I know you guys didn't miss the Achilles/Patroclus reference in the second to last episode. Unless you're saving the best for last.
_________________ 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.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37249 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Will hasn't become Hannibal's Patroculus yet maybe? Hannibal sacrifices Abigail in front of Will and cuts into his stomach to make him stronger, pushing him over the edge, a moment of extreme empathy(with Hannibal).
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By now we have seen that therapeuein in the basic sense of ‘maintain the well-being’ and in the derivative sense of ‘heal, cure’ is in fact related to the idea of a ritual substitute who maintains the well-being of someone superior whom he serves by standing ready to die for that special someone. That is the therapeutic function, as it were, of the therapōn
But Will isn't ready to die for Hannibal yet.
_________________ 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
To maintain’t long in stinking, make good carrion,
But leave no good deeds to preserve them sound!
And must all come to this? fools, wise, all hither?
Must all heads thus at last be laid together?
Draw me my picture then, thou grave neat workman,
After this fashion, not like this; these colours
In time, kissing but air, will be kist off:
But here’s a fellow; that which he lays on
Till doomsday alters not complexion.
Death’s the best painter then: they that draw shapes,
And live by wicked faces, are but God’s apes.
They come but near the life, and there they stay;
This fellow draws life too: his art is fuller,
The pictures which he makes are without colour." [The Honest Whore, 4.1.63-94]
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"A version of the vanitas or memento mori motif, the pose of Hamlet can be seen in three distinct though interrelated forms: a man or woman contemplating a skull, a man contemplating the head of a statue, and a woman gazing at a mirror. The skull and mirror function interchangeably as truth-tellers and reminders of time and death. The heads of statues, contrasted to the living heads of the observers, are essential skulls.
Painting is one of the vanities of man, sustaining as it does, the fiction that man may overcome or at least disguise his fate. As such, it suggests the opposite of the skull or the mirror, both of which tell man the inexorable truth about himself."
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that." [Shakespeare, Hamlet, 5.1.172-83]
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"Hamlet's reaction to the sight of Yorick's remains is surprisingly physical; though Hamlet is chiefly a cerebral character, he feels a tangible sensation when he looks upon his former friend. The thought of the deceased jester is nauseating to the prince; he tells Horatio "my gorge rims at it." This reaction is evidence of a significant transformation in Hamlet's character. Earlier in the play, when he had the opportunity to murder a praying Claudius, he backed down based on his prediction of a blissful afterlife for his nemesis. By Act Five, Hamlet's ideas about death have changed. As he looks upon Yorick's skull, he concludes that everyone will eventually decompose as the jester has. "Let her paint an inch thick," Hamlet says of Ophelia, "to this favor she must come." Despite all human efforts to evade death, it is inevitable. Hamlet is now experiencing death not in a distant and abstract way, as he does in the "To be or not to be?" soliloquy. At this moment in the play, Hamlet interacts with death both physically and directly. It is this revelation that allows the drama to move forward: with a more complete understanding of death, Hamlet is prepared to both kill and die for his beliefs.
The skull is a physical reminder of the finality of death. For all of Hamlet's brooding and philosophical contemplation of mortality, here, Hamlet literally looks death directly in the face."
"What separates Hamlet from other revenge plays (and maybe from every play written before it) is that the action we expect to see, particularly from Hamlet himself, is continually postponed while Hamlet tries to obtain more certain knowledge about what he is doing. This play poses many questions that other plays would simply take for granted. Can we have certain knowledge about ghosts? Is the ghost what it appears to be, or is it really a misleading fiend? Does the ghost have reliable knowledge about its own death, or is the ghost itself deluded? Moving to more earthly matters: How can we know for certain the facts about a crime that has no witnesses? Can Hamlet know the state of Claudius’s soul by watching his behavior? If so, can he know the facts of what Claudius did by observing the state of his soul? Can Claudius (or the audience) know the state of Hamlet’s mind by observing his behavior and listening to his speech? Can we know whether our actions will have the consequences we want them to have? Can we know anything about the afterlife? The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly contemplates whether or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world."
"In Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, he contemplates suicide not as an escape from life, but rather as an escape from his “sullied flesh”(Hamlet 23). This imagery of spoiled flesh reflects the image of the poisoning and polluting of the kingdom and of Hamlet’s own being. He is aware that the flesh is rotting away and restricting him from reaching out and embracing the darkness of the unconscious.Hamlet is indifferent to physical death. His push to leave the light and enter the darkness of the unconscious drives him to question his own motives. Hamlet constantly attempts to reject his “growing inner-self” because he himself is unsure of the unknown. When Hamlet first meets his father’s ghost, he leaves behind the world of reality and light and enters a world with no reason, reality, and light. He enters the world of unconscious, the world of darkness. This new world of darkness poses as an unknown that makes Hamlet uneasy enough to question his sanity. Upon his return to the light, Hamlet becomes conscious that within the darkness ideal is found and motives are revealed. To Hamlet, the darkness represents his inner-self. His growing inner-self is a replica of this world of darkness and ideals, of no reason and unconsciousness. Because this world holds no reason, Hamlet is frightened by the unknown and unconscious possibilities of this world thatis growing inside of him. Hamlet’s mind rules his flesh because it wants to push away from the diseased reality and enter the darkness and embrace rather than reject his growing inner-self.Hamlet’s contemplation of suicide then becomes a contemplation of letting go of the light and submersing himself in his inner-world of unconsciousness and darkness. He wonders whether it is better to leave behind his consciousness that is leading him to the brink of insanity, or to embrace it.
And by sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream.(Hamlet, 63)
In his world, Hamlet is completely self-aware. He sees the probable outcomes of his life. His contemplating of suicide is hardly out of cowardice, it is out of this notion of trying to reject the growing of his inner-self. Hamlet’s growing inner-self is almost symbolic of the burgeoning darkness where the edge of reason and the brink of insanity lie. Through his constant attempts toreject his growing inner-self, Hamlet becomes more and more conscious that it is the unconscious that drives all desire and motive."
"Hamlet's' subject is not revenge or bereavement but “Hamlet's consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself." [Harold Bloom]
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"Yorick's Skull serves as a symbol of death in all its entirety but more so as a physical relic left by the deceased as an omen of what’s to come. When Hamlet takes the skull and stares directly at the sight, he is symbolically staring into death itself and contemplates its connotations. He speaks to the skull about being Old King Hamlet’s former jester, and by remembering Yorick in life he comes to realize the inevitability of death and inescapable disintegration of one’s body.
Hamlet is likewise fascinated by the equalizing, impartial, and absolute effect of death that acts on both the greatest of men and peasants. “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay./ Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (V.i.193-194). Hamlet notes that despite all the power that these men had in life (he references Alexander the Great), their demise meets no exception since their bodies will rot, only to be recycled into the earth as generations before them. It is by starring into Yorick’s skull and reflecting on death is Hamlet finally able to take a more mature outlook on death. He no longer truly fears death but sees it as a natural inevitability that need not be sped (shows no suicidal tendencies). This revelation marks a character evolution for Hamlet as we see him in this scene as mature and rational; he exemplifies a state of mind that is calm and with purpose. He shows no recklessness, fearlessness, or pittance but an objective resolve of what he knows is to come and what he must do (“Let be”).
"Hamlet's confrontation with the skull leads to flighty reveries on the vanity of human wishes. His imagination locates "the noble dust of Alexander till 'a find it stopping a bunghole" (203-04):
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? (208-12)
The way in which the dead Alexander is reduced to a loamy gadget to stop a beer barrel is undoubtedly ludicrous. "Imperious Caesar" is not exempt from this sort of comic degradation.
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall t'expel the winter's flaw!
(213-16)
It is undeniable that Hamlet himself impersonates Death. He "has above all that preternatural aptitude for mocking each man according to his station and peculiar folly which was the distinguishing mark of Death itself in the Dance of Death."
A student the Dance of Death instructs us that "'Death' in the Dance of Death has been variously styled—'la railleuse par excellence—variée à l'infini mais toujours boufonne'—and as exhibiting a 'cynisme railleur.'" According to G. Wilson Knight's testimony, Hamlet is not innocent of "the demon of cynicism," "the cancer of cynicism," and "the hell of cynicism." Another Shakespearean scholar concludes that Hamlet's responses are "the jests of Death" and that the diseased wit which is admittedly Hamlet's (3.2.321-22) is "Death's own." Even if "Death is not the only character whose qualities Hamlet has inherited," it is a preponderant aspect of Hamlet's makeup. Hamlet is a principal persona in this drama of the Dance of Death, a macabre medieval legacy. It may be said that Hamlet plays Death in the status of a jester, albeit officially he has no cap and bells.
In this context Hamlet's "antic disposition" (1.5.172) poses itself. Contrary to the notion that it denotes assumed madness with "antic" being synonymous with "mad, crazy, or lunatic," lexicographical investigation of the word "antic" reveals that the phrase signifies something like "grotesque demeanor" since the most fundamental meaning of the word current at the date Shakespeare composed our play corresponds to "grotesque."
The etymological explanation that The Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed. on CD-ROM) gives is cogent: "appl. ad. It. antico, but used as equivalent to It. grottesco, f. grotta, 'a cauerne or hole vnder grounde' (Florio), orig. applied to fantastic representations of human, animal, and floral forms, incongruously running into one another, found in exhuming some ancient remains (as the Baths of Titus) in Rome, whence extended to anything similarly incongruous or bizarre: see grotesque'"
The word "antic" comes from the Italian "antica" (la manièra antica,i.e., the antique fashion) but in its actual usage, historically it referred to "[la manièra] grottesca" literally rendered, "the manner of the grotto." In any theoretical consideration of the grotesque its basic connection with the Italian "grotta" in its derivation is unanimously recognized. Hence "antic" as denotative of "grotesque." (We may be given to venture a hypothesis that the "antic" fashion, the ancient way, could have impressed those exposed to it with a sense of regression into the remotest primordial world peopled by phenomenal, phantasmagoric images, where human beings, animals, plants, and even inanimate objects merged in natural confusion and profusion, the world as symbolized, in a manner, by the grotto. In the psychoanalytic language of evolution this immemorial world is translated as the unconscious. In our idiom manifestation of such a regression is grotesque.)
The foregoing perspective is also set forth by Eleanor Prosser in her succinct formulation regarding the usage of the word "antic" in Hamlet.
Hamlet's choice of words, "antic disposition," is significant. In Shakespeare's day, "antic" did not mean "mad." It was the usual epithet for Death and meant "grotesque," "ludicrous." The term is appropriated for the grinning skull and the tradition of Death laughing all to scorn, scoffing at the pretenses of puny man.
When it comes to characterization of our hero, the "antic disposition" he decides to put on proves to be a grotesque mask he wears, a mask designed to conceal his true colors and befuddle his enemies with a view to executing his revenge more conveniently. His ludicrous simulation of madness is to be necessarily overshadowed by Death, for whom "antic" as meaning "grotesque" served as the usual epithet in the age of Shakespeare. Hamlet is the titular protagonist of the antic hay that this tragedy is geared to.
The characteristic melancholy, the mythical sorrows of Hamlet that often end up in detracting from his personality, can be deemed a form of such "an antic disposition" (even if it is an involuntary one) redolent of death. Melancholy is traditionally associated with Saturn, which is "symbolic of the sad tranquility of death." Hamlet's brooding melancholy partakes of Saturnian death. If we may go further and attend to a literary convention that Saturn is a patron-god for satirists and to the satiric temper that informs Hamlet to a certain degree, Hamlet's character will be delineated like this: Hamlet as melancholiac and satirist (the satirist in English Renaissance literature was almost invariably a melancholiac) is under Saturn's influence. And that is the price of his being a genius as revealer of dark truths.
Be that as it may, Hamlet's rage for punning can be taken for manifestation of the same pattern of deportment that we are discussing. "[A pun] is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence"...
A recidivistic pun-maker, Hamlet can be labeled (or libeled) as pun incarnate. It is fruitful to take a glance at Willard Farnham's idea expressed in his book devoted to the exploration of The Shakespearean Grotesque:
In its grotesqueness the pun is a monstrous union of incompatible things that has at times a complexity carried beyond doubleness. Its wholeness built of incompatibility is prone to be incompatible with and defiant of dignity.
An apposite instance may be Hamlet's utterance "I am too much in the sun," which is supposed to comprehend ventriloquistic undertones of "I am too much in the son." The phrases that will exemplify the case are legion. Suffice it to remark that in his antic disposition Hamlet is addicted to making the pun that is an antic, that is to say, grotesque figure of speech in its monstrous yoking together of incompatible things, the pun that, like the joke of which it is a prominent component, partially discloses the dark recesses of the human mind.
Hamlet is a gallery of grotesque figures, the gallery which mirrors the inferno that the world has become, for "through the depiction of grotesque characters" Shakespeare, just like Bosch, "shows us Hell, the Hell of man's making."
The final Hamlet landscape that an eminent Shakespearean critic depicts is awful. After referring to the "sound" of the "musings and indecision of Hamlet" that "have been a frantically personal obbligato in the Senecan movement of revenge," Thomas McFarland closes his existentialist reading of the play with this statement: "Now at last [the] sound is stilled, the skulls grin, and the play moves toward its universal night." The "universal night" that the critic assumes for the play's final tableau could be apocalyptic. Perhaps apocalypse is intrinsically grotesque. And in our modern time we will be exposed to such an apocalyptic scenery. In his enormously provocative and problematical tirade, Lucky in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a grotesque parody of "man thinking" as he is, betraying glossolalia and logorrhea, talks compulsively and ceaselessly about "the skull the skull the skull the skull" that supposedly abounds in the universal graveyard that his visionary reflection reveals our entire world has become. Lucky's antic discourse is, as he himself paradoxically avers at its temporary end, left "unfinished. . . ."
