"In America, Baudrillard defi nes anorexia as a “fatal strategy” which is symptomatic of “a culture of disgust, of expulsion, of anthropoemia, of rejection” which is itself “characteristic of a period of obesity, saturation, overabundance”:
The anorexic prefi gures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says: I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.
If one agrees that anorexia is a fi gure by which “the greedy subject states that he is not hungry in order to draw attention to his desire for hunger, his desire for a desire” (Richard 146), it follows that the main issue at stake here is how to control the potential excesses of the body through a series of rituals which serve the more general need “to obliterate every human feeling of pain, fatigue, sexual desire” so that hunger remains “the master of oneself” (Lupton 133). Self-starvation thus becomes a means of achieving a sense of autonomy and identity. According to Deborah Lupton, “fasting, now commonly described and diagnosed as eating disorder anorexia nervosa has . . . existed for hundreds of years as a practice of the self, a means of constructing identity”...
Drawing upon Rudolph Bell’s historical account of self-starving women in Holy Anorexia, Lupton points out that women in particular have been attracted to this radical means of self-control and that “in the medieval period and the Renaissance it was women rather than men who adopted extreme self-starvation to display their religious piety and devotion.” Lupton’s assessment of anorexia shows that, despite the modern, vanguardist character of Antin’s experiments, anorexic body art is by no means a contemporary invention. Amongst earlier “holy anorexics,” there is the example of Saint Catherine of Siena...
If one refers to Lévis-Strauss’s theories on symbolic cooking in The Raw and the Cooked, Saint Catherine of Siena’s decision to eat only raw vegetables indicates a refusal to transform raw matter into a “cultural” item liable to distract her from her ethic of renunciation. It also reasserts the need to consider the body as un unfi nished and uncontained entity:
"for other, more radical “holy anorexics,” eating putrefi ed human flesh or drinking bodily fl uids (like excrement, urine, vomit, blood, and saliva, pus and open wounds are one of the manifestations of Kristeva’s abject) amounts to denying the boundaries between self and other as well as the limits between life and death."
As Kristeva has pointed out in her discussion of the abject—a notion which occupies an intermediary position between subject and object—food is a crucial element in the blurring of corporeal limits, one which results in the dissolution of identity faced with what she describes as the principle of “uncontrollable materiality” (Kristeva 43–44) which governs our relationship to the body. For Kristeva, the act of eating (or excreting, or vomiting, which is a crucial part of the anorectic’s daily ritual), in particular, traumatically reminds us of our uncontrollable and unfi nished condition. Ingestion, digestion, and excretion thus partake of the abject as a reaction against the threat of a breakdown of meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between self and world, between what is us and what is no longer part of us." [Michel Delville, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption]
"The rune of Algiz depicts a person with arms upraised, elk's antlers, or a representation of the Norse God Heimdall who holds his sword in one hand and his horn in the other -- guarding the divine realm of Asgard. In the old Germanic languages, Algiz means "defense" or "protection". "Elhaz", yet another name for this rune, means "elk" and refers to the four elks that feed off of the World Tree of Norse legend, or Yggdrasil."
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"The symbol itself could represent the upper branches of Yggdrasil, a flower opening to receive the sun (Sowilo is the next rune in the futhark after all,) the antlers of the elk, the Valkyrie and her wings, or the invoker stance common to many of the world’s priests and shamans. In a very contemporary context, the symbol could be powerfully equated to a satellite dish reaching toward the heavens and communicating with the gods and other entities throughout this and other worlds."
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"Spiritually, it signifies the reaching of the divine. The rune also means success through quest, search or other enterprise. Schemes develop quickly, like a fast growing pine tree. You are protected from any attack, while awareness and alertness guide you. Vision, clarity of mind and wisdom will support your cause."
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"One interpretation of the stave-shape is that it shows a human with head and hands upraised in the Teutonic stance of prayer, or willed and mutual communication between gods and humans. It is the rune by which one may hold speech with one´s own valkyrja, the swan-winged bringer of wisdom and messenger between god and humans. Bifrost may only be crossed by humans when they are guided by the valkyrja, when the increase of dust - that is, the full melding of the highest being of the soul with the living human awareness - has taken place. One may use the original tree-form to draw power from all the worlds. Elhaz may be used to cause woe to those who are spiritually unrefined to benefit from its cleansing fire."
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"The antlers are a symbol of spiritual authority because they grow above the physical head, reaching towards the realm of spirit. They signify regeneration, because they die and grow back, bigger than before. They are worn by Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Master of the Animals, by Mongol women shamans, and by the rotiyaner or “men of good minds”, the traditional chiefs of the Six Nations of the Longhouse, or Iroquois. Visually, deer antlers suggest the shape of a tree, even the World Tree that shamans climb; the resemblance is in the French word for antlers, which are called thebois - wood – of the deer."
"Deer's medicine includes gentleness in word, thought and touch. The ability to listen, grace and appreciation for the beauty of balance. Understanding of what's necessary for survival, power of gratitude and giving, ability to sacrifice for the higher good, connection to the woodland goddess, alternative paths to a goal
In the Celtic tradition, there are two aspects of deer - female and male. The Hind (the red female deer), called Eilid in the Gaelic language, symbolises femininity, subtlety and gracefulness. The Hind is believed to call to us from the Faery realm, tempting us to release the material trappings of so-called 'civilization', to go deep into the forest of magic, to explore our own magical and spiritual nature. The Stag, Damh in the Gaelic tongue, is also linked to the sacredness of the magical forest. The Damh represents independence, purification, and pride. It is known as the King of the Forest, the protector of its creatures. For time immemorial people have sought to identify with the stag by ceremonially wearing antlered headdresses and imitating the deer's leaping grace.
They can hear a twig snap a very long way off. People with this power animal are often described as being swift and alert. They are intuitive, often seeming to possess well developed, even extrasensory perceptions. Sometimes their thoughts seem to race ahead, and they appear not to be listening, to be somewhere else. Anyone with power animal has latent clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. They can see between the shadows, detect subtle movements and hear that which is not being uttered.
The set of antlers grown by the male deer are antennae that connect it to higher energies. Called ‘The Crown of Courage’, the antlers are linked to the crown chakra in man. As the antlers grow, the crown chakra opens and widens giving those with this power animal a direct channel to universal knowledge."
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"Elk... Your antlers reach for the Sun.
Shamans could make this trip without the need of an actual reindeer. Instead, they “turn[ed] into a... reindeer” and flew to the sun on their own, dressed in antlers and a feathered cloak, beating a reindeer skin drum. In a sense, their power was a result of an experience analogous to joining the Wild Hunt — they had previously re-enacted and identified with the death of a reindeer whose spirit lived on in them. Having followed him into death, they were able to fly into new worlds. Similarly, the Huichol Sacred Deer led his people to the site of his own death, where his body had first become the peyote. Re-enacting that death by shooting the plant with arrows, pilgrims could then take advantage of his sacrifice and ride the drug-that-was-the-deer to a new life.
Civilizations developed other ways to get to the sun. In the meditative archery of ancient Turkey and India, arrows were aimed at shining discs, with the imagery of piercing the sun to reach an unnameable beyond. In late Roman times, the sun-god’s chariot bore emperors aloft to the sun, the natural destination of the soul freed from the wheel of fate. But the tradition of following the stag who bears the sun has an even longer history and reflects our inescapable rootedness in the natural world. To be more, to reach higher, we must unite ourselves all the more deeply with the forces of earth and the wild, forces which are always branching outward, rising upward, like a crown of antlers. It is they that sweep us from one world, one state of consciousness, to the next. That is why, for much of human history, the journey of transcendence was not governed by human will or won by human hand, but instigated and led by the antlered ones, those most ancient messengers from the more-than-human world."
The antlers of the deer represented in the rune Algiz symbolized a man with arms upstretched to the vaults of space, an evolution of consciousness branching out from one's fatedness, to pierce the Sun and shedding of karma... to become light, create a world of one's own.
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"The hand. Here is a weapon unparalleled in the world of free-moving life. Compare with it the paw, the beak, the horns, teeth, and tail-fins of other creatures. To begin with, the sense of touch is concentrated in it to such a degree that it can almost be called the organ of touch, in the sense that the eye is the organ of vision, and the ear of hearing. It distinguishes not only hot and cold, solid and liquid, hard and soft, but, above all, weight, form, and position of resistances, etc. — in short, things in space. But, over and above this function, the activity of living is gathered into it so completely that the whole bearing and allure of the body has — simultaneously — taken shape in accordance with it. There is nothing in the whole world that can be set beside this member, capable equally of touch and action. To the eye of the beast of prey which regards the world “theoretically” is added the hand of man which commands it practically." [Spengler, Man and Technics]
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"Your choices affect the physical structures of your brain, changing the way you think. Blood and breath are only elements undergoing change to fuel your radiance, just as a source of light is burning." [Hannibal, 2.11]
Faustianism is the Blond Beast wanting to be a God that plays dice, both creator and destroyer.
It is a defiance against God, against god-ruled society, against god-ruled moralities. Faust's revenge : The independent life of a poetic creation...
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"... Faustus ... dared to confirm he had advanced beyond the level of a scarlet sinner — he was a conscious follower of the Prince of Darkness. The fact he could publicly project an Antichrist image with pride, having no fear of reprisal, and his seeming diabolical art of escaping all punishment when others who were considered heretics had burned at the stake for less, would certainly signal that an unnatural individual walked in their midst. It is true in many respects he assumed the role of the charlatan, yet how apropos, considering his willingness to follow his ‘brother-in-law’ known as the Father of Lies and deception." [E.A. Bucchianeri (Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World: Volume I)]
Lucifer is literally the "Light-Bringer". Archetypically it stood for Venus, and its demonic Charm, its Charisma... persuasion. A poet, a willer of his own world, his own light and sun, demonized as evil, Satan, the horned one... A guide and psychopomp to the pilgrims of His new dawn...
"What I love about Mads's approach to the character is that, in our first meeting, he was adamant that he didn't want to do Hopkins or Cox. He talked about the character not so much as 'Hannibal Lecter the cannibal psychiatrist', but as Satan - this fallen angel who's enamoured with mankind and had an affinity for who we are as people, but was definitely not among us - he was other.
"I thought that was a really cool, interesting approach, because I love science fiction and horror and - not that we'd ever do anything deliberately to suggest this - but having it subtextually play as him being Lucifer felt like a really interesting kink to the series.
"It was slightly different than anything that's been done before and it also gives it a slightly more epic quality if you watch the show through the prism of, 'This is Satan at work, tempting someone with the apple of their psyche'. It appealed to all of those genre things that get me excited about any sort of entertainment."
"Hannibal is a fallen angel..." - 0:00-0:16:
The psychopomp is a conductor of souls Branching across levels of consciousness...
The Luciferian uses his Charisma to persuade others to Re-cognize their innate potential as a Lover would.
Venus of whose sign it is, is the planet of love and love-charms. This involves an opening of consciousness.
Intimacy.
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"No one can be fully aware of another human being unless we love them. By that love we see potential in our beloved. Through that love we allow our beloved to see their potential. Expressing that love, our beloved's potential comes true." [Hannibal, 2.9]
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"Never touching but guiding them from dissonance towards conversation..." [Hannibal, 2.10]
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"You and I went so long in our friendship without ever touching; yet I almost felt attuned to you." [Hannibal, 2.10]
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"Sympathetic resonance or sympathetic vibration is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness. The classic example is demonstrated with two similar tuning-forks of which one is mounted on a wooden box. If the other one is struck and then placed on the box, then muted, the un-struck mounted fork will be heard. In similar fashion, strings will respond to the external vibrations of a tuning-fork when sufficient harmonic relations exist between the respective vibratory modes. A unison or octave will provoke the largest response as there is maximum likeness in vibratory motion."
When one dies, the other carries on the vibration, the poetic notes, the heart-beat...
This was the meaning of the genius. Being in-touch with the Double, the Diablo - that the Protraction of one's vibration even when dead, could stretch even across centuries setting another in motion.
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"Genius is — literally — creative power, the divine spark in the individual life that in the stream of the generations mysteriously and suddenly appears, is extinguished, and a generation later reappears with equal suddenness. Talent is a gift for particular tasks already there, which can be developed by tradition, teaching, training, and practice to high effectiveness. Talent in its exercise presupposes genius — and not vice versa." [Spengler, Man and Technics]
Han is the Pure Longing of this Protracted-love, the intensity of this longing. The search for love is an urgency. precious. The crisis of modernity is as Sloterdijk brilliantly excavated is owing to the tearing and severance of one's alter-double through the discarding the beliefs around one's birth-placenta:
Sloterdijk wrote:
"The placenta functions as a tangible physical object that is capable of containing the abstract concept of the “With” that accompanies us from our earliest vibrations. The disposal and neglect of the placenta isn’t so much important in its physical action, as it is in what it says about our thinking about our intimate companionship with our genius and ourselves. The forgotten placenta symbolizes our forgotten genius, and introduction into an institutionalized individualism. There are some indications that modern individualism could only enter its intense phase in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the general clinical and cultural excommunication of the placenta began.
But where, as in the most recent part of the Modern Age, the With-space is annulled and withdrawn from the start through the elimination of the placenta, the individual increasingly falls prey to the manic collectives and total mothers – and, in their absence, to depression. From that point on, the individual is driven ever deeper into the fatal choice between and autistically defiant decent into loneliness and devourment by obsession communities, whether in pairs or larger groups. On the way into apparent willfulness, one arrives at something else: the human without a protective spirit, the individual without an amulet, the self without a space. If individuals do not succeed in augmenting and stabilizing themselves in successfully practiced loneliness techniques – artistic exercises and written soliloquies, for example – they are predestined to be absorbed by totalitarian collectives. For the individual whose double disappeared in the garbage always has good reason to prove to himself that he was right to survive without his With, rather than keeping his intimate other company in the garbage…they deny that they are constantly repeating a betrayal of their most intimate companion in their remorselessly autonomous being.
The Roman genius is a representative from the immeasurable collection of soul companions and guardian spirits of which the mythologies of people and major religions tell. From a religion-typological perspective, it belongs to the morphological circle of outer souls which, like the Egyptian Ka or the Mesopotamian guardian spirits Ilu, Ishtaru, Shedu and Lamassu, were assigned to the inner life forces of individuals as external supplements. Even the Socratic daimonion, though it already tended to articulate itself as an internalized guardian spirit, like an early argument for the conscience, still belongs typologically to the external or supplementary souls as a threshold figure; Socrates speaks of this subtle guest, which intervenes in his monologue , as if it came from an external space of closeness. Properties of the outer soul are also found in the character-daimon which, according to the great myth of the hereafter in the tenth book of Plato's Republic (620 d-e), is assigned to every soul that has chosen a new earthly fate by Lachesis, one of the three Fates.
Like most figures of this type, the Roman genius appears as an unmodulated fixture; it accompanies its charge's affairs like a benevolent silent partner with no claims or demands for development; its constancy stems from the fact that it is a spirit with few qualities. With an unchanging form and as a mysterious union of the wonderful and the reliable, it ensures that the psychological space inhabited by the ancient subject discretely and continuously borders on a proximate transcendence. Hence the ancient could never imagine the individual life simply as a distinctive soul-point, a trapped spark or striking flame; existence very much has a spheric and medial structure, because the subject is always placed inside a demigod-like field of protection and attention.
A mature subjectivity would be one that had developed its geniuses from micro- to macro spheric functions without breaking the continuum.
The genius, the twin, the guardian angel and the outer soul form a group of elemental and enduring concepts for the second pole in the psycho-spheric dual.
In traditional cultures, children must become at least as mentally spacious as their parents in order to move into the world house of their tribe. In advanced cultures, this factor is joined by professional spirits of provocation and soul expanders - which, in the case of the ancient Greeks, led to the discovery of school and the transformation of demons into teachers. (The teacher historically appears on the scene as a second father; he oversees the sensitive transition from the quartet stage - that is, to the minimum form of society. Since the advent of teachers, fathers have found themselves observing dissimilar sons.)
Depressive impoverishment is the exact depiction of the state of no longer having anything to say after the removal of the most important augmenter; that is why, in the ancient world, real melancholia was primarily the illness of the banished and the uprooted who had lost their families and ritual contexts through wars and pestilence. But regardless of whether an individual is forced to go without the cult of its gods or its divine partner, the depressive-melancholic subject embodies the certainty of the genius' no-longer-being. Falling prey to melancholia means nothing other than devoting oneself with undivided intensity of belief to the conscious or unconscious statement that I have been abandoned by my intimate patron, accomplice and motivator. Melancholia constitutes the pathology of exile in its pure form - the impoverishment of the inner world through the withdrawal of the life-giving field of closeness. In this sense, the melancholic person would be a heretic of the with in his lucky star - an atheist in relation to his own genius, or the invisible double who should have convinced him of the unsurpassable advantage of being himself and no one else.
The sublime, the childlike and the sick - in his turbulent polemic against Christianity, nietzsche does not take the time to unravel the riddle of how these aspects could come together in a single qualifier, namely "idiotic"… "Childlike" could refer to the willingness to interact with others without asserting one's own self, instead keeping oneself available as the augmenter of the other. The idiotic subject is evidently the one that can act as if it were not so much itself as its own double, and potentially the intimate augmenter of every encountered other. The idiot placentalizes himself… The idiotic savior would be the one who did not lead his life as the main character in his owns tory, but had rather exchanged places with this afterbirth in order to make space for its being-in-the-world as itself. Is this a pathological excess of loyalty? "Unless you become like children….?" Perhaps Jesus should rather have said: "Unless you become like this idiotically friendly thing…"?" [Spheres-Bubbles] [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Intimacy is not a happy affair, but the "breach of individual separateness" is a dangerous one... The antlers protrude and are intrusive and you can't be sure what kind of charged particles enter your blood-stream...
Its why the ancients advised to always keep good company. Resonant love seeks beings it shares Affinity with, for Intrusion is a Rudeness it abhors.
The Demon was a Romantic poem from an orthodox-Xt. perspective, written by Lermontov. It speaks of the Demon as a lonely creature forever destined to wander alone, for its poisonous kiss kills even those good souls who would venture to love it.
"Sad Demon, exiled spirit, was flying over the sinful Earth. He was tired of his own evil, of his empty and needless life, which can't be stopped and had to go on and on. In Georgia, a local prince was preparing a wedding feast for his beautiful daughter Tamara and a prince from another country. Tamara was dancing when Demon saw her. The foreign prince was hurrying to wedding, but he was ambushed and killed by robbers. All in tears Tamara was lying in her chamber, when she heard a strange caressing voice, which tried to calm her. She was afraid and pressed her father never to try to marry her off again, but to send her to the monastery, so that God could defend her. But Demon found her in the monastery as well and managed to seduce her. He was sincerely in love and wanted to change his life with her, he did not want be evil again. She believed him. After their night together, Tamara died. Demon wanted to take her soul, but the Angels took it and did not allow Demon to follow her to the God.
"Lermontov's best-known poem, The Demon (1842), about an angel who falls in love with a mortal woman, reflected the poet's self-image as a demonic creature. The melancholic Demon, exiled from Paradise, wanders on Earth, past hope of making peace again. At night he visits Tamara who says: "Come, swear to me to leave behind / All evil wishes from this hour". The Demon promises: "You are my holy one. This day / My power at your feet I lay. / And for your love one moment long / I'll give you all eternity." His kiss like deadly poison kills Tamara, who is saved by her martyr's pain: "She suffered, loved, laid down her life - / And Heaven opened to her love!" The Demon curses his dreams of better things - "Alone in all the universe, Abandoned, without love or hope!..." Lermontov drafted the sorrowful and self-accusing poem first at the age of 14."
The poem goes...
"And memories of happier days About his exiled spirit thronged; Of days when in the halls of light He shone among the angels bright; When comets in their headlong flight Would joy to pay respect to him When he had known both faith and love, The happy firstling of creation! When neither doubt nor dark damnation Had whelmed him with the bitterness Of fruitless exile year by year, And when so much, so much...but this Was more than memory could bear. Outcast long since, he wandered lone, Having no place to call his own, Through the dull desert of the world While age on age about him swirled, Minute on minute - all the same. Prince of this world - which he held cheap - He scattered tares among the wheat.... A joyless task without remission, Void of excitement, opposition - Evil itself to him seemed tame.
Tamara
But speak, who are you? You must tell.
The Demon
I am he to whom you barkened In the stillness of the night, He whose thought your mind has darkened, He whose sadness you have felt, Whose image haunts your waking sight, Whose name the end of hope has spelt To every soul with whom I treat. I am he no man may love, A scourge to all my mortal slaves, The ill in nature. Enemy To Heaven and all the powers above. Lord of knowledge, liberty. And, as you see, I'm at your feet. Moved beyond all that I have known I would speak softly in your ears Quiet prayers of love. Tell of my pain, My first on earth, and my first tears. Ah hear me out, for pity's sake! One word from you would quite restore me. Robed in the love of your pure heart I might again resume my part In the angelic ranks and take An aspect new and a new glory. Ah, hear me, hear me I implore you, I am your slave and I adore you! No sooner did I see you than I felt a sudden, veiled revulsion For immortality and power; And I was drawn by strange compulsion To envy the frail joys of man; Life without you became a torment To be apart from you - a horror. Sorrow Beneath the scar stirred like a serpent Awakening an ancient pain. For, tell me, without you what gain Is there in my infinity? Endless dominion, majesty? Loud, empty words - a spacious fane Devoid of all divinity!
Tamara
Leave me, false spirit of deceit Be silent, for I will not trust The Enemy. Ah God... some sweet Insistent poison saps resolve - I cannot say the prayer I must - Your words are fire and I dissolve And melt in them. I cannot see.... But say: how came you to love me?
The Demon
How, lovely one? - I do not know, My life is wondrous full and new, The crown of thorns I proudly cast With my own hands from off my brow. All that I have been shattered lies: My heaven and hell are in your eyes. I love you with a passion vast. You cannot love as I love you, With all the ecstasy and power Of deathless thought and dreams sublime. If only You could but understand the lonely Embittered boredom of existence When, century on century, Alone in suffering and Joy In evil meeting no resistance, For good receiving no reward, Enclosed in self, by self most bored, A never-ending war to wage Past hope to triumph or destroy Past hope of making peace again! To pity where I would desire. To know all things from age to age, Seek hatred's all-consuming fire And nought to find but cool disdain! For since God's curse upon me came All natural ardours have grown cold. I saw my fellow-stars arrayed In wedding garments as of old; Through azure space before me flowing They passed me by in crowns of flame; And yet... of these, my one-time brothers, Not one would recognise me now. So, in despair, I called on others, Outcasts like me, to join my growing Battalions, but - I know not how - In their embittered words and faces, In their dark looks I in my turn Knew no one. Then in terror I Beat with my wings the earth to spurn And launched myself into the sky, And flew, and flew.... Whither? For why? I do not know... By friends rejected, Like those from Eden's gates ejected, I saw the whole world pale and dim. Abandoned to the current's whim, Even so without a sail, may float A rudderless and broken boat Upon the surface of the sea Knowing nor course nor destiny; So, in the early morning hour, Abandoned by some passing shower Of thunderous rain, a lonely cloud Black through the azure heights of heaven May wander lost without a haven Leaving no trace upon the ether God only knows from whence - or whither! For a short while myself I vowed To teaching sin and spreading doubt Of all things noble, all things fair. But not for long ... mankind I wrenched Too easily to my fell will. The flame of faith, too easy quenched, Left me triumphant, but without An object worthy of my skill. To mislead hypocrites and fools... What profit was there for me there? I hid away in mountains far And wandered like a displaced star In lonely, never ending flight: And when some traveller belated Would follow, deeming me a light In some near dwelling; I would lead Him to the cliff-edge ... hear the hated Voice call up from the abyss... And leave him - and his horse - to bleed.... Yet all too soon I tired of this And other spiteful, sombre sports! How often, raising storms of stones, And, clad in mists and lightening, I would go hurtling through the cloud To cow the spirit of the crowd, Rebellious upshoots frightening, Drowning their murmuring in my groans, Seeking escape from pursuant thoughts. Seeking to expunge from memory Things that may not forgotten be! What is the tale of miseries, The labours and the pains of man Throughout the passing centuries, Compared to but one minute's span Of my great, unacknowledged anguish? What of mankind? - their works and sorrow? Here today - and gone tomorrow.... Then - they have hope in judgement just; He may forgive, although He must At first condemn them. I shall languish Unshriven throughout eternity.... My torment has no end, like me, And, deathless, it must ever wake, Now creeping closer like a snake, Now caustic, burning to the bone, Now dull and heavy like a stone - To live - the everlasting tomb Of hope and passion is my doom!... By the brief glory of this dream I swear, and by our meeting here And by the threat of separation; I swear by all the spirit hosts Whom Fate has set at my command, On swords divine I take my oath As wielded by my enemies The impassive, sleepless angel band; I swear by you, your life, your death, Your last, long look and your first tear, The gentle drawing of your breath, The silken torrents of your hair; I swear by suffering and bliss, I swear even by this love of ours,- I have renounced all vengefulness I have renounced the pride of years; From this day forth no false temptation Will rise to trouble any soul; I look for reconciliation, I look for love, for adoration, I look for faith in Higher Good. And by a tear of true contrition I'll wipe away the fiery trace Of wroth divine from off a face More worthy of you. May the whole Wide world in calm rusticity Bloom on, all unaware of me! Believe me, I alone have vision To love you: I have understood Your greatness as no other could: You are my holy one. This day My power at your feet I lay. And for your love one moment long I'll give you all eternity. For I am changeless, true and strong In love as in malignity Free spirit of the air, I'll bear you High up above the stars to where you Will reign in splendour as my queen, Tamara, first love of my dream, I shall go soaring to the sky Sink to the bottom of the sea - All you could wish for I shall give But love me...."
