It has only increased in our time, with the outsourcing of industry and the spread of advanced weaponry to peoples who could not have possibly invented them. Global industrialization simultaneously has strengthened the power of non-Western peoples, while sapping the strength of the native working class in the West. Faustian technology, operating hand-in-hand with the forces of capital, has enabled the mass movement of foreign peoples into formerly homogeneous nations. While mass immigration has no one single cause, it is effectively, to use Alain de Benoist’s notable turn of phrase, “the reserve army of capital.” In his essay of the same title, Benoist notes how the French construction and automobile industries deployed trucks in the Maghreb to recruit immigrant labor. While it is true that other civilizations have imported foreign labor, only the late Faustian civilization has done it on such a scale as to threaten the survival of their national ethnic integrity. The combination of borderless thought and high technology now threatens the survival of the very people who dreamed up such ideas, as the threat of Europeans becoming minorities in their own homelands grows.
Perhaps a stronger descriptor than Faustian for the civilization that is our subject would be Titanic. Titanic in the sense of the Italian Traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola, who uses the term Titanism to refer to a particular type of usurpation of divine power. It accentuates the Faustian revolt against the divine order. Evola characterizes the Titanic civilization as such:
The first type of civilization is the Titanic one, in a negative sense, and refers to the spirit of a materialistic and violent race that no longer recognized the authority of the spiritual principle corresponding to the priestly symbol or to the spiritually feminine “brother” (e.g., Cain vs. Abel); this race affirmed itself and attempted to take possession, by surprise and through an inferior type of employment, of a body of knowledge that granted control over certain invisible powers inherent to things and people. Therefore, this represented an upheaval and a counterfeit of what could have been the privilege of the previous “glorious men,” namely, of the virile spirituality connected to the function of order and of domination “from above.” It was Prometheus who usurped the heavenly fire in favor of the human races, and yet he did not know how to carry it; thus the fire became his source of torment and damnation.[10]
Faustian man, like Prometheus, has stolen fire from the gods, reordering nature to suit his purpose. The Faustian man revolted against nature, as Spengler notes, “The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man.”
The expansive Faustian mind seeks to eliminate the barriers imposed by nature itself. Hegel characterizes it as thus, “The principle of the European mind is self-conscious reason which is confident that for it there can be no insuperable barrier and which therefore takes an interest in everything in order to become present to itself therein.” What we see is the drive of Faustian science to “know the mind of God,” which English physicist Stephen Hawking equated with “the ultimate triumph of human reason.” And if it is uncovered perhaps it will do more harm than good. The Spenglerian horror writer H. P. Lovecraft states prophetically in his story “The Call of Cthulhu”:
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
The ecological devastation and social chaos sown by the scientific advances of Western civilization seem to validate Lovecraft. However, the Promethean narrative offers a glimmer of hope, a way out. The hero Heracles, son of the Olympian Zeus, frees Prometheus from his torture. Evola states that Heroism, as represented by Heracles in the Titanic cycle, is “the restoration of the Olympian solar spirituality and overcoming of both the Mother and Titan figures.” Considered from the spiritual position of Tradition, the overcoming of Titanic Faustian civilization is possible. However, let us not forget the role of man in fulfilling destiny and let us recognize the need for a new spirit to transcend our declining civilization before it destroys us.
This restoration need not be a return to the “dark ages” of obscurantism. Indeed oriented in the proper direction, the traits we associate with Faustian civilization, such as constant self-overcoming, intrepidity, rising to challenges, are tools for spiritual growth that predate Faustian civilization. From a Traditional viewpoint, they predate humanity itself, they are transcendent, beyond space and time. Evola’s “esoteric reading” of Nietzsche makes this clear:
The cutting of all bonds, the intolerance of all limits, the pure and incoercible impulse to overcome without any determined goal, to always move on beyond any given state, experience, or idea, and naturally and even more beyond any human attachment to a given person, fearing neither contradictions nor destructions, thus pure movement, with all that that implies of dissolution — “advancing with a devouring fire that leaves nothing behind itself,” to use an expression from an ancient wisdom tradition, though it applies to a very different context — these essential characteristics that some have already recognized in Nietzsche can be explained precisely as so many forms in which the transcendent acts and manifests.[11]
However, these tendencies need to be directed vertically, towards transcendence, not horizontally in the realm of sheer materialism, not manifesting in the need to dominate the world’s physical being. Evola attributes Nietzsche’s mental collapse to the fact that his energy remained on a non-transcendent level, burning him out like a circuit whose current is too strong. Continuing with the contrast between the horizontal plane of life, and the vertical axis of “more than life,” in the sense of Georg Simmel’s “more than living” (mehr als leben), we can envision two symbols, the ocean, and the mountain. The divine order stands with the mountain, whereas Faustian Titanism is the realm of the ocean. Western man is faced with a choice. He can conquer himself and ascend the peaks of the spirit, or he can conquer the world and disappear past the water’s horizon."
Hannibal: "You are almost blind to your own true feelings, no more able to express them than a scar can blush. Don't let fear leach your strength." [Hannibal, 3.11]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Our intellect is only the blind instrument of Another Drive which is a Rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us: whether it be the drive to restfulness, or the fear of disgrace and other evil consequences, or love. While 'we' believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive Which Is Complaining About Another' that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the Vehemence of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a Struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides." [Daybreak, 109]
Hannibal:"Before he became the Red Dragon, this shy boy would never have dared any of this."
Will: "But now he thinks he can do anything. Anything. Anything!" [Hannibal, 3.11]
Jung wrote:
The “filius” of the alchemists is one of the numerous manifestations of Mercurius, who is called "duplex" and "ambiguous" and is also known outside alchemy as "capable of anything”. His "dark" half has an obvious affinity with Lucifer." [Psychology and Religion, Foreword to Werblowsky’s “Lucifer and Prometheus,” p. 312-314, Para. 470].
But Hesiod describes Zephyr as ‘brightening’: he clears the sky, and is for that reason helpful to the navigation of ships, because in a clear night skies sailors can see the stars (Hesiod 379); and the De Vita follows several ancient texts, astrological as well as philosophical, in indicating that the daemonic faculty has a intimate connection with the stars and so (by implication) with processes of stellar timing (book 3).