A student the Dance of Death instructs us that "'Death' in the Dance of Death has been variously styled—'la railleuse par excellence—variée à l'infini mais toujours boufonne'—and as exhibiting a 'cynisme railleur.'" According to G. Wilson Knight's testimony, Hamlet is not innocent of "the demon of cynicism," "the cancer of cynicism," and "the hell of cynicism." Another Shakespearean scholar concludes that Hamlet's responses are "the jests of Death" and that the diseased wit which is admittedly Hamlet's (3.2.321-22) is "Death's own." Even if "Death is not the only character whose qualities Hamlet has inherited," it is a preponderant aspect of Hamlet's makeup. Hamlet is a principal persona in this drama of the Dance of Death, a macabre medieval legacy. It may be said that Hamlet plays Death in the status of a jester, albeit officially he has no cap and bells.
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?" [N., JW]
Prometheus took Fire to man, while the Cynic searches a Man to his fire.
Nietzschean Cynicism is of the Blond Beast's - The Philosopher who has stared into the abyss like the Dionysian Hamlet:
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"[b]The Greek philosophers went through life with the secret feeling that there were far more slaves than one might suppose — meaning that everyone who was not a philosopher was a slave. Their pride overflowed at the thought that even the most powerful men on earth belonged among their slaves."
"In its grotesqueness the pun is a monstrous union of incompatible things that has at times a complexity carried beyond doubleness.
...A recidivistic pun-maker, Hamlet can be labeled (or libeled) as pun incarnate.
Suffice it to remark that in his antic disposition Hamlet is addicted to making the pun that is an antic, that is to say, grotesque figure of speech in its monstrous yoking together of incompatible things, the pun that, like the joke of which it is a prominent component, partially discloses the dark recesses of the human mind."
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"We have seen that the distinctive importance of the head for the earliest Greeks, Romans, etc., was that it contained the stuff of life, the seed, and in it the procreative life-soul, and that cerebrum is related to cereo, cerus, etc., and expressive of procreation, fertility. That we may now see to be the root meaning of cornu, horn, Him (='brain'), etc. There was a further reason why horns should be connected with procreation. Not only does castration produce marked change in the growth of horn but also, just as hair was believed to be an outcrop of the procreative power since it grows upon the face and pubes at puberty, so it was observed that horns tend to develop fully at a similar stage. Not only are horns thus an outcrop of the procreative power but their use is largely sexual. Quoting many examples Darwin declared that 'tusks and horns appear in all cases to have been primarily developed as sexual weapons', i.e. for use by the male to defeat rivals in approaching the female.
We may confirm our explanation of the horns in Cretan cult and at the same time explain what also has not hitherto been satisfactorily explained, virtually the only horn or horns separated from the head in Greek myth, the 'horn of plenty'. It was Cretan, the horn of Amaltheia, foster-mother of Zeus. Why was a horn believed to be the source of new-born creatures, fruits, etc.—fertile cornu. Because it was itself an embodiment of the seed, the procreative power. The 'horn of plenty' was a symbol of the genius and sometimes represented containing phalli. Thus we can also explain the alternative legend that it was the horn of the prime river-god Acheloos. A river was itself the fertilising liquid of life with which the head and its other outcrop, hair, were particularly associated. The horn of Amaltheia was believed to be the source of the fertilising liquid above, rain.
The ancient Germanic peoples here in the North had names for brain and horn cognate to the Greek and Roman names. In some counties 'to have got the horn' = ' to lust, be lustful' and the epithet 'horny' meant 'amorous'. There is clear evidence that early Greeks, e.g. Archilochus, referred to the male organ itself as 'horn', and Aristotle in fact explained thereby.
In any case, if 'horn' had in early times such sexual significance, we can understand, as it has not been possible hitherto, how a man's wife, who receives lovers, prostituting herself, could be said 'as the saying is, to make horns for him'. She thus supplements him. Possibly there is a joking suggestion also of her working for his benefit. From such an idiom it would be but a step to say that the husband who 'has many a Paris in his house' has horns. Mediaeval poems (e.g. in the thirteenth century) show a belief that a horn grew upon the forehead of him whose wife had received a lover. Presently it was a custom in England and elsewhere in Europe for neighbours to put actual horns upon the head of the husband, apparently to show with what his wife had supplemented him. Possibly on occasion the association of horns with the pugnacious anger of the sexual element played a part. In The Story of Rimini Leigh Hunt describes how an enemy 'Had watched the lover to the lady's bower And flew to make a madman of her lord.' The putting of horns upon the head of the patient cuckold might by some be intended to endow him with that which he seemed to lack, sexual power and pugnacity, what belonged to the element in the head.
Their use of cerebrum and cerebrosus implies that for the Romans to have more brain was to have more of the substance active in aggressive anger, and the conception traced of the horns as an outcrop of that sub stance will help us to understand Ovid's reference to his becoming angry at last because his mistress receives other lovers, Virgil's irasci in cornual of a bull extending its anger into its horns. Thus also we can better understand the virtues attributed to the horn of the unicorn or' Scythian ass' (i.e. rhinoceros). It was the concentrated substance of the procreative element from the animal that was the supreme embodiment of procreative power. Aelian tells of the Arcadian Styx that no vessel could hold it, not even iron ones, none except the horns of Scythian asses. In mediaeval belief a unicorn could not be caught by force or skill but would run to a maiden's bosom." [Onians, The Origins of European Thought]
"I used to hear my thoughts, inside my skull, with the same tone, timbre, accent, as if the words were coming out of my mouth.” “And now?” “Now…my inner voice sounds like you." [Hannibal]
"Critically, in a series of passages Critchley and Webster — along with every other critic — miss, Nietzsche identifies himself as both Hamlet and Shakespeare. In his notebooks for The Birth of Tragedy, he writes, “Shakespeare: ‘The poet of tragic knowledge,’” casting the Bard as his theatrical forebear, “the first tragic philosopher.” In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says that his writing is “certainly warlike,” and “prove[s] that I was no Jack the Dreamer, that I take pleasure in fencing.” To write tragic philosophy is to become the Hamlet of Act V, who finally acts, despite the terrible truth. Nietzsche’s final reference to Shakespeare comes on January 3, 1889, the very day of his mental collapse in Turin. In a letter to Cosima Wagner, he writes, “I have often lived among men already and I know everything they can experience, from the lowest to the highest. Among Indians I was Buddha, in Greece I was Dionysus, — Alexander and Caesar are my incarnations, as is the Shakespeare poet, Lord Bacon.”
Bacon, Nietzsche thinks, created Shakespeare as a mask, and Shakespeare made Hamlet as his mask — “every profound spirit needs a mask,” we hear in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche enables himself to write by imagining that he is Hamlet fencing, wearing a Hamlet-Shakespeare-Bacon mask all at once."
"We long to know ourselves, we may even need to love ourselves. Taken to its extreme this desire can become narcissism, which is not a good thing. But the quest for self-awareness and its attendant dangers and mysteries is complex. Narcissus fell under that spell and died. Another figure in Greek mythology who suffered for self-conscious capacity is Prometheus, who was punished by Zeus for giving human beings "fire.""
"In this sense Dionysiac man is similar to Hamlet: both have gazed into the true essence of things, they have acquired knowledge and they find action repulsive, for their actions can do nothing to change the eternal essence of things; they regard it as laughable or shameful that they should be expected to set to rights a world so out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion—this is the lesson of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom about Jack the Dreamer who does not get around to acting because he reflects too much, out of an excess of possibilities, as it were. No, it is not reflection it is true knowledge, insight into the terrible truth, which outweighs every motive for action, both in the case of Hamlet and in that of Dionysiac man. Now no solace has any effect, there is a longing for a world beyond death; beyond the gods themselves; existence is denied, along with its treacherous reflection in the gods or in some immortal Beyond. Once truth has been seen, the consciousness of it prompts man to see only what is terrible or absurd in existence wherever he looks; now he understands the symbolism of Ophelia’s fate, now he grasps the wisdom of the wood-god Silenus [that it is best never to be born, and next-best to die soon]; he feels revulsion." [BT, 7]
"Prometheus is action. Hamlet is hesitation. In Prometheus the obstacle is exterior; in Hamlet it is interior. In Prometheus the will is securely nailed down by nails of brass and cannot get loose; besides, it has by its side two watchers—Force and Power. In Hamlet the will is more tied down yet; it is bound by previous meditation—the endless chain of the undecided. Try to get out of yourself if you can! What a Gordian knot is our reverie. Slavery from within, that is slavery indeed. Scale this enclosure, "to dream!" escape, if you can, from this prison, "to love!" The only dungeon is that which walls conscience in. Prometheus, in order to be free, has but a bronze collar to break and a god to conquer; Hamlet must break and conquer himself. Prometheus can raise himself upright, if he only lifts a mountain; to raise himself up, Hamlet must lift his own thoughts. If Prometheus plucks the vulture from his breast, all is said; Hamlet must tear Hamlet from his breast. Prometheus and Hamlet are two naked livers; from one runs blood, from the other doubt." [Victor Hugo]
As for the theft of fire, many of the stories put the source of fire in theunder world, where the sun is at night, so that when the thief of fire returns he is also the rising sun."
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"…an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures." [Heraclitus]
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"Below is an excerpt from R. J. Zwi Werblowsky's "Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton's Satan." 1952. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd: London. Pg. 53-58.
"Prometheus himself is a god, like Zeus. The fact that somehow he comes to stand for mankind as their suffering champion, and possibly as their type and symbol, must not make us oblivious to his essentially divine nature. As Kerényi says, Prometheus is first and foremost a god. The paradox here lies in the fact that he undergoes insult and suffering in a typically human manner. This distinguishes him both from Christ and from the romantic Prometheus. Jesus is primarily a man. In his case the paradox comes through the faith that the man Jesus is also God. The romantic Prometheus, Goethe's for instance, is man claiming the rank and dignity of God. His suffering is that of mankind, but his protest is that of outraged divinity, or rather of the divine quality of his humanity. The only parallel to Prometheus would therefore be a gnostic Urmensch, anthropos or Adam Kadmon. In the mythological sphere Prometheus is thus the divine representative of the non-olympic, the human pole of the world.
Thirdly, the fact should be noted that Prometheus suffers during daytime. With sunrise the eagle of Zeus, itself an obvious symbol for the sun (which is actually apostrophized once by Prometheus as 'bird of Zeus'), comes to feed on his liver. Now the liver of Prometheus grows again during night. But also generally speaking the liver belongs to the night as the traditional seat of the passions, partly also because of its dark colour, and last but not least in its function as a means of divination. The unbinding of Prometheus and his liberation from daylight suffering therefore correspond to an important step forward in the evolution of the human image in man. He has now become a daylight being, and is accepted as such by the gods.
This brings us back again to the problem of the development of consciousness...
In Greek philosophy, from Heraclitus to the Stoics, fire and its qualities were a favourite subject of speculation. Empedocles ascribed to fire consciousness, thought and knowledge, qualities which Heraclitus thought were a divine prerogative, whilst Aristotle allowed them to men also, though admitting their divine provenance. For if there is anything divine in man, it is undoubtedly his consciousness of himself, whether we call it soul, spirit, reason or thought. Its most prominent symptom is the loss of man's original unity, or even identity with the world. The primitive participation mystique has given way to a new distance of man not only towards nature, but also towards himself. Man has ceased to exist as a mere piece of nature, something has emerged within him in virtue of which he now stands over and above himself and the world. Life in its specifically human sense, as thought, speech, purposeful and creative activity, is the expression of man's new status and dignity.
But Prometheus has more than knowledge. He has cunning. He is astute and clever, and Zeus himself had profited from his 'smartness' not less than mankind. But this astuteness implies, as Kerényi points out, a certain crookedness of mind, ranging from deceitfulness to inventiveness. Prometheus is ankulometes, that is, his thinking is ankulos, crooked---the mark of a basic deficiency which wants to be overcome. Zeus, the god, whose being knows no inherent defections, per definitionem lacks this crookedness, and may thus well need at times the help of a Prometheus. The order of Zeus is perfect, regulated and static. His world has measure and limits, and every being is assigned its place. But, and here the trouble starts, the human pole of the universe, as soon as it becomes aware of itself at all, becomes aware of fatal deficiencies. Man's attempt to cope with this situation by remedying these deficiencies, presupposes a mental make-up foreign to Zeus. Cleverness is a compensatory function of defectiveness, and man's resourcefulness is thus the means by which he evades and oversteps the rules and bounds set by Zeus, whilst Zeus, like Milton's God, may ironically look on."
"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]
Detienne-Vernant speak of Hephaeustus' "metis" connecting his crooked intelligence with his crooked feet... Hephaestus - was the Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes. As a smithing god, Hephaestus made all the weapons of the gods in Olympus.
Blacksmiths and 'Fire-Forgers' ['consciousness-temperers'... 'sheen of sword-tempering'] like Hephaestus were looked upon as magicians and sorcerers for working with fire and dealing with the tempering of swords...
Quote :
"From the fire-place calls the old man, Thus the gray-beard asks the minstrel: "Tell me who thou art of heroes, Who of all the great magicians? Lo! thy blood fills seven sea-boats, Eight of largest birchen vessels, Flowing from some hero's veinlets, From the wounds of some magician. Other matters I would ask thee; Sing the cause of this thy trouble, Sing to me the source of metals, Sing the origin of iron, How at first it was created."
Zani: This brings us to another topic that was frequently discussed in our reading group. In your work, what’s your theory of the boundary or membrane? Because bubbles have membrane boundaries, but spheres often do not.
Sloterdijk: In the second volume of Spheres, which deals with globes, I try to show how the first members of “high civilization” made an effort to interpret the cosmos in terms of ultimate roundedness: soul and cosmos belonging together, forming a kind of metaphysical diet with the cosmos: they belong together to the extent that the outer boundaries are the maximal conceivable sphere.
If you turn to the vision of the world in the Middle Ages, you find the classical Aristotelian concept of spherology, according to which the earth is included as one of seven layers of cosmic, ethereal substances that carry the planet. The outermost boundary consists of what they call the Empyrean, the crystal heaven — or, according to Dante, the dwelling place of God and the source of light and creation. There is no real beyond.