The Demon watched the heating wings Fading triumphantly from sight And cursed his dreams of better things, Doomed to defeat, venting his spite And arrogance in that great curse.... Alone in all the universe, Abandoned, without love or hope!..."
"The Ubermensch or the Blond Beast is a figure that wills the ovecoming of its self-ressentiment against its own mortality, its own temporality." [Satyr]
Society tries to put a cap on its possibility of Becoming. Good and Evil are slammed on it to curb its self-love. The Daemon is made to resent its Immortality. It experiences this as Han. As a deep injury. Affliction to its very be-ing. An affront to its Pride...
Catharsis takes the form of an incurable and deep longing for a twin-fork... The search for love is a deep need.
Antlers branching restlessly everywhere... unable to live in this miserable world. A malady. An ache. Unbearable sickness. torment. black melancholia.
To paraphrase Nietzsche from the joyful wisdom, "The tyranny of pain excelled by the tyranny of a pride that refuses to accept the conclusions of pain..." Han is unconsolable pride...
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"Moving on is a rebuke. Show them how strong you are. Survive them." [Hannibal, 2.12]
Loving is a Knowing... and the quest is a lonely and perilous one...
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"We are a Faustian generation, my dear--we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed), to be able to know." [A.S. Byatt (Possession)]
Quote :
"I sold my soul to the devil… I sold my soul to the Devil, No for a farthing not for a shilling But the knowledge of my own ignorance. And in its place I have but a dull void Of loneliness in this unworthy, miserable world. I sold my soul to the Devil, Because I couldn’t live with it, It has revealed in an awful whisper To me, all that is better left unsaid. I envy ignorance and purity of heart, For me its no use, what’s done will not be altered, The Devil, is my only trusted friend And for my soul he is in my debt. The truth that we would rather not have known Cannot escape from my unveiled sight And I’ll make it my revenge on those who are happier then I, To crush the fortress, To remove the blinds And to present you with the naked, vulgar Truth."
The Naked Vulgar Truth...
Quote :
"What, then, are the basic forms of the speaking? Not the judgment and declaration, but the command, the expression of obedience, the enunciation, the question, the affirmation or negation. These are sentences, originally quite brief, which are invariably addressed to others, such as “Do this!” “Ready?” “Yes!” “Go ahead!” Words as designations of notions1 are only products of the object of the sentence, and hence it is that the vocabulary of a hunting tribe is from the outset different from that of a village of cowherds or a seafaring coastal population.
The original object of speech is the carrying out of an act in accordance with intention, time, place, and means. Clear and unequivocal construction is therefore the first essential, and the difficulty of both conveying one’s meaning to, and imposing one’s will on, another produced the technique of grammar, sentences, and constructions, the correct modes of ordering, questioning, and answering, and the building-up of classes of words — on the basis of practical and not theoretical intentions and purposes. The part played by theoretical reflectiveness in the beginnings of speaking in sentences was practically nil. All speech was of a practical nature and proceeded from the “thought of the hand.”" [Spengler, Man and Technics]
To know other is to know self. The best pretenders control the varieties of personality already in them.
When a liar convinces the other, a conman exploits, a magician performs his trickery, the seducer seduces, he is only pulling out of the other what was there all along. He cannot place what he then manipulates there, he must only (re)cognize it, as himself in otherness, and if his understanding of self is precise he can direct it.
There is a psychological equivalent in the tuning-fork example of in-tune vibrations. I think it is called mirroring. The alteration in tone, caused by placing a piece over one part of one of the tuning-forks, can be considered a form of control.
Someone in control of his self, his vibrations, his becoming, can adjust his tone, so as to produce in the other a congruence. The second believes the first is like it, because both vibrate the same, they are in tune. The first can adjust his tone to what is within his ability. Solitude can be the product of this controlled adjustment, where the tuning-fork never allows for the entire breadth of its vibrations to be heard, for whatever reason, and is constantly adjusting to remain within the harmonics of otherness.
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Last edited by Satyr on Mon May 19, 2014 4:59 pm; edited 1 time in total
To know other is to know self. The best pretenders control the varieties of personality already in them.
When a liar convinces the other, a conman exploits, a magician performs his trickery, the seducer seduces, he is only pulling out of the other what was there all along. He cannot place what he then manipulates there, he must only (re)cognize it, as himself in otherness, and if his understanding of self is precise he can direct it.
There is a psychological equivalent in the tuning-fork example of in-tune vibrations. I think it is called mirroring. The alteration in tone, caused by placing as piece over one part of one of the tuning-forks, can be considered a form of control.
Someone in control of his self, his vibrations, his becoming, can adjust his tone, so as to produce in the other a congruence. The second believes the first is like it, because both vibrate the same, they are in tune. The first can adjust his tone to what is within his ability. Solitude can be the product of this controlled adjustment, where the tuning-fork never allows for the entire breadth of its vibrations to be heard, for whatever reason, and is constantly adjusting to remain within the harmonics of otherness.
That was very nice.
Isn't that how Strauss and Nietzsche thought too? Displaying only a certain range, and letting the other hear what it wants to hear... Isn't that how even popular democracy works? You find that frequency which evokes maximum resonance possible and extract approval, set them all vibrating to you...
To see the extent to which or what level a manipulation has occured, you have to first sound out the maximum potential a thing can take.
You only spot the abuse, you only experience it, when you are aware of the Purity, the possibility of what it Could have been...
Also, to hear if the other resounds at your frequency, one would necessarily have to Mute oneself, so a withdrawl and a solitude of necessity ensues in the beginning atleast.
I was going to develop it from another angle.
The weight attached to a fork can also be thought of as an idea or Accentuation we implant in another, to generate a beat, an interaction within specific range.
His psychiatrist warns that while Hannibal was her patient, it was he who was influencing her.
Hannibal shows even in the position of surrender, or it is from the very position of a surrender or act of disclosure, the observed influences the observer. The observed plants a seed in the obserber, hannibal in her...
She also says, not to under-estimate because that is what he wants you to think.
That reminded me of how the typical sore loser when caught uses the last trump card to save his face when s/he declares, "I wanted to be caught", "I wanted to be defeated", "I wanted you to think that way"...
Isn't that how Strauss and Nietzsche thought too? Displaying only a certain range, and letting the other hear what it wants to hear...
And Plato/Socrates.
Lyssa wrote:
Isn't that how even popular democracy works? You find that frequency which evokes maximum resonance possible and extract approval, set them all vibrating to you...
Yes.
Lyssa wrote:
To see the extent to which or what level a manipulation has occured, you have to first sound out the maximum potential a thing can take.
In relation to what you want from it. it's potential to satisfy your need.
Lyssa wrote:
You only spot the abuse, you only experience it, when you are aware of the Purity, the possibility of what it Could have been...
Abuse is how you keep someone away. It creates a disharmony that accentuates division.
The weaker one cannot withstand tuning itself in harmony with the dominant one. It resumes its approach.
Lyssa wrote:
Also, to hear if the other resounds at your frequency, one would necessarily have to Mute oneself, so a withdrawl and a solitude of necessity ensues in the beginning atleast.
And the motive would have to be clear.
Lyssa wrote:
I was going to develop it from another angle.
The weight attached to a fork can also be thought of as an idea or Accentuation we implant in another, to generate a beat, an interaction within specific range.
Cultivation, education, an idea...a memetic possibility.
Lyssa wrote:
His psychiatrist warns that while Hannibal was her patient, it was he who was influencing her.
Hannibal shows even in the position of surrender, or it is from the very position of a surrender or act of disclosure, the observed influences the observer. The observed plants a seed in the obserber, hannibal in her...
This is unavoidable, because the daemon cannot be repressed, not even with pretence. The inferior one gravitates and attunes itself to the stronger one, on a intuitive level, while on a conscious level the opposite is being pretended.
Lyssa wrote:
She also says, not to under-estimate because that is what he wants you to think.
Another way is to seemingly become emotional, to "lose control".
A feigned weakness, projecting a similarity.
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Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"With Marshall Mc Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information, but serve to form communicating group-bodies. People possess language so that they can speak of their own merits [Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves." [Nietzsche Apostle]
Quote :
"The word coupling denotes the idea that in a molecule, vibrational and electronic interactions are interrelated and influence each other. Among the many forms of coupling there are also Entanglement, Quantum Entanglement, Sympathy, Sympathetic Association, Sympathetic Oscillation, Sympathetic Vibration. "Norman Lockyer, in his book "The Chemistry of the Sun" says that, in dealing with molecules one feels as if dealing with more a mental than physical attribute - "a sort of expression of free will on the part of the molecules." Also "The law that connects radiation with absorption and enables us to read the riddle set by the sun and stars, is then simply The law of Sympathetic Vibration." The Snell Manuscript"
Armies and their marching beat too must work on this psychic principle...
The factor here is the common ground. Synchronization only when the participants share a foundation.
A socioeconomic/cultural system provides this ritualized, order; the predictable, solid but (re)active grounding. Language and how words are defined is how this happens memetically, in synchronizing thoughts.
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Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Loving is a Knowing... and the quest is a lonely and perilous one...
Quote :
"We are a Faustian generation, my dear--we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed), to be able to know." [A.S. Byatt (Possession)]
Quote :
"I sold my soul to the devil… I sold my soul to the Devil, No for a farthing not for a shilling But the knowledge of my own ignorance. And in its place I have but a dull void Of loneliness in this unworthy, miserable world. I sold my soul to the Devil, Because I couldn’t live with it, It has revealed in an awful whisper To me, all that is better left unsaid. I envy ignorance and purity of heart, For me its no use, what’s done will not be altered, The Devil, is my only trusted friend And for my soul he is in my debt. The truth that we would rather not have known Cannot escape from my unveiled sight And I’ll make it my revenge on those who are happier then I, To crush the fortress, To remove the blinds And to present you with the naked, vulgar Truth."
The Naked Vulgar Truth...
Quote :
"What, then, are the basic forms of the speaking? Not the judgment and declaration, but the command, the expression of obedience, the enunciation, the question, the affirmation or negation. These are sentences, originally quite brief, which are invariably addressed to others, such as “Do this!” “Ready?” “Yes!” “Go ahead!” Words as designations of notions1 are only products of the object of the sentence, and hence it is that the vocabulary of a hunting tribe is from the outset different from that of a village of cowherds or a seafaring coastal population.
The original object of speech is the carrying out of an act in accordance with intention, time, place, and means. Clear and unequivocal construction is therefore the first essential, and the difficulty of both conveying one’s meaning to, and imposing one’s will on, another produced the technique of grammar, sentences, and constructions, the correct modes of ordering, questioning, and answering, and the building-up of classes of words — on the basis of practical and not theoretical intentions and purposes. The part played by theoretical reflectiveness in the beginnings of speaking in sentences was practically nil. All speech was of a practical nature and proceeded from the “thought of the hand.”" [Spengler, Man and Technics]
Faust, becoming God, taking a form of his own... mastering over nature, not just Hand but the Body as a Thinking Technology...
Satyr wrote:
""God" as the representation of this immutable, determining, higher order, residing in the "immanent", the receding past, dies, in this slow falling back. Man can now shape the past - as Orwell described it - taking God's place as the creating "word."
The word is freed from a Being. Man becomes the shaper of his own reality, by taking control over the word. Man becomes the shape-shifter, the doppelganger. And what is shaped more easily than flesh, but inanimate matter: plastic, fabric, metal. To take control is to pull away, to dislodge. The word is detached from the phenomenon, becoming purified....a holy word. Sacred being what is unsoiled by the earthly, the base, the primal = enlightened, made light, placed on a pedestal, on metal boots, for instance, as if floating above reality, detached/detaching from it. The skin feels, but behind the metal it is numbed - the metal is an added padding, a thickness. Sunlight does not burn it...it only heats its surfaces.
The word is its own definition, in the same way God was defined as the Creator of Himself, and of the world. A solipsistic innuendo - the end of the causal chain. A word is what is written, using words, in the dictionary. When used linguistically it refers only to the mental abstraction - abstraction being a form of detachment, simplification/generalization being the cutting away of dimensions.
Dictionary offer a general outline, just as the Bible does. Both are taken literally, rather as representations, an art-form....just as the armor and the arks are taken as literal additions, extensions of the human embodying them. The human becomes spiritualized, the behind the scenes, the masks, animating energy - the ghost in the machine, in the armor, the contrivance.
Behind the word, emotions. The word refers back to human abstractions, or, when it dares, to human emotions. A hint at the primal. But, now, the emotions are stripped of their worldly utilities, the reason they evolved. They becomes expressions of the divine, which is always masked, armored, hidden, in the dark.
The noumenon comes to the forefront, as does the armor. The phenomenon, is hidden, distanced....placed into lethe, forgetfulness: covered, concealed. The armor is human contrivance. It is the new apparent." [Arms and Armour]
"Armor was a reaction to the bow and arrow, the crossbow. When anyone could fell a fighter from a distance, or massacre a group of formidable warriors by striking them with quantities of arrows from a safe distance, the armor became inevitable.
Arrows are metaphors for karma, directed by words. Your fate, your reputation, your destiny, now determined by gossip, distant hidden voices whispering (shaping arrow heads, finding rocks), and flinging them to injure from a safe distance.
The armor protected the wearer from these words. A karmic wall. The metal shell was a detachment, a barrier, a discriminating possibility. It kept the rabble out.
The warrior did not have to be a good fighter...because he was a walking talk; a Frankenstein, shuffling towards the other, untouched by arrows, by the masses throwing rocks from the shadows. Like Frankenstein he was made up of many different parts, all connected artificially, creating a monstrosity. The quality of the technique was judged by how well it emulated the human form, how it made the observer forget that there was an intervention artifice between the eye and the moving spirit. Against words a linguistic defense; an iron clad rhetoric - rigid, detached, artistic but unaesthetic, anesthetic.
Two types of modern warfare emerges - dialectics. One was used by the commoner, who found stones, or could artificially manufacture multiple arrow-heads to fling at the other from the safety of a detached distance, amplifying his weakness into a arrow-pointed force. The other used a more refined from of distancing: the outer shell, detaching himself from words, creating an alternative space within space/time.
Both compensate for a lack of artistry. Both types of "fighters" compensate for an absence of fighting talent. Both uses distance, when warrior approach and engage, suing the weapon, the artifice, the word, as an extension of their arm: a surgical instrument."
The armour, a Karmic wall, protecting the wearer from words, from repute, from destiny, from fate, like the defensive function of the Karmic Antlers whispered in the Algiz or Elk rune...
"One's Character IS one's Fate, one's Daemon." [Heraclitus]
This Karmic Wall is what Reich referred to as "Character Armour" or "Armouring" in his somatic psychoanalysis; reconnecting the free-flow of communication between the Beast and the Sovereign, the continuity between Words and Action...
Quote :
"Character Armor.
A habitual pattern of organized defenses against anxiety."
Quote :
"“Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally identical to muscular armor (chronic muscular spasms)..."
Quote :
"In character-analytic work, we meet the function of the armor also in the form of chronically fixed muscular attitudes.”
Reich will later define this “muscular armor” as:
“the sum total of the muscular attitudes or chronic muscular spasms which an individual develops as a block against the breakthrough of emotions and organ sensations, in particular anxiety, rage and sexual excitation."
"Pioneer of emotion-centered healing techniques and researcher of primordial energy, Reich believed that the root cause of mental illness was evidenced in inhibited sexuality. He developed a theory of what he initially called "vegetative currents", streaming life energy flowing within the human body that is basic to it's functioning. These currents are most accessible to study in the sexual (life continuing) functions, but are inherent in all life.
Reich discovered that these vegetative currents were blocked by chronic tension of the body's muscles. These blocks form in observable patterns and structures, "character armor", which Reich believed were reflective of the primitive evolutionary segmentation of the body. These patterns provide a degree of predictability of the symptoms that the patient would experience."
"THE BODY'S OUTWARD APPEARANCE IS AN ACCURATE REFLECTION OF WHAT'S HAPPENING INSIDE, said Reich. There is a basic mistake in idea, "I think,...I am." You can't change your thoughts at a basic level without change in your body, in what you do.
Reich wanted a full-body emotional response to life. If you cover yourself up, may deaden pain, but also rob yourself of full joy. When someone inhibits an impulse they feel tension. Inhibited libido is tense muscles, sexual charm is relaxed muscles.
FUNCTIONS OF MUSCULAR ARMOR:
KEEPS POTENTIALLY EXPLOSIVE EMOTIONS IN WARDS OFF EMOTIONS OF OTHERS. Reich noticed men have trouble taking away armor because they are so accustomed to suppressing feelings and emotions. An armored person does not feel their armor as such. Reich believed that mind-body work is necessary for people to rid themselves of this armor. BODY ARMOR AND CHARACTER ARMOR are essentially the same. Their function is trying to protect yourself against the pain of notexpressing things that society says you may not express. Muscular armor is character armor expressed in body, muscular rigidity. Armoring is the sum total of the muscular attitudes which a person develops as a defense against the breakthrough of emotions, especially anxity, rage, sexual excitation. Character armor is the sum total of all the years of the muscular attituded that have also been incorporated in the person's character.
CHARACTER ARMOR CAN BE REFLECTED IN LIFE-PATTERNS. Karen Horney, reflecting on Reich's work, noted that people may arrange their lives to fit their character armor. Thus a severely introverted person may find an apartment in a building that is so configured that he or she need not meet or interact with neighbors, and shop at impersonal stores where minimal contact with others is necessary.
THE LONGER THE ARMOR GOES ON, INSTINCT SUPPRESSED, THE MORE PSYCHOSOMATIC PROBLEMS ITS LIKELY TO LEAD TO
RINGS
Blocks are the contractions in the organsism which prevent the free flow of energy. It appeared to Reich that these appear as rings at a number of points in the body.
1. OCULAR. Forehead, eyes, cheekbones, tear duct glands. Inability to open eyes wide. Treatment: Get people to open their eyes "really wide like they're scared."
2. ORAL. Lips, chin, throat. Person may find it hard to cry, grin, grimace at all.
3. NECK: When armoned, holding back crying, anger.
4. CHEST: Major function--self-control, restraint. Ex: suppressed spite. Holding back anger. Tight muscles holding back raving rage, heartbreaking solbbing, intolerable longing. The armored peerson is unable to express thos things.
With someone armored in chest areas -- hands and arms may move very awkwardly.Example of being free of this armor: musician or dancer who moves in very fluid way. Armor in head and chest-- often found in militarism. Militarism based on armoring and vice-versa. In women, armoring can result in insensitivity in nipples, disgust at nursing.
5. DIAPHRAGM.
6. ABDOMINAL CONTRACTIONS
7. PELVIC REGION. When excitement reaches a place that is blocked, the pleasure that comes from the flowing of the energy turns into rage. Might have muscular spasms. Emphasis on vigorous expression of anger, rage, crying, other emotions. We can function as a whole unit when the armor is removed. Focus on breaking up the inhibitions.
SEXUALITY AND ARMORING. As a result of armoring, the sexual impulse is changed from something soft and gentle to something harsh and brutal. Inability to express sexuality causes rage, which must also be repressed, and then sex becomes mechanical and brutal.
ORGIASTIC POTENCY: Ability to surrender to the flow without any inhibition. Complete surrender to the sexual act. "This is always lacking in neurotic individuals." Few people mature with complete orgiastic potency. Full orgasm can only happen in 4 ways, held Reich:
If people love each other and can express this love When both people are free of armor, then involuntary muscular movements occur before climax Breathing should be deep, full, pleasurable Shortly before orgasm both sexes should experience deep, delicious current-like sensations running up and down bodies. Armoriing cuts this off. Otherwise, climax in loins only. Not throughout body.
Reich saw sexual energy as in two parts. Buildup and release. Charge and discharge. He held that NEUROSIS IS NONE OTHER THAN THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL CHRONICALLY AUTOMATIC INHIBITIONS OF NATURAL SEXUAL EXCITATION, AND EVERYTHING ELSE IS THE RESULT OF THIS ORIGINAL DISTURBANCE. STASIS: A damming-up of sexual energy in the organism. Stasis = neurosis. Sexual stasis is the difference between the energy built up and the amount released during orgasm. This leftover energy, undischarged, feeds the inhibition which is hindering sexual release and pleasure, and the inhibition in turn adds to the sexual stasis. A vicious circle. That, for Reich, was the energy source of neurosis. ESSENTIAL: Ability to give and receive love in all its forms The full orgiastic reflex is a sign that the person is free of body armoring. Reich's goal was to RESTORE THE PRIMACY OF OUR SENSUAL NATURE. To really let go during the sexual experience. Not just an orgasm but a complete, full release.
In CHARACTER ANALYSIS, resistances could be observed in the patient's behavior --ways of talking, walking, moving. Reich couldn't understand why psychoanalysts refused to pay attention to observable behavior.
We have primarily one character structure. Our character can imprison us in rigid and stereotyped reactions at the same time that we build our character as a defense against our environment. Characterological armoring. The armoring is a compromise between our impulses and our social obligations--between what we want and what we think we should do.
In therapy, instead of digging into the deep meaning of the information people present, he would notice how they breathed, held their shoulders, etc. and work with that.
In the 1930s, took idea of armoring one step farther, to muscular armor. Assumes that we are the sum total of our entire lives. How we breathe, laugh, hold ourselves.
He focused on breaking down the muscular armor. Through breathing and other techniques that mobilized body energies. Lookef for "the orgasm reflex" in breathing. Start breathing way up high and way down into the belly. Then become aware of your head --what does your head do as you inhale and exhale, which way does the pelvis go?..."
"Reich decided the patients' body language could be more revealing than their words. He observed their tone of voice and the way they moved and concluded that people form a kind of ARMOUR to protect themselves, not only from the blows of the outside world, but also from their own desires and instincts. Most of us desire something, and immediately set out to find ways NOT to get it! Reich saw this process working in the body. Over the years a person builds up this character armour through bodily habits and patterns of physical behaviour. This being in the days before Kevlar, the armour was presented as a series of corsetry designs in canvas and whalebone, which included a shoulder-straightener for men. Reich called this work Character Analysis."
"A character structure is a system of relatively permanent traits that are manifested in the specific ways that an individual relates and reacts to others, to various kinds of stimuli, and to the environment.
For Wilhelm Reich, character structures are based upon blocks—chronic, unconsciously held muscular contractions—against awareness of feelings. The blocks result from trauma: the child learns to limit their awareness of strong feelings as their needs are thwarted by parents who meet cries for fulfillment with neglect or punishment. Reich argued for five basic character structures, each with its own body type developed as a result of the particular blocks created due to deprivation or frustration of the child's stage-specific needs:
The schizoid structure, which could result in full blown schizophrenia: this is the result of not feeling wanted by hostile parents, even in the womb. There is a fragmentation of both body and mind with this structure.
The oral structure: from deprivation of warmth and milk from the mother, around age 1. The oral structure adopts an attitude of "you do it for me, because you didn't nurture me when I was young." Shoulders are usually hunched, head bent forward, wrists and ankles weak, as if to say, "I can't get it for myself."
The psychopath or upwardly displaced structure: this wound, around the age of 3, is around the parent manipulating, emotionally molesting the child, seducing them into feeling "special," for the parent's own narcisstic needs. The child resolves to never again permit themselves to be vulnerable, and so decides to instead manipulate and overpower others with their will. The body is well developed above, weak below, as the psychopath pulls away from the ground and attempts to overpower from above. This structure has variations, depending on the admixture with prior wounds: the overbearing is the pure type, the submissive is mixed with oral, the withdrawing, with schizoid.
The masochist structure: this wound occurs when the parent refuses to allow the child to say "no," the first step in setting boundaries. The child seeks relief from the rage that builds up underneath bounded muscle and fat, by provoking punishment from others.
The rigid: this wound occurs around the time of the first puberty, the age of 4. The child's sexuality is not affirmed by the parent, but instead shamed or denied. This structure seeks to prove to the parents and others that the child is worthy of love. The rigid structure is often beautifully harmonious, but there is a physical split around the diaphragm between heart and pelvis: love and sex. This person has trouble with being aware of their emotions, which are strong, yet buried. The rigid structure has many substructures, depending on the exact nature of the wound, the admixture with other pre-rigid (oedipal) structures, and the gender: in women, the masculine aggressive, hysterical, and the alternating; in men, the phallic narcissist, the compulsive, and the passive feminine.
While each of these structures has blocks, and these blocks to some degree resemble "armour," it is only the rigid structure that truly has what Reich called "character armour": a system of blocks all over the body. Depending on which version of rigid one is, the rigid character possesses either 'plate' (i.e. clanky) or 'mesh'(much more flexible) character armour."
"Character Armour is a compromise between our impulses and our social obligations - between what we want and what we think we should do. Reich took the idea of armour one step farther, to Neuro-Muscular Armour He focused on breaking down the Neuro-Muscular Armour through breathing and other techniques that moved body energies.
Neuro-Muscular Armour
One way in which the body protects itself from emotional intensity is by suppression, which leads to the development of chronic muscular tension called Neuro-Muscular Armour by Reich.
Function of Muscular Armour:
To keep inside pontentially explosive emotions, To keep away the emotion of others, Men find it difficult to remove the armour as they are so accustomed to supressing feelings/ emotions, People cannot feel their armour, Reich believed that Mind-Body work is needed to remove armour.
Body Armour and Character Armour:
Are essentially the same, Function is to protect against pain, Pain is caused by non-expression of things that society says must not be expressed, Muscular Armour is the expression of Character Armour in the body, where it causes rigity, Can lead to cancer, arthritis, and rheumatism.
Rings of Tension are blocks where muscular contraction prevents the free flow of energy. Reich identified 7 of these rings in the body:
Occular - forehead, eyes, cheekbones, tear duct glands - inability to open eyes wide, Oral - lips, chin, throat - may find it hard to cry, grin, or grimace, Neck - holding back of crying, and anger. Chest - self-control, and restraint - holding back of anger, Diaphragm, Abdomen, Pelvis - pleasure turns into anger - muscular spasms.
Sexual Repression
Reich believed that Sexual Repression is caused by armouring:
The sexual impulse is changed from something soft and gentle to something harsh and brutal, Inability to express sexuality causes rage, which must also be repressed, and then sex becomes mechanical and brutal, The pelvis is pulled back and thigh and buttock muscles tighten, There is a loss of the ability to feel pleasure from sexual acts."
"Wilhelm Reich coined the term armoring as a reference to character and body armor. Initially trained as a psychoanalyst with Freud, Reich veered from standard theory and practice and over time conceptualized a very different paradigm. He practiced with an engaged style in the here and now, interacting with how patients presented in the office and toward him.
Reich created the term character armor. He meant that we all have coping patterns – stylistic character defenses that we develop throughout our life, usually starting before we can think or talk. We scope out our life situation with parents, caregivers, and early schooling, and figure out the best way to adapt. Depending on how our life unfolds, our defensive structure either becomes more adaptive or becomes problematic. Reich called our habitual demeanor, stance and attitude character armor. Our dominant, submissive, pleasing, withdrawn, petulant, stubborn styles, for example, become a uniform we wear in relationships – our suit of armor.
As Reich’s work progressed scientifically, his focus turned to the body and the way it mirrors the character in all systems. He found that our bodies embody the template of our personalities and conform to those dictates. Reich discovered the basic pulsation in the universe and that healthy organisms and organs have natural expansion and contraction. That life energy pulsates. When we are armored, our pulsation is interrupted and the movement restricted; the energy flow throughout our body is impeded. We may experience this as a lack of sensation, aliveness, a stiffness or tension. Armor can develop into painful sensation if places in our body have chronic holding or are under-charged. So our physicality speaks as well as our voice. Our armoring reduces our creative capacity, our natural expression of our unique Self.
If we allow expansion, we naturally experience new ideas and interests that we have energy to pursue. As we reinstate our natural pulsation by interrupting our character and dissolving our body armor, we naturally and spontaneously embrace life in the way suited to us. When we are imprisoned in unconscious ways of being, we lose flexibility necessary for healthy adaptation."
"There are two ways to think of armoring phenomenon, as arrested neuromuscular development with some compensatory distortions, or as a imposed change on an already developed function. The former is probably true of 'early' character aspects, especially before age two, and the latter is probably true of armoring that happens at age four and five. That is why bodywork for 'early' problems may best be methodical and developmental, while bodywork for later problems may best be explosive and 'releasing'. It is probably fair to say that both Reich and Lowen emphasized releasing type bodywork.
The word armor of course has a connotation of something that resists penetration. Wilhelm Reich developed the concept because he felt that some psychoanalytic patients were unaffected by in-session interpretations and out-of-session events that 'should' have affected them strongly. It was as if things 'bounced off' them. The name armor implies that the phenomenon comes into existence to fulfill this purpose. That is a teleological explanation, which for biological phenomena, may be misleading. If the purpose is no longer relevant, then the phenomenon should disappear right? This is in fact how many therapist approach the problem--trying to convince the client to 'just drop' the defense, it is no longer needed. That is not how biology works. A more physiologically sound model is allostasis below.
The Amoeba
The amoeba is a one-celled animal, that is, a protozoa. Under a microscope, it can be seen that an amoeba naturally reaches out into its environment. If poked however, the amoeba contracts. What is interesting is that having contracted from the first poke, the amoeba will contract more readily and longer to a second noxious stimulus. The comparison to humans (metazoa) that have been hurt almost makes itself. What is clear with the amoeba, is that this is not a cognitive problem, the amoeba has no brain "to erroneously overgeneralize," or otherwise form a cognitive distortion. Contraction is a biological reaction, not a mental mistake."
"When we trace the origin of this character 'armor' analytically, we see that it also has a definite economic function. Such armor serves on the one hand as a defense against external stimuli; on the other hand it proves to be a means of gaining mastery over the libido, which is continuously pushing forward from the id, because libidinal and sadistic energy is used up in the neurotic reaction formations, compensations, etc." [Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, p. 48]
"What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good—the atavism of an older ideal." [Nietzsche]
Quote :
"Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before. Atavisms can occur in several ways. One way is when genes for previously existing phenotypical features are preserved in DNA, and these become expressed through a mutation that either knock out the overriding genes for the new traits or make the old traits override the new one. A number of traits can vary as a result of shortening of the fetal development of a trait (neoteny) or by prolongation of the same. In such a case, a shift in the time a trait is allowed to develop before it is fixed can bring forth an ancestral phenotype. In the social sciences, atavism is a cultural tendency—for example, people in the modern era reverting to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus. An atavus is a great-great-great-grandfather or, more generally, an ancestor.
Atavistic regression is a hypnosis-related concept introduced by the Australian scholar and psychiatrist Ainslie Meares.
As used by Meares, for example, his 1960 work A System of Medical Hypnosis, the term atavistic regression is used to denote the tendency to revert to ancestral type:
“The atavistic hypothesis requires… a regression from normal adult mental function at an intellectual, logical level, to an archaic level of mental function in which the process of suggestion determines the acceptance of ideas. This regression is considered to be the basic mechanism in the production of hypnosis.” Meares held the view that when in hypnosis, the higher (more evolved) functions of the subject's brain were switched off, and the subject reverted to a far more archaic and far less advanced (in evolutionary terms) mental state; something which significantly altered the subjects' cognitive processing so that they readily accepted internally consistent, literal logic without any of the normal filters and verifications against the objective facts of the real world."
"Considered the conscious part of the mind to be useless for this, believing that it only served to reinforce the separation between ourselves and that which we desire. It has been argued that Spare's magic depended (at least in part) upon psychological repression. According to one author, Spare's magical rationale was as follows, "If the psyche represses certain impulses, desires, fears, and so on, and these then have the power to become so effective that they can mold or even determine entirely the entire conscious personality of a person right down to the most subtle detail, this means nothing more than the fact that through repression ("forgetting") many impulses, desires, etc. have the ability to create a reality to which they are denied access as long as they are either kept alive in the conscious mind or recalled into it. Under certain conditions, that which is repressed can become even more powerful than that which is held in the conscious mind." It was a logical conclusion to view the subconscious mind as the source of all magical power, which Spare soon did. In his opinion, a magical desire cannot become truly effective until it has become an organic part of the subconscious mind. Spare also believed in what he called "atavistic resurgence", the idea that the human mind contains atavistic memories that have their origins in earlier species on the evolutionary ladder. In Spare's worldview, the "soul" was actually the continuing influence of "the ancestral animals" that humans had evolved from. For this reason, he believed in the intimate unity between humans and other species in the animal world; this was visually reflected in his art through the iconography of the horned humanoid figures. Although this "atavistic resurgence" was very different from orthodox Darwinism, Spare greatly admired the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin..."
I believe the title 'Hannibal Rising' was an intended pun on the meaning of Japan being the land of the "Rising Sun"... the "Light Bringer"... Lucifer...
Bushido refers not only to martial rectitude, but to personal rectitude: Rectitude or Justice, is the strongest virtue of Bushido. A well-known samurai defines it this way: ‘Rectitude is one’s power to decide upon a course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering; to die when to die is right, to strike when to strike is right.’ Another speaks of it in the following terms: ‘Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature. Without bones the head cannot rest on top of the spine, nor hands move nor feet stand. So without Rectitude neither talent nor learning can make the human frame into a samurai.’
Bushido distinguishes between bravery and courage: Courage is worthy of being counted among virtues only if it’s exercised in the cause of Righteousness and Rectitude. In his Analects, Confucius says: ‘Perceiving what is right and doing it not reveals a lack of Courage.’ In short, ‘Courage is doing what is right.’
A man invested with the power to command and the power to kill was expected to demonstrate equally extraordinary powers of benevolence and mercy: Love, magnanimity, affection for others, sympathy and pity, are traits of Benevolence, the highest attribute of the human soul. Both Confucius and Mencius often said the highest requirement of a ruler of men is Benevolence.
Discerning the difference between obsequiousness and politeness can be difficult for casual visitors to Japan, but for a true man, courtesy is rooted in benevolence: Courtesy and good manners have been noticed by every foreign tourist as distinctive Japanese traits. But Politeness should be the expression of a benevolent regard for the feelings of others; it’s a poor virtue if it’s motivated only by a fear of offending good taste. In its highest form Politeness approaches love.
True samurai, according to author Nitobe, disdained money, believing that “men must grudge money, for riches hinder wisdom.” Thus children of high-ranking samurai were raised to believe that talking about money showed poor taste, and that ignorance of the value of different coins showed good breeding: Bushido encouraged thrift, not for economical reasons so much as for the exercise of abstinence. Luxury was thought the greatest menace to manhood, and severe simplicity was required of the warrior class … the counting machine and abacus were abhorred.
Though Bushido deals with the profession of soldiering, it is equally concerned with non-martial behavior: The sense of Honor, a vivid consciousness of personal dignity and worth, characterized the samurai. He was born and bred to value the duties and privileges of his profession. Fear of disgrace hung like a sword over the head of every samurai … To take offense at slight provocation was ridiculed as ‘short-tempered.’ As the popular adage put it: ‘True patience means bearing the unbearable.’
Economic reality has dealt a blow to organizational loyalty around the world. Nonetheless, true men remain loyal to those to whom they are indebted: Loyalty to a superior was the most distinctive virtue of the feudal era. Personal fidelity exists among all sorts of men: a gang of pickpockets swears allegiance to its leader. But only in the code of chivalrous Honor does Loyalty assume paramount importance.
Bushido teaches that men should behave according to an absolute moral standard, one that transcends logic. What’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong. The difference between good and bad and between right and wrong are givens, not arguments subject to discussion or justification, and a man should know the difference. Finally, it is a man’s obligation to teach his children moral standards through the model of his own behavior: The first objective of samurai education was to build up Character. The subtler faculties of prudence, intelligence, and dialectics were less important. Intellectual superiority was esteemed, but a samurai was essentially a man of action. "
"A low heart rate is a true indicator of one's capacity for violence." [Hannibal, 2.11]
Quote :
"The Way of the Samurai should be in being aware that you do not know what is going to happen next, and in querying every item day and night. Victory and defeat are matters of the temporary force of circumstances. The way of avoiding shame is different. It is simply in death. Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams." [Hagakure]
Quote :
Although it seems that taking special care of one's appearance is similar to showiness, it is nothing akin to elegance. Even if you are aware that you may be struck down today and are firmly resolved to an inevitable death, if you are slain with an unseemly appearance, you will show your lack of previous resolve, will be despised by your enemy, and will appear unclean. For this reason it is said that both old and young should take care of their appearance. Although you say that this is troublesome and time-consuming, a samurai's work is in such things. It is neither busywork nor time-consuming. In constantly hardening one's resolution to die in battle, deliberately becoming as one already dead, and working at one's job and dealing with military affairs, there should be no shame. But when the time comes, a person will be shamed if he is not conscious of these things even in his dreams, and rather passes his days in self-interest and self-indulgence." [Hagakure]
Quote :
"Death is the only sincerity. It is said that becoming as a dead man in one's daily living is the following of the path of sincerity." [Hagakure]
Quote :
"The man replied, "When I was a child, I once became suddenly aware that a warrior is a man who does not hold his life in regret. Since I have held that in my heart for many years, it has become a deep conviction, and today I never think about death. Other than that I have no special conviction.'' [Hagakure]
Quote :
"Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders' that goes, "Step from under the eaves and you're a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting." This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand." [Hagakure]
Muhlmann used this Samurai Effect to describe the Mask as the Extra-body forming Aura, intimidating the Other.
The Mask as a rhetoric of Persuasion.
Muhlmann wrote:
"MSC events... release maximal (M) stress (S) and cause strong phases of cooperation on numerous levels: the cooperation of the terrorists, cooperation of the rescuers, cooperation of the victims, their families and friends, the cooperation of the police and military units. Stress physiology belongs to the organism’s cognitive systems and the cognitive result triggered off by the perception of a stressor is the binary reaction system ‘fight or flight’ – attack or retreat. Under the influence of stress, noradrenaline, adrenaline and cortisol secretion is increased. This has the following effect; cardiac and circulatory functions are intensified, metabolism, immunity and sexual activity however are weakened. In this way all the organism’s energy reserves are channelled into the skeletal muscles in order optimise their motor abilities. They are used for fight or flight. In addition neural areas in charge of rapid perception and fast reaction are also strengthened. Stress physiology is thus a cognitive process by which a perception is transformed into a flow of energy. Of even greater importance than the stress itself is the happy ending of the stress phase. It is here, that a second aspect of the cognitive character of stress manifests itself, and it is here, that the decision is made whether the whole process is healthy or morbid, since stress is normally associated with morbid behaviour. It is above all this pathological and therapeutic aspect which has led to stress physiology being so well researched. Morbid stress can lead to depression in humans for example.
There are three possible results of the fight: dominance, subdominance and submission. The victor is ‘dominant’ his catecholamine and cortisol levels quickly reach their normal levels after stress action. Experiments have demonstrated that after repeated successful stress actions the base values of noradrenaline, adrenaline and cortisol are even lower than they were before the stress success series. This means that the animals have become healthier through the success series. The cardiac and circulatory complex is able to adapt as the low cortisol levels bring healthy sleep and increased immunity. Here we find a phenomenon which we can call the ‘samurai effect’. The successful combatant finds ever increasing inner peace. His fighting abilities create something like an aura. This aura can be perceived by opponents and can result in duels being decided on the strength of this aura and the opponent signalling ‘I surrender’.
Stress cognition consists of two phases. During the first phase recognition of a stressor is changed into an energy flow in which organic energy is transformed into fight or flight activities. During the second phase stress activity is assessed. Only if the individual arrives at a non-negative assessment of the stress action does it then enter the poststressal relaxation phase. This is typified by rapidly sinking catcholamine and cortisol values and is associated with a slightly improved general state of health and increase in testosterone production. As testosterone is a sexual hormone the world looks a much nicer place in poststressal relaxation than it would have without the stress episode. Mars is the god of combat and victory and Venus the goddess of relaxation. Both, as we know, are well acquainted with each other." [Maximal Stress Co-operation Theory]
Achillean Spontaneity as Body-Memory:
Muhlmann wrote:
"Potential transformations of genetic programs depend on learning activity. If no learning activity takes place the genetic offers remain switched off and no genetic expression, as it is called, occurs. Genetic expression in the neuronal area is the development of the neuronal network which is dependent on activity.
This neuronal reinforcement by means of the repetition of activities can also be described as ‘body memory’ or ‘procedural’ memory. The ‘body memory’ becomes active when all bodily movements are automatic, e.g. when driving a car we don’t think about which foot operates which pedal or when playing the piano one does not think about what one’s fingers are doing and when soldiers doing their drill at the barracks don’t have to think about how to handle their weapons.
Enculturation means storage of cultural traits in the biological memory. It is possible for example to speak of the enculturation quotient of a riding a bicycle, driving a car, playing the piano, having a barbeque, eating spaghetti, playing football, tightrope walking, firing a machine gun and programing a computer.
The triggering of an emotion during a learning or perceptual process stimulates the so-called ‘episodic memory’. The episodic memory means that the individual not only remembers the object noticed but also the entire scene in which the object was noticed." [MSC]
The Sovereign is the Sovereign-And-the-Beast, a twin-coupling... If Sovereignty requires an internal co-operation, there must be an externalization of conflict, i.e. wars. Feminization naturally is the systemic enforcement of this internal cooperation for the sake of a wider sovereignty... The United Nations as pointed out by Derrida as well, is the severing of the Beast and the Sovereign. Hannibal is an expose on the Feminization of Man;
Muhlmann wrote:
"In other words, conflict will only be found where cooperation can be found. Lone wolves are only fooling themselves.
If this merging of conflict and cooperation is so continued that it becomes impossible to distinguish one from the other, we are confronted with a phenomenon which strongly reminds us of the well-known linguistic paradigm “Gegensinn der Urworte” (Benveniste, 1956). Here are some examples – in Latin ‘altus’ means high and at the same time low. ‘Sacer’ means sacred and cursed. ‘Maiestas’ means sovereignty and treason. It has often been stressed that the paradoxical meanings of the Latin word ‘sacer’ are more a anthropological problem than a linguistic one (Milner, 2002). However, it is especially conspicuous that not only the terms ‘sacer’ and ‘maiestas’ but also the unit of cooperation and conflict concern the phenomenon of sovereignty and that MSC is nothing but the organisational centre of sovereignty.
Sovereignty is the result of externalising conflict. This is the way communities arise which are internally free of conflict or at least low in conflict and emotionally harmonized. From the point of view of history the externalisation of conflict signifies nothing else but war, and sovereignty despite the United Nations’ charter still means the arrogated right to start a war at any time.
Institutionalised war is the most important cultural result of the MSC effect. It represents the cultural shaping of the separation of conflict and cooperation. The most radical manifestation of the externalisation of the conflict through internal population cooperation is the phenomenon of cultural preparedness to die.
It is closely linked to the system of emotional rule adjustment since cultural preparedness to die is regulated by the principle of ‘honor’ and the principle of functioning of honour differs only slightly from that of decorum. [MSC]
And what is Cultural Synchronization, but the gravity of maximal stress evened out by a shared experience, the participation in a common memory;
Muhlmann wrote:
If an MSC event always separates cooperation from conflict and must trigger off strong stress emotions in order to, by means a positive assessment, create a phase of relaxation and furthermore, if this relaxation is inevitably the result of separating cooperation from conflict and therefore is infused with cooperative behaviour in its entirety, then this complete MSC complex of stress, emotion, relaxation and cooperation is to a large extent memoactive. That means it is excellently suited as a enculturating trait which can be transmitted over many generations in the future. Enculturating traits are units of transmission. They are so to say the atoms of cultures." [MSC]
Loving is a Knowing... and the quest is a lonely and perilous one...
Quote :
"Character Armor.
A habitual pattern of organized defenses against anxiety."
Quote :
"“Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally identical to muscular armor (chronic muscular spasms)..."
ORGIASTIC POTENCY: Ability to surrender to the flow without any inhibition. Complete surrender to the sexual act. "This is always lacking in neurotic individuals." Few people mature with complete orgiastic potency. Full orgasm can only happen in 4 ways, held Reich: If people love each other and can express this love When both people are free of armor, then involuntary muscular movements occur before climax Breathing should be deep, full, pleasurable Shortly before orgasm both sexes should experience deep, delicious current-like sensations running up and down bodies. Armoriing cuts this off. Otherwise, climax in loins only. Not throughout body..
We have primarily one character structure. Our character can imprison us in rigid and stereotyped reactions at the same time that we build our character as a defense against our environment. Characterological armoring. The armoring is a compromise between our impulses and our social obligations--between what we want and what we think we should do...."
The Love Armour between the Beast and the Sovereign...
"Love and death are the two great hinges around which human sympathies turn. What we do for ourselves dies with us, what we do for others lives beyond us." [Hannibal, 2.13]
"The first study of a man who wants to be a poet is his self-knowledge, complete; he looks for his own soul, he inspects it, he tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it. That seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! - But the soul has to be made monstrous... I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses. All the forms of the love,of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessence. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, where he becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, - and the supreme Savant! - For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone else! He reaches the unknown, and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them!... So the poet is truly the thief of fire." [Rimbaud]
Lucifer, derived from Latin 'lux' and 'ferre' - 'Lightbearer', or the torch/fire bearer, is synonymous with Prometheus, meaning forethought - the creative spark of the mind, and also; from the Sanskrit 'Pramantha' - the sacred sign and instrument for kindling sacred fire, and also from 'Pramatha' - to 'stir up' violently, - to 'turn', to 'loom', the symbolism of the swastika - double axe labrys, derived from Latin labia - meaning lips or folds, indicating therefore folds of time, folds of human consciousness... the Aryan genius.
To 'stir', to emerge and come forth of its own accord and its own inner law.
Prometheus Creating Man from Clay (detail), 1845. is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who in Greek mythology is credited with the creation of man from clay and the theft of fire for human use, an act that enabled progress and civilization. He is known for his intelligence, and as a champion of humanity.
"Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes to-day, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. This very fact fully justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term : M A N. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on earth. ...If we divide mankind into three categories - founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture - the Aryan alone can be considered as representing the first category. ...The readiness to sacrifice one's personal work, and, if necessary, even one's life for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race. The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual powers; but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of the community. Here the instinct for self-preservation has reached its noblest form..." [Hitler; MK]
Quote :
"The best and highest that man can acquire they must obtain by a crime, and then they must endure its consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended divinities must requite the nobly aspiring race of man. It is a bitter thought, which by the dignity it confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity, deception, weakness in the face of temptation, wantoness,--in short, a whole series of preeminently feminine passions,--were regarded as the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the sublime view of active sin as the essential Promethean virtue, and the discovery of the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy in the justification of human evil - - of human guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby." [Nietzsche, BOT]
Quote :
“The age of Titans… that is to say the world of the barbarians. It was because of his Titanic love of man that Prometheus had to be devoured by vultures..." [Nietzsche, BOT]
"The power of celestial fire which is pure, incorruptible and spontaneous is forever sufficient unto itself; it perpetuates itself in a constant, imperishable youth. Human fire, stolen by Prometheus and given to mortals in the form of a 'seed of fire', a fire that must be generated for the purpose of cooking the meat from the sacrifice, is a hungry fire: it must be constantly fed or else, like man himself, it will die for lack of sustenance.