This creates ample trouble for positioning God, saints, elected human beings, angels, and all those created in the middle, because they had to be located somewhere, in that vision of the world. The horror of a vacuum was so strong that they could not tolerate the idea of emptiness. Consequently, in this vision of the world everything is full. To be a human being means to live on the surface of the lowest sphere. Yet inside the earth, there are still more layers, down to where Satan has his residence. That’s what you learn by reading Dante — a Satan-centric view of the world.
The medieval vision of the world is Satanocentric. You cannot combine the geological and theological visions of the world; there is a profound contradiction between these two construction principles that compete throughout the Middle Ages. On the one hand, it is evident that the vision of the world has to be theocentric. God has to be at the center. But in which center? The best place in the universe is already occupied by Satan. At the coldest point, Satan constantly cries without being able to cry.
At the same time, however, medieval thinkers had to answer the question of locating the divine resident — a question that could not be resolved within classical metaphysics. I have found dozens of medieval representations of this impossibility. If the earth is in the middle, it constitutes the lowest point of the system; and only the happy few will escape to the Empyreum. The location of the divine could thus not be determined in the classical vision. Classical metaphysics failed. Spherology as cosmology failed. Construct the vision of the world from its own principles and you encounter necessary contradictions. The supralunar world is condemned, inhabited by beings who are condemned."
The Fire-Forger looking into the satano-centric abyss...
Quote :
"Just some thoughts about Cain and Iron-Workers in history:
In many cultures, iron-working was considered a transgression against the natural order, as can be seen in this quote from "The Forge and Crucible": "In India, as elswehere, a whole mythology classes iron-workers amont the various categories of giants and demons. All are enemies of the gods who represent other ages and other traditions" This seems to be true of Cain as well-Cain's descendants are a race of magicians or of supernatural beings-For instance, the monster Grendel in Beowulf was supposed to be a descendant of Cain.
For what reason is the blacksmith seen as demonic? The extraction of ore from the earth was seen, according to Mircea Eliade, as an act which violated the natural order. By digging underground, humanity was risking inviting the demoniac and chthonic forces, and was symbolically "killing" the metals that grew in the earth. Also, the act of forging a weapon used for killing could be seen to be analagous to killing itself-Thus, the blacksmith's act of heating and hammering the metal was seen as an act of killing.
Hence, the symbolism of Cain murdering his brother. This can be seen in ancient Greek myth regarding three brothers, who were smith daimons: "Two brothers put their third brother to death; they bury him beneath a mountain; his body changes to iron."The two brothers represented the hammer and the anvil, the third brother is the iron, which is slain by the other two, and forged into a weapon." The symbolism also recalls the legend of Romulus and Remus and other similar myths about fratricide.
Another reason why iron-working was viewed as demonic may be that the blacksmiths were seen as sorcerors who "stepped on the gods toes", so to speak, by using magic to forge weapons. Forging weapons and tools believed to have magical power, the miths were, by analogy, acting in the role of creator or demiurge, and perhaps this was a bit too close to self-deification for comfort. Note that in the book of enoch, Azazel was expelled from heaven for teaching humanity forbidden arts (most of a magical nature) which included the forging of weapons. The act of the blacksmith, like that of the alchemist, was viewed as analagous to the search for immortality, and therefore a violation of the traditional boundary of man and god. Here's a quote from Joseph Campbell regarding this point:
"These first shamans became the itinerant blacksmiths, who in later mythic lore appeared as dangerous wizards producing "immortal thunderbolt matter" made from crude rock. Miracle of miracles, it was "analogous to that of spiritual, whereby the individual learns to identify himself with his own immortal part.""[Galactica Publishings]
I extrapolate it to the "kali yuga" or the Iron Age... when everything has become so "instrumentalized"... Marshall McLuhann's "the medium is the medium"...
I extrapolate it to the "kali yuga" or the iron age... when everything has become so "instrumentalized"... Marshall McLuhann's "the medium is the medium"...
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!
Physiologically there are abundant reasons for an extension of ourselves involving us in a state of numbness. Medical researchers like Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas hold that all extensions of ourselves, in sickness or in health, are attempts to maintain equilibrium. Any extension of ourselves they regard as "autoamputation," and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Our language has many expressions that indicate this self-amputation that is imposed by various pressures. We speak of "wanting to jump out of my skin" or of "going out of my mind," being "driven batty" or "flipping my lid." And we often create artificial situations that rival the irritations and stresses of real life under controlled conditions of sport and play.
While it was no part of the intention of Jonas and Selye to provide an explanation of human invention and technology, they have given us a theory of disease (discomfort) that goes far to explain why man is impelled to extend various parts of his body by a kind of autoamputation. In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load. For example, in the case of the wheel as an extension of the foot, the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media was the immediate occasion of the extension or "amputation" of this function from our bodies. The wheel as a counter-irritant to increased burdens, in turn, brings about a new intensity of action by its amplification of a separate or isolated function (the feet in rotation). Such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception. This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The young man's image is a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition.
The principle of self-amputation as an immediate relief of strain on the central nervous system applies very readily to the origin of the media of communication from speech to computer.
Physiologically, the central nervous system, that electric network that coordinates the various media of our senses, plays the chief role. Whatever threatens its function must be contained, localized, or cut off, even to the total removal of the offending organ. The function of the body, as a group of sustaining and protective organs for the central nervous system, is to act as buffers against sudden variations of stimulus in the physical and social environment. Sudden social failure or shame is a shock that some may "take to heart" or that may cause muscular disturbance in general, signaling for the person to withdrawfrom the threatening situation.
Therapy, whether physical or social, is a counter-irritant that aids in that equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central nervous system. Whereas pleasure is a counter-irritant (e.g., sports, entertainment, and alcohol), comfort is the removal of irritants. Both pleasure and comfort are strategies of equilibrium for the central nervous system.
With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. It could well be that the successive mechanizations of the various physical organs since the invention of printing have made too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system to endure.
In relation to that only too plausible cause of such development, we can return to the Narcissus theme. For if Narcissus is numbed by his self-amputated image, there is a very good reason for the numbness. There is a close parallel of response between the patterns of physical and psychic trauma or shock. A person suddenly deprived of loved ones and a person who drops a few feet unexpectedly will both register shock. Both the loss of family and a physical fall are extreme instances of amputations of the self. Shock induces a generalized numbness or an increased threshold to all types of perception. The victim seems immune to pain or sense.
Battle shock created by violent noise has been adapted for dental use in the device known as audiac. The patient puts on headphones and turns a dial raising the noise level to the point that he feels no pain from the drill. The selection of a single sense for intense stimulus, or of a single extended, isolated, or "amputated" sense in technology, is in part the reason for the numbing effect that technology as such has on its makers and users. For the central nervous system rallies a response of general numbness to the challenge of specialized irritation.
The person who falls suddenly experiences immunity to all pain or sensory stimuli because the central nervous system has to be protected from any intense thrust of sensation. Only gradually does he regain normal sensitivity to sights and sounds, at which time he may begin to tremble and perspire and to react as he would have done if the central nervous system had been prepared in advance for the fall that occurred unexpectedly. Depending on which sense or faculty is extended technologically, or "autoamputated," the "closure" or equilibrium-seeking among the other senses is fairly predictable. It is with the senses as it is with color. Sensation is always 100 per cent, and a color is always 100 per cent color. But the ratio among the components in the sensation or the color can differ infinitely. Yet if sound, for example, is intensified, touch and taste and sight are affected at once. The effect of radio on literate or visual man was to reawaken his tribal memories, and the effect of sound added to motion pictures was to diminish the role of mime, tactility, and kinesthesis. Similarly, when nomadic man turned to sedentary and specialist ways, the senses specialized too. The development of writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of individualism, introspection and so on.
Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body. There is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense "closure" evoked by the TV image. But the effect of the entry of the TV image will vary from culture to culture in accordance with the existing sense ratios in each culture. In audile-tactile Europe TV has intensified the visual sense, spurring them toward American styles of packaging and dressing. In America, the intensely visual culture, TV has opened the doors of audile-tactile perception to the non-visual world of spoken languages and food and the plastic arts. As an extension and expediter of the sense life, any medium at once affects the entire field of the senses, as the Psalmist explained long ago in the 115th Psalm:
Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes they have, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not; Noses have they, but they smell not; They have hands, but they handle not; Feet have they, but they walk not; Neither speak they through their throat. They that make them shall be like unto them; Yea, every one that trusteth in them.
The concept of "idol" for the Hebrew Psalmist is much like that of Narcissus for the Greek mythmaker. And the Psalmist insists that thebeholding of idols, or the use of technology, conforms men to them. "They that make them shall be like unto them." This is a simple fact of sense "closure." The poet Blake developed the Psalmist's ideas into an entire theory of communication and social change. It is in his long poem of Jerusalem that he explains why men have become what they have beheld. What they have, says Blake, is "the spectre of the Reasoning Power in Man" that has become fragmented and "separated from Imagination and enclosing itself as in steel." Blake, in a word, sees man as fragmented by his technologies. But he insists that these technologies are self-amputations of our own organs. When so amputated, each organ becomes a closed system of great new intensity that hurls man into "martyrdoms and wars." Moreover, Blake announces as his theme in Jerusalem the organs of perception:
If Perceptive Organs vary, Objects of Perception seem to vary: If Perceptive Organs close, their Objects seem to close also.
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the "closure" or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. An Indian is the servo-mechanism of his canoe, as the cowboy of his horse or the executive of his clock.
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. One of the merits of motivation research has been the revelation of man's sex relation to the motorcar.
Socially, it is the accumulation of group pressures and irritations that prompt invention and innovation as counter-irritants. War and the fear of war have always been considered the main incentives to technological extension of our bodies. Indeed, Lewis Mumford, in hisThe City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing. More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture. It is from such intensive hybrid exchange and strife of ideas and forms that the greatest social energies are released, and from which arise the greatest technologies. Buckminster Fuller estimates that since 1910 the governments of the world have spent 31/2 trillion dollars on airplanes. That is 62 times the existing gold supply of the world.
The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have "social consciousness" presented to us as a cause of guilt-feelings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin."
Achilles, Faust, Lucifer, Prometheus, Narcissus, Hamlet, Nietzsche, Hannibal, the lead character from the film 'The Next Three Days', Socrates - all Brooders.
All han-types staring into death - the Pan-ic of knowledge - not romantic, but Brooders, Cold calculators, Pure wrath/love...
The brooding, looming [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]... as the Arche-ic.... Archaic... the genius...
Quote :
"On the one hand deinon (looming, stirring) means the terrible, but not in the sense of petty terrors. ...The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overpowering sway which compels panic fear, true anxiety as well as collected, silent awe that vibrates with its own rhythm. The violent, the overpowering is the essential character of the sway [of being] itself. ..." [IM 149-150]
Against this subjugation, and determining it in an originary way, however, is the overarching structure of dike, which Heidegger (abjuring the traditional German translation of dike as "justice") will translate as Fug or "fugal jointure", that overpowering structure of being that compels all beings to adapt to, fit in (einfugen), and comply with (sichfugen) the enjoining structure (das fugende Gefuge) of being. In this vision of being as a kind of organizing matrix that brings all beings together contrapuntally in a fugal structure, where opposition and conflict serve as unifying forces that allow divergences to converge even as they become mutually implicated in their difference, Heidegger will put forward his own vision of the polis as the site of openness for the contests, conflcits, antagonisms, and enjoining oppositions of the violence-doing of techne and the overpowering fugal jointure of dike." [Bambach, Heidegger's Roots]
The Daimon is the Organizing Matrix, the Arche-ic, but also the Archaic pulling everything together... It is the inner genius.
Guillaume Faye wrote:
"The essence of archaism. It is necessary to give the word 'archaic' its true meaning, which is a positive one, as suggested by the Greek noun archè, meaning both 'foundation' and 'beginning'--in other words, 'founding impulse'. The word also means 'what creates and is unchangeable' and refers to the central notion of 'order'. 'Archaic' does not mean 'backward-looking', for it is the historical past that has engendered the egalitarian philosophy of modernity that is now falling into ruin, and hence any form of historical regression would be absurd. Modernity already belongs to a past that is over. Is archaism a form of traditionalism? Yes and no. Traditionalism entails the transmission of values and is rightly opposed to those doctrines that wish to make a clean sweep of things. It all depends on what traditions are handed down: universalist and egalitarian traditions are not acceptable, nor are those that are diseased, demobilising and fit only for museums. Should we not draw a distinction when it comes to traditions (values transmitted) between positive and harmful ones? Our current of thought has always been torn and weakened by an artificial distinction contrasting 'traditionalists' with those 'who look towards the future'. Archeofuturism can reconcile these two families through a dialectic overcoming.
The Archeofuturist synthesis as a philosophical alliance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Futurism and archaism are both related to Apollonian and Dionysian principles that have always appeared to be mutually opposed, when in fact they are complementary. The futurist pole is Apollonian in its sovereign and rational plan to shape the world, and Dionysian in its aesthetic and romantic mobilization of pure energy. Archaism is telluric in its appeal to timeless forces and conformity to the archè, but it is also Apollonian, for it is founded on wisdom and the endurance of human order."
"According to the traditional mythical belief of the Romans, every human being has his personal tutelary or protecting spirit; the Romans called this tutelary spirit the ‘genius’. This genius accompanies the individual throughout his life, and so Horace calls it ‘comes’, a companion or an escort (Epistles, 2, 2, 187). It was also called one’s ‘tutela’, or patron. The genius is sometimes related to what the Romans called ‘anima’ or ‘animus’, in other words, the soul. And yet it is much more than just the individual’s soul. It is also his character, or fate, in a positive as well as a negative sense. The genius is primarily responsible for how a human individual develops, for what he becomes, and for when he dies. Hence the genius could also be called the spirit of one’s destiny; or, as the classical philologist Theodor Birt called it, one’s ‘spirit of becoming’ (Werdegeist). Gignere means ‘to produce’ or ‘to beget’, ‘to bring forth’, ‘to give birth to’. Thus the genius is a productive spirit that gives birth to something or brings something into being. It is an independent and (sometimes) autonomous divine being, that can act out its own intentions. It is to this divine being that the Roman would pray and make offerings (for instance, on birthdays or on the occasion of important family celebrations). Moreover, this divine being can, principally in the form of a snake or serpent, appear outside the individual human being and act independently of him. These non-venomous serpents, which many Romans kept as if pets or tolerated in their houses as ‘co-habitees’, were often seen as the embodiments of the geniuses of the people living there or as geniuses of the place (as the ‘good spirits of the house’). They were treated with respect, offerings were made to them, plates of food were set out for them. The main feast-day of the genius was considered to be the individual’s birthday. On this day the particular genius was hailed by the Romans as Natalis, and by the Greeks as daímon genéthlios - in both cases as the spirit or god of birth. Offerings of flowers and wine were made as well as offerings of incense. At the moment of birth, the genius joined the individual and bound itself to him or her for the individual’s entire lifespan, and for this reason (even after the death of the individual) would be celebrated on the individual’s birthday and treated to food and drink. Similarly, on anniversaries of the family or the household, offerings were made to the genius – specifically, the genius of the father of the family and the head of the household (‘pater familias’) – at the fireplace or in the private shrine or chapel (the lararium). A wall painting at Pompeii gives us a good impression of such a sacrificial offering. It was also the custom to swear by one’s genius. One did not simply swear – as was the custom since the days of Augustus – by the genius of the emperor but also by the genius of one’s friend, one’s master or one’s patron. In Aristotelian terms, the genius as the originary principle is the télos of the human being (in the sense of ‘goal’ as well as of ‘limit’), the individual’s ‘entelechy’. In the genius as the tutelary spirit that determines the individual’s fate and (trans)forms his life, the persistent effect of the archaic becomes clear. "The beginning is always what is greatest,’ Heidegger declares. Arche functions in Heidegger’s work as the name designating the twofold character of the beginning: on the one hand, it names the origin as such as the source of all emergence or incipience; on the other, it designates the power that comes to presence in the origin itself. Arche, in this sense, is the ‘ruling origin’ of being. Arche is not a temporally prior point of origination or a historically discoverable past. Rather, the arche derives its power from, or rather unfolds its power as, something futural. As Heidegger expresses it in his lectures 1937–1938:
"The futural is the beginning of all happening. In the beginning there lies everything sheltered. Even if what has already begun and what has already become, appear to have advanced beyond their beginning, yet the beginning... remains in power and abides and everything futural comes into confrontation with it. In all authentic history, futurity is decisive..."." [Paul Bishop, The Archaic]
To quickly and so crudely summarize the connections I have made above:
Prometheus - fire; Narcissus - water Heraclitus' - fire and the watery flux
Hannibal: fire - prometheus - burning hell - devil - genius/metis - blacksmith - sorcerer. Will: water - narcissus - Uroboric language - the "and" of the beast-And-the-sovereign.
Together: sorcerer - socratic sophism - the daimonic satyr - philo-sopher as the splendid blond beast.
The blacksmithian Wizard. The Magician. The Sorcerer. The Sage. The Satyr. The Sophi-st. The Fasci-st. The Demon-strator. The De-Monstrator who points things out; etymologically related to - The Monster ['divine sign']. The Hannibal Lecter.
The constant circulation and juggling of same old things, same old concepts in the air, a Dancer's balance building a rhythm, and from nowhere the juggler introduces One More Same Old skittle in his act, and again, One More Same Old... Fasci-nating your gaze.
Its not the concepts per se, but how they are made to Relate, the matrix organ-izing - the Rhythm is Novel.
Arch-aeo-Futurism.
'How many can you manage to 'juggle'' before it falls down and you start again'? is what Heraclitus called the spirit of the Aion-child.
The His-story of Philo-sophy. Its Green Deep-Wood Magic. Philosophy is Eros.
Will hasn't become Hannibal's Patroculus yet maybe?
"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]
-
"Both of us are too curious about too many things for any ideals." [Hannibal, 2.13]
The Kynicism of the Blond Beast.
Like Diogenes seeking an honest man, Like Zarathustra seeking the Full man and 'not dwarfs and abortions of men', Hannibal seeks "Purity", "Cleanliness", "Honesty"... he seeks han in Will.
There is that clip I can't find at the moment where Hannibal tells his psychologist - its Will's honesty and purity that draws him.
Quote :
Hannibal sacrifices Abigail in front of Will and cuts into his stomach to make him stronger,
No.
Its Hannibal's pure Ruth-less-ness.
Purity of being true to oneself.
Han. - Self-first. always.
It is the shattering of the Idea/l that is Will... the broken tea-cup.
Quote :
But Will isn't ready to die for Hannibal yet.
What's interesting for me is Hannibal's remark to Will after his tip-off: "We couldn't leave without you."
This lack of desertion, even putting your most prized possessions in danger, in disadvantage - like the lead character also in the film 'The Next Three Days' is No Sentimentalism, No Romantic nonsense, but sheer Ego.
Recall the feeling of Achilles' rage when "His" Breisias is taken away from him; the same in the film 'Next Three Days' his wife taken away from him, the same in Hannibal - his sister, his innocence, his ideal... taken away from him. You would go to war and put yourself at a disadvantage because you are Unable to desert Your Ego.
All three characters are Brooders. And they act from cold caluclation, not sentimentalism.
"Critically, in a series of passages Critchley and Webster — along with every other critic — miss, Nietzsche identifies himself as both Hamlet and Shakespeare. In his notebooks for The Birth of Tragedy, he writes, “Shakespeare: ‘The poet of tragic knowledge,’” casting the Bard as his theatrical forebear, “the first tragic philosopher.” In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says that his writing is “certainly warlike,” and “prove[s] that I was no Jack the Dreamer, that I take pleasure in fencing.” To write tragic philosophy is to become the Hamlet of Act V, who finally acts, despite the terrible truth. Nietzsche’s final reference to Shakespeare comes on January 3, 1889, the very day of his mental collapse in Turin. In a letter to Cosima Wagner, he writes, “I have often lived among men already and I know everything they can experience, from the lowest to the highest. Among Indians I was Buddha, in Greece I was Dionysus, — Alexander and Caesar are my incarnations, as is the Shakespeare poet, Lord Bacon.”
Bacon, Nietzsche thinks, created Shakespeare as a mask, and Shakespeare made Hamlet as his mask — “every profound spirit needs a mask,” we hear in Beyond Good and Evil.
"Every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say, superficial interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he manifests." [BGE, 2]
Nietzsche enables himself to write by imagining that he is Hamlet fencing, wearing a Hamlet-Shakespeare-Bacon mask all at once."
What marks upon the yielding clay? Two marks Made by my feet, two by my daimon’s feet But all confused because my marks and his Are on the selfsame spot, his toes Where my heels fell, for he and I Pausing a moment in our headlong flight Face opposite ways, my future being his past.
The Daimon’s relationship with the human being is capricious and unpredictable in a way that is aptly summed up in the symbol of the lightning flash.
If the schema of A Vision is founded in mechanisms of refelection and balance, the Daimon is their active controller, embodying all that least resembles the human, and enforcing awareness of this opposition, through crises which shock the individual into recognition of its otherness.
When Yeats discovered the gnomic fragment of Heraclitus, ‘Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life’, it is evident from his repeated quotation, partial quotation and paraphrase of it in his writing that he saw it as encapsulating the essential myth of his universe. In his last year Yeats summarised his outlook: ‘To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, beings or persons which die each other’s life, live each other’s death’(L 918; 1938).
That a greater completeness is to be found in the image of man’s complementary opposite is the basis of Yeats’s earlier conception of the ‘mask’, which itself found a separate place in the System, perpetually set at the opposite point of the circle to the Will. While the idea of the ‘mask’ is that it is created or acquired from the archetypal elements of the imagination, Yeats seems to have found that the metaphor took on a more independent, mythic life, developing towards the idea of an ‘anti-self’, the inverse reflection of a man’s self that is evoked by lack and need from the Anima Mundi.
In Per Amica Silentia Lunae Yeats describes how, ‘Each Daimon is drawn to whatever man . . . it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image the antithetical dream of man’ (Myth 362). The Daimon shapes the mask and the mask becomes less the goal in itself, than the means of evoking the anti-self: ‘By the help of an image / I call to my own opposite, summon all / That I have handled least, least looked upon’ (VP 367), while the Daimon actively comes to the human in search of its complement.
Daimon is timeless, it has present before it [a man’s] past and future, or it has no present and is that past and future, and as the dramatisations recede from his waking mind and from the dreams that reproduce his waking desires they begin to express that knowledge’ (VPl 975). The Daimon or ‘timeless individuality contains archetypes of all possible existences whether of man or brute, and as it traverses its circle of allotted lives, now one, now another, prevails. We may fail to express an archetype, or alter it by reason, but all done from nature is its unfolding into time’ (VPl 970).
If man and Daimon are one continuous perception, human and Daimon are loosely like an iceberg, of which the Daimon is the greater part, the ideal or archetype, while the human is the visible local expression of a small, chosen fraction to other perceiving beings. Through the course of time and many incarnations, the human element of the dyad must seek to express as much of the complete sphere as possible, segment by segment, gyre by gyre, until the totality of the Daimonic archetype has been brought into material manifestation."
"To say it once more: today I find it an impossible book: . . . What found expression here was anyway—this was admitted with as much curiosity as antipathy—a strange voice, the disciple of a still "unknown God," one who concealed himself for the time being under the scholar's hood, under the gravity and dialectical ill humor of the German, even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian. Here was a spirit with strange, still nameless needs, a memory bursting with questions, experiences, concealed things after which the name of Dionysus was added as one more question mark. What spoke here—as was admitted, not without suspicion—was something like a mystical, almost maenadic soul that stammered with difficulty, a feat of the will, as in a strange tongue, almost undecided whether it should communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this "new soul"—and not spoken!" [BT "Attempt at a Self-Criticism", 3]
"The mask, with wide staring eyes that fix one like those of the Gorgon, expresses and epitomizes all the different forms that the terrible divine presence may assume. It is a m ask whose strange stare exerts a fascination, but it is hollow, em pty, indicating the absence of a god w ho is somewhere else but w ho tears one out of oneself, m akes one lose one's bearings in one's everyday, familiar life, and w ho takes possession of one just as if this empty mask was now pressed to one's own face, covering and transforming it." [Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece]
Walter Otto wrote:
"Confrontation:
The mask is pure confrontation–an antipode, and nothing else. It has no reverse side–’Spirits have no back,’ the people say. It has nothing which might transcend the mighty moment of confrontation. It has, in other words, no complete existence either. It is the symbol and the manifestation of that which is simultaneously there and not there: that which is excruciatingly near, that which is completely absent－both in one reality. Thus the mask tells us that the theophany of Dionysus, which is different from that of the other gods because of its stunning assault on the senses and its urgency, is linked with the eternal enigmas of duality and paradox. This theophany thrusts Dionysus violently and unavoidably into the here and now–and sweeps him away at the same time into the inexpressible distance. It excites with a nearness which is at the same time a remoteness. The final secrets of existence and non-existence transfix mankind with monstrous eyes." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
“Greece, the only form in which life can be lived: the horrible in the mask of beauty.” So an early notebook entry from 1869/70, blurring the lines of Nietzsche’s customary analysis in an intriguing anachronism. Here, it is not some dimension of Greece but Greece itself that is experienced through “the mask of beauty.” Greece is an aesthetic deception. It is necessary in the sense that it fulfills a need. We have seen plenty of evidence that “Greece” does at least that. But wherein lies the horror? Not in the fascinatingly “unclassical” contents of the classical imagination or in the terrifying truths of Dionysus: all these are masked by their own metaphysical ideality, as we have also seen. The horror that Greece shields us from has a more proximate actuality, one that obtains somewhere in “life,” not in the dead past. And Nietzsche’s writings on antiquity pose a threat precisely because they expose the proximate presence of this horror. On one approach, we might say that their threat resides not in revealing contemporary views about antiquity to be a fantasy, but in fulfilling these fantasies. In bringing them too close, Nietzsche’s writings make the reigning fantasies about the past too much a part of the present; at the extreme, they eliminate the present altogether by dissolving its own fantastic consistency, a consistency that crucially relies upon the image of an estranged antiquity. Isn’t this the real threat of a “rebirth” of antiquity? Yet the fascination that runs through the contemporary world from classicism to the present is not only with a horror held at arm’s length but ultimately also with the problematic substance of antiquity itself – with its actual inconsistency, its disobedience of ideal norms, its seeming refusal of classicism, and so on, or else – what can be equally disconcerting – the excessive obedience of antiquity to norms imposed from without, its all too easy acceptance of ideals, its infinite malleability, indeed its very classicism. Perhaps what is horrible is not something that the mask of beauty hides but the possibility, which no subject can consistently face, that the mask hides nothing – apart from its own self-masking.
_________________ 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
"The beast and the sovereign are connected, Derrida contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below."
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"Derrida has persistent recourse to the figure of the wolf in order to insist on the sovereign's capacity for suspending the law, for therefore resembling an animal, an outlaw, acting like a wild beast, wolf or werewolf: one cannot be interested in the relations of beast and sovereign, and all the questions of the animal and the political, of the politics of the animal, and man and beast in the context of the state, the polis, the city, the republic, the social body, the law in general, war and peace, terror and terrorism, national or international terrorism, etc., without recognizing some privilege in the figure of the 'wolf'..."
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"What Derrida points out is the hypocrisy of imperialist missions that operate under the umbrella philosophy of “spreading universal human rights,” which he sees an insidious act of cunning that allows “sovereign” states to treat the other as outlaw, in the name of a law only the former can enforce. I think the paradox is pretty clear: we treat men like “beasts” in a mission take them out of this “beastly-ness, ” in the name of a universal humanity. By identifying the other as less than human we claim to attempt to bring them up to the level of humanity, based on some universal humanity..."