Originally men and gods live in the closest proximity, feasting together. When the moment comes to establish their respective shares Prometheus kills and cuts up a huge ox, dividing it into two parts. The men receive the meat and all that can be eaten while the gods are left with the bones and a little fat, the very portions still assigned to them, in the form of rising smoke, in the sacrifices made on perfumed altars. Zeus takes his revenge by hiding his fire from men - the heavenly, pure, inexhaustible, ungenerated fire which men had presumably enjoyed hitherto. So it is now impossible to cook the meat.
Prometheus steals the seed of fire, hidden in the hollow stalk of a fennel plant, and presents it as a gift to men. So the flame of sacrifice burns on earth where men are now able to sustain their failing strength by eating the cooked meat. Zeus, cheated, counter-attacks. He hides the seed of wheat from men and buries it in the depths of the earth: it will henceforth be necessary to labour in the fields in order to harvest grain and eat bread. At the same time he creates the first woman, with whom it will be necessary to labour in order to produce children. Hephaistos models her out of clay moistened with water. She is a chthonic creature, damp and earthy, and not only is her condition mortal but also close to bestial by reason both of her insatiable appetite for food and also of her sexual appetite unleashed during the Dog Days when, being better protected against the burnmg heat of the sun then her husband, whose constitution is hotter and dryer than hers, she literally roasts her man; 'without any torch she dries him up', delivering him over, even while still green and raw, to the dessication of a premature old age. Pandora is, through her excessive animal sensuality, a fire to make men pay for the fire that Prometheus hid and stole from the gods. But she is more than this. She is herself a hidden trap, a double heing whose appearance disguises and masks the reality. Hephaistos makes her out of clay and water hut he fashions her in the image of the immortal goddesses and the beauty which shines forth from her body as if she were divine strikes not only men hut gods too with wonder. The cunning of Zeus' vengeance lies in his having endowed with erotic seduction, that is a divine appearance, a being whose soul is that of a bitch and who hides her gross bestiality beneath the winning gentleness of her smile and the deceitful flattery of her lips. Pandora is an evil but an evil so beautiful that men cannot, in the depths of their hearts, prevent themselves from loving and desiring her. Together they form a couple whose condition of life is neither that of the gods nor that of the beasts, neither the Golden Age nor a state of wildness but something between the two: the life of man as it has been defined ever since the separation of mortals and immortals through sacrifice, agriculture and marriage." [Detienne, Gardens of Adonis]
Quote :
"As the inventor of the fire used in cooking and of the sacrificial meal, it was Prometheus who was responsible for the first distribution and for the beginning of the separation of gods and men. On the day when, at Mekone(601, he distributed the shares from the first sacrificial animal, Prometheus established the diet which differentiates men and gods. To men, whom he wished to favour, the Titan allotted the best share, all the meat from the huge ox, leaving to the gods only the smells rising from the burned fats and roasting meat. In making this unfair allocation Prometheus was unconsciously recognising the vital need for the human species to eat meat. He was fulfilling the will of Zeus who condemned men to experience hunger and death. Similarly, by allotting to the Olympians only the bones and fat, thus leaving them nothing but the smoke and smells, the first sacrificer was consecrating the superiority of the Immortals over their human partners. Since the need to eat is in inverse proportion to vital energy and since Hunger and Death are seen as twin brothers, the gods demonstrate their supernatural condition by insisting upon super-foods which are inaccessible to creatures of flesh and blood who can no more live on the smell of meat alone than subsist on the perfume of myrrh and frankincense." [Detienne, Gardens of Adonis]
Quote :
"The sacrificial meal, instituted by Prometheus, has two effects. It introduces a diet in which the consumption of cooked meat from domesticated animals goes along with agricultural labour and the harvesting of cereals. Its other immediate consequence is, as Hesiod tells us, the appearance of the first woman and the establishment of marriage. The fact is that for the Greeks marriage is a form of ploughing, with the woman as the furrow and the husband as the labourer. If the wife does not, in and through marriage, become cultivated, cereal-producing land she will not be able to produce valuable and welcome fruits - that is legitimate children in whom the father can recognise the seed that he himself sowed as he ploughed the furrow. Demeter who is the goddess of agriculture is also the patroness of marriage. When a young girl enters into marriage she enters the domain that belongs to the deity of cereals. To enter this domain and remain there she must rid herself of all the 'wild' character inherent in the female sex. This wildness can take two, opposed, forms. It might make the woman veer towards Artemis, falling short of marriage and refusing any sexual union or, on the other hand, it might propel her in the opposite direction, beyond marriage, towards Aphrydite and into unbridled erotic excess. The position of the legitimate wife, is in between that of the young girl defined by her virginal status and that of the hetaha, the courtesan entirely devoted to love. Shunning contact with males, living far from men and the life of the city, like Artemis, the virgin huntress, mistress over wild animals and uncultivated land, shares in the life in the wild that is symbolised, in the marriage rites, by the crown of thorny plants and acorns. The civilised life of a wife, the 'milled wheat' life as it was called, was symbolised in the marriage ceremony by winnowing basket, pestle and bread and opposed to life in the wild as good is to evil. To accede to this life the virgin had to renounce the 'wildness' which hitherto held her at a distance from man. The yoke of marriage domesticated her, in the strongest sense of the term. By belonging henceforth to one of the family hearths of which the city was composed she became integrated, so far as any woman could be, into the civic community." [Detienne, Gardens of Adonis]
Quote :
"There is, then, a fundamental difference between feasting with the gods and sacrificing to them. The Hesiodic story about the Silver Generation actually anticipates the human condition of these figures by describing them as men who owe sacrifice to the gods (W&D135-137). Nevertheless, the nature of their offense against the gods is parallel to the offense of Prometheus. In both instances, the afflictions of the human condition are brought about by the withholding of tîmai from the gods. In the context of a single event, a feast, Prometheus as the agent of humanity withholds tîmai from the gods; in the context of a continuous institution, sacrifice, men keep restoring tîmai to them. When the Silver Generation refuses to sacrifice, the offense is the same as the primordial offense of Prometheus: the withholding of tîmai from the gods." [Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans]
Quote :
"Prometheus “creates culture at the price of perpetual pain” and “symbolizes productiveness"..." [Marcuse, Eros and Civilization]
"In Ireland and Anatolia,... and in Ancient Greece as well..., one manifestation of Chaos is societal in character; the figuration of all that is "anti-social". This includes all that disrupts the established hierarchy of gods and men, free and unfree, noble and common, patron and client, rich and poor. It particularly includes all that violates hospitality: the institutionalized gift-exchange relation, which lies at the very center of interpersonal, interfamilial, and intertribal relations in the I.E. world."
The 'other' is what disrupts the harmony that exists in the very Aryan notion of Reciprocity of this gift-relation. Yajna - or Sacrifice, thus distinguished the Aryan from the Barbarian.
The dasyus in the Rig Veda were called a-yajvanah sanakah 'impious old men' who have no worship, i.e.'worth'-ship (Yaj-), with whom there is no covenant(a-vrata-)", as they did not offer sacrfices to the Gods. The very idea of a Sacrifice is to extend oneself. Conquest implied therefore, a necessary elevation of the conquered [what is Self-ed] along with one's Self as a sign of one's self-reverence.
A well-turned out individual evelates and extends the conquered in his turn-ing along with oneself - the Spiral motif. The entwining is an en-twin-ning.
Hannibal and Will.
A mannerbunde emerging, a society of two. The Promethean dream of men becoming their own gods and feasting together in their own golden age...
Yet,
Quote :
"He who understands this innermost core of the Prometheus myth - - namely, the necessity of crime imposed on the titanically striving individual--will at once feel the un-Apollonian element in this pessimistic representation. For Apollo seeks to calm individual beings precisely by drawing boundary lines between them, and by again and again, with his requirements of self-knowledge and self-control, recalling these bounds to us as the holiest laws of the universe." [Nietzsche, BOT]
Zeus challenged, must send the vulture to maintain justice, equilibrium of the cosmos.
Such creativity comes at a cost, for absolute order would spell death of that very order.
The Promethean disruption now introduces death, labour, agriculture, and the whole institution of civilization. The liver is the seat of balance, and for the disruption, Prometheus must pay with the curbing of his freedom.
When Prometheus ushers in society, to create a tribe of his own, elevating man with his gift, sacrifice is instituted as necessary penalty. Hospitality and reciprocal gift relations become the mark of the highest man who aspires to be-come God... the Aryan man. One pays homage to that which is sacrificed.
"Imago is also a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of a loved one buried in the unconscious, carried with us all our lives. An ideal. The concept of an ideal. I have a concept of you, just as you have a concept of me. Neither of us Ideal." [Hannibal, 2.13]
Kali, the mark of Time, of Entropy... and the protection against Entropy...
"The worship of a mother goddess as the source of life and fertility has prehistoric roots... Kali's blackness symbolizes her all-embracing, comprehensive nature, because black is the color in which all other colors merge; black absorbs and dissolves them. 'Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her' (Mahanirvana Tantra). Or black is said to represent the total absence of color, again signifying the nature of Kali as ultimate reality. This in Sanskrit is named as nirguna (beyond all quality and form). Either way, Kali's black color symbolizes her transcendence of all form. Kali's nudity has a similar meaning. In many instances she is described as garbed in space or sky clad. In her absolute, primordial nakedness she is free from all covering of illusion. She is Nature (Prakriti in Sanskrit), stripped of 'clothes'. It symbolizes that she is completely beyond name and form... Her disheveled hair forms a curtain of illusion, the fabric of space - time which organizes matter out of the chaotic sea of quantum-foam. Her garland of fifty human heads, each representing one of the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizes the repository of knowledge and wisdom. She wears a girdle of severed human hands - hands that are the principal instruments of work and so signify the action of karma. Her lolling tongue which is red dramatically depicts the fact that she consumes all things and denotes the act of tasting or enjoying what society regards as forbidden... The bloodied sword and severed head symbolize the destruction of ignorance and the dawning of knowledge. The sword is the sword of knowledge, that cuts the knots of ignorance and destroys false consciousness (the severed head). In her mad dancing, disheveled hair, and eerie howl there is made present the hint of a world reeling, careening out of control. The world is created and destroyed in Kali's wild dancing, and the truth of redemption lies in man's awareness that he is invited to take part in that dance, to yield to the frenzied beat of the Mother's dance of life and death. The image of Kali, in a variety of ways, teaches man that pain, sorrow, decay, death, and destruction are not to be overcome or conquered by denying them or explaining them away. Pain and sorrow are woven into the texture of man's life so thoroughly that to deny them is ultimately futile. For man to realize the fullness of his being, for man to exploit his potential as a human being, he must finally accept this dimension of existence. Kali's boon is freedom, the freedom of the child to revel in the moment, and it is won only after confrontation or acceptance of death. "
"I am the dance of death that is behind all life the ultimate horror the ultimate ecstasy I am existence I am the dance of destruction that will end this world the timeless void the formless devouring mouth I am rebirth Let me dance you to death Let me dance you to life Will you walk through your fears to dance with me? Will you let me cut off your head and drink your blood? then will you cut off mine? Will you face all the horror all the pain all the sorrow and say "yes"? I am all that you dread all that terrifies I am your fear will you meet me?"
Skull
Quote :
"the skull is symbolic of wisdom and retained knowledge. In these ceremonies, the skull signifies that the inner nature or core of the person has been stripped down through initiation. Here the skull's death symbol can mean physical death, the dying of the flesh, or psychological death, the dying of the self. The skull with crossbones stood for the God in old Pagan religions. The crossed bones beneath the skull symbolized the Slain God, and his resurrection from death. In Witchcraft when the skull is displayed on the front of the cauldron it symbolizes renewal through the transformation powers connected with the cauldron.
When associated with magic and mysticism the skull serves as a link to spirits of the Underworld by its association with death. For this reason, among others, the skull was present during the initiation ceremonies of the Old Religion to signify the death of the old personality and the birth of a new consciousness."
Quote :
"The transitoriness of life; The Vanity of worldy things; death; memento mori; the moon; the shades; the dying sun; gods of the dead; The skull is, on the other hand, a symbol of the vital life-force contained in the head. The skull with the crossbones indicates death, the thigh also symbolizing a vital force, that of the loins; the flag carrying the skull and cross bones is an emblem of pirates.
Alchemic: With the raven and the grave, the skull is a symbol of the blackening and mortification of the first stage of the Lesser Work, `earth to earth’, and signifies dying to the world; but it is also that which survives and so is used as a reminder of-life and transmutation.
Graeco-Roman: Attribute of Cronos/Saturn as Time. Emblem of the SS.
Associated with the cult of the cult the HEAD, skulls kept over the Tresholds of Celtic tribal huts were probably thought of as guardians.
Some tribes venerate the skulls of their most important Ancestors, as they believe that a person’s vital force resides there.
The inclusion of the skull makes explicit the essential finiteness of man and the limitation of human knowledge. Human vision and knowledge is necessarily limited by time and place.
In Hans Holbein’s painting ‘the ambassadors’ the anamorphic skull can be connected to the contrast between discursive reason and intellectual vision as different stages of human knowledge. The stable, balanced, serene composition is interrupted only by a long gray shape that rises diagonally from the floor. when viewed from the proper angle, this shape is recognized as a skull in reflecting holbein’s interest in symbolism and radical perspectives. The skull disrupts our trust in the cartesian perspective center in the same way, our trust in our own reality (belief systems) becomes destabilised.
"Death's Head or the Totenkopf, symbol of the NS SS.
"The basic concept of heroic realism was propounded by Ernst Junger and the notion itself propagated by S.S. Obergruppenfuhrer Werner Best. Best’s theme was ‘War and the Law’. He described National Socialism as an attitude of mind capable of copying the realities of the world in which peace did not exist, where struggle and tension were the rule. Such an attitude of mind visualised no final solution since it knew that the whole of life, the dynamic of the cosmos, consisted of tension, struggle and unrest.
To quote Best: ‘From this recognition of the truth, this refusal to contemplate a definitive solution, must emerge a new moral code unrelated to the teleology of existing doctrines. Doctrines necessarily direct action towards a certain end and so lay down what that action should consist of. The unbending rules of orthodoxy prescribe what the individual is to do in each individual circumstance. The new moral code cannot lay down ‘what’ because it recognises no such thing. It is not directed towards a specific end and does not serve some purpose of fulfilment or completion. Every moment calls into question the events of its predecessor. No set of values for which we may at one time have fought can necessarily be regarded as positive or permanent. The yardstick of the new code of morality therefore is not its context, not ‘what’ but ‘how’. In other words the manner of achievement. The important point is not what we fight for but how we fight. The fight itself is essential and permanent, the aims of that fight are temporary and changeable.
‘There can therefore be no question of success in our fight. Desire for victory in the immediate impulse in any fight but victory is not the decisive or governing factor for those engaged in the struggle. Anyone can fight in the expectation that he will win or that ‘good cause’ will one day triumph.
‘Such a man believes in an ultimate aim and so the fight becomes tolerable to him. The criterion of the new mental attitude, on the other hand, is the acceptance of a fight in a lost position for a lost cause; the essence is to fight a good fight, whether it is for a good cause or whether it is successful matters little. Thus from a realistic acceptance of the truth will emerge a heroic code of morals. Consequently the attitude of mind which is the hallmark of National Socialism may be described as heroic realism.’" [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
"From the Middle Ages in the West, skulls acted as memento mori, reminders that time passes rapidly, life is not endless, and earthly things are transient. They appeared on funerary monuments, in still-life paintings. The skull and crossbones now symbolize the danger of death.
The possibly frivolous and merely decorative nature of the still life genre was avoided by Pieter Claesz in his "Vanitas" (illustration, below right): Skull, opened case-watch, overturned emptied wineglasss, snuffed candle, book: "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" The visual cues of the hurry and violence of life are contrasted with eternity in this somber, still and utterly silent painting.
When the skull is represented in Nazi SS insignia, the death's-head (Totenkopf) deals with the fear of death, but when tattooed on the forearm its apotropaic power helps an outlaw biker cheat death.
The possibly frivolous and merely decorative nature of the still life genre was avoided by Pieter Claesz in his "Vanitas" (illustration, below right): Skull, opened case-watch, overturned emptied wineglasses, snuffed candle, book: "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" The visual cues of the hurry and violence of life are contrasted with eternity in this somber, still and utterly silent painting.
When the skull appears in Nazi SS insignia, the death's-head (Totenkopf) represents loyalty unto death. However, when tattooed on the forearm its apotropaic power helps an outlaw biker cheat death. The skull and crossbones signify "Poison" when they appear on a glass bottle containing a white powder, or any container in general. But it is not the same emblem when it flies high above the deck as the Jolly Roger: there the pirate death's-head epitomizes the pirates' ruthlessness and despair; their usage of death imagery might be paralleled with their occupation challenging the natural order of things. "Pirates also affirmed their unity symbolically", Marcus Rediker asserts, remarking the skeleton or skull symbol with bleeding heart and hourglass on the black pirate ensign, and asserting "it triad of interlocking symbols— death, violence, limited time—simultaneously pointed to meaningful parts of the seaman's experience, and eloquently bespoke the pirates' own consciousness of themselves as preyed upon in turn. Pirates seized the symbol of mortality from ship captains who used the skull 'as a marginal sign in their logs to indicate the record of a death'"
The skull of Adam at the foot of the Cross: detail from a Crucifixion by Fra Angelico, 1435
When a skull was worn as a trophy on the belt of the Lombard king Alboin, it was a constant grim triumph over his old enemy, and he drank from it. In the same way a skull is a warning when it decorates the palisade of a city, or deteriorates on a pike at a Traitor's Gate.
The Serpent crawling through the eyes of a skull is a familiar image that survives in contemporary Goth subculture. The serpent is a chthonic god of knowledge and of immortality, because he sloughs off his skin. The serpent guards the Tree in the Greek Garden of the Hesperides and, not that much earlier, a Tree in the Garden of Eden. The serpent in the skull is always making its way through the socket that was the eye: knowledge persists beyond death, the emblem says, and the serpent has the secret. The skull speaks. It says "Et in Arcadia ego" or simply "Vanitas.""
"My (memory) palace is vast. Even by medieval standards. Suvine and beautiful and timeless. With a single reminder of mortality... a skull, graven in the floor. " [Hannibal, 2.13]
"If I am ever apprehended, my memory palace will serve more than just a mnemonic system; I will live there. All the palace chambers are not lovely, light and bright. In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. There are holes in the floor of the mind." [Hannibal, 2.13]
"With Marshall Mc Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information, but serve to form communicating group-bodies. People possess language so that they can speak of their own merits [Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves." [Nietzsche Apostle]
Armies and their marching beat too must work on this psychic principle...
The blond beast moving as one unit.
Quote :
"The purpose of the Fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior. The carefully thought out symbols (which are proper to every counter-revolutionary movement), the skulls and disguises, the barbaric drum beats, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are simply the organized imitation of magic practices." [Horkheimer-Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment]
Contrast Hannibal's evaluation of the low heart-rate as the more evolved human, to the theme of the Blade Runner:
Quote :
"These thematic elements provide an atmosphere of uncertainty for Blade Runner's central theme of examining humanity. In order to discover replicants, an empathy test is used, with a number of its questions focused on the treatment of animals—it seems to be an essential indicator of someone's "humanity". The replicants are juxtaposed with human characters who lack empathy, while the replicants appear to show compassion and concern for one another at the same time as the mass of humanity on the streets is cold and impersonal. The film goes so far as to put in doubt whether Deckard is a human, and forces the audience to reevaluate what it means to be human.
The question of whether Deckard is intended to be a human or a replicant has been an ongoing controversy since the film's release. Both Michael Deeley and Harrison Ford wanted Deckard to be human while Hampton Fancher preferred ambiguity. Ridley Scott has confirmed that in his vision Deckard is a replicant. Deckard's unicorn dream sequence inserted into the Director's Cut coinciding with Gaff's parting-gift of an origami unicorn is seen by many as showing Deckard is a replicant as Gaff could have access to Deckard's implanted memories. The interpretation that Deckard is a replicant is challenged by others who believe unicorn imagery shows that the characters, whether human or replicant, share the same dreams and recognise their affinity, or that the absence of a decisive answer is crucial to the film's main theme. The inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of the film, as well as its textual richness, have permitted viewers to see it from their own perspectives."
Hannibal's perspective of the "low-heart rate" indicates the composure of the Blond Beast, while the "cold-heart rate" indicates the emotionless Zombiehood of the Replicants in Blade Runner...
What separates the Blond Beast from the Replicant?
The Mind.
Intelligence of the Blond Beast that is the Calm of Heigtened Consciousness is radically different to the Mindlessness of the Replicant that is the automated calm of mechanical exhaustion.
The "Humanity" of Blade Runner is founded on Sympathy although they call it empathy, and if we consider sympathy as another mindlessness, isn't the 'human' element of Blade Runner another Zombie of types too?
representative paper money, with guaranteed convertibility;
fiduciary paper money, incompletely guaranteed; and,
conventional paper money, sometimes referred to as "fictional (or fictive) money," which is inconvertible and circulates only as forced currency." [Goux, The Coiners of Language]
"In the West, the representatives of the divine royalty and the leaders who embody the two powers (spiritual and temporal), in what I have called "spiritual virility" and "Olympian sovereignity," belong to a very distant and almost mythical past. We have seen how, through the gradual deterioration of the Light of the North, the process of decadence has unfolded... Once the appex dissapeared, authority descended to the level inmediately below, that is, to the caste of the warriors. The stage was then set for monarchs who were mere military leaders, lords of temporal justice and, in more recent times, politically absolute sovereigns. In other words, regality of blood replaced regality of the spirit. Then a second collapse ocurred as the aristocracies began to fall into decay and the monarchies to shake at the foundations; through revolutions and constitutions they became useless institutions subject to the "will of the nation," and sometimes they were even ousted by different regimes. The principle characterizyng this state of affairs was: "The king reigns but he does not rule." Together with parliamentary republics the formation of the capitalist oligarchies revealed the shift of power from the second caste (the warrior) to the modern equivalent of the third caste (the mercantile class). The kings of the coal, oil, and iron industries replace the previous kings of blood and of spirit. Correspondingly, this era was characterized by the theory of the social contract. At this time the social bond was no longer a fides of a warrior type based on relationships of faithfulness and honor. Instead, it took on a utilitarian and economic character; it consisted of an agreement based on personal convenience and on material interest that only a merchant could have conceived. Gold became a means ad powerful tool; those who knew how to acquire it and to multiply it (capitalism, high finance, industrial trusts), behind the appereances of democracy, virtually controlled political power and the instruments employed in the art of opinionmaking. Aristocracy gave way to plutocracy, the warrior, to the banker and industrialist. The economy triumphed on all fronts. Trafficking with money and charging interest, activities previouly confined to the ghettos, invaded the new civilisation.
In reality, the codification of the traffic with gold as a loan charged with interest, to which the Jews had been previously devoted since they had no other means through which they could affirm themselves, may be said to be the very foundation of the acceptance of the aberrant development of all that is banking, high finance, and pure economy, which are spreading like a cancer in the modern world. This is the fundamental time in the "age of the merchants".
Finally the crisis of bourgeois society, classs truggle, the proletarian revolt against capitalism, the manifest promulgated at the "Third International" in 1919, and the correlative organization of the groups and the masses in the cadres proper to a "socialist civilization of labor" -all these bear witness to the third collapse, in which power tends to pass into the hands of the lowest of the traditional castes, the caste of the beasts of burden and the standardized individuals. The result of this transfer of power was a reduction of horizon and value to the plane of matter, the machine, and the reign of quantity. The prelude to this was the Russian Revolution. Thus, the new ideal became the "proletarian" ideal of a universal and communist civilization.
We may compare the above mentioned phaenomenon of the awakening and gushing forth of elemental subhuman forces within the structures of the modern world to a person who can no longer endure the tension of the spirit (first caste), and eventually not even the tension of the will as afree force that animates the body (warrior caste), and who thus gives in to the subpersonal forces of the organic system and all of a sudden reacts almost magnetically under the impulse of another life taht replaces his own. The ideas and the passions of the demos soon escape men´s control and they begin to act as if they had acquired an autonomous and dreadful life of their own. These passions pit nations and collectivities against each other and result in unprecedented conflicts and crises. At the end of the process, once the total collapse has ocurred, the awaits an international system under the brutal symbols of the hammer and the sickle.
Such are the horizons facing the contemporary world." [Evola]
Add to that,
Baudrillard's 4-fold Precession of the Simulacra:
Quote :
"1. signs thought of as reflecting reality: re-presenting "objective" truth;
2. signs mask reality: reinforces notion of reality;
3. signs mask the absence of reality; (Disneyworld, Watergate, LA life: jogging, psychotherapy, organic food)
4. signs become simulacra - they have no relation to reality; they simulate a simulation - hyper-reality. (Spinal Tap, Cheers bars, new urbanism, Starbucks, the Gulf War was a video game)
Bacon's 4-fold Idolatry:
Quote :
The Idols of Human Understanding by Francis Bacon (condensed and edited):
"The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding , and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men’s minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger, fortify themselves as far as may be possible against their assaults. There are four classes of idols which beset men’s minds. To these, for distinction’s sake, I have assigned names:
Idols of the tribe;
Idols of the cave;
Idols of the marketplace;
Idols of the theater.
The idols of the tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe, race, and culture of men. It is a false assertion that the measure of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well as the sense of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
The idols of the cave are the idols of the individual man. Everyone has a cave or a den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing to his personal and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.
There are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call idols of the marketplace, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.
Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call idols of the theater; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.”
Nietzsche's 'How the True World Became a Fable':
Quote :
"1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents"). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian. )
3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)"
Loving is a Knowing... and the quest is a lonely and perilous one...
Quote :
"We are a Faustian generation, my dear--we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed), to be able to know." [A.S. Byatt (Possession)]
Quote :
"I sold my soul to the devil… I sold my soul to the Devil, No for a farthing not for a shilling But the knowledge of my own ignorance. And in its place I have but a dull void Of loneliness in this unworthy, miserable world. I sold my soul to the Devil, Because I couldn’t live with it, It has revealed in an awful whisper To me, all that is better left unsaid. I envy ignorance and purity of heart, For me its no use, what’s done will not be altered, The Devil, is my only trusted friend And for my soul he is in my debt. The truth that we would rather not have known Cannot escape from my unveiled sight And I’ll make it my revenge on those who are happier then I, To crush the fortress, To remove the blinds And to present you with the naked, vulgar Truth."
The Naked Vulgar Truth...
Quote :
"What, then, are the basic forms of the speaking? Not the judgment and declaration, but the command, the expression of obedience, the enunciation, the question, the affirmation or negation. These are sentences, originally quite brief, which are invariably addressed to others, such as “Do this!” “Ready?” “Yes!” “Go ahead!” Words as designations of notions1 are only products of the object of the sentence, and hence it is that the vocabulary of a hunting tribe is from the outset different from that of a village of cowherds or a seafaring coastal population.
The original object of speech is the carrying out of an act in accordance with intention, time, place, and means. Clear and unequivocal construction is therefore the first essential, and the difficulty of both conveying one’s meaning to, and imposing one’s will on, another produced the technique of grammar, sentences, and constructions, the correct modes of ordering, questioning, and answering, and the building-up of classes of words — on the basis of practical and not theoretical intentions and purposes. The part played by theoretical reflectiveness in the beginnings of speaking in sentences was practically nil. All speech was of a practical nature and proceeded from the “thought of the hand.”" [Spengler, Man and Technics]
Faust, becoming God, taking a form of his own... mastering over nature, not just Hand but the Body as a Thinking Technology...
Satyr wrote:
""God" as the representation of this immutable, determining, higher order, residing in the "immanent", the receding past, dies, in this slow falling back. Man can now shape the past - as Orwell described it - taking God's place as the creating "word."
The word is freed from a Being. Man becomes the shaper of his own reality, by taking control over the word. Man becomes the shape-shifter, the doppelganger. And what is shaped more easily than flesh, but inanimate matter: plastic, fabric, metal. To take control is to pull away, to dislodge. The word is detached from the phenomenon, becoming purified....a holy word. Sacred being what is unsoiled by the earthly, the base, the primal = enlightened, made light, placed on a pedestal, on metal boots, for instance, as if floating above reality, detached/detaching from it. The skin feels, but behind the metal it is numbed - the metal is an added padding, a thickness. Sunlight does not burn it...it only heats its surfaces.
The word is its own definition, in the same way God was defined as the Creator of Himself, and of the world. A solipsistic innuendo - the end of the causal chain. A word is what is written, using words, in the dictionary. When used linguistically it refers only to the mental abstraction - abstraction being a form of detachment, simplification/generalization being the cutting away of dimensions.
Dictionary offer a general outline, just as the Bible does. Both are taken literally, rather as representations, an art-form....just as the armor and the arks are taken as literal additions, extensions of the human embodying them. The human becomes spiritualized, the behind the scenes, the masks, animating energy - the ghost in the machine, in the armor, the contrivance.
Behind the word, emotions. The word refers back to human abstractions, or, when it dares, to human emotions. A hint at the primal. But, now, the emotions are stripped of their worldly utilities, the reason they evolved. They becomes expressions of the divine, which is always masked, armored, hidden, in the dark.
The noumenon comes to the forefront, as does the armor. The phenomenon, is hidden, distanced....placed into lethe, forgetfulness: covered, concealed. The armor is human contrivance. It is the new apparent." [Arms and Armour]
"Armor was a reaction to the bow and arrow, the crossbow. When anyone could fell a fighter from a distance, or massacre a group of formidable warriors by striking them with quantities of arrows from a safe distance, the armor became inevitable.
Arrows are metaphors for karma, directed by words. Your fate, your reputation, your destiny, now determined by gossip, distant hidden voices whispering (shaping arrow heads, finding rocks), and flinging them to injure from a safe distance.
The armor protected the wearer from these words. A karmic wall. The metal shell was a detachment, a barrier, a discriminating possibility. It kept the rabble out.
The warrior did not have to be a good fighter...because he was a walking talk; a Frankenstein, shuffling towards the other, untouched by arrows, by the masses throwing rocks from the shadows. Like Frankenstein he was made up of many different parts, all connected artificially, creating a monstrosity. The quality of the technique was judged by how well it emulated the human form, how it made the observer forget that there was an intervention artifice between the eye and the moving spirit. Against words a linguistic defense; an iron clad rhetoric - rigid, detached, artistic but unaesthetic, anesthetic.
Two types of modern warfare emerges - dialectics. One was used by the commoner, who found stones, or could artificially manufacture multiple arrow-heads to fling at the other from the safety of a detached distance, amplifying his weakness into a arrow-pointed force. The other used a more refined from of distancing: the outer shell, detaching himself from words, creating an alternative space within space/time.
Both compensate for a lack of artistry. Both types of "fighters" compensate for an absence of fighting talent. Both uses distance, when warrior approach and engage, suing the weapon, the artifice, the word, as an extension of their arm: a surgical instrument."
"Words, for me,a re not enslaved. They are color hues on an artist's palette.
If they have been appropriated and made famous, to the general public, by particular artist with particular nature's is not that important.
Meme is effective because of its similarity, in form, and rhyme, with gene, but also because this similarity reflects a deeper relationship. Meme is a continuance of the Gene...and uses the same methods within different contexts.
Both are self-replicating and "selfish". Both begin in the individual and then extend themselves towards the universal. Gene is the organic part which then evolves the capacity to break free from it.
To Know Thyself, is a Delphic decree, challenging the individual to explore his past, his previous nurturing...his nature. But not only to explore, but to accept...to embrace, because most of it will not be flattering, soothing, "positive".
Memes are an extension of this...just as mind is an extension of body; the brain's projections. Language, it is said, is a sophistication of grooming. The tactile giving way to the more effective and efficient verbal.
Words are a form of insemination. When we convince another, we impregnate him/her...we mind-fuck them...we seduce them. No force, no rape...(s)he opens up willingly.
Knowledge is encoded experience; encoded nurturing/nature; encoded past. The encoding method is words, just as in genes it is chromosomes. The meme is an extension of the gene. It's effectiveness is that it can bridge geographic and cultural boundaries and fertilize the alien...but not the totally alien.The other must posses reseptibilty...just as with genes the other must belong to the same species."
"Words are complex codes constructed by using simple symbols: letters, numbers.
Linguistic symbols, at least in western languages, represent sounds; vocalizations. Mathematical symbols represent pure abstractions; concepts that can be used to refer to any phenomenon.
With organics life the outer skin, shell, represents the organism's extreme, ambiguous, appropriation of possibilities (spatial dimensions) - as a representation (interpretation by the observer) of the aggregate energies comprising its Becoming (inter)activities.
Words, and the languages it then produces as habitual codes, established as shared by a group, are symbols of a mind's interpretation of a phenomenon. I would suggest that the particularities of words - their guttural, nasal, throaty, sonar, tonal, qualities - reflect a particular people's relationship to the particular phenomennon being interpreted."
"Words are now the only thing left to us. They’ve evolved from being an advancement in communal grooming and from being a sophistication in group dynamics into becoming a method of sucking a concept dry from all potential and, therefore, of deleting an idea’s significance. Words are now how actions are made sterile via abstraction and endless repetition. Words are how females compensate for their insufficiencies in a world that only allows for words and then, only some of them. In a world of men, where one had to stand by his own words, there would be none of this endless prattle.
It is their ease (path-of-least-resistance) that lends them to the weak – those that now use them as a substitute for action with such carelessness that words lose all meaning. Words can affect and infect, if one does not learn to read in between them; words can reveal and conceal, depending on the creativity of the one using them; more significantly words can be used instead of… Words may be actions themselves but they are ones stripped of all substance; words are cheap and that is why they are ubiquitous and recyclable in this day and age; words are light because they have none of the weighty engagements they allude to. Words, in and of themselves, are so empty of value that one can use them to express what he contradicts with his very deeds, and if caught doing so, one can pile on more words, waiting for time to deal with the remembrance…only to then return to the same activities in secret – the ones exposing one’s true nature - while mouthing-off ideals he can never live-up to because he never intended to, or had little understanding of what was demanded of him. Words can build image, they can “correct” what nature has wrought, they can give promises that cannot be kept and suggest connections that do not exist. Words are timeless because they suffer none of the natural attritions the world forces upon what is more real; words are ethereal and magical; words are effete. Words are deadly weapons and magnificent tools when used by word-smiths - those with the artistry and the talent to shape them to their own will – but they quickly become ridiculous and vulgar in the hands or mouths of the incompetent and artless. Words can backfire, and are never forgotten, because they express an intent that has never been attempted; words are threatening and impotent, all at once. Words are how men seduce women and women give themselves to men; words are how the game is played when nobody is obliged to stand by them or face the costs for having spoken them or who do not have to follow through with their insinuations. Words, and how they are strung together, can either expose a mind’s inner order, intelligence, expose a deeper symmetry, outside outer appearances, or they can expose a mind’s inner turmoil, its chaos and its deeper ugliness. Words are how words are drowned out, ignored, and perhaps this is why “free-speech” is such a popular post-modern principle.
Maybe it is the duty of a noble man to reconnect words with actions, so that these lesser spirits can no longer use them with such careless abandon; maybe the price of words should be reinstated, so that children and females do not succumb to the urge to utilize their impact with such recklessness. In a world full of chatter maybe this can produce more quietness by imposing upon actions, including words, the price that would make most fall silent or face the consequences."
"Words have become so powerful in our time for three reasons. The first is obvious: they are a form of expression, grooming, establishing and maintaining relationships, aiding in the effectiveness and efficiency of cooperative social unions. Words can be transmitted across time and space, and so their reach, is powerful. This is why they have become the building block for memetic fertilization, transmission, control. The second reason is because words are a natural progression from genetic to memetic expression. Their binary constructs naturally reflect brain functions and mental abstractions. They reduce the complexity and indeterminacy of the phenomenon by cutting it away from the causal chains: it makes of the fluid into a static thing, which it can then symbolize with vocal or visual artistry. The third reason is that words are malleable, easy. One can alter a word, or a phrase suing chains of words, when (s)he cannot alter the chain of causality being expressed using thesewords. Words are so useful that they can refer to nothing other than what is imagined. That is, they can be self-referential, solipsistic, detached from sensual awareness. Words offer the possibility for nihilism, as they can contradict the empirical, with the static, formal, absolutist, insinuations. For a mind immersed in semantics there is no need for evidence outside the human skull, because words are proof enough that the thought must refer to a phenomenon which is possible, rather than to a phenomenon that takes the sensual, and then either recombines it into unities which have no sensual referent, or that totally contradict the phenomenon being sensed.
We live in a world of sheltering, which means that words ascend, while aesthetics decline in relevance. What matters is the term, and how it makes us feel."
" The path from hunter/gatherer to domestic farmer, goes through trappings.
One construct traps, nooses, lures, hooks, to trap a prey, so as to overcome his own inability to run, fight, physically outperform his prey, by using himself as bait, and machination. In time he replaces himself with another machination....something automated, almost as reactive as he is. This technique/technology evolves into something more sophisticated. The trap no longer kills or maims the prey, but keeps it alive....prolonging its utility. The practice of killing has been ritualized. The religious practice is secularized.
With the deification of words one can only use words to harm, seduce, inspire, lead, dominate. God is the word - the Word is God. We enter the Modern frontiers of word-play and Nihilistic inversions.
God becomes Humanity, and Humanity God The word is a human tool.
Man becomes Woman, and Woman Man. A fashion statement, a trendiness, popularized by marketing.
Superior becomes Inferior, and the Inferior Superior. Relativism raised to the height of Truth - the Subjective worshiped as an Objective. Camouflage. This is the realm of normality, civility, social etiquette, politeness. One is expected to play along, and not to shatter the illusions being recreated.
Mass imitation creates a shared delusion. It becomes ritualized.
"This has nothing to do with general eloquence. This is not about crafting beautiful turns of phrase. It is about giving each character an individual voice and arranging these voices on the page, like a choir singing, sometimes in unison, others in counterpoint. For example, both Hannibal and Will use figurative language masterfully, and never more so than when they speak to each other. What I would like to point out is that they don’t do it for the same reasons, as becomes evident by this exchange in “Sorbet”:
Hannibal: Sum up the Ripper in so many words?
Will: Choose them wisely.
Hannibal: Oh, I always do. Words are living things. They have personality, point of view, agenda.
Will: They’re pack hunters.
For Hannibal, the use of language is an aesthetic endeavor, like cooking or music. But even as he strives for beauty, his language is calculated, methodical, insidious. Hannibal’s words are contract killers. In contrast, Will’s words are pack hunters. They are wolves (or dogs) hunting for food. They need the sustenance to stay alive. His words are always running after a truth so elusive, that literal language would be too heavy and too slow to catch up with it.
So, I believe that the use of figurative language in Hannibal is not just a vacuous exercise in aesthetics.
...captions help visualize the language. They clearly divide the screen in two: the top part is a visual landscape, shaped by mise-en-scene, cinematography, production design. The bottom part is a verbal landscape, inhabited by verbs, nouns, adjectives and lined with imagery and metaphor. In Hannibal the two landscapes exist parallel to each other, in a symbiotic relationship where image feeds off language and vice-versa.
Hannibal is a feast for the senses. But it is also a show about the senses. Vision haunts Will. Taste drives Hannibal. Images of Will taking off his glasses to “see” a crime scene and of Hannibal indulging in a meal run through the whole season “like a thread through pearls”. One episode is dedicated to each of the other senses. “Coquilles” is the episode of smell where Hannibal exhibits his almost supernatural olfactory abilities by smelling disease on Bella and Will. “Fromage” is the episode of hearing, where people are killed to make music and their killer ends up with half his ear shot off. It is also the episode where Will’s hearing is impaired, both by auditory hallucinations and the noise of a gun. “Trou Normand” is the episode of touch where Hannibal ensures confidence and establishes trust by touching Will and Abigail.
In the captions, senses are less like threads and more like neurons, diverging, intersecting, or firing all at once. Seeing might be terrifying for Will, but so is being blind – especially because someone has moved all the furniture around. And when the scales fall from his eyes, that’s when he truly sees who he is – and who Hannibal is. In this verbal landscape, senses are the chemical elements that nightmares are made of. Spaces speak with noise, serenades are heard behind closed eyes and nerves make clicking sounds. Thoughts are not tasty, bloodhounds smell madness and screams are smeared on the air. Through the season, this sensory attack sandblasts Will, causing the light and colour that make him alive to fade.
This loss of light, this dimming is evident in both the visual landscape and the verbal. The three scenes set in Hobbs’s kitchen become progressively darker. In “Aperitif”, when Will enters the kitchen, it’s early morning, it’s sunny and light is coming in through the curtains. Everything is clear, everything is open and there is not much to say, but a lot of things to do. In “Potage”, it’s an early autumn evening and everything is darker. Still, there is enough light in the kitchen for Will to talk to a shadow suspended on dust. There can’t be shadow without light. Unless, of course, your world is made of shadow. By the time Will enters Hobbs’s kitchen for a third time in “Savoureux”, his world has been overrun by the shadows of Hannibal’s crimes. In the world of images, it is right before dawn and everything is dark. Appropriately, in the world of words, Hobbs has also become darker: a shape made of swarming flies, black and vibrant and crawling with life. How else would we be able to see him now that the light everywhere has dimmed?
Parallel to these two landscapes, the visual and the verbal, runs a third one: an auditory landscape or “soundscape”, as Fuller called it in an interview. Much has been written about Brian Reitzell’s work in the show by people a lot savvier than me. The sounds coming from the screen are an integral part of the feel of the show and add texture and depth to the images and the characters. But there’s also a soundscape in the caption world, eager to be discovered, sometimes shouting in assonance (the repetition of vowels) and other times whispering in consonance (the repetition of consonants).
When the mongoose under the house sees the snakes slither by, we hear their threatening hisses. When Will talks to shadows suspended on dust, we hear the shadows speaking softly in his ear. When a killer finds peace in the pieces disassembled, we hear them fall into place, flesh on flesh, bone on bone. When Will hears his heart dim but fast, like footsteps fleeing into silence, we hear it too, fluttering with fear. Of course, in moderation, madness can be a medicine for the modern world, but all we hear is Hannibal’s madness humming in the background like an old fridge in the silence of the night.
There is one last instance of “verbal soundscaping” I would like to mention and it comes, rather fittingly, from the season finale, “Savoureux”. Will is standing in the kitchen where he killed Hobbs and looks at the wall, reliving the moment when he shot him. He sees the space opposite him assume Hobbs’s shape, filled with black and swarming flies. And then he shoots him. Not with a gun, but with a word. By spitting out hard and fast the strong syllable of the word “scattered”, while essentially eliminating the weak syllable, Will shoots Hobbs οne last time; not with a gun, but with a word."
Those horns, like root stems exposed to the sun, needy, seeking, intrusion upwardly focused.
The upward signifying mind, as opposed to the downward body.
Does the hypnotist will the "victim’s" hypnosis? No, he manipulates the willingness already present.
Does the grifter invent the other's desire? Does the one selling place the need the product satisfies in the brain? Does the faith healer heal? Does the liar lie? Does the hunter create the hunted? Does the farmer construct domestication? Does the magician conjure up forces that do not exist?
Fuller introducing the antlers/deer motif makes the trope of the blond beast all the more richer. Its how he retropolates the psyche of Hannibal into a more spiritual tapestry, taking you yourself to behold the juxtaposition of the wolf and the deer... The deer is a quiet animal, hardly makes a sound, uncannily aware of medicinal herbs in the forest,... intuitions growing silently... The subconscious is so subtle and it makes inroads very quietly... In Indo-Celtic thought, it was believed Fire ran away hiding itself in the antlers of the deer.... The deer symbolized the hidden fire because the antlers look like tree-branches inside which fire was believed to be hidden. So, to hunt or control the deer, was to regain your "fire", to be the master of your fluctuating senses;
Evola wrote:
"The Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika (4:66-67; 84-88) contains indications on how to use sounds in order to neutralize the mental organ. In the region of the heart some sounds are manifested. The inner sound (nada) at first is strong and resembles various things, such as a bell, waves, thunder, or rain. The mind must keep concentrating on these subtle sounds, excluding all other perceptions, until it becomes fixed and until it has successfully removed the limitation that it represents for the I. "Just like a hunter, the sound first attracts, ties, and finally slays the mind. . . . When the inner organ, similar to a deer, pauses and listens to a sound, a skilled hunter is able to kill it" (4:92, 94, 99)." [The Yoga of Power]
The deer reflecting into "streams of water" where Will feels his refuge, his sanctuary....
"I’m not sure about Hannibal. I think Hannibal is a very broadly spectrumed human being/fallen angel, who probably is capable and interested in everything humanity has to offer. Whereas Will Graham is very definitely heterosexual... to be absolutely clear, it is not sexual, but it’s beyond sexual. It is pure intimacy in a non-physical way. But it is that intimacy between heterosexual men that I’m fascinated with because it does go beyond physical parameters to this very primal basic male bonding place." [Fuller]
"His supernatural condition, marking him with six digits, is finalized with the loss of the entire hand, and of the girl. Loneliness, amputation, the high price of being extraordinary and unwilling to serve, to direct your gifts towards helping the masses, the herd. Loneliness still pulls upon him. He is not yet god, but a fallen angel. And by "human" Hannibal understands something more than the sexual, the procreative..."
Before the modern interpretations of the "Fall of Narcissus" at his own reflection, the myth of Narcissus portrayed a state of self-meditation, a "Know Thyself", a looking into the waters at your twin self, your reflection, in the still mirror of your being.... will reflecting into hannibal,, hannibal reflecting into piano music...
Quote :
"Narcissus, who, in the mirror of the water, tries to grasp his own beauty . Bent over the river of time , in which all forms pass and flee, he dreams: The images of Orpheus and Narcissus reconcile Eros and Thanatos. They recall the experience of a world that is not to be mastered and controlled but to be liberated -- a freedom that will release the powers of Eros now bound in the repressed and petrified forms of man and nature. These powers are conceived not as destruction but as peace, not as terror but as beauty. It is sufficient to enumerate the assembled images in order to circumscribe the dimension to which they are committed: the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time , the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise - - the Nirvana principle not as death but as life...
Trees and animals respond to Orpheus' language; the spring and the forest respond to Narcissus' desire. The Orphic and Narcissistic Eros awakens and liberates potentialities that are real in things animate and inanimate, in organic and inorganicnature--real but in the un-erotic reality suppressed. These potentialities circumscribe the telos inherent in them as: "just to be what they are ," "being -there," existing.
The Orphic and Narcissistic experience of the world negates that which sustains the world of the performance principle. The opposition between man and nature, subject and object, is overcome. Being is experienced as gratification, which unites man and nature so that the fulfillment of man is at the same time the fulfillment, without violence, of nature. In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are -- beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, "objectively." "Le monde tend à la beauté."
In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. His silence is not that of dead rigidity; and when he is contemptuous of the love of hunters and nymphs he rejects one Eros for another. He lives by an Eros of his own...
It is significant that the introduction of narcissism into psychoanalysis marked a turning point in the development of the instinct theory: the assumption of independent ego instincts (self-preservation instincts) was shaken and replaced by the notion of an undifierentiated , unified libido prior to the division into ego and external objects. Indeed, the discovery of primary narcissism meant more than the addition of just another phase to the development of the libido ; with it there came in sight the archetype of another existential relation to reality. Primary narcissism is more than autoeroticism; it engulfs the "environment ," integrating the narcissistic ego with the objective world. The normal antagonistic relation between ego and external reality is only a later form and stage of the relation between ego and reality...
Originally the ego includes everything,later it detachesfrom itself theexternalworld. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling -- a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. The striking paradox that narcissism , usually understood as egotistic withdrawal from reality, here is connected with oneness with the universe, reveals the new depth of the conception: beyond all immature autoeroticism , narcissism denotes a fundamental relatedness to reality which may generate a comprehensive existential order. Narcissus' life is that of beauty, and his existence is contemplation. These images refer to the aesthetic dimension as the one in which their reality principle must be sought and validated." [Marcuse, Eros and Civilization]
- The cornucopia of fruits and food and flesh on the dining table...
Before the modern interpretations of the "Fall of Narcissus" at his own reflection, the myth of Narcissus portrayed a state of self-meditation, a "Know Thyself", a looking into the waters at your twin self, your reflection, in the still mirror of your being.... will reflecting into hannibal,, hannibal reflecting into piano music...
Quote :
"Narcissus, who, in the mirror of the water, tries to grasp his own beauty . Bent over the river of time , in which all forms pass and flee, he dreams:
The Orphic and Narcissistic experience of the world negates that which sustains the world of the performance principle. The opposition between man and nature, subject and object, is overcome. Being is experienced as gratification, which unites man and nature so that the fulfillment of man is at the same time the fulfillment, without violence, of nature. In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are -- beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, "objectively." "Le monde tend à la beauté."