Evola wrote:
"According to the traditional view, man as such, is not reducible to purely biological, instinctive, hereditary, naturalistic determinisms;... man distinguishes himself from the animal insofar as he participates also in a super-natural, super-biological element, solely in accordance with which he can be free and be himself. Generally, these two aspects of the human being are not necessarily in contradiction with one another. Although it obeys its own laws, which must be respected, that which in man is 'nature' allows itself to be the organ and instrument of expression and action of that in him which is more than 'nature'. It is only in the vision of life peculiar to Semitic peoples, and above all to the Jewish people, that corporeality becomes 'flesh', as root of every sin, and irreducible antagonist of spirit." [Metaphysics of War]
If we, but, had ears to hear the subtle energies around us, the world would be a symphony. A symphony not, always, pleasing to listen to. Maybe then we would wish for deafness. But why be so pessimistic, when the day is still young? In the white noise little tunes would be heard; sometimes nearby, and at other times echoing in the distance. Our own becoming would be a song, attracting, or turning others away.
And if we could teach ourselves to fine-tune our instrument to sound good to whomever came our way, would we be Siren's, or Satyr's?
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37249 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The resdessness of the goat-god and his sexual promiscuity are just as contrary to marriage as is the introversion that is incest. Thus Pan on the erotic level turns out to be an anti-Oedipus.
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Pan is called skirtôn (leaper) by an Attic vase inscription of the fifth century. Cornutus, author of a Stoic treatise On Greek Theology, would in the first century A.D. explain this by recourse to allegory: "His nature as a leaper and his love of play represent the eternal movement of the universe." Although this is obviously tendentious, it nevertheless interprets the traditional image of the god. Pan's dance, his animal leapings-about, are abundantly represented on Attic and Italian pottery of the classical era. It is sharply contrasted with the measured round dance of the nymphs as we see it on Attic reliefs and elsewhere.
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Philostratos the Sophist, in his Eikones, imagines the scornful attitude of the nymphs toward Pan, whose leapings know no bounds. The goat-god always escapes from the balance, which he nevertheless invites. He retains contact with that prior sphere where things originate, and actually with the farthest part of it, with the frontier where directions reverse. He is the son of Hermes, and in his own way also a god of passages; his laughter, his erotic passion, his motions as of a young animal inaugurate a new order of things. Without him, we may suspect, peace when it concluded conflict would come as a dead letter, not growing into new harmony, but rather structured into rigidity.
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The krotos (sound of clapping), gelôs (laughter), and cuphrosunë (good humor) thus appear as constitutive elements of panic ritual, and this not only in the sense that festive gestures were an ordinary part of most Greek sacrifices. The same point can be made about the dance, which played a fundamental part in the cult of Pan. The god made his presence felt in the excited and turbulent chorus of his votaries. A cer- tain balance is achieved by the festival, which brings together in ritual the two extremes of Pan's potency, panic and possession, but in such a way that each shows only its positive aspect: the god is present without alienation and the distance between god and worshipper is kept to a minimum. By panic, Pan atomizes a social group (an army), fragments it, destroys its solidarity; by possession, he evicts the individual from his own identity. In his dance and festival, the individual, while remaining himself, loses himself. This is perhaps what the Pharsalian inscrip- tion cited earlier means by "just excess." The chorus simultaneously displays social solidarity with the extrasocial: it communicates with na- ture and the gods. The Epidaurus Hymn reminds us that Pan's music and dance restore a threatened cohesion. Dance, laughter, and noise become, in the festival, signs of a recovered closeness.
Panic passion is unstable for the same reason that it is violent and futile: it is entirely opposed to marriage. Just as Pan's landscape is detached from the city and its agricultural land, so his erotic behavior remains detached from the institution that gives passion its acculturated form. Lucian finally makes this detachment explicit in one of his imaginary dialogues when Pan responds to his father Hermes: "Tell me, Pan, are you married yet?—Oh, no, father! I belong to Eros, after all, and I wouldn't want to get bound to one woman."
A solitary vagabond, a wanderer through snowy wastes, in frontier territories off the beaten track (mountains, gullies, rocks), Pan seems gripped by a constant and eccentric restlessness. The erotic life of this creature follows the pattern of his wanderings, and consists of a se- quence of passing encounters, furtive and violent couplings, often unnatural and altogether extramarital. An epigram by Agathias the Scholastic shows us how Pan's eroticism matches his landscape.
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The Homeric Hymn to Pan describes him in motion as "slayer of beasts" with a huntsman's keen eye- sight. Herding and hunting are two aspects of one function; this god who protects the balance of nature in the animal sphere also has in his care the limits set on activities that might threaten that balance.
Far from treasuring up goods in the manner of the chaste and laborious bee, Pan squanders, "sheds" his sound; he drowns the world with a siren's music. This seduction is first and foremost pastoral; the melodies sprung from the di- vine lips guide and fertilize the flocks.
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Let us here be content with one detail directly relevant to the Alexandrian stories just cited. When Pan pursues a girl, be she Echo or Syrinx, her song is preserved by Earth. It is the voice of one buried, which rises from a place beyond our reach, mediated by the echo or the reeds of the flute. Now the syrinx is sometimes an instrument that communicates with the other world: according to Euripides, the music of its mourning can reach as far as Hades. The Greek word synnx can, however, mean any long, hollow object. Although the meaning "Pan's flute" is attested as Homeric, the word is used in the Iliad to mean the sheath of a lance. In tragedy it can mean the axle nave of a chariot, in Polybius, a tunnel or mine. Syrinx is etymologically related to Sanskrit surüngä, "subterranean corridor."
Apollodorus's fragment makes a great point of the echo, a noise that comes we know not whence, but which we ascribe to Pan and the nymphs. The relation between panic and the echo is a fundamental theme. It brings into reliet one way in which the Greeks felt the presence of the god Pan. The god is manifest in the echo. Pausanias writes that the people around Menalia in Arcadia could hear Pan play the flute. More than one Greek mountain was haunted by Pan's music: Cythaeron (Euripides' Bacchae: 951fF), Lykaion (Pausanias 8.38.11); and also the vicinity of Apollonia in southern Illyria (Ampelius Liber memorialis 8.7.10). Pan is somewhere; he is very near, but invisible; he is a disembodied voice. A sound can be heard, but one cannot tell from where. ------------ Such places the neighbours imagine to be haunted by goat- foot satyrs and nymphs, and they say there are fauns, by whose night-wandering noise and jocund play they com- monly declare the voiceless silence to be broken, with the sound of strings and sweet plaintive notes, which the pipe sends forth touched by the player's fingers; they tell how the farmers' men all over the countryside listen, while Pan, shak- ing the pine leaves that cover his half-human head, often runs over the open reeds with curved lips, that the panpipes may never slacken in their flood of woodland music. ------------ The Greeks never deny the relation between Pan and panic. The his- torians, it is true, usually speak only of immediate and naturalistic causes, but their recurrent use of such phrases as "the disorder ascribed to Pan" and "the fear we call panic" shows that their prudent rationalism was not generally shared and had to deal with widely held beliefs. Fur- thermore, a review of the panics they report reveals that most of them took place somewhere near a sacred cave of Pan.
Panic is connected with echoes; this in turn brings us to the legend of the nymph Echo, the ever-mobile, ineluctable object of Pan's vain pursuit. The god in this legend is an object of repulsion, something to be shunned. Panolepsy, by contrast, negates distance; in a "seizure" the effect of Pan, even to the point of madness or paralysis, is essentially an aspect of his capacity to attract and bind through music. Pan reminds us of the nurse who shunned the god at his birth; panolepsy evokes, on the human level, the charm that spread through Olympus when the young Pan arrived. Should there not be a myth corresponding to that of Echo on the other, the panoleptic side, a myth where the goat-god's seductive powers would take erotic effect without rejection? As we know, Pan is usually unlucky in love (duserös). He is a goat- herd and does not understand love. We hear much of his attempts, but litde of his success.
"Certain texts show us a Pan capable not only of derangement but also of radical transformation, whereby the victim changes his nature. Nonnos mentions a Pan lussöön, "mad," who can shatter an enemy fleet with his sharpened claws (or horns, or hooves, θηγαλέοι,ς όνύχεσσυ). The participle lussöön relates this fury to personified madness, to the mythical Lyssa. This latter appears not infrequently in Greek mythology. She plays a terrifying and bewitching melody upon her flute, and thus transforms her victim into a mad dog or a furious wolf. Heracles, who suddenly begins to pant like a dog, sets off after his children in a hunt unleashed by the goddess; the Bacchae, styled by Euripides "the quick dogs of Lyssa," track Pentheus like their prey; Actaeon's dogs go mad and rend their master under the influence of this same Lyssa. It even seems that etymologically Lyssa means "she-wolf," in the sense of "she who turns one into a wolf." As Nonnos speaks of him, Pan shares the power of Lyssa."
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"An astonishing passage in Apuleius, which is also marked with the sign of Pan (the story is told by Syrinx), tells us to beware the ferocity of ewes at noon: "For when the sun is in his force, then seem they most dreadful and furious with their sharp horns, their stony foreheads, and their poisonous bites wherewith they arm them selves to the destruction of mankind." This madness, which is very like that which overtakes Pan himself in Nonnos, helps us to understand a speech by one of Theocritus's goatherds:
It is not fit, shepherd, not fit at noon for us To play the syrinx. We fear Pan. His hunt Is over now; he's tired and rests. Then is he touchy, And the bitter bile is sitting in his nose.
Bucolic ("of the cowherd") is here opposed to pastoral ("of the goat herd") (βονκολίκόν versus αίπολικόν). The dangers of noon relate to small animals, not to herds of cows. At noon one must avoid attracting Pan's attention by doing anything direcdy connected with his sphere: that of the syrinx and small livestock. Those who disregard this danger expose themselves to the anger of the god, to his madness. Noon is typically silent and motionless; it is the still point of the day. Pan is the god of noise and movement; if we wake him at this hour when he should be asleep, we are in effect inviting him to fill up this silence and stillness. Pan is a god who should not be approached in silence. Consequendy, noon is the moment of the day when there is the greatest danger that he may invade us, dispossess us. In his anger, Pan would be capable of transforming the shepherd, protector of the flock, into his worst enemy, the wolf. In his madness the goat-god himself and the flocks he tends could turn as violent as carnivores. In its extreme ver sion, panolepsy maddens its victim and makes of him something sub-human. To disturb Pan at noon is to flout a divine law (ου 0έμις, says Theocritus's goatherd)
The general similarity with Dionysiac mania should be noted. The latter breaks out in its most violent form when people refuse to recognize Dionysus's divinity or to accept his cult; its mythical victims are people like Pentheus or Lycurgus. In Euripides' play, the Bacchae themselves had at first refused to accept the new god.
Lyssa, whose power is close to Pan's, turns up also in the sphere of Dionysus (she can be seen in Aeschylus and Euripides, driving on the maenads). The Homeric Hymn to Pan takes note of the deep bond between the goat-god and the god of maenads by stressing Bacchus's particular pleasure in welcoming the newborn Pan to Olympus." [Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan]
Its this lussoon panic, lyssa-ish pan-ic, hypnotic violence that Heidegger attributes to the very heart of Dike - of the primal Logos:
Heidegger wrote:
"On the one hand deinon (looming, stirring) means the terrible, but not in the sense of petty terrors. ...The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overpowering sway which compels panic fear, true anxiety as well as collected, silent awe that vibrates with its own rhythm. The violent, the overpowering is the essential character of the sway [of being] itself. ..." [IM 149-150]
"The Horned God, under his European folk-iconography as the Devil, is often depicted as bearing a three-tined fork or trident in his hand, a distinctly non-biblical attribute. The meaning of the Devil's trident must be traced back into the prehistoric reaches of the indo-European migrations. The Wild Huntsman…
The name Rudra-Shiva is nowadays interpreted as meaning 'Wild' and is found in Latin as 'Rudis' - 'Rough, Wild' from the Indo-European *Rodas - 'Roughness, Wildness, Rawness'… a personification of divine ferocity and awesome energy.
He wields the Vajra-Trident called the Trishula whose three times represent creation, preservation, and dissolution or white clarity (Sattvas), red energy (Rajas) and black inertia (Tamas).
The trident borne by the Devil in European folk-imagery is a version of the stang… later metamorphosed into the familiar pitchfork…. witches' broom, etc.
An old German name for male Witches, 'Gabelreiterinnen', means the 'Pitchfork Riders', the masculine implement whose metal tines represent the old One's horns.
The Wild Hunt mythos contains the archetypel Mystery of Discarnation and its lord, the Hunstman of the Primal Midnight is the Great Initiator therein.
It is the Horned Master of the Hunt who summons forth and separates the Subtle Body, the vehicle of the Fetch, from the gross material body. His horn calls us forth into spirit to merge with the ecstatic horde of the dead who range between the cosmic realms at the dead of the night. The Wild Hunt, throughout the diversity of its folkloric forms, represents a sacred metaphor and pathway of initiatory death, ecstasies and the liberation of the soul upon the nocturnal journey to the regenerative epicenter of the Underworld…
The Wild Hunt embodies the secret of Going-Forth-By-Night, the transformation of the psyche from incarnate materiality into discarnate vision and spiritual flight.
The Horned One is thus… the true liberator of the soul from all limitation and the inductor into the wildest depths and vertiginous heights of the Wisdom." [Nigel Jackson, Masks of Misrule]
Sloterdijk wrote:
"If you turn to the vision of the world in the Middle Ages, you find the classical Aristotelian concept of spherology, according to which the earth is included as one of seven layers of cosmic, ethereal substances that carry the planet. The outermost boundary consists of what they call the Empyrean, the crystal heaven — or, according to Dante, the dwelling place of God and the source of light and creation. There is no real beyond.
This creates ample trouble for positioning God, saints, elected human beings, angels, and all those created in the middle, because they had to be located somewhere, in that vision of the world. The horror of a vacuum was so strong that they could not tolerate the idea of emptiness. Consequently, in this vision of the world everything is full. To be a human being means to live on the surface of the lowest sphere. Yet inside the earth, there are still more layers, down to where Satan has his residence. That’s what you learn by reading Dante — a Satan-centric view of the world.
The medieval vision of the world is Satanocentric."
Portal of the Vision...
Goux wrote:
"Oedipus's posture is a perversion of the Apollonian principle that enjoins self-knowledge. It is as if the Sphinx's conqueror was committing himself to the path of the wrong self-knowledge, knowledge that wounds the divine instead of honoring it. The Delphic instruction to "know thyself," a precept issuing from the center, the navel of the Earth, would concern the difficult access to a divine self within the soul, and not the specular view of one's mortal visage... in the specular inclination of Narcissus, as in a speculative orientation that is more intellectual than aesthetic. This would be the perversion of Oedipus-and of philosophy."[Oedipus, philosopher]
Compare the tri-dent, Goux, and Plato on the three states of sattvas, rajas, tamas or reason, will, passion:
Lyssa wrote:
"This is how Plato had used the word "hindered";
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"The soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception, that is to say when using the sense of sight or hearing or some other sense... is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable and wanders and is confused. But when returning into itself it reflects, then it passes into the other world, the region of purity and eternity and immortality and unchangeableness which are its kindred and with them it ever lives, when it is by itself and is not hindered." [Plato, Phaedo, 79bd]
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"The daimon, or divine part of the soul, dragged by the lower parts, flows helplessly from life to life in the stream of change, sloughing one shadowy body for another in the grip of appetite and ambition. So it continues until, through philosophical discipline, the lower parts are stilled and reason is set again upon the throne of the self. ...The world below has functioned as a field in which the soul could purge itself of its appetitive and ambitious parts." [Plato, Tim., 41d-44c]
the three psychic states - the stag-horn is the trident separating the immaterial from the material and gives birth to visions, to Daemonic Wisdom of the deepest depths... that is at the centre of the earth, satanocentric.
The very navel of the earth was regarded as Delphi. And the precept issuing from it was 'Know Thyself'... The meaning of the Daemon's Trident or the Stag-Horn or the Horned God - is Self-knowledge, a Sovereignty.
One part of the KT logo sideways even looks like the trident...
Hannibal:"I wanted to see how much like your father you were."
Abigail: "Oh my God."
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"You know, vampires have no reflection in a mirror? There's this idea that monsters have no reflection in a mirror. And what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. It's that, if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn't feel myself reflected at all … And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it." [Junot Diaz]
"If Hannibal Lector posits an disavowal of society by enacting its barbarity to excess, Jack Crawford is the unwitting gatekeeper of a submerged territory not yet lucid to the threat that walks amongst it. More an advocate of tough love to achieve a greater moral good, Jack Crawford seems to function as a surrogate for a kind of necessary but essentially benevolent paternalism to counteract the destructive chaos that Hannibal gleefully seeks to interject. The cold modernism of the FBI headquarters may produce an alienating affect upon initial encounters, but comes to offer merciful relief to the baroque madness of Hannibal’s interior and exterior playgrounds."
Crawford as the "gate-keeper" [cold FBI exteriors hiding warm "love" interiors] keeps Mirrors [Will] from reflecting that Hannibal [cold interior hiding warm exterior] tries to polish...
In the zombie world of hyper-narcissism, each mirroring the other in mindless consumption and losing in self-referentiality, it is a culture of no mirrors, the inability to find a reflect is what Hannibal must "mirror" to all the pigs and monsters who have lost all reflection...
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"The self’s encounter with the absolute is a process of existential reflection, rather than thought reflection. But reflection requires a mirror, a reflecting surface upon which the subject can focus the self. This is, from a psychological viewpoint, just the meaning of the ‘sign of contradiction’. A contradiction ‘attracts attention’ to itself:
"There is a something that makes it impossible not to look—and look, as one is looking one sees as in a mirror, one comes to see oneself…. A contradiction placed squarely in front of a person…is a mirror." (Practice, pp. 126–7)
The metaphor of the mirror is both instructive and potentially misleading. In medieval theology the metaphor of the mirror had stood for the central location of man in the divine cosmological plan. In the human soul was a model of the entire cosmic structure which man, as a microcosm, reflected internally. But Anti-Climacus has a very different notion of ‘reflection’ here. His is a religion of ‘hidden inwardness’ in a cosmos from which the human subject has become detached. There is no longer any separation between the mirror, the observer and the reflection. The peculiar uniformity and dullness of the modern world is here given a specifically religious development; the ‘compressed’ subjectivity of melancholy is rediscovered in the most ‘advanced’ of the pseudonyms. Anti-Climacus expresses the notion in the language of Either. ‘The contradiction confronts him with a choice, and as he is choosing, together with what he chooses, he himself is disclosed.’" [Harvei Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity]
In Roman mythology, Veritas is the daughter of Saturn/Kronos - it is a reflective truth born out of conscience and discipline and trials - which Saturn stands for. Saturnine truth is long-lasting, reflecting the Roman ideology of the enDuring Imperium. What is not easy to efface is also indicative of Melancholia, again a Saturnine aspect. [Durer's painting comes to mind].
In Greek mythology, Aletheia is the daugher of Jupiter/Zeus - it is a light that is Presencing, dis-closing - as in, reveals in its Expanse, in its Dis-closure - the wide space of jupiter reflecting the Greek ideology of the Polis. Jupiterian truth is born out Journeying and perception. It is alleviating - hence indicative of Laughter (olympian laughter of the gods) and the Sanguine - a Jupiterian state.
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"Jung - “It is the truth, a force of nature that expresses itself through me- I am only a channel- I can imagine in many instances where I would become sinister to you. For instance, if life had led you to take up an artificial attitude, then you wouldn’t be able to stand me, because I am a natural being. By my very presence I crystallize; I am a ferment. The unconscious of people who live in an artificial manner senses me as a danger. Everything about me irritates them, my way of speaking, my way of laughing. They sense nature.”
Goethe - “Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.”
“First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth. The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.”"
"She who burns brightly" has turned into the following comment that was made in the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.];
Lyssa wrote:
Baudrillard wrote:
"A new art of living, a new way of living, say the adverts -- a `switched--on' daily experience. You can shop pleasantly in a single air-conditioned location, buy your food there, purchase things for your flat or country cottage -- clothing, flowers, the latest novel or the latest gadget. And you can do all this in a single trip, while husband and children watch a film, and then all dine together right there.
The famous slogan, `Ugliness doesn't sell', is now passé. It might be replaced by: `The beauty of the setting is the prime requirement for happy living.'
The unprecedented comfort of strolling among shops whose tempting wares are openly displayed on the mall, without even a shop-window for a screen, the mall itself being a combination of the rue de la Paix and the Champs-- Elysées. Adorned with fountains, artificial trees, pavilions and benches, it is wholly exempt from changes of season or bad weather: an exceptional system of climate control, requiring 13 kilometres of air-conditioning ducts, makes for perpetual springtime.
Not only can you buy anything here, from shoelaces to an airline ticket; not only can you find insurance companies and cinemas, banks or medical services, bridge clubs and art exhibitions, but you are not a slave to the clock. The mall, like any street, is accessible night and day, seven days a week." [The consumer Society]
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"Insomnia incubates megalomania. The mighty caliph Harun al-Rashid walked through One Thousand and One Nights as an insomniac. Nero was insomniac. Hitler was insomniac. Cioran understood the connection: "You enter into a conflict with the whole world, with sleeping humanity. You no longer feel like one person among others, because others live unconsciously. One develops a demented pride. One tells oneself, 'My destiny is different, I know the experience of the uninterrupted vigil.' Only pride, the pride of a catastrophe, gives you courage then. One cultivates the extraordinarily flattering feeling of no longer being part of ordinary humanity."
"She who burns brightly" has changed into a perpetual Neon and 24 hour malls.
Sanguine Laughter has changed into the myth of modern [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
The meaning of what was considered "Wakefulness" has now taken on the import of "Sleeplessness".
The meaning of the Alertness of the Blond Beast has now inverted into the import of the Zombie - a creature that cannot close its eyes, although it is literally brain-dead.
In the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] thread, it was explored how the movie Fight Club tried to displace the nightly hours of Zombie consumption back to a Thymotic masculinity - fighting, self-assertion, rage...
Lyssa wrote:
"Against the Commodification of Rage and real social-packs, this paper sets out nicely wrt. the Vampire/Zombie consumption paradigm which usually happens at night, when labour time is over - exactly what the film reverses...
"In Fincher’s rendering, fighting is thus an area of human interaction that has not yet been “colonized” by the logic of profit and commodification of the system (Habermas 1987). This represents a stark refusal to play the “game between persons” of the post-industrial society, and as such represents an image — maybe one of the few possible portrayals in the contemporary juncture — of a group of men coming to acquire a measure of class consciousness. Not only that, insofar as fighting begins to occupy the very same hours of the day — and sometimes the same spaces such as bars — that were previously devoted to assiduous consumptive activity (going out to dance clubs, alcohol consumption, dining with a date, etc.) — and fighting only occurs at night during the film — it begins to take the place of consumption. The night, previously filled with the endless quest to find the self through consumption, comes to be dominated by a new quest to deny the parameters of this search by way of retreating from its requirements (i.e. keeping a nice, “well-kept” appearance)."
In Hannibal too, we see, the difference between his Wakefulness all night as compared to the Sleeplessness of those who hear the "lambs crying"... At night, the Wakeful Narcissism of Hannibal changes the collective sleepless Narcissistic psychosis of the Rude, of the base into a Design by morning. Into fe(a)stive Laughter by morning; the Zombies munch on mindlessly in their "happiness", the myth that 'all is well'.
In that same Underworld thread, I also remarked pertaining to Heraclitus' comments on Sleep and Wakefulness,
Lyssa wrote:
"Real Asceticism is Athleticism, or as Sloterdijk phrases it - its being "Sleepless in Ephesus" :
Sloterdijk wrote:
"If one had to say in one sentence what constituted thought in the Ionic era, the answer would be: thinking means being sleepless in Ephesus - sacrificing one's nights in Miletus. One can almost take this literally, as the proximity of the Ionians to the Chaldean traditions of nocturnal celestial observation may also have bred in them a tendency towards intellectual night work; the contempt of the waking for the sleeping belongs to the basic inventory of intellectual athletism. As Heraclitus' fragments tell us, the distinction between diurnal and nocturnal activity is meaningless for waking thought. The waking that is unified with thinking performs the only asceticism that can help the first philosophy get into shape. As waking thought, it is pure discipline - an acrobatics of sleeplessness. If it does not virtually unify the thinker with the ever-wakeful logos, it certainly brings them close together. It is no coincidence that some of Heraclitus' harshest words deal with the dependence of ordinary people on sleep. For him, hoi polloi are none other than the people who do not awaken to the shared (koinon) in the morning, but instead remain in their private world, their dreamy idiocy, as if they had some special knowledge (jdian phr6nesin). These are the same who also sleep through religious matters, as it were - they think they are purifying themselves by soiling themselves with blood, 'just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud'. Trapped in their own worlds, people do not hear what the non-sleepers have to say to them. If one speaks to them of the all-pervading logos, they merely shrug their shoulders. They see nothing of the One, even though they are submerged in it. They act as if they were seeking God, yet he is standing in front of them."
The Xt. Zombies are the ones who sleep through the night and never awaken in the day, the Jewish Vampires are the ones who sleep through the day forced into their own private worlds unable to bear the harsh reality of the day. As regards the werewolf, Jung's essay on Wotan as the restless, never sleeping undercurrent flowing through 'night' and 'day', the low and high cycles of a culture with periodic flashes fits not only with Sloterdijk's phrase "sleepless in ephesus", but also heraclitus' own saying Dionysos and Hades are the same. The hyper-inflation of the ego in Xt. characterizes its Narcissism, and the self-splitting compartmentalization of the actor in the jew characterizes its Schizophrenia."
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in regard to Sleep and A-letheia:
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I. 3 "But other men are oblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep."
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"I. 2 Although all things come to pass in accordance with this account (logos), men are like the untried when they try such words and works as I set forth, dis- tinguishing each according to its nature (physis) and telling how it is."
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"I (D. 1). 1 Although this account (logos) holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend, both before hearing it and once they have heard..."
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"II (D. 34) Not comprehending, they hear like the deaf. The saying bears wit- ness to them: absent while present."
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"V (D. 71—3) Marcus Aurelius: [Always bear in mind what Heraclitus said . . . And bear in mind the man who forgets where the way leads, and that 'they are at odds with (diapherontai) that with which they most constantly associate' (the logos which controls all things), and that what they meet with every day seems strange to them, and that one should not act and speak like men asleep.]"
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"VI (D. 89) Plutarch: [Heraclitus says that the world (kosmos) of the waking is one and shared but that the sleeping turn aside each into his private world.]"
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"XV1 (D. 107) Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls (psychai) do not understand the language (literally, 'if they have barbarian souls').
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"XVII (D. 19) Not knowing how to listen, neither can they speak."
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"XVIII (D. 40) Much learning does not teach understanding (noos)."
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"XXXII (D. 112) Thinking well (sophronein) is the greatest excellence and wisdom: to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature (physis)."
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"XXIX (D. 116) It belongs to all men to know (ginoskein) themselves and think well (sophronein, keep their thinking sound)."
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"XXXIII (D. 93) The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals but gives a sign."
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"XC (D. 26) A man strikes (haptetai) a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched. Living, he touches {haptetai) the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches {haptetai) the sleeper."
The Sleeplessness of the Zombie is the epitome of Modern Oblivion - Lethe,,, from which derives the word Lethargy.
The Vitality of the Blond Beast is everything that is opposed to every kind of Modern Lethargy. According to Nietzsche, it was Xt. that Was and ushered in the religion of Lethargy, of comfort, of security. Truth as Security, as Stiffness, as the Safe-unshakeable otherworldliness - all expressions of Zombie Lethe-argy..., or even to rhyme with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], we might say, of Vampire Lethe-Orgy. 24 hour malls...