In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. His silence is not that of dead rigidity; and when he is contemptuous of the love of hunters and nymphs he rejects one Eros for another. He lives by an Eros of his own...
It is significant that the introduction of narcissism into psychoanalysis marked a turning point in the development of the instinct theory: the assumption of independent ego instincts (self-preservation instincts) was shaken and replaced by the notion of an undifierentiated , unified libido prior to the division into ego and external objects. Indeed, the discovery of primary narcissism meant more than the addition of just another phase to the development of the libido ; with it there came in sight the archetype of another existential relation to reality. Primary narcissism is more than autoeroticism; it engulfs the "environment ," integrating the narcissistic ego with the objective world. The normal antagonistic relation between ego and external reality is only a later form and stage of the relation between ego and reality...
Originally the ego includes everything,later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling -- a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. The striking paradox that narcissism , usually understood as egotistic withdrawal from reality, here is connected with oneness with the universe, reveals the new depth of the conception: beyond all immature autoeroticism , narcissism denotes a fundamental relatedness to reality which may generate a comprehensive existential order." [Marcuse, Eros and Civilization]
- The cornucopia of fruits and food and flesh on the dining table...
An orphic/narcissistic economy.
Quote :
"I don’t know if I will ever be myself again. I don’t know if I’ve got any self leftover. I spent so long thinking I was him it’s gotten really hard to remember who I was when I wasn’t him… It’s hard to be your own person when you can’t get out of your own head." [Will, Hannibal]
Will’s fear of having a "fluid personality" is also manifested in his dreams and his hallucinations...
Near the beginning of Part Two of Alberti's On Painting, the first treatise to give voice to the aesthetic sensibility that was to shape the evolution of Renaissance and Post- Renaissance art, we find the following remark, to which I referred briefly last time:
"Moreover, painting was given the highest honour by our ancestors. For, although almost all other artists were called craftsmen, the painter alone was not considered in that category. For this reason, I say among my friends that Narcissus who was changed into a flower, according to the poets, was the inventor of painting. Since painting is already the flower of every art, the story of Narcissus is most to the point. What else can you call painting but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the water in the fountain" (64)
A strange remark! Why should Alberti want to claim Narcissus as his precursor
To call him the inventor of painting would seem to cast the art of painting in a very questionable light. Ovid, one of "the poets" of whom Alberti must have been thinking, although he speaks of "the poets," in the plural, describes Narcissus as a young man of extraordinary beauty, possessed by a pride that refused love, until one of those he scorned prayed to heaven that he, too, might feel the pain of unrequited love; punished by Nemesis, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflected image; slowly consumed by this love he was transformed into the flower we call "narcissus."
Alberti's use of the Narcissus story invites us to seek the origin of painting not just in love, but in an inversion of love brought about by pride. But can this be how Alberti would have his readers understand his remark?
To locate the origin of art in pride hardly seems to serve Alberti's stated purpose: to prove that "painting is not unworthy of consuming all our time and study." (63) How does Alberti understand that worth? If we take him by his word, the worth of painting would seem linked to its self-sufficiency: to say that it is not unworthy of taking up all of our time, is to suggest that the pursuit of art need not serve other activities, for if so, could it ever be worthy of taking up all of our time? For the sake of art, Alberti seems to suggest, we may suspend all other concerns. To be sure, I may be placing too much weight on what would seem to be no more than a casual remark made in passing; just like the anecdotal reference to Narcissus, it seems no more than a rhetorical aside, hyperbolic, as such asides tend to be, certainly not weighty enough to warrant the kind of literal approach I am imposing on it. But just such rhetorical asides, where the author relaxes a bit, often reveal his deepest concerns better than his central argument.
As stated, Alberti's statement of purpose gestures in a direction that would have to have troubled a more traditional Christian thinker. Just as Narcissus has denaturalized eros, the person who allows art to take up all of his time would seem to have strayed from his natural end. With Kierkegaard one could speak here of a teleological suspension of the ethical, although what is suspended here is not just the ethical, but the religious. Such suspension is indeed inseparable from the pursuit of art for art's sake. As Kierkegaard knew, there is something demonic about such suspension; and there is something demonic about dedicating one's whole life to art.
I would like to call special attention to Alberti's claim that art is not unworthy of consuming all our time. Art apparently is capable of consuming, i.e., of abolishing time. Do we get here a hint of the worth of painting, as Alberti understands it? Is its dignity linked to its ability to defeat, or perhaps only to let us forget, if only for a time, the tyrannical rule of time? As Schopenhauer insists, in time aesthetic experience promises to lift the burden of time.
But let me return to the traditional understanding of the tale of Narcissus as a tale of pride subverting the natural order. That Alberti is aware of this reading, a reading that has to invite criticism, is suggested when he tells the reader that he tells his playful determination of the origin of painting only to his friends (where the reader being let in on the secret, is thereby included in Alberti's circle of friends).
What readers was Alberti addressing? First of all his fellow painters. As I pointed out, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that, down to the present, painting has acted out the scenario set by Alberti and his friends.
Giving voice to the artistic revolution that overthrew medieval art, Alberti's On Painting helps mark the beginning of the aesthetic approach to beauty and art that has shaped the development of art ever since. Alberti's mention of Narcissus forces us to question this approach's ruling ethos: should we locate the origin of Renaissance and Post-Renaissance art in love, more precisely in that inversion of love brought about by pride of which Ovid's tale tells?
Quote :
Consider once more Alberti's remark:
"...I say among my friends that Narcissus who was changed into a flower, according to the poets, was the inventor of painting. Since painting is already the flower of every art, the story of Narcissus is most to the point."
Narcissus was changed into a flower. As we read in Ovid:
"The pyre, the tossing torches, and the bier, were now being prepared, but his body was nowhere to be found. Instead of his corpse, they discovered a flower with a circle of white petals round a yellow center"
It is significant that Narcissus was changed not just into a flower, but into the flower that now bears his name. As a matter of fact, the myth of Narcissus may well represent a response to the flower, which loves the water and turns its head downward. The flower also helps to explain the parentage of the mythical Narcissus, whose father is Cephisus, god of the main river of Boeotia, while his mother is called Liriope, because the narcissus was considered a kind of lily (leirion).59 The myth, it has been argued, offers us an extended figure of the flower known in antiquity not only for its beauty, which returns every spring, but for its benumbing odor. The flower was thus also associated with fainting and death.
If the ancients associated the flower with both beauty and death, these associations return in the mythical figure of the beautiful Narcissus, who in antiquity was considered a symbol of death.60 The images of Narcissus on grave monuments suggest that Narcissus was not only understood as an incarnation of pride, but more positively, as a symbol of a metamorphosis that offers consolation for the pain inflicted by the terror of time. Narcissus' metamorphosis into a flower rescues him from total annihilation and grants him a semblance of immortality
The flower is the metamorphosed Narcissus, we can say his metaphor. In this metaphor Narcissus continues to live. Thus his final wish is granted after all. I quote Ovid's Narcissus:
"I am cut off in the flower of my youth. I have no quarrel with death, for in death I shall forget my pain: but I could wish that the object of my love might outlive me. As it is, both of us will perish together, when this one life is destroyed."
The wish is paradoxical: while ready to die, Narcissus yet wishes that the object of his love might outlive him; but that object is of course he himself. Narcissus accepts death and yet wishes for continued life. And this paradoxical wish for life in death is granted. As the flower he has become, Narcissus is reborn every spring and thus rescued from total destruction.
Note that this reading invites an interpretation of the flower as a figure of painting. "By embracing with art what is presented on the surface of the fountain," — these are Alberti's words, — the artist gives it permanence, allows the mirror image to remain when its original has long ceased to be. Is this then part of Alberti's reason for invoking Narcissus? Is art the ambiguous figure of both death and the victory over death, a victory the artist does not owe to nature, or to God, but to his own skill?
Once more consider the line: "What else can you call painting but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the fountain." The artist does not just re-present what he sees in the mirror, he embraces it, where we should recall that just this was denied to Narcissus. The artist may thus be said to succeed where Narcissus failed. The offspring of that embrace is the work of art. Art allows the narcissistic eros to become procreative after all.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
Alberti's description of art as an embrace of what is reflected in the water's mirror recalls Plato's discussion of Book X of the Republic — this, too, a text that invites challenge of Alberti's celebration of painting
"And there is another artist, — I should like to know what you would say of him. Who is he? One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen. What an extraordinary man! Wait a little, and there will be more reason for your saying so. For this is he who is able to create not only vessels of every kind, but plants and animals, himself, and all other things — the earth and heaven, and the things which are in heaven or under the earth; he makes the gods also. He must be a wizard and no mistake. Oh! you are incredulous, are you? Do you mean that there is no such maker or creator; or that in one sense there might be a maker of all these things but in another not? Do you see that there is a sense in which you could make them all yourself? What way? An easy way enough; or rather, there are many ways in which the feat might be accomplished, none quicker than turning a mirror round and round — you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and all the other things of which we were just now speaking, in the mirror. Yes, he said; but they would be appearances only."
Alberti's artist embraces these appearances with his art and thereby grants them permanence. This embrace allows him to escape the proud self-isolation of Narcissus. The products of the painter's pride meet with the community's grateful acceptance. "Any master painter," Alberti suggests, "who sees his work adored will feel himself considered another god." (64) "In painting animals" Zeuxis is said to have set "himself up almost as a god." (64) Like Plato, Alberti, too, understands the artist as a maker of the gods, citing the authority of Trismegistus, who is supposed to have said the "mankind portrays the gods in his own image from his memories of nature and his own origins." (64) "Nothing," Alberti adds, "has ever been so esteemed by mortals."
Socrates would have insisted that what is here being esteemed are only imitations of appearances. Alberti, of course, would not have disputed that. But why then should painting be so valued by mortals. The word "mortals" hints at the answer: Alberti observes that "Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive. Even after many centuries they are recognized with great pleasure and with great admiration for the painter." (65) And a bit later: "Thus the face of a man who is already dead certainly lives a long life through painting." (65) Alberti thus places painting in opposition to death. It has its origin in that ill will against time Nietzsche calls the spirit of revenge. That ill will bids human beings translate themselves out of time. Art, as Alberti understands it, effects such a translation.
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this ill will against time is a refusal of the authority of eros. The tale of Narcissus has its origin in such a refusal. It is significant that the tale began with a perversion of eros, with a rape. The mother of Narcissus, Ovid tells us, "was the nymph whom Cephisus once embraced with his curving stream, imprisoned in his waves, and forcefully ravished."63 The sexual act here is divorced from love. We understand why the unwanted offspring of such violence should refuse the nymph Echo's aggressive advances, why his "soft young body housed a pride so unyielding that none of those boys or girls dared to touch him."64 Refusing all embraces, Narcissus would rather die than allow himself to be touched. In the end of course even proud Narcissus cannot escape love and love demands an object beyond the self. Narcissus finds that object in the mirrored reflection of his own beauty"
"I am on fire with love for my own self. It is I who kindle the flames which I must endure. What should I do? Woo or be wooed? But what then shall I seek by my wooing? What I desire, I have. My very plenty makes me poor. How I wish that I could separate myself from my body! A new prayer this, for a lover, to wish the thing he loves away! Now grief is sapping my strength; little life remains for me — I am cut off in the flower of my youth. I have no quarrel with death, for in death I shall forget my pain: but I could wish that the object of my love might outlive me: as it is, both of us will perish together when this one life is destroyed."
Narcissus says of himself that he has what he desires. He thus would seem to embody that state of plenitude of the circle-men of whom Aristophanes speaks in Plato's Symposium. Just as Ovid's tale links the plight of Narcissus to his pride, so it was the pride of these circlemen that provoked the punishment of Zeus.
The myth of Aristophanes interprets for us the awakening of love that puts an end to what Freud called "the primary narcissism of the child,"66 to the child's only apparent self-sufficiency. Plenty now proves to be poverty. The self-embrace for which Narcissus longs would mean the impossible recovery of a plenitude denied by our fragmented self. Recognizing the impossibility, yet refusing to let go of his dream, Narcissus makes his peace with death. But Narcissus is not quite ready to renounce life altogether. He wants both: to be and not to be. This contradictory longing lets him wish that the object of his love, his own fleeting image in the pool, might outlast him. Narcissus knows that this is a vain wish. The mirror image will perish together with what it mirrors. But Alberti could have consoled Narcissus: art is able to give permanence to what has only fleeting existence in the mirror. It allows the beauty of Narcissus to survive, unsullied by a love that would embrace to give birth. Alberti’s invites us not only to consider the history of painting from this Narcisstic perspective, but more especially the history of selfportraiture. Or is there perhaps a sense in which every painting can be considered a selfportrait?
Is art then born of a narcissistic self-assertion? Alberti's remark at any rate invites an understanding of art as a figure of that integral fulfillment reason that reality denies us and which we yet dream of and refuse to let go. Traditionally the dream of integral fulfillment has been the dream of paradise. Art thus appears as a figure of paradise.
The Association of art with paradise and of both with Narcissus is made explicit by Andre Gide's retelling of Ovid's tale. In Gide's retelling the pool of Ovid's story becomes the river of time:
"On the banks of the river of time, Narcissus has come to a stop. Fateful and illusory river where the years pass and flow away.... The place where Narcissus is looking is the present. Out of the most distant future, things which are still only potential hurry towards existence; Narcissus sees them, then they pass him by; they flow away into the past. Soon it strikes him that everything is always the same. He wonders; he reflects. They are always the same forms that pass; the movement of the current alone differentiates them. — Why are they so many? or why are they the same? — It must be because they are imperfect, since they are always re-commencing...and all of them, he thinks, are striving and rushing towards a lost primeval form, paradisal and crystalline. Narcissus dreams of paradise.67"
Paradise here names a state where "everything was perfectly what it ought to be." That of course is how the art-work has often been described and indeed, the paradise Narcissus dreams of is remarkably like a work of art:
"Paradise here names a state where "everything was perfectly what it ought to be." That of course is how the art-work has often been described and indeed, the paradise Narcissus dreams of is remarkably like a work of art:
"Eden! where melodious breezes were wafted, undulating in pre-ordained curves: where the sky spread its azure over symmetrical lawns; where the birds were the colour of time and the butterflies on the flowers made providential harmonies; where the rose was rosecoloured because the green-fly settled on it for the very reason that it was green. Everything was as perfect as a number and scanned according to a rule; concord emanated from the relationship of lines between themselves; over the whole garden brooded a constant symphony."
To the dream of paradise corresponds the dream of Adam, the grown-up child, who, knowing nothing of desire, knows nothing of time. Here is how Andre Gide describes him:
"Single, still unsexed, he remained seated in the shade of the great tree. Man! Hypostasis of the Elohim! Mainstay of the Divinity! For his sake, by means of him, forms appear. Motionless and central in the midst of this fairyland, he watches it unrolling."
Just as Gide thinks paradise in the image of the work of art, he thinks Adam in the image of the aesthetic observer. Or perhaps we should say rather the reverse: Gide thinks the work of art as a figure of paradise and the aesthetic observer as a figure of Adam, who in turn is thought, as John Scotus Eriugena already thought him, in the image of Aristophanes' circlemen. But with Gide it is first of all not pride that puts an end to this state of perfection, but boredom. That boredom might be the origin of the fall had indeed already been suggested by Kierkegaard’s aesthete in Either/Or. Adam grows tired of forever watching, wants to see and thereby seize himself. Yet, are not pride and boredom linked? Gide's Adam wants to assert himself. Such self-assertion lets his refuse the plenitude of his original aesthetic state.
"And man, terror-stricken, self-duplicated hermaphrodite, wept with anguish and horror, feeling surges up within him, at the same time as a new sex, the anxious, uneasy desire for that other half, so like himself — that woman who, in a blind effort to re-create out of herself the perfect being and then stop breeding, will nevertheless carry in her womb the unknown creature of a new race and soon push into existence another being, still incomplete and incapable of sufficing to himself"
Gide's Narcissus, who dreams this version of the Aristophanic myth, refuses the otherdirectedness of procreative eros. Seeking to recover the plenitude of Adam, he seeks to embrace himself:
"Narcissus, solitary and puerile, falls in love with the fragile image; with longing for a caress, he bends down to the river to quench his thirst for love. He bends down and suddenly, lo and behold! the phantasmagoria disappears; he can see nothing on the river now but two lips stretched towards his own, two eyes, his own, looking at him. He understands that it is himself, that he is alone and that he is in love with his own face. Around him is empty azure, which is broken through by his pale arms, stretching out with desire through the shattered apparition and plunging into an unknown element."
His attempt to repossess lost plenitude fails. But what then is Narcissus to do. Gide would have him renounce eros altogether and contemplate. Following Schopenhauer, Gide understands contemplation here aesthetically. The inverted eros of Narcissus is quieted by beauty. To find satisfaction Narcissus must renounce the vain attempt to embrace himself and allow himself to become absorbed in contemplation of the plenitude of the work of art.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Perpetual, So many nice lines there, ty, except, that kind of Schopenhauerian contemplation into the river of time is the exact opposite of Will's nature here.
What I differentiated in the aesthetic thread on two kind of objectivity.
Will's reflection at his self is from the overfullness of his senses. Not a detached self-knowledge, but a "becoming other", an erosion of his boundaries with the other. Pure Dionysian mimesis.
He is "pure empathy".
"Love and death are the two great hinges around which human sympathies turn." [Hannibal, 2.13]
There's a better inference of Narcissus that needs to be explored. I'll look into it later.
One's empathy is aligned with the popular, the modern...it leads to sympathy. The other's is misaligned with the popular, the modern...it lead to antipathy.
One is tending toward antipathy, the other is becoming indifferent.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"How terrible it is to have wisdom when it does not benefit those who have it."[Tiresias - Sophocles, Oedipus]
Narcissus was a stag-hunter. When born, Tiresias was asked whether the child would live a long life, and the seer, aware of the difficulties of the enigmatic maxim "Know thyself", replied:
"If he never knows himself." [Tiresias. Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.350]
In other words, the death of Narcissus, could be taken to imply Narcissus was one who Knew Himself...
"The essence of knowledge is self-knowledge." [Plato]
"Enquiry into the truth of the Self is knowledge." [Upanishads]
"Without self-knowledge, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave. This is why in all ancient teachings the first demand at the beginning of the way to liberation was: ‘Know thyself’." [Gurdjieff]
"Thou sleep’st: awake, and see thyself." [Shakespeare]
"At last, in a flash, understanding blazes up, and the mind, as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light." [Plato]
"Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn." [Emerson]
"This is true knowledge, to seek the Self as the true end of wisdom always. To seek anything else is ignorance." [Bhagavad Gita]
"By falling in love with his reflection, Narcissus not only received the punishment that he deserved for his lack of piety in the treatment of Echo, but also unwittingly exposed the love of the world as being nothing but, or the same as, self-love.
In his novel The Alchemist, Paolo Coehlo invents a continuation to the myth of Narcissus: after Narcissus died, the Goddesses of the Forest appeared and found the lake of fresh water transformed into a lake of salty tears.
‘Why do you weep?’ the Goddesses asked. ‘I weep for Narcissus,’ the lake replied. ‘Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus,’ they said, ‘for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand.’ ‘But… was Narcissus beautiful?’ the lake asked. ‘Who better than you to know that?’ the Goddesses said in wonder, ‘After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!’ The lake was silent for some time. Finally it said: ‘I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.'"
""Nietzsche attributes the birth of tragedy to the mimetic experience of the chorus.
Mimesis was "the primary dramatic phenomenon: projecting oneself outside oneself and then acting as though one had really entered another body, another character." (Nietzsche) When the bard chanted his poem he became the character portrayed. The situation became 'real' for the poet and the chorus. "The dithyrambic chorus ... is a chorus of the transformed, who have forgotten their civil past and social rank, who have become timeless servants of their god and live outside all social spheres." (Nietzsche)
The Platonic diatribe diametrically opposed mimetic transformation. Plato saw mimesis as an assault on the intellect and damaging to the control of the rational mind. In his view: in the mimetic experience the participant subjected himself to madness.
Plato declared that all poetry is mimesis. "All good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.... There is no invention in him until he is inspired and out of his senses." This image of the poet is reiterated by Jaynes: "Poets then, around 400 BC were comparable in mentality to the oracles of the same period and went through a similar psychological transformation (possession) when they performed." Even in modern history, creative inspiration is seen as "the invasion of the artist by an outside power." (Osborne) It is not until the beginning of Romanticism that inspiration is seen as originating within the unconscious. For the mythopoeic mind the pastiche held the aura of its referent. The imitation did not represent the thing but was the thing and replaced the thing's immediate presence. " Likewise, when the artist brought the idea into being he did not manufacture a product, instead he let presence 'radiantly appear.' The mythopoeic Greek, swayed by the radiant presence of the image, reacted as if it were the real thing.
In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche defines two states of perception as aesthetic. The "two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysos ... represent to me, most vividly and concretely, two radically dissimilar realms of art." The distinction is between the sublime (Dionysos) and beauty (Apollo), or rapture and dream, or to quote Heidegger on Nietzsche, between "holy passion and sober representation." For Nietzsche, Dionysos symbolized the universal, Apollo symbolized individuated art. "To understand the tragic myth we must see it as Dionysian wisdom made concrete through Apollonian artifice."
When Socrates influenced the young tragic poet Plato to drop poetry and turn to dialectic prose, it marked the beginning of the modern era in the arts. 'Cold paradoxical ideas' and 'fiery emotions' were the rational poet's equivalent to 'Apollonian contemplation' (dreamlike) and 'Dionysian transports' (mimesis). "The Apollonian tendency now appears disguised as logical schematism." (Nietzsche) The stage was set for the Socratic law of aesthetics: 'beauty is sensible,' and 'knowledge is virtuous.' Art became a medium for actualizing the ethical diachronic self. "Apollo demands self-control, a knowledge of self.... The aesthetic necessity of beauty is accompanied by the imperative, 'Know thyself'."
The impact of the confrontation, the immediacy and strength of the illusion, is Dionysian. It is in the ineffable content of our first impression, realized as a temporary loss of self. The Dionysian aspect of the aesthetic experience allows psychic energy that is normally barred from escape to flow out and include the object of perception. This mimetic identification with the art object is realized as the 'felt' quality of the aesthetic emotion. In the rare occasion of the meaningful art experience, consciousness transcends the reasoned expectations of the ego for an intensified ontological experience and a heightened awareness of the art object. The aesthetic experience displays both tendencies recognized by Nietzsche. These can be characterized as the merging of self and other (Dionysian) and the resulting recognition of formal gestalts and contextual references (Apollonian).
Nietzsche concluded that the transcendent experience of art pulled man from the clutches of nihilism. The Dionysian transformation, while disruptive to ego-consciousness, is the means for resolving the existential paradox. The gap between self-knowledge and ethical action, between 'merely animal and animal transcending,' (Maslow) between being both man and God, between is and ought, between actuality and potentiality, is bridged during the aesthetic experience.
Art has degenerated from the omnipotent tragedy of the Greeks to a watered-down facsimile at the service of the intellect -- from the manifestation of transpersonal cultural myths to the personification of feeble egos. People no longer trust their feelings, and need the logic of the word to direct their course."
"What is the relationship between the geometric pattern of the labyrinth and the structure of the myth? [...] The question is crucial when seeking the meaning of a 'way' that the ancient mysteries led to, because geometry has always been traditionally integrated with the esoteric tradition. The inscription above the gate of Pythagorus's school — 'No one may enter here who does not know geometry' — is a sort of complement to that other dictum — 'know thyself' (γνῶθι σεαυτόν)."
[Patrick Conty, The Genesis and Geometry of the Labyrinth]
"An actual entity is actual when it has significance for itself. By this it is meant that an actual entity functions in respect to its own determination. In other words, an entity is to be deemed actual if, and only if, it enjoys self‑functioning. For to say, as Whitehead does say, that to be actual is to be either self‑realizing or self‑realized, is also to say, if in somewhat clumsier terms, that to be actual to be either self ‑functioning or self‑functioned. Being self ‑functioned (or self‑realized), therefore, is a sufficient criterion for distinguishing actual from non‑actual beings. (Nobo, 1986, 42) [Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity, New York: Sate University of New York Press, 1986.]