"priestly medication doesn’t address underlying cause: alleviates, consoles suffering, symptoms, weariness. ...to fight dominating lethargy, ‘holy men’ ¯ awareness of life, hypnotic dampening of sensibility: no wanting, no wishing, no loving, no hating, no revenge, no work, loss of self (psychological), thus ridding themselves of deep depression, a mystica unio with God achieved, like deep sleep (!), no consciousness of what is outside nor within, hypnotic feeling of nothingness, absence of suffering" [N. in GM]
Examining this Xt. Lethargy further, we come across [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.];
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"Acedia is a feeling of lethargy around good intentions, a failing of the ability to care enough about oneself and the world. The word "acedia" derives from Greek for lack of care. The root of "care" means to lament or cry out. "Acedia" is a word of sadness and loneliness."
Of course, by "care", in Xt. it referred to the inability to care for oneself as in not being able to care for one's neighbour, one's God, one's duty, one's morals... it was highest sin.
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"Madness hangs around melancholy from the beginnings of the idea two and a half millennia ago. The wavering boundary between what might be considered simply a mood, or a disposition, and a more serious disorder has never been resolved.
Early investigations of melancholy were based on humoral theory, and melancholy was simply one amongst four types of humoral imbalance, rather than any exceptional or alarming condition. Historians of medicine point to concerns, even amongst the ancients, about distinguishing mere temperaments from serious disorders. In the diagnosis of a ‘melancholic’, what was required was the identification of a disproportionate expression of sadness, for example in the magnitude or sustained nature of grief, or in wretchedness without a normal cause. This foundational judgment, rooted in the words of Hippocrates (‘If fear or sadness last for a long time it is melancholia’), persists to the present day, almost word for word, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.
The emphasis was on the treatment of humoral imbalances, eliminating the black bile by bathing and other means, for example, and remedies such as coitus were suggested because they ‘dissipated fixed ideas of the soul and calmed ungovernable passions’.
The Byzantine Paul of Aegina noted that ‘Melancholy is a disorder of the intellect without fever’, and he identified a range of symptomatic behaviours of those afflicted, including prophesying, suffering from delusions of being animals, and identifying as an earthen-vessel. This latter delusion is believed to derive from black bile’s alliance with ‘earth’, and occurs also in Arabic writings around this time, as a feeling of being made of clay, which again produces anxiety in the sufferer, and fear of being broken.
Later medieval times continued the legacies inherited from the ancients, including the root idea of ‘fear and sadness’ being out of proportion or without cause, but added to this was the idea of acedia – or what is sometimes termed‘sloth’. Monks in particular were afflicted by acedia; it was an occupational hazard. Their necessary detachment from the ordinary world of daily activities in order to release them to a life of asceticism and dedication to prayer meant that monks sometimes descended into a state of torpor. This was not only seen as a type of melancholic sickness, but also a deadly sin, persisting today as the sin of Sloth.
For Samuel Johnson, melancholy had no positive dimensions, no aspect of genius, and was a sign of insanity. He believed melancholy to be the cause of fixating on one ‘notion or inclination’ so that it ‘takes such an entire possession of a man’s mind, and so engrosses his faculties, as to mingle thoughts perhaps he is not himself conscious of with almost all his conceptions, and influence his whole behavior.’" [Jacky Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
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"The melancholy of boredom, acedia, grew out of the taedium vitae of ancient times, the ennui of world weariness and despair at life’s tedium. The need to escape from taedium vitae was one of the few permissible reasons for suicide amongst the Romans, recognising the burden of such an emotion. Taedium vitae affected both the body and the mind.The soul’s illness was manifested somatically, in physical unwellness.On the tomb of the Roman Marcus Pomponius Bassulus is an inscription which explains his suicide as a consequence of this physical and psychical affliction: ‘But vexed of anxieties of a hardpressed mind as well as by numerous pains of the body, so that both were extremely disgusting, I procured for myself the death I wished for.’
During the Dark Ages, in the time of the Desert Fathers – the monks that were stationed in the deserts of Egypt – acedia was identified as a spiritual illness. The rigours of asceticism and devotion to prayer made for a very disciplined and isolated life. Living as hermits, they were required to rise at 4am for prayers, and to spend their days in solitude. Evagrius Ponticus, one of the desert monks based in the Desert of Cells, was conflicted over his occasional reluctance to carry out these rigorous and disciplined tasks, and was dogged by a sense of lassitude and psychic exhaustion. In the fourth century John Chrysostom described the plight of a monk suffering from monastic melancholy, with the symptoms of ‘terrifying nightmares, speech disorders, fits, faints, unjustified feelings of hopelessness about his salvation, and being tormented by a prompting to commit suicide.’
Another of the Desert Fathers, John Cassian, described ‘accidie’ as the ‘midday’ or ‘noonday demon’ (or the ‘sixth’ hour as it was to monks), the time when tiredness and heat were at their most intense, manifesting themselves in restlessness, a sense of time dragging, loneliness and idleness. Psalm 91:6 warns against the ‘destruction that wasteth at noonday’. Cures were perseverance, courage, or the redoubling of efforts at prayer, all targeted towards increased spiritual fortitude.
Acedia originally encompassed both sadness and lassitude, or more precisely what Jackson describes as two triads: sorrow-dejection-despair and neglect-idlenessindolence. Acedia was originally used interchangeably with another term, tristitia. Over time acedia took on the negative connotations of despondency, and tristitia the positive ones of noble suffering.
Sloth and laziness persisted as an auxiliary component of melancholy, and became associated with the ‘great ennui’ of modernity, what Schopenhauer saw as the corrosive force of the modern age. This return to the ancient’s sense of taedium vitae appears in Cheyne’s writings on the ‘English malady’, where he identified Luxury and Laziness as the causes of the growth in nervous disorders, particularly melancholia." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
Acedia leads from the immanence and introspection of the Romanticists to the industrial Lethe-argic dis-membering, dis-connection, a rootless wandering Zombiehood...
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"Melancholy was also the flavour of the moment in Germany, epitomised by Goethe’s ‘Young Werther’, who was possessed with love melancholy, obsessed with death, and ultimately committed suicide. As well as love melancholy, the heightened subjectivity of the age is also expressed in feelings for nature, and the sadness that is immanent in one’s surroundings. The beauty of loneliness and isolation is central to this time, and the eighteenth-century Swiss writer Johann Georg Zimmerman described how this ‘sort of sweet melancholy overcomes us in the lap of rural tranquillity when viewing all of nature’s beauty [and]… solitude on occasion, but of course not always, transforms deep despondency into sweet melancholy.’ And the German Idealist, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling wrote in his Weltalter, or‘World Age’, of the ‘veil of melancholy which is spread over the whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life’. The yearning for the infinite impels this sense of melancholy, the ‘unappeasable grief ’of the universe.
As modernity develops through the rise of industrialisation and progress, it is a different melancholy that is the object of the hunt. Not the spirited melancholy of the Romantics, nor that of an affective relationship with Nature, nor the ornamental melancholy adopted by the aristocracy as a decoration for their souls; here it is a bleak sensibility borne of the individual’s place in the world – a sense of abandonment. Dislocation and detachment emerges at all levels, from the individual to society at large in the face of, as Washington Irving termed it,‘the melancholy progress of improvement’, or as EM Cioran remarked of the West, ‘Machines and effort and that galloping melancholy – theWest’s last spasm.’ The Kantian Sublime, Hegelian ‘alienation’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘dread’ all circle about this schism in the connection of self to space, and are all inflected with degrees of melancholy.
The emergence of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ – or selfhood and alterity – as the underpinnings of human existence manifested the disconnection of the individual from the broader cultural setting.Yet this is a solitude which does not have the ‘sweet melancholy’ of Zimmerman, but more a ‘bleak melancholy’ which is inflicted rather than sought out. It is within this context, this cleaving, that modern psychoanalytical thought begins to develop and, with it, the Freudian notion of melancholy." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
And Anomie,
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"Related to acedia’s melancholic reaction against life’s strictures, anomie is a modern form of alienation from the world.The isolation of anomie stems from a sense of displacement, whether being literally removed from one’s home, or from feeling unconnected to the placelessness of contemporary existence. Early twentieth-century sociological theorist Emile Durkheim related the anxiousness of anomie to the individual’s feeling of failure in the face of society’s expectations, what he called a ‘normlessness’ in that individuals couldn’t reach what were perceived as norms.
Throughout the twentieth century the plight of the anomic has escalated with the increasing levels of affluence, acutely captured in the term‘affluenza’, defined as ‘a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste.’
Individuals manipulated by advertising into the need to have material goods, to achieve a particular status and so on, are driven towards the melancholic anomie of feeling alienated and displaced from a world beyond their means. Implicated in this is the ‘culture of happiness’, the expectation that,with sufficient investment, it is possible to bypass anything which might make us feel sad.However, this simply adds to the anomie.
In his commentary on the exhibition Mélancolie: Genie et Folie en Occident, historian Georges Minois pointed out the predicament of a ‘society of consumption and immediate satisfaction’ full of ‘compulsively happy people’,who feel obliged to be ‘optimists by command’. He suggests that this pursuit of happiness is in fact disabling, where the constant striving for a flawless existence has the opposite effect, making people vulnerable to the ‘democratic form of melancholy’ – depression. Anomie as affluenza is what Hamilton and Denniss call ‘luxury fever’. It is the flipside to Cheyne’s connection between luxury and laziness, as here it is the unrequited desire for luxury, rather than its numbing excesses,which is the seat of melancholy." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
"The daze of nothingness our song. One task is done, another comes, Mindless motion, brain is numb.
The facts are clear, their value not, We watch without a sense of plot. We go to sleep, we come awake, We move our feet, for motion's sake.
The picture's there, we grab the phone. We then remember that they're gone. The crying's stopped, that part is past, Now strangeness joins the acting cast.
A moment in, a moment out, A mystery, without a doubt. Perplexing incongruity, Unreason near insanity.
"Vanity of vanities," the preacher says, And glances at the stoppéd clock." [Ken Schenck]
In the Bhagavad Gita and Plato's structure of the Psyche, Lethargy is attributed to Sanskrit Tamas [Inertia] and Greek [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] respectively.
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"Epithymia - This is the level of desire and instinct, and is the lowest level of soul expression. It is also concerned with basic survival needs and appetites, and finds expression through the two lowest chakras: the Generative and Root centers.
Obvious parallels can be drawn between Plato's three levels of soul expression and the three Gunas of yogic philosophy, as well as the ego, id and superego of Freudian psychology. The correspondences are:
Nous, Logos - the Sattva Guna and the superego. Thymos - the Rajas Guna and the ego. Epithymia - the Tamas Guna and the id." [[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
The Tamasic or the Epithymic is Appetitive; in the higher souls, it takes the form of an intellectual brooding, while in the lower, on sex, flesh, consumption. It is a brooding nature that is heavy, dark, melancholic, and feeds on inert substances that make one feel dull - like the "fullness" one feels after stuffing a McDonald's or such "fast" food.
It slows down the appetite. It increases fatigue. A sleeplessness. Dark circles. Heavy open eye-lids that can't close, is too tired/zombified to close.
Contrast Hannibal's "Wakefulness" here as opposed to "Sleeplessness" - all the care and attention to the skillful gourmet that he puts in his mouth. [Note: He too feeds on rotten, inert flesh that has been stored for days and months and years even... - there are two kinds of melancholy - that of the Zombie, as well as that of the Han - inert composure on the out while furious activity on the inside].
Brooding is also a Brewing.
Intellectually or otherwise.
From Aletheia to Ale. Among the Germanics, Ale was the rune of memory. Wotan was the god of ale/mead and poetic inspiration. This has a deeper history and esoterism among the Indo-Germanics and the science [sapia] of the soul is called "Madhu-vidya" - Mead-Knowledge, just as among the Greeks nek-tar etymologically meant "Overcoming[tar] death[nek]. Honey was the food of the Gods... the food of immortality. The thick concentrate sap was regarded as stored in the highest seat of the head - hence the worship of the Sun-head in the sky, and many decapitated gods among the I.E.s.
Hannibal feeds on the liver, fava beans as well as the Ale - the Chianti.
The Liver is the most regenerative organ which the I.Es attributed under Jupiter. Thriving on the Liver signals his Immortality, his God-Likeness.
To the Pythagoreans, beans symbolized the spirit of one's ancestors, and eating them was a grave error. To feed on them perhaps hints at giving birth to one's own self. "My action is my womb." [Buddha]
Ale is a re-membering. Ale-theia...
Memory is the perception of a pattern, a design. To devise a design is a Metis - which has its roots in memory.
But what Metis is characterized by is a quickness, a dexterity, a flexibility, the Oblique, adjusting itself to a world of Becoming... This Robust vitality that typifies Hannibal or the Blond beast is the opposite of all Lethe-argy and Lethe-orgy.
It is the possession of Great Health, of Laughter - merry Ale-theia,, a sanguine A-letheia. This self-care is an active resolution all the way to Death, and doesn't fear Oblivion. Food is gratitude to All memory, to affirmation of All of one's life.
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"Then this would be our last supper. ...of this life." [Hannibal, 2.13]
Hannibal's 'Last Supper' is the opposite of the Xt. one, where the foreseen betrayal and Lethe-argy needs to be "punished", for fear of being forgotten. Christ must be crucifed to remember who one is. - Muhlman's MSC thesis. Eating his flesh and drinking his blood as sacrament is actually drinking from the Lethe...
"Whether due to diagnostic inflation or a demonstrable psychopathological change in the population, the concern is that the creative capacity of melancholy will be suppressed because of the fear of madness, and along with the elimination of ‘bad melancholy’ comes the loss of the ‘good melancholy’ of genius and beauty.
Throughout melancholy’s history the conundrum has been detected at various points on this circle – in some cases melancholy is seen as a cause of genius, and in others as a consequence of it. Irrespective of which is the cause and which the effect, the introspection of melancholy in the context of ‘genius’ is associated with unusual insight, in sharp distinction from that particular thread of the discourse which connects melancholy self-absorption with sloth, or acedia. The very same things which might be considered signs of madness, then, can also be interpreted as genius.
This paradox of melancholy and genius was first captured in Aristotle’s ‘Problem XXX,I’,18 which begins with the perplexing question,‘Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics, and some of them to the extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?’