The primitive people also had their own logic of tailer eater Uroboros, in which a serpent is biting her own tail with her own mouth. Narcissus, who loves himself, is the successor of Uroboros. Socrates' dictum 'know thyself' is nothing but a philosophically transformation of Uroboros and Narcissism.The commonalities of Uroboros, Narcissus, and Socrates' dictum all refer to the self, so let me call all three of them 'I self referential.'
Some might disagree with my view which identifies Narcissus with Socrates. Both Uroboros and Narcissus are dangerous mythological ingredients to be eliminated by axial age male philosophers. According to Fromm the earliest paradoxical logic in the West was expressed in Western habits of thought that is felt to be 'natural' and self evident, while on the other hand "X is A and not A" seems to be nonsensical. An opposition to Aristotelian logic is what one might call paradoxical logic, which assume that A and non A do not exclude each other as predicates of X. Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, In the Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics, it became the philosophy of Hegel and Marx."
Heraclitus's philosophy. What does earliest mean? I think Fromm used that term carelessly. If he had paid attention to the origin and history of the logic, then he might have come to a very important conclusion. The earliest logic is that of Uroboros and Narcissus. The logic of Uroboros is presupposed both in the West and East together at almost the same period, the period of axial age (2nd 8th century B. C. E) In other words, Aristotelian logic can not be understood without presupposing the primitive self referential logic of Uroboros Narcissus because Aristotle created his own three logical laws to eradicate the self reference. Aristotle is the person who knew how dangerous self reference was. Self reference is ambiguous and fuzzy and irrational, so Aristotle decided to eradicate the self referential elements from his logical system. He cut the uroboric serpent body into two by using three foundational pillars of his logic, the laws of identity, contradiction, excluded middle4) and declared, "A cannot be A and non A," but Lao tse, at almost the same axial period as Aristotle, announced, "That which is one is one. That which is not one, is also one." Aristotle's difference from Lao tse is clear; such a differences also highlights difference between the West and East.
How can the self reference be related to the paradoxical logic system? A kind of expression of self reference, self love, means loving myself as subject and object as Narcissus did. Narcissus's death is caused by his regressive and ambiguous attitude toward himself. Uroboros is so irrational that it should be cut into two: finally dualism is created. Several western thinkers and most eastern thinkers like Lao tse took the progressive self reference and applied it to their philosophical ideas. For instance, Heraclitus and Whitehead as western thinkers are experts who used the paradoxical logic to a large extent.
In sum, when the axial age thinkers including Greek and Indian Chinese thinkers faced the self reference expression through Uroboros or Narcissus, they divided it into two separate beings, then rejected Heraclitus's philosophy and even dialectical and paradoxical thinking as well. For Aristotle, "dialectic is a kind of negative demonstration which either shows the insufficiency of reason for denying an ultimate principle." Self reference has two aspects: regressive and progressive. Major western thinkers like Plato and Aristotle considered it a regressive aspect whereas most eastern thinkers made the self reference a progressive one.
That created fundamental difference I think that a mythological reflection of self reflection is the symbol of Uroboros which serpent bites his tail with her mouth by making a circle. Uroboros is the symbol of Self reference. Louis Lavalle (1883 1951), A French scholar, demonstrated well the structure of self reference through Narcissus, a Greek mythological being, in his book The Dilemma of Narcissus.
Narcissus has fallen in love with an image which he takes to be himself, though it is nothing but a reflection of himself, an appearance. His reflection and appearance draw him to death. How much dangerous is it? How can a mere reflection lead him to this critical moment? He would know himself more completely, and he grasps at his reflection in the water. It eludes him, his real self being elsewhere, and unknowable. The appearance he sees reflects what he was, but what he has ceased to be. Since the image in the water cannot react to his love (nor Echo either, for she too is a mere reflection of himself), Narcissus finds himself alone. And not only alone, but withering away; ... Frustration leads Narcissus to exhaustion, and finally to death.
Narcissus' self reference aggravated evil thing of his death. Lavella also knew that Socrates' 'know thyself' is a kind of self reference.
'Know thyself', said Socrates, as though he had Narcissus already in mind. But Socrates was fully aware that the man who knows himself is also endlessly deepening himself and so transcending himself.
Lavella exactly pointed out that Socrates' 'know thyself' is an expression of self reference as follows: "Socrates' understanding of Self reference is quite more similar to Buddha than Narcissus, that is, his self reference didn't lead him to death but knowledge."
Aristotle disliked self reference or dialectic logic. "Dialectic for Aristotle is a kind of negative demonstration which either shows the insufficiency of reasons for denying an ultimate principle or examines the absurd consequences of denying it. It is to argue from promise which are accepted by someone else or which are improbable." [Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 4, W.D. Ross, trans.]
The first step towards trapping, as a hunting method, is empathy - the projection of self into otherness. Sympathy is the preliminary stage where association floods the brain with compassion. The survival instinct overcomes, placing self at a distance, creating a space, a boundary across which objectification can begin. If this next step is not accomplished then the predator remains a prey - cult of victimhood, the meek who inherit what they have no right to. The victim psychology having identified with an other victim uses this shared identity to victimize. Pity as a tool of domination.
Fear is the primary emotion, and so, the association with the fear of need/suffering is produced first. The mind relates to otherness; sees in the otherness the pain suffering, and never surpasses it. Identity as a negation, a negative: "I am that which I am not" But need/suffering I am - life feeling the unity of living in this shared need/suffering. But life is also appropriation of otherness, which is cannibalism if the identification is accepted as such.
The appropriation of otherness is the manipulation, exploitation of otherness, where other than self is distinguished as a negation of the Self, the universal whole. Life feeds on life, ordering appropriates lower, inferior, forms of ordering, so as to increase its own, in relation to entropy.
Its hunger is never satiated, and if it is denied its prey it will begin to consume itself: Nihilism results in a self-consuming asceticism. Even inaction forces the body to tear at itself, feeding on its fat, muscles, bones, until it can no longer support itself. Feeding, is the appropriation of otherness, so as to avoid hunger, which is the beginning of self-consuming.
"With a cannibalistic psychiatrist as its central character, it is not surprising that we should look to this film for fantasies about the earliest, oral phase of development, in which sucking and, later, biting are the central focus of the infant’s pleasure. Freud and other early psychoanalysts, particularly Melanie Klein, wrote about an infantile fantasy that by swallowing or eating another creature or person, we become like them (an early version of “you are what you eat”). In Totem and Taboo, (1913) he wrote about primitive tribes that worshipped an animal, the “totem”, and would eat the animal in a ritual meal in order to take on its powerful characteristics. In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud suggested that mourners and some depressed patients unconsciously fantasize that they have taken in a valued person who has been lost to them through death or for some other reason. He pointed out that mourners frequently adopt some characteristics of the deceased and that depressed people often attack themselves with reproaches that would better fit a valued person who has been lost to them in some way. Freud speculated that one of the child’s earliest means of loving and holding onto a loved object was by incorporating the object, devouring it in fantasy in order to have the object and its desirable qualities inside itself.
There is nothing in The Silence of the Lambs that suggests that Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism is motivated by a desire to become like his victims. Oral desire and pleasure can be expressed in many ways other than literally swallowing or biting. As this film demonstrates, the act of looking and observing may carry secret oral gratifications. Early on, we are made subtly aware that Starling is the object of men’s eyes. On her way to meet Jack Crawford, who heads the FBI Behavioral Science section, Starling enters an elevator filled with male students. They look at her, a small feminine figure amidst a sea of men. This is repeated later when Starling is surrounded by a group of police officers in a small town where the body of a murdered girl has been found. Throughout the film, men turn to look at her. Lecter will later use that to make a point about the relationship between orality and voyeurism.
Crawford sends Starling to a maximum security prison for the criminally insane to try to get Lecter to fill out a psychological profile. There, we begin to see a link between looking, sexuality, and devouring. The psychologist in charge, Dr. Chilton, who tries to pick Starling up himself, tells her, “I don’t believe Lecter’s even seen a woman in eight years, and boy, are you ever his taste—so to speak.”
The sight of her clearly excites his fellow inmates, who have been held in this special isolation cellblock for years. As Starling walks down the cellblock, one inmate leers at her and a second gets very excited and hisses at her, “I can smell your cunt.” The act of looking has been sexualized.
Dr. Lecter is at the end of the cellblock behind a glass wall. He stares at Starling with large, penetrating eyes, averting his gaze only momentarily to look down at the protocol she has brought him. The camera frequently focuses on his eyes, nose, and mouth. He is superhumanly observant and perceptive.
Lecter: “Good Morning.”
Starling: “Dr. Lecter, my name is Clarise Starling. May I speak with you?”
Lecter: “You’re one of Jack Crawford’s, aren’t you?”
He asks to see her credentials, and as she holds them up, he says, “Closer, please” and then in a more demanding tone, “Closer,” as she nervously edges towards the glass between them. Lecter picks up from her temporary credentials that she is not a full fledged FBI agent. He then begins to set a pattern of intense curiosity about Starling.
Lecter: “Now then, tell me what did Miggs say to you? Multiple Miggs, in the next cell, he hissed at you. What did he say?”
Starling: “He said, ‘I can smell your cunt’.”
Lecter: “I see. I myself cannot.” Lecter sniffs the air coming through breathing holes in the upper part of the partition. “You use Evian skin cream and sometimes you wear L’Air du Temps, but not today.”
Lecter’s sniffing the air lends an atavistic sense to his acute observations. His interest in her odor reminds us of his cannibalism. It connects his masterful power of observation with his perverted desire to eat his victims’ flesh. As the interview develops, he demonstrates that he can use those powers to verbally chew up Starling. Earlier, Jack Crawford had warned her, “Be very careful with Hannibal Lecter . . . You’re to tell him nothing personal, Starling. You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” Now we get a sense of the danger, as Lecter rejects the psychological profile Starling passes in for him to fill out.
Lecter, with a West Virginia drawl that carries sarcasm: “You thought you could dissect me with this blunt little instrument.”
Starling: “No, I thought that your knowledge–”
Lecter: “You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? You know what you look like to me with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube—a well scrubbed hustling rube with a little taste. A good nutritionist has given you some length of bone, but you aren’t more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you tried so hard to shed, pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear, a coal miner? Does he stink of the land? You know how quickly the boys found you—all those sticky, tedious fumblings in the back seats of cars while you could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the F-B-I.”
Starling is clearly stung by the insults, and implies that at least some of it has been accurate, when she says, “You see a lot, doctor, but are you strong enough to point that high powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or are you afraid to?”
Lecter: “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
Although it is not made explicit, a connection is being made between knowing about someone and cannibalizing them. Lecter has used his powers of observation for his own sadistic pleasure. The simultaneous focus on his eyes and mouth underlines a connection between orality and voyeurism. Starling is small and feminine, tough but vulnerable under his gaze.
Towards the end of the film, we will see Starling being taken in by the gaze of the other serial killer, “Buffalo Bill”, who spies at her through infrared lenses while she gropes in the dark. He is getting ready to shoot her, but first he reaches out a hand as if to touch. Earlier, we have seen him use these infrared lenses to spot his prey, a young girl he was planning to kidnap.
In the last of their interviews, Lecter makes a clear statement of the role of orality in observing. In this part of the interview, he is in his role as teacher and mentor, and he speaks in his best professorial tone.
Lecter: “First principle, Clarise, simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius: ‘Of each particular thing ask what is it in itself. What is its nature?’ What does he do, this man you seek?”
Starling: “He kills women.”
Lecter: “No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?”
Starling: “Anger, um, social acceptance, sexual frustration–”
Lecter: “No, he covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarise? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.”
Starling: “No, we just–”
Lecter: “No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice, and don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?”
Lecter connects the act of looking with the act of taking and claiming something as your own. This is only a hair’s breadth from saying that the function of observation may gratify a wish to devour and make a desired object part of ourselves.
The psychoanalytic function of knowing and understanding provides valuable oral gratification for Lecter. Knowing Starling’s secrets is deeply satisfying, and, by implication, being able to help her change further gratifies his need to not only take her in, but also to digest her and transform her. By depicting the perverse extreme, Harris and the filmmakers have isolated important oral gratifications in psychoanalytic work.
By empathizing with the dead girl and identifying with her, Starling is able to trace her way through the remnants of her life and her contacts. As she does this, she develops insight into the killer’s motives in skinning his victims. Although the film gives no direct answer to Lecter’s question, there is a suggestion that Lecter’s interpretation has effected a change in Starling and that the screaming of the lambs has stopped."
Many elements of the myth suggest, through its basic ambiguity, the tragic nature of Medusa. One of the most revealing of these is the gift from Athena to Asclepius of two drops of the Gorgon's blood, one of which has the power to cure and even resurrect, while the other is a deadly poison. Medusa's blood is therefore the epitome of the 'pharmakon', while she herself -- as is shown by the apotropaic function of her mask -- is a 'pharmakos'. As has been demonstrated by René Girard, the 'pharmakos' is the scapegoat whose sacrifice establishes the dual nature of the sacred and reinforces the separation of the monster and the god. However, it is for literature and the arts to reveal the close relationship between opposites and the 'innocence' of the victim. In this respect, the myth of Medusa is revealing. In his study The Mirror of Medusa (1983), Tobin Siebers has identified the importance of two elements, i.e. the rivalry between Athena and the Gorgon, and the mirror motif.
According to Ovid (Metamorphoses, IV. 779ff), the reason for the dispute lay in Poseidon's rape of Medusa inside the temple of the virgin goddess. The goddess is supposed to have punished Medusa by transforming her face, which therefore made Medusa an innocent victim for the second time. However, another tradition, used by Mallarmé in Les Dieux antiques (1880), stressed a more personal rivalry: Medusa had boasted that she was more beautiful than Athena. Everything points to the face that the goddess found it necessary to set herself apart from her negative double in order to assert her 'own' identity. Common features are numerous. For example, snakes are the attribute of Athena, as illustrated by the famous statue of Phidias and indicated by certain Orphic poems which refer to her as 'la Serpentine'. Moreover, the hypnotic stare is one of the features of the goddess 'with blue-green eyes', whose bird is the owl, depicted with an unblinking gaze. Finally, because she has affixed Medusa's head to her shield, in battle or in anger she assumes the terrifying appearance of the monster. Thus, in the Aeneid (11, 171), she expresses her wrath by making flames shoot forth from her eyes. These observations are intended to show that Athena and Medusa are the two indissociable aspects of the same sacred power.
A similar claim could be made in respect of Perseus, who retains traces of his association with his monstrous double, Medusa. Using her decapitated head to turn his enemies to stone, he spreads death around him. And when he flies over Africa with his trophy in a bag, through some sort of negligence, drops of blood fall to earth and are changed into poisonous snakes which reduce Medusa's lethal power (Ovid, op. cit., IV. 618). Two famous paintings illustrate this close connection between the hero and the monster. Cellini's Perseus resembles the head he is holding in his hand (as demonstrated by Siebers) and Paul Klee's L’esprit a combattu le mal (1904) portrays a complete reversal of roles -- Perseus is painted full face with a terrible countenance, while Medusa turns aside.
In this interplay of doubles, the theme of reflection is fundamental. It explains the process of victimization to which Medusa was subjected, and which falls within the province of the superstition of the 'evil eye'. The way to respond to the 'evil eye' is either to use a third eye -- the one that Perseus threw at the Graiae - or to deflect the evil spell by using a mirror. Ovid, in particular, stressed the significance of the shield in which Perseus was able to see the Gorgon without being turned to stone, and which was given to him by Athena. Everything indicates that the mirror was the real weapon. It was interpreted thus by Calderón and Prevelakis, and also by Roger Caillois in Méduse et Cie (1960).
Ovid was responsible for establishing the link with Narcissus, a myth that he made famous. It seems that the same process of victimization is at work here. The individual is considered to have been the victim of his own reflection, which absolves the victimizer (Perseus, the group) from all blame. This association of the two myths (and also the intention of apportioning blame) appears in a passage in Desportes' Amours d’Hyppolite (1573) where the poet tells his lady that she is in danger of seeing herself changed 'into some hard rock' by her 'Medusa's eye'. Even more revealing is Gautier's story Jettatura (1857) in which the hero, accused of having the 'evil eye', eventually believes it to be true and watches the monstrous transformation of his face in the mirror: 'Imagine Medusa looking at her horrible, hypnotic face in the lurid reflection of the bronze shield.'
Medusa's head is both a mirror and a mask. It is the mirror of collective violence which leaves the Devil's mark on the individual, as well as being the image of death for those who look at it. Both these themes -- violence rendered sacred and death by petrifaction -- are found in Das Corgonenhaupt (Berlin, 1972), a work by Walter Krüger about the nuclear threat.
However, when considered in terms of archetypal structures, Medusa's mask still retains its secret. What is the reason for the viperine hair, the wide-open mouth with the lolling tongue, and, in particular, why is Medusa female? What relationship is there between violence, holy terror and woman?"
"The mirror discloses the relationship between me and myself, my body and the consciousness of my body –not because the reflection constitutes my unity qua subjet,…..but because it transforms what I am into the sign of what I am. This ice-smooth barrier, itself merely an inert sheen, reproduces and displays what I am –in a word, signifies what I am- within an imaginary sphere which is yet quite real. A process of abstraction then –but fascinating abstraction. In order to know myself, I “separate myself out from myself”. The effect is dizzying. Should the “Ego” fail to reassert hegemony over itself by defying its own image, it must become Narcissus –or Alice. It will then be in danger of never rediscovering itself, space qua figment will have swallowed it up, and the glacial surface of the mirror will hold it forever captive in its emptiness, in an absence devoid of all conceivable presence or bodily warmth. The mirror thus presents or offers the most unifying but also the most disjunctive relationship between form and content: forms therein have a powerful reality yet remain unreal; they readily expel or contain their contents, yet these contents retain an irreducible force, an irreducible opacity, and this is as true for my boddy (the content of “my consciousness”) as for other bodies, for bodies in general. So many objects have this dual character: they are transitional inasmuch as they tend towards something else, yet they are also aims or “objectives” in their own right…..There is in fact little justification for any systematic generalization from the effects of this particular object, whose role is properly confined to a sphere within the immediate vicinity of the body…..The mirror introduces a truly dual spatiality: a space which is imaginary with respect to origin and separation, but also concrete and practical with respect to coexistence and differentiation." [H. Lefevre, p. 185-186, 1999]
"...the idea of empathy can reconnect neurophysiology with psychology and social theory, and reestablish the grounds for a natural concept of ethics. Specifically, it can connect mimetic theory with a possible basis in biology, since empathy seems to represent an extension of mimetic processes across the animal kingdom. For this reason, empathy/mimesis might be the grounds for a concept of ethics based on natural observation. Drawn from a German term Einfiihlung, which means "feeling into," empathy carries the concept of "getting into the feelings of someone else" (deWaal 79).
In the scientific description, however, empathy is seen as the highest human expression of a broader biological capacity for mimesis that seems inextricable from the very progress of the phylogenetic process.
Among the earliest life forms, organisms drew information from one another to pattern and coordinate such basic biological functions as reproduction and nurture. But with the increased complexity of multicellular creatures, new means of communication arose, making possible more flexible adaptation and sociability. Gradually the direct chemical coordination suitable for collectives or swarms gave way to richer and more individual communication between organisms of higher forms of differentiation.
The externally evident demarcation of the head region, with its organs of sensory perception and communication, evolved in parallel with internal cerebral structures capable of processing more complex impressions of the surrounding environment and coordinating greater freedom of motion. These vital powers of action and awareness in turn came to be governed, guided and integrated by an inner felt sense of need, goal or purpose. As Leon Kass says, "desire, not DNA, is the deepest principle of life" (Kass 1994,48).
This quality of "inwardness" is paralleled by an equally complex differentiation and integration of the external "look" of the animal. This "look," which is the literal translation of the Latin root of our word species, is the result of a genetically determined plan as important as any internal vital organ. It provides the unity of form that reveals or selectively conceals the inner life of the organism. It communicates and coordinates vital information regarding sexual and other social interactions. This upward process of complex integrated organization of the "inner life" and the external action and presentation of self reaches its fullest expression in the human form. Along with upright posture and its freeing of the hands as tools of "gnostic touching," comes a reordering of the senses and a highly flexible, furless canvas of self presentation we call the face (Kass 1985,287).
Upwards through mammalian evolution there is a progressive refinement of the structures of the face that facilitate active and increasingly subtle communication and penetration into the life of the other. With more than 30 finely tuned muscles of facial expression and vocal control, human beings are capable of a wide array of communicative expressions of emotions and intentions. Paul Ekman claims to have discerned more than 18 forms of smiling, each with a distinct meaning (66).
With upright posture came a retraction of the snout and bilateral stereoscopic vision. Sight replaced smell as the prominent sense. Whereas smell required direct chemical contact, and sound gave formless information, sight gave a knowing and accurate encounter with the form and unity of wholes. Sight allowed rapid perception of objects and actions at distant horizons. The detached beholding of sight allowed a deeper and more accurate apprehension of the reality of things; sight allowed insight.
The cerebral processing and storage of visual images allowed detachability of object from image and the emergence of imagination and its creative powers. In coordination with vocalization through the fine muscles of the larynx, the capacity for imaging gave rise to symbolic representation and genuine communication. These powers, together with the freed upper limbs and the "tool of tools," as Aristotle called the hands, allowed a freedom and flexibility that has its psychic equivalents in the open-ended desires and indomitable will of the human creature. The omnivorous nature of our diet is paralleled by an equally omnivorous appetite of dreams and desires (Kass 1994, 70-74).
Notwithstanding the transcendent possibilities in our visions and longings, we are rooted in the biological processes and evolutionary echoes of our earthly origins, both physical and social. In the quest for personal fulfillment of these dreams and desires other human beings are both our companions and our competition. More than any other single factor other human beings have been the shaping environment of our evolution. Nowhere is this more evident than in our emotional contours and our capacities for empathy.
Emotions by their nature are dynamic and evanescent, difficult to define and more difficult to study scientifically. Far from the notion of an unruly volatility on top of a more stable and noble reason, emotions define the very shape and significance of human life. They are the amplification systems of embodied being, the megaphones of meaning. Cognitive scientists speak of "hot" cognition, recognizing the inseparable role of emotions in the processes of perception, memory and judgment. They guide and give form to our developing identity and keep our lives on an integrated purposeful track.
Emotions have their evolutionary origins in the physiological processes of biological regulation. William James noted that the postural and visceral changes in emotional states place the organism in a condition of readiness for action or response. The subjective feelings of emotions are evolution's later additions in the service of the inner life of consciousness and purposeful desire. This inseparable psychophysical unity of manifest emotion embodies the evolutionary experience of life's long history. Far from a private inner language of being, it reflects survival strategies shaped by the physical and social parameters of our environment and shared with other members of our species, and indeed across life's larger process.
Charles Darwin was fascinated by the question of the universality of emotional expression. He argued that, like externally evident anatomical features, the physiological and subjective states of emotion reflect both phylogenetic progress and species specificity. This idea, though out of fashion for most of this century as we digested the bewildering diversity of ethnographic studies, has recently received support in the research of Paul Ekman. Looking at more than a dozen cultures, including an isolated preliterate culture of New Guinea, he found a nearly universal language of facial expression of the emotions of anger, sadness, disgust, enjoyment and surprise. In addition he noted emotion specific physiological changes in both the central nervous system (CNS) and the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Furthermore, the very act of "voluntarily performing certain muscular actions generated involuntary changes in autonomic nervous system activity" (Ekman 64). For example, accelerated heart rate and increased skin conductance accompanied the muscle actions expressive of anger. Ekman's studies, along with reports of similar manifestation of emotions in other primates and early in human childhood development, are consistent with an evolutionary view of the expression of emotions. It is this shared quality of emotions, between individuals of the same species, and even across species, that makes possible the process of empathy.
And what an amazing capacity it is! Spanning the gulf between individuals, even of varied ages and circumstances, it provides the crucial bridge that allows genuine social existence and the emergence of entirely new possibilities in the evolving story of life. Like consciousness of self, awareness of other people is so much a part of us that we rarely ponder the mystery of its mechanism.
How does any creature know things beyond the borders of its subjectivity?
How does any creature even recognize its own species?
The capacity for empathy seems to be the extension of more fundamental mimetic processes. Mimicry or copied behavior is common across the animal kingdom. Even animals with "minuscule brains compared to primates notice how members of their own species relate to the environment" (deWaal 71).
An octopus, watching another octopus trained to attack either a red or a white ball, "monitored the actions of the other with head and eye movements. When the same balls were dropped in the spectator's tank, they attacked the ball of the same color" (Fiorito 545).
Researchers note that the observing animal gains knowledge more quickly than through classical conditioning or trial-and-error learning (Dugatkin 261). It is easy to see how such an ability would serve an organism well. The process bypasses the struggle of discovery and taps the experience of another. It is almost a form of parasitism, an economy where the rewards are reaped without the risks. Both energy and time are saved. It seems like such an obvious strategy, and in fact is common in the animal world associated with certain categories of behaviors: reproductive choice, food selection and foraging (Whiten 276). Yet how it works is not at all obvious. How does the organism know to imitate only the successful strategies of others of its species? Possibly fixed action patterns are triggered by selective releasing mechanisms. (Like a chameleon that changes color to fit his surroundings, a stimulus may enter the eye and trigger a cascade of physiological changes and actions.)
With higher organisms, observational learning involves increasingly complex dynamics. Simple stimuli are experienced within a context of social circumstances. For example, a baby monkey may see the frantic fear reaction of his troop in the presence of a big black snake. Some form of generalized emotional contagion seems to be operating, a more real sense of the feelings of the other.
But this stops short of the identification needed for the imitation required for cultural transmission. Extensive studies of monkeys have not lent support to their reputation for "monkey see, monkey do." Even the famous 'potato washing' story of the Japanese macaques1 showed that there was an incomplete and extremely slow transmission speed of this very useful bit of "monkey culture" (Whiten 248). True identification seems to involve the capacity to make others an extension of self, to reach out mentally and make the situation of the other to some extent one's own. To at least a limited degree this capacity seems present in chimps.
To carry out such a mimicry seems to require picturing oneself in the actual place and actions of another—to adopt his role. But to truly know the reality of another, we must be able to enter into their beliefs, intentions, and subjective feelings.
What mechanisms of mind could make possible such abilities?
The emergence of complex social existence in primates appears to have been strongly correlated with a transition from an olfactory system of communication to a visual system. Vision allows faster and more sensitive signals than either smell or sound. In addition to the shift to vision, the neurologic control of the facial muscles also greatly improved.
Taken together with the studies cited earlier showing that voluntary performance of muscular actions of emotional expression generated concurrent involuntary autonomic nervous system states, one can see the grounds for a genuine empathic resonance through facial communication.
Human beings have an astonishing capacity to recognize and remember faces. Unlike most objects, processed at the basic category level, faces are identified in their individuality despite the multimodal presentation of poses, angles, distances and illumination. Neonates preferentially turn to faces, and within days discriminate their mother's face from that of a stranger. Adults retain distinct memories of thousands of faces over long periods of time—as anyone who has gone back to look at their high school yearbook can affirm. Furthermore, we are uniquely sensitive to the dynamic changes and emotional expressions of faces.
Special ensembles of cells in the brain respond only to faces. They discriminate not only identities, but also highly specific facial forms such as yawns or frowns. Some cells are specialized to decipher the relationship between gaze and body posture, signaling direction of movement and inner intentions. Other cells selectively respond to the facial messages of inner feelings revealed in emotional expressions (Perret; Baylis 91-93)."
"One thing is needful,” Nietzsche exclaims, “— To ‘give style’ to one’s character — a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.”
Hannibal Lecter, whatever else he is, is a profoundly self-contented individual, for what better way to put one’s own demons to rest than by becoming one? As a demented aesthete, Lecter’s raison d’être seems to be “to give style” to his character in the Nietzschean sense. His preoccupation with the finer things is reflective of this constructive process. Through the revaluation of virtue, he fashions himself into a figure in which the disparate qualities of “good” and “evil” are realigned and ultimately reintegrated. This is a process that removes him from the normal sphere of ethics, rather than one that places him in opposition to the good. Unlike the rebel-hero — whose heroism is predicated upon the defiance of a corrupt social order, but through moral means only — the Nietzschean villain transcends conventional morality altogether by restructuring the dominant value system itself."
"Dandyism is about taking up a position of ironic detachment from the world and living it out in scrupulous detail." [Sebastian Horsley]
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"Immense calm with your heart pounding." [Noel Coward]
Lyssa wrote:
"The han heart is a Voyeur - its a going slow. A very Discriminate delight in Taking Time to absorb silently.- Life is an Obsession. The Voyeur is not someone who necessarily has to hide, be introverted, and be silent to observe,,,, but speech and interaction itself can be a cloak of weaving silence. The Han is protracted intensity - hurling of oneself into the farthest future... Achilles is Pure in his self-concern. Voyeurism is Being Clean, 0 noise - intense self-mirth."
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"Dandyism introduces antique calm among our modern agitations.” [Barbey d’Aurevilly]
"At the beginning of the film, a close-up on Lecter’s iconic restraint mask — placed in a gift box and surrounded by tissue paper — announces a shift into his world. Throughout the opening credit montage, bizarre occurrences in Florence are captured by surveillance cameras: monuments appear out of thin air, pigeons appear to feast on flesh, and a flock of birds choreograph their amblings to form Lecter’s face in the middle of a palazzo. All of these occurrences are captured in a series of jump cuts and in jerky time-lapse photography. The suggestion here is that the force of the principal character will be potent enough to overwrite the constraints of the moral law — allegorised as the all-seeing technological vision of the FBI.
The value system in both Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal is connotative of this noble/ slave dichotomy, especially in its juxtaposition of Lecter with high-ranking officials in various institutions: Dr. Fredrick Chilton (Anthony Heald), Inspector Renaldo Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), and Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta) in particular. Each of these men hold prominent positions in publicly regarded organisations (the medical community, the Italian Police, and the FBI, respectively), but all of them are represented as ingratiating, overreaching, and/or sexist charlatans. Not only are they professionally incompetent or ineffectual, but their devotion to “illegitimate” institutions of power mark them as servants to facile gods (consider Lecter’s derisive attitude towards the “Eff-Bee-Eye,” and his dismissal of psychiatry, which he “doesn’t consider a science”). Each of the men attempts to match wits with Lecter and suffer the consequences for their folly. And though their attitudes towards him are envy, fear, and ignorance respectively, Hannibal’s malice towards them is not borne of hate. The cruelty with which he remorselessly dispatches them is “innocent” insofar as it is a product of contempt (as an indication of power) rather than spite. While each of them is killed in a spectacular or comic fashion, Hannibal undertakes their executions with a perfunctory attitude: he wears the same expression disembowelling Pazzi as he does whilst mincing parsley for Krendler’s last supper."
"Here Narcissus, tired of hunting and the heated noon, lay down, attracted by the peaceful solitudes and by the glassy spring. There as he stooped to quench his thirst another thirst increased. While he is drinking he beholds himself reflected in the mirrored pool–and loves; loves an imagined body which contains no substance, for he deems the mirrored shade a thing of life to love. He cannot move, for so he marvels at himself, and lies with countenance unchanged, as if indeed a statue carved of Parian marble. Long, supine upon the bank, his gaze is fixed on his own eyes, twin stars; his fingers shaped as Bacchus might desire, his flowing hair as glorious as Apollo’s, and his cheeks youthful and smooth; his ivory neck, his mouth dreaming in sweetness, his complexion fair and blushing as the rose in snow-drift white. All that is lovely in himself he loves, and in his witless way he wants himself…" [Ovidius, Metamorphoses]
The abyss above: Gazing into the river of becoming...
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"This Zarathustra did; and no sooner had he laid himself on the ground in the stillness and secrecy of the variegated grass, than he had forgotten his little thirst, and fell asleep. For as the proverb of Zarathustra saith: "One thing is more necessary than the other." Only that his eyes remained open:—for they never grew weary of viewing and admiring the tree and the love of the vine. In falling asleep, however, Zarathustra spake thus to his heart: "Hush! Hush! Hath not the world now become perfect? What hath happened unto me? As a delicate wind danceth invisibly upon parqueted seas, light, feather-light, so—danceth sleep upon me. No eye doth it close to me, it leaveth my soul awake. Light is it, verily, feather-light. It persuadeth me, I know not how, it toucheth me inwardly with a caressing hand, it constraineth me. Yea, it constraineth me, so that my soul stretcheth itself out:— —How long and weary it becometh, my strange soul! Hath a seventh-day evening come to it precisely at noontide? Hath it already wandered too long, blissfully, among good and ripe things? It stretcheth itself out, long—longer! it lieth still, my strange soul. Too many good things hath it already tasted; this golden sadness oppresseth it, it distorteth its mouth. —As a ship that putteth into the calmest cove:—it now draweth up to the land, weary of long voyages and uncertain seas. Is not the land more faithful? As such a ship huggeth the shore, tuggeth the shore:—then it sufficeth for a spider to spin its thread from the ship to the land. No stronger ropes are required there. As such a weary ship in the calmest cove, so do I also now repose, nigh to the earth, faithful, trusting, waiting, bound to it with the lightest threads. O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe. Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect. Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo—hush! The old noontide sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness— —An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its happiness laugheth. Thus—laugheth a God. Hush!— —'For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!' Thus spake I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: THAT have I now learned. Wise fools speak better. The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance—LITTLE maketh up the BEST happiness. Hush! —What hath befallen me: Hark! Hath time flown away? Do I not fall? Have I not fallen—hark! into the well of eternity? ..."O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, "thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul? When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things,—when wilt thou drink this strange soul— —When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt thou drink my soul back into thee?" Thus spake Zarathustra, and rose from his couch beside the tree, as if awakening from a strange drunkenness: and behold! there stood the sun still exactly above his head. One might, however, rightly infer therefrom that Zarathustra had not then slept long.
...Oh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity and for the marriage-ring of rings—the ring of the return? Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity! FOR I LOVE THEE, O ETERNITY!" [TSZ, Noontide, The Seven Seals]
"I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie." [Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore]
Man [Perseus] is a rebel.
He wants to destroy the "Real", the "Truth" that is set for him, that he is "forced to see" [Medusa].
The "Hammer" and "The Twilight of the Idols".
The mirror is an extension or reflection of one's sub/un-conscious, and so the purity of oneself, his "innocence of becoming"... and so when he looks at Medusa using the mirror and severes her head, he re-fashions and creates the world in his own image.
The playful sheen of the mirror prevents petrifaction. The playful sheen in Greek was called a kind of Metis (cunning intelligence) that etymologically relates to Medusa and Maya - all from the same root.
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"Odysseus is the hero who is polumetis as well as polutropos and polumechanos. He is an expert in tricks of all kinds (pantoious dolous), polumechanos in the sense that he is never at a loss, never without expedients (poroi) to get himself out of any kind of trouble (aporia). When taught by Athena and Hephaestus, the deities of mêtis the artist also possesses a techne pantoie, an art of many facets, knowledge of general application. The polumetis is also known by the name of poikilometis or aiolometis. The term poikilos is used to refer to the sheen of a material or the glittering of a weapon, the dappled hide of a fawn, or the shining back of a snake mottled with darker patches. This many-coloured sheen or complex of appearances produces an effect of irridescence, shimmering, an interplay of reflections which the Greeks perceived as the ceaseless vibrations of light. In this sense, what is poikilos, many-coloured, is close to what is aiolos, which refers to fast movement. Thus it is that the changing surface of liver which is sometimes propitious and sometimes the reverse is called poikilos just as are good fortune which is so inconstant and changing and also the deity which endlessly guides the destinies of men from one side to the other, first in one direction and then in the other. Plato associates what is poikilos with what is never the same as itself, oudepote tauton and, similarly, elsewhere opposes it to that which is simple, haplous." [Detienne-Vernant, Cunning Intelligence]
The playful design of the ER [the innocence of becoming] - the "Maya-lie", metis - is how one could look at the petrifying gravity of Life - the Medusa.
"There is a kind of philosophy, familiar to students of Eastern and Western thought, that has the peculiar characteristic of having as one of its goals its own demise. It is easy to construct a philosophy that refutes itself through self-contradictions or self-referential paradoxes, but it would be difficult to convince anyone of its profundity. These philosophies that I wish to explore to a small degree do more, however, than merely refute themselves. They seem to transcend themselves in a profound way and leave the student in a place he was not in before. Philosophy is used as a means for putting an end to itself in a nontrivial way. The symbol in Buddhism of the raft that must be abandoned when one reaches the other shore, or the suggestion in Sextus Empiricus and early Wittgenstein that one must throw away the ladder after climbing to a higher level, are common representations of the goals of these philosophies.
Wittgenstein, for example, says at the end of the Tractatus:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands them finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. [1]
I have used the term "uroboric" to designate these philosophies in accordance with a similar symbol used by the Gnostics and the medieval alchemists. Some of the drawings remaining from these schools depict a serpent, Uroboros, bent in a circle swallowing its own tail. Sometimes Uroboros is shown transforming itself into a salamander, and in this representation are portrayed two important aspects of uroboric philosophy. The first is the swallowing of one's tail, the throwing away of the raft or ladder, the erasing of one's footprints, and the second is the transformation into a salamander, the achievement of a state that is often discontinuous with and profoundly different from one's original philosophical stance. This is philosophy of exorcism and is fundamentally therapeutic in nature. It is philosophy of cure; it loosens life-knots and relieves intellectual cramps. It creates a road to a peak that produces a new vision then erases both road and peak.
Uroboric philosophies are a subset of therapeutic philosophies and both these kinds of philosophies can and often do, by means of self-referential assertions, lead to contradictions and interesting kinds of paradoxes. In fact, some uroboric philosophies deliberately use these contradictions and paradoxes to erase the path over which they have traveled. This article will be concerned with the examination of some of the dialectics of self-erasure and various ways of handling what I shall refer to as uroboric paradoxes.
Most philosophies tend to be therapeutic in some sense or at some stage their program in their having to correct or exorcise supposedly mistaken views of other philosophies. But those philosophies that are generally therapeutic in nature take a skeptical stance about the very nature of philosophy itself. In other words, their view is that there is not just something wrong with a certain part of a particular philosophy but that there is something mistaken about the nature of philosophy in general. This sweeping view, of course, involves us in the threat of a self-contradiction or self-refutation, for if the view that expresses general skepticism about the nature of philosophy is itself treated as a philosophical view, then it must include itself among the condemned enterprises. Suppose, for example, that such a therapeutic or skeptical view were to assert that all philosophical statements were mistaken. If this view were itself taken to be a philosophical statement, then we would be involved with some unfortunate logical difficulties reminiscent of the so-called liar paradox.
A statement is paradoxical if its assertion leads to the consequence that, if it is true, then it is false, and, if it is false, then it is true. A modern version of the liar paradox illustrates this property: "This sentence is false."
The traditional liar paradox is not a full paradox in the same sense, for its falsity does not imply its truth. If I make the statement. "Everything I say is false" and if that statement is allowed to be taken as an example of something I say, then if it is true, it is false, but if it is false, it does not imply its truth. Its falsity, at best, implies that there is at least one thing I say that is true, and unless I only say that one sentence, we cannot infer that the sentence is true. It does have the unfortunate consequence, however, that to say "Everything I say is false" implies that there must be something I say which is true, and this does seem to be paradoxical in some sense. It also grates against whatever Humean sympathies we might have concerning the a priori determination of truth value of some one of a set of matter-of-fact propositions which I might utter. Statements like "all generalizations are false" and "all philosophical statements are mistaken" would seem to be similar in consequence to the limited form of the liar paradox, and we might expect to derive equally unfortunate particular propositions of the form "There is at least one generalization which is true" and "There is at least one philosophical statement which is not mistaken." These statements could be considered limited paradoxes or simply self-refuting. There are numerous other propositions playing important roles in philosophical systems which undermine themselves in a parallel manner if they are allowed to refer to themselves. The statement of the verification criterion by the early logical positivists, "a statement is factually meaningless unless it is verifiable," when applied to itself produced, if not a contradiction, grave difficulties of a similar kind.
In general, of course, this kind of paradox or self-refutation is not a desirable property for a philosophical system. One way to avoid this problem is to employ some sort of theory of types and treat one's own statements as being different than those one is criticizing or characterizing. Therapeutic philosophies tend to be metaphilosophical theories for this reason.
Wittgenstein's later philosophy, while tending to be therapeutic, did not have the uroboric elements displayed in the Tractatus. In that book he was concerned with the relationship between language and the world. Like most uroboric philosophies, his was concerned to sketch out the limits of what could be said and then to point, in some sense, to what lay beyond expression. Of course, the difficulty is that the pointing is done in language, and the language, if understood in the ordinary way, cannot point beyond itself. This is the reason the language has to be cancelled at a certain point. In the Zen sense one focuses on the finger pointing at the moon and misses the moon itself. The pointing finger, once it attracts the attention, has to disappear from sight. Wittgenstein was rightly annoyed by Russell's comment in the introduction to the Tractatus that what was not expressible in one language perhaps could be expressed in terms of a metalanguage, for that would make it appear that everything could be said -- which went against the primary intuition of the book. That would make it seem that philosophy could have the last word."
"Certain structural elements from the myth of Medusa also reappear in the myth of the Cave (The Republic, 514-7a), i.e. fascination, averted eyes, violence inflicted on the philosopher, etc.
In his poem (op. cit.), Queneau maintains that the sun, like the Gorgon, is fearsome and castrating: 'The sun: O monster, O Gorgon, O Medusa/O sun'. In this way, Medusa herself can become an incarnation of the Ideal, i.e. of Virtue (Du Bellay, Epithalame, 1559), of Beauty (Baudelaire, op. cit., 'La Beauté') and of Truth (Kosmas Politis, Eroica, Athens, 1938). Surely the sun itself is the severed head that, like the head of St John the Baptist, only soars in the zenith: 'In triumphant flights/from that scythe' (Mallarmé, Hérodiade, 'Cantique de saint Jean', 1913). Whoever seeks Athena, finds Medusa's head. Whoever approaches too close to the sun discovers its castrating and castrated monstrousness (Bataille, L’Anus Solaire, 1931).
Although Nietzsche had embarked upon the destruction of all idols, he too, in this way, recognized the desire for death inherent in the desire for truth at any cost. The philosopher who wants to examine all things 'in depth', discovers the petrifying abyss. The destiny of the man whom Nietzsche refers to as 'the Don Juan of knowledge' will be paralyzed as if by Medusa, and will himself be 'changed into a guest of stone' (Morgenröte i.e. the Dawn of Day, 327, 1881). This is also the destiny of the 'lover of truth' who, in the Dionysos Dithyramben (1888) appears to be 'changed into a statue/into a sacred column'. Nietzsche, who was aware of the necessity 'for the philosopher' to live within the 'closed circuit of representation' (Derrida), to seek the truth even if he no longer believes in it, without ever being able to attain it, devised his own version of the 'truth', his Medusa's head, the Eternal Return: 'Great thought is like Medusa's head: all the world's features harden, a deadly, ice-cold battle' (Posthumous Fragments, Winter 1884-5).
All thinkers who reflect upon the nature of representation, as well as on thought which pursues the 'eidos' are in danger of confronting Medusa's head. Thus, Aristotle, in The Politics (VIII) differentiates between instructive and cathartic music which is associated with Bacchic trances, whose instrument is the flute and which should be avoided. To prove his point, he refers to the myth of Athena. When she played the flute, her face became so distorted that she abandoned the instrument. It was in fact she who had invented the flute to imitate an unknown sound, virtually unrepresentable, i.e. the hissing of the snakes on Medusa's head as she was decapitated (Pindar, The Pythian Odes, XII, 2-3). As she played, she noticed in a spring that her features were becoming distorted and assuming the appearance of the Gorgon's mask. This once more introduces the Narcissistic theme and the blurring of the difference between Athena and her rival, which here arises from tragic art. Therefore, in terms of philosophy, art should remain in the service of the 'eidos' by continuing to represent the image that arouses desire for the Object.
But it is also condemned if it presents the object in such an obvious manner that the remoteness of desire degenerates into dangerous enjoyment. This partly explains Tournier’s condemnation of image and photography in La Goutte d'Or (1985). He explicitly links their power to Medusa's petrifying fascination and contrasts them with the art of writing which is the art of education and the route to wisdom 'par excellence'.
It would seem that the fear experienced at the sight of Medusa's head is the terror of discovering the secret behind the representation of the image."
"Fear is the primary emotion, and so, the association with the fear of need/suffering is produced first. The mind relates to otherness; sees in the otherness the pain suffering, and never surpasses it. Identity as a negation, a negative: "I am that which I am not" But need/suffering I am - life feeling the unity of living in this shared need/suffering. But life is also appropriation of otherness, which is cannibalism if the identification is accepted as such."
"This uroboric self-destruction is what is known in the Buddhist tradition as `suunyata-`suunyataa, 'the emptiness of the emptiness doctrine'. As Candrakiirti put it:
Emptiness is not a property, or universal mark, of entities, because then its substratum would be nonempty, and one would have a fixed conviction (d.r.s.ti) about it. In fact, it is a mere medicine, a means of escape from all fixed conviction. It is taught so that we may overcome attachment, and it would be a pity if we were to become attached to it. It is not a positive standpoint, but a mere turning away from all views and thought-constructions. To treat it as an object, and to oppose it to non-emptiness, is to miss the point (Prasannapadaa, 12.).
[The dialectic] is like fire, which, after consuming the fuel, destroys itself also. (AL 2.480.) [And also it is like] aperient drugs, which do not simply eliminate the humours from the body, but also expel themselves along with the humours. (OP 1.206.) And again, just as it is not impossible for the man who has ascended to a high place by a ladder to overturn the ladder with his foot after his ascent, so also it is not unlikely that the Skeptic after he has arrived at the demonstration of his thesis by means of the argument proving the nonexistence of proof, as it were by a step-ladder, should then abolish this very argument. (AL 2.480-481.)
Remarkable parallels to these passages can be found in Buddhist and other texts. Candrakiirti, like Sextus, compares the dialectic to a medicine which, having cured the disease, dissolves itself. [36] We may compare a statement by the "crypto-Buddhist" Vedaantin Ramana Maharshi with Sextus' fire analogue:
The thought 'who am I?' will destroy all other thoughts and, like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get destroyed. Then there will arise self-realization."
"The doctrinal move towards self-abrogation has of course also been referred to as apophasis. Michael Sells explains that: Apophasis can mean “negation,” but its etymology suggests a meaning that more precisely characterizes the discourse in question: apo phasis (un-saying or speaking-away). . . . Any saying (even a negative saying) demands a correcting proposition, an unsaying. In these terms, an apophatic discourse is one which ultimately abrogates, negates, or “unspeaks” itself."
"A paraconsistent logic is a logical system that attempts to deal with contradictions in a discriminating way. Alternatively, paraconsistent logic is the subfield of logic that is concerned with studying and developing paraconsistent (or "inconsistency-tolerant") systems of logic.
Inconsistency-tolerant logics have been discussed since at least 1910 (and arguably much earlier, for example in the writings of Aristotle); however, the term paraconsistent ("beside the consistent") was not coined until 1976, by the Peruvian philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada.
Paraconsistent logics are propositionally weaker than classical logic; that is, they deem fewer propositional inferences valid. The point is that a paraconsistent logic can never be a propositional extension of classical logic, that is, propositionally validate everything that classical logic does. In some sense, then, paraconsistent logic is more conservative or cautious than classical logic. It is due to such conservativeness that paraconsistent languages can be more expressive than their classical counterparts including the hierarchy of metalanguages due to Alfred Tarski et al. According to Solomon Feferman [1984]: "…natural language abounds with directly or indirectly self-referential yet apparently harmless expressions—all of which are excluded from the Tarskian framework." This expressive limitation can be overcome in paraconsistent logic.
The primary motivation for paraconsistent logic is the conviction that it ought to be possible to reason with inconsistent information in a controlled and discriminating way. The principle of explosion precludes this, and so must be abandoned. In non-paraconsistent logics, there is only one inconsistent theory: the trivial theory that has every sentence as a theorem. Paraconsistent logic makes it possible to distinguish between inconsistent theories and to reason with them.
Research into paraconsistent logic has also led to the establishment of the philosophical school of dialetheism (most notably advocated by Graham Priest), which asserts that true contradictions exist in reality, for example groups of people holding opposing views on various moral issues. Being a dialetheist rationally commits one to some form of paraconsistent logic, on pain of otherwise embracing trivialism, i.e. accepting that all contradictions (and equivalently all statements) are true.However, the study of paraconsistent logics, does not necessarily entail a dialetheist viewpoint. "