The necessary balance needed to ensure a melancholic is not a freak but a genius is speculated to come from the correct amount of melancholy humour – black bile – and that it must be of an average temperature, not too hot, nor too cold. The melancholic genius navigates a path between the two great abysses of depression and recklessness. If the black bile is too cold the resulting melancholia is one of dullness, and too hot brings about melancholic mania – in between is the melancholic mean, the condition of genius. ]The Daemon's Balance]
The 1795 edition of Attic Nights describes how ‘the waywardness of disposition which is called melancholy’ is something which does ‘not happen to little and weak minds; but there is something of elevated affection in it.’ It also aligns melancholy with the idea of ‘frenzy’ and still further with the ‘highest spiritual exaltation’. [Wotan - the berserker god of the Blond Beast, the god of "poetic frenzy and inspiration" which suddenly "seizes" and "transports" one - the "wild hunt" takes you off somewhere...]
Albertus Magnus’s work on Aristotle’s ‘Problem XXX,I’ which re-awakened interest in the connections, re-stating the melancholic’s outstanding qualities as good memory and astuteness. The two poles of this conundrum are positioned around the heavy gravitas of the saturnine temperament, and the contrasting ‘spiritus phantasticus’ – the imaginative soul, the elusive creative spark of genius itself.
Philosopher Marsilio Ficino was a key influence on the development of ideas on genius and melancholy. In his De vita libri tres, or ‘Three Books on Life’, he brought together the opposing traditions of furor melancholicus and furor divinus, joining Aristotelian melancholy with Plato’s concept of mania, the sacred fury or madness of creativity and inspiration.
Dürer’s image of Melencolia I, 1514, is perhaps the most iconic image of melancholy genius, expressing the ambivalence of scholasticism in opposition to sloth. On one hand the figure of the angel appears sunk in contemplative thought, yet around her lie the tools of knowledge, as though abandoned.These twin forces of melancholy are the ‘typus Acediae’ and the ‘typus Geometriae’.‘Acediae’ is slothfulness, and ‘Geometriae’ is not simply geometry as such, but the broader idea of the scholasticism of the liberal arts, of knowledge and learning. In Dürer’s image, however, the idleness is not sloth-like, but contemplative and preoccupied, reflecting his own melancholic traits. The angel is a symbol of a melancholic ‘winged genius’ who embodies melancholy’s associations with humanitarian concerns, noble solitude..." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
The Dandy like Hannibal is a melancholic... a Han-Voyeur who perceives and surveys everything with inert composure. The Voyeur relishes everything slowly, with delay, cloaked in a silence of his own, and his silence cloaked in clear speech - [the Noble's Cunning];
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"Despite the impact of Freud’s conceptualisation of melancholia at this time, Walter Benjamin eschewed these fresh psychological ideas, and instead reclaimed the astrological legacy, declaring:‘I came into the world under the sign of Saturn – the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays…’ Benjamin was a major theorist of melancholy, notably in his 1928 work on German Trauerspiel (tragedy or literally ‘mourning play’), and his vast but never completed Passagenwerk, known in English as The Arcades Project. There was a seamlessness between his own internal condition and the topics that he applied himself to, excavating ‘the Saturnine acedia’ from the baroque theatre, revealing the presence of melancholy in literature as in Proust’s ‘loneliness which pulls the world down into its vortex’...
The motif of head-in-hands has a lengthy ancestry, and is found as much in the mourners in Egyptian sarcophagi relief images, as in medieval expressions of sorrow. The gesture represents a triad of ‘grief, fatigue and meditation’, the cornerstones of melancholic demeanour. In both Dürer’s and Van Gogh’s images, the fist is clenched, and held against the head. The clenching of a fist had earlier been considered the sign of particular mental afflictions but here, held close to the head itself, becomes expressive of the anguish of the melancholic, fraught with the paradoxes and tensions of madness, genius, beauty, and so on. As Van Gogh wrote of his portrait of Dr Gachet, he showed him,‘Sad but gentle, yet clear and intelligent.’" [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
Hannibal and his nostalgia of what-once-was, of his "backwards-looking" is a heightened consciousness, the grace of which is what strikes us as the "Beauty" of the melancholic... there is power in his ability to prevent things from sliding into 'oblivion'... Hannibal is the most a-Lethargic;
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"The sixth-century philosopher Boethius observed that,‘The beauty of things is fleet and swift, more fugitive than the passing of flowers…’ The recognition of the beauty of things about to disappear, of the intensification of beauty at the approach of death, is a melancholic species called ubi sunt, Latin for ‘where are?’ The beauty of the ubi sunt moment is a version of nostalgic yearning and backwards-looking wonder at the fragility of what comes to pass.
Kant relates the idea of sensation back to the humoral tradition, aligning aesthetic appreciation – or lack of it – with each of the four temperaments. The phlegmatic is considered to have a deficiency of finer sensation and a comparative apathy, and is dismissed as having no place in his study of aesthetics. The choleric, too, does not have a deep appreciation of aesthetics, tending to overemphasise the moral consequences of a fine feeling, but only at the level of the gloss. More in keeping with the idea of the beautiful is the character of the sanguine,who is not onedimensional in his or her aesthetic appreciation, but is sensitive to the varied circumstances. The sanguine has adoptive virtues, which are the mark of nobility and compassion.
Kant makes a distinction between these adoptive virtues, which are beautiful and charming, and the genuine virtues, described as sublime and venerable. It is with the genuine virtues that he associates melancholy. With a ‘profound feeling for the beauty and human nature and a firmness and determination of the mind’ the melancholy frame of mind is distinguished from the ‘changeable gaiety’ and inconstancy of a ‘frivolous person’. It is gentle and noble, and characterised by the sense of awe in apprehending a danger to be overcome and the aspiration towards self-conquest. Melancholy is therefore associated with ‘beauty’ in its generalised sense, and also with Kant’s particular category of the Sublime. A Sublime sadness must be founded on ideas and could be found in a place of retreat, a place for contemplative solitude. As philosopher Dylan Trigg points out, this sense of the self in solitude is a primarily melancholy trait, ‘The awareness of the self and so necessarily the Other is… accentuated in the melancholic: he is aware of all that he isn’t; and the sublime is always a contrast between microscopic and macroscopic polarities – the greater this is realised, the higher the sublimity.’" [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
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"Time did reverse. The teacup that I shattered did come togheter." [Hannibal, 2.13]
The Nostalgia of Hannibal, or Achilles, or the Blond Beast's is not a dry-cold one, but one of "Furor" - of heated "Inspired Memory", a Seething, a boiling... Hamlet's Brooding contemplation and procastination is a Furious-lethargy, of trying to think, to undertsand, to analyze, to Devise a Design, a metis;
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"Nostalgia holds a particular affinity with melancholy. Like melancholy, nostalgia was also considered an illness, the disease of homesickness. Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, invented the word in the late seventeenth century, as a hybrid of the Greek words for returning home (nostos) and pain or longing (algos). Despite its construction, Hofer’s ‘nostalgia’ meant not the pain of returning home, but the anguish of being away, of being apart from one’s place in the world.
In The Art of Memory, Frances Yates makes the connection between melancholia and memory, noting that melancholics are best able to retain memory ‘owing to their hard and dry constitution’. The medieval philosopher and theologian Albertus Magnus explained that, based upon the theory of the four humours, melancholy could produce good memories ‘because the melancholic received the impressions of images more firmly and retained them longer than persons of other temperaments’.
It is not an ordinary ‘dry-cold’ melancholy which is associated with memory, and specifically ‘the temperament of reminiscibilitas’, or reminiscence, but a ‘dry-hot’ melancholy, intellectual and inspired." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
"Shakespeare was an astute observer of melancholy and is believed to have studied Timothy Bright’s protopsychiatric Treatise of Melancholy (1586) in forming the character of Hamlet. In his soliloquy Hamlet offers a small catalogue of melancholy traits, clothing and demeanour:
"’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods and shapes of grief, That can denote me truly…"
In particular, Hamlet announces two specific colourings of melancholy, inky and solemn black, in a description which also evokes the more recent dark and melancholy figure of Batman. The ‘dark’ version of Batman – as opposed to the commercialised television incarnation – is suffused with a tragic sense, with his darkened face and black cape. His brooding introspection, contrasted with ‘heroic’ qualities, makes him the epitome of melancholy, a latter-day Prince of Denmark.
As Jean Clair observed,‘The measurement of space and time is an infinite project, inspiring those who undertake it with a feeling of powerlessness, which leads to melancholy.’ Anything involving collection invites the fear of finality, and the melancholic needs closure to be eternally delayed, as Jean Baudrillard puts it,‘The collection is never really initiated in order to be completed…Whereas the acquisition of the final item would in effect denote the death of the subject.’" [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
Yet, this kind of fear of recollection of the Batman is the very opposite of both Hannibal and Hamlet. Procrastination to endless deference is the mark of the apocalyptic mentality of the Xt. that Batman displays... Mirrored in the melancholia of the "Wandering Jew" and such figures in "exile" exemplified by the comedian and the clown - why Jews excel here;
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"In Chaplin ‘a sort of tristesse, a melancholy’ which epitomises the undercurrent of sadness within the role of the clown, in miming, and in slapstick. As the figure marooned on the outside of society, clowns become symbolic of latent tragedy – of imminent disaster. Søren Kierkegaard’s tale of the clown in the theatre captures this melancholic predicament, of how being the eternal funny guy draws a veil over anything possibly serious.When a fire broke out backstage in the theatre, Kierkegaard recounts, ‘the clown came out to warn the public, they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater.’ More recently, the melancholy clown is resurrected in Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s conceptual art.
In her discussion of Rondinone’s clown works, Christine Ross explains how the tragic destiny derives from the condition of ‘not being seen’ – of the separation and disengagement between the clown and the viewers. The clowns’ attempts at not being seen, as an affected oblivion, are reminiscent of strategies of camouflage, of disappearing into the background. But as is typical of melancholy, a paradox always ensues: the clown, at the same time as camouflaging himself, becomes an exhibitionist.
He wants to display his hidden qualities, he wants to be seen not being seen.This resonates with the way that early twentieth-century French sociologist Roger Caillois connected psychasthenia – a psychological disorder characterised by phobias and obsession – with the theory of camouflage. The famous essay by Callois,‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, brings clowning to mind, in the work of the mimic. By trying not to be seen, while still wanting to be seen, clowns set up an irony, where it is their camouflage that makes them vulnerable, like the insects in Caillois’ essay, where:
"there are cases in which mimicry causes the creature to go from bad to worse: geometer-moth caterpillars simulate shoots of shrubbery so well that gardeners cut them with their pruning shears.The case of the Phyllia is even sadder: they browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves…"
So, the face of melancholy, of the clowns, the weavers, and the scholars, is one which at once conceals and reveals the place of the individual in their world. Often contemplative, with furrowed brow and darkened face, the melancholic demeanour is detached, introspective. The typical melancholic tasks might involve activities of great detail and even greater infinitude, and a contradictory relationship with one’s surroundings, like the melancholy of camouflaged insects themselves,who graze upon one another as a consequence of their own disguise." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
From the Clown to the Clone... - Anarcho-Prmitivism and Transhumanism are both expressions of Xt. on either side of the "coming-now" as the perpetual deference - note here the "disconnect" with the present, no re-membering in the seeming remembrance that persists like a rootless zombie - the Lethargy of life;
Transcendence,
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"With parallels in the French mal du pays (country sickness) and the German Heimweh (home-pain), nostalgia is a form of bitter-sweetness, a love of longing, a joyous pain. Like lovesickness’s embracing of the agonies of unrequited love, homesickness revels in the impossibility of returning to a particular moment. The impossibility of actually returning to the past, a lost object which most certainly cannot be regained, casts nostalgia as melancholy par excellence.
Nostalgia is a melancholic prolonging, a retardation of closure – nostalgics do not seek a cure, they want the pleasure of the pain of separation. After all, as Immanuel Kant advised, the Heimkunft, or homecoming, is often ‘very disappointing’ because in the intervening time that very place may have been ‘wholly transformed’ – to return to that exact place is impossible.
In echoing melancholy’s fixation on a single object, nostalgia’s obsession with a particular time and place is able to block out all connection to the present.This impossibility allows the moment to persist untrammelled amidst the contemporary. For this reason nostalgia is often seen as a reaction to progress, a yearning for simpler times, a longing for that which has been sacrificed.
Nostalgia’s sentimentalising is also a process of editing. In yearning for that which has past, only the positive aspects are recalled, amplified, valorised, while the negative dimensions of that previous time fly under the radar. Places are often fragmentary, discontinuous...
As part of nostalgia’s editing of place and time there is an element of imaginative invention, of wistful reconstruction. Things which may have been negative in the past can cross over into a positive recollection, so that memories even of war can be suffused with a golden glow.
The deprivations of Communist East Germany fade in the face of a species of nostalgia called ostalgie, a hybrid of the German Ost (east) and nostalgie. The pre-1989 reunification abbreviation of the DDR, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik or German Democratic Republic, is now a sought-after emblem on t-shirts and other memorabilia.
And it is not just those who experienced the communist regime that seek these items. One of the curious things about nostalgia is that it sometimes involves borrowing the memories of others. Just like the DDR emblem,CCCP – the Russian form of the former USSR – is also in vogue around the world. And the imagery of the hammer and sickle printed on a t-shirt is nostalgically worn in the USA, for example, with all recollections of the schism of the ColdWar conveniently consigned to the rubble of memory." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
And, Immanence,
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"The parallel with love melancholy was captured by the tenth-century Arab physician Isaac (Ishaq ibn Imran),who also described a variety of religious melancholy, observing that, ‘There are many holy and pious men who become melancholy owing to their great piety and from fear of God’s anger or owing to their great longing for God until this longing masters and overpowers the soul; their whole feeling and thoughts are only of God, the contemplation of God, His greatness and the example of His perfection. They fall into melancholy as do lovers and voluptuaries, whereby the abilities of both soul and body are harmed, since the one depends on the other.’
One of the most profound moments of religious melancholy was the experience of Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross. Dark Night of the Soul was written while he was incarcerated in a small cell, and embodies the yearning, through spiritual attainment, for a union with God." [Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy]
