More from the Dune series. Frank Herbert said in interviews that he used to work in political journalism, and was witness to a lot of the devious power plays made by the super rich and powerful. Doubtless that's where much of the power of the novels comes from--the ugly truths the stories deal with, the cynicism and ruthlessness of the characters, and this sense of tragic necessity in order to survive. The characters are always learning tough lessons that frame them within vast timelines where their individual lives don't count for much except as pieces in someone else's game.
Also, I see a narrative of Hellenic virtue vs. Judaic power (or the effects of it) in the stories. For example, the main protagonists in the novels are the Atreides and their descendants, who explicitly trace their ancestry back to the mythical king Atreus. They are known as natural leaders, having great talent in reading people and commanding. But they are also known for their strict code of honor. Throughout the books their bloodline, their genetic legacy, is always seen as an asset to anyone who can get their hands on it.
From the fifth book, Heretics of Dune, this passage describes a villainous old woman and one of her minions, trying to win over an Atreides descendant named Teg. What (or who) does this bring to mind??
Quote :
The eyes were deeply set green ice. Her nose was an elongated beak whose shadow touched thin lips and repeated the sharp angle of the chin. A black skullcap almost covered her gray hair.
[Teg then greets her.]
"So you recognize this as a bank." Her voice carried only a slight trembling.
"Of course."
"There are always means of transferring large sums or selling power," she said. "I do not speak of the power that runs factories but of the power that runs people."
"And that usually passes under the strange names of government or society or civilization," Teg said.
"I suspected you would be very intelligent," she said. She pulled out a chair and sat but did not indicate that Teg should seat himself. "I think of myself as a banker. That saves a lot of muddy and distressful circumlocutions."
[Teg goes on to insult her, and she responds:]
"I like it that you can command but you cannot command me! You command the muck and that is the only function we have for such as you."
"The muck?"
She waved a hand, a negligent motion. "Out there. You know them. Their curiosity is narrow gauge. No great issues ever enter their awareness."
"I thought that was what you meant."
"We work to keep it that way," she said. "Everything goes to them through a tight filter, which excludes all but that which has immediate survival value."
"No great issues," he said.
"You are offended but it doesn't matter," she said. "To those out there, a great issue is: 'Will I eat today?' 'Do I have shelter tonight that will not be invaded by attackers or vermin?' Luxury? Luxury is the possession of a drug or a member of the opposite sex who can, for a time, keep the beast at bay."
And you are the beast, he thought.
. . .
Teg frowned in thought. There was something deeply evil about this pair. They went against every morality by which he modeled his behavior. . . .
[He] took some reassurance from the realization that neither of these two really enjoyed life. He could see that in them clearly. [They] had forgotten or, most likely, had abandoned everything that supported the survival of joyous humans. He thought they probably non longer were capable of finding a real wellspring of joy in their own flesh. Theirs would have to be mostly a voyeur's existence, the eternal observer, always remember what it had been like before they had taken the turning into whatever it was they had become. Even when they wallowed in the performance of something that once had meant gratification, they would have to reach for new extremes each time just to touch the edges of their own memories.
. . .
Not a milligram of naiveté remained in either of these two. Nothing was expected to surprise them. Nothing could be truly new for them. Still, they plotted and devised, hoping that this extreme would produce the remembered thrill. They knew it would not, of course, and they expected to carry away from the experience only more burning rage out of which to fashion another attempt at the unreachable. That was how their thinking went.
Teg designed a smile for them, using all of the skills he had learned. It was a smile full of compassion, of understanding and real pleasure in his own existence. He knew it for the most deadly insult he could hurl at them and he saw it hit. Muzzafar glowered at him. The Honored Matre went from orange-eyed rage to an abrupt surprise and then, quite slowly, to dawning pleasure. She had not expected this! It was something new!
_________________ "The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already." --Orwell, 1984
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"If you worship your enemy, you are defeated. If you adopt your enemy’s religion, you are enslaved. If you breed with your enemy, you are destroyed." – Polydoros of Sparta
Arion collects a great amount of superb quotes and contasting photo's on his blog: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
“Shakespeare show’d the best of his skill in his Mercutio, and he said himself, that he was forc’d to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him.” -John Dryden
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
"In the fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. O! how shall I describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smoothness! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own, is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to be interested in them — these and all congenial qualities, melting into the common copula of them all, the man of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellences and all its weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio!" -Coleridge: Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare.
_________________ 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.
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
[T]he essence of great experience is penetration into the unknown, the unexperienced …
If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coördinated.
At 8:00 he talks about some word/concept in greek (Aristos-Dias? Aristmos-theas? I don't know Greek) and Egyptian (Aristhmos?) that means, as he says later "What something does is indifferentiate from what it is."
Perhaps Satyr or someone else can help me find out what the word/concept is exactly? I've tried googling it to no avail. It perfectly summarizes what I concluded in my diary about what a human life is: its purpose, its definition, its meaning.
Not enough!-- It is not enough to prove something, one also has to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37258 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
“I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.”
“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”
― Homer, The Iliad
“No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.”
― Homer, The Iliad
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37258 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans…’ Neither by land nor by sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans’: Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Anfang
Gender : Posts : 3989 Join date : 2013-01-23 Age : 40 Location : Castra Alpine Grug
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
Russia became for me the reality and the deep daily realization that reality is something that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience. Russia is the country where men are solitary, each one with a world within himself, each one profound in his humbleness and without fear of humiliating himself, and because of that truly pious. Here the words of men are only fragile bridges above their real life.
_________________ 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.
Anfang
Gender : Posts : 3989 Join date : 2013-01-23 Age : 40 Location : Castra Alpine Grug
Blood is thicker than water. Blood is also stickier; it clots, coagulates, congeals. Water is thin, neutral, constant, ever-flowing; it leaves no stain. Aristotle was the first to criticise the kind of political brotherhood sketched in Plato's Republic as 'watery'. He argues:
As a little sweet wine mingled with a great deal of water is imperceptible in the mixture, so, in this sort of community, the idea of relationship which is based upon these names will be lost; there is no reason why the so-called father should care about the son, or the son about the father, or brothers about one another. Of the two qualities which chiefly inspire regard and affection — that a thing is your own and that you love it — neither can exist in such a state as this.
This objection is often misunderstood (by Bertrand Russell and by Wilson McWilliams, for example). Aristotle is saying not that Plato's ideal state could not generate any kind of affection (though he is sceptical about that too), but rather that such love as it does generate will be of a new, diluted kind and that Plato is being dishonest in giving it the old name. Dilution is not an unintended defect in the Platonic scheme; it is its essential purpose. In the interests of general political concord Plato aims to destroy the particular private attachments and affections which obtain within the family in order that the love so selfishly concentrated should be spread throughout the community. Shelley describes the intended process:
Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled The abysses of the sky and the wide earth, There was a change: the impalpable thin air And the all-circling sunlight were transformed, As if the sense of love dissolved in them Had folded itself round the spherèd world.
Aristotle says that such a process could not happen, because family love is generated by the social reality of the family. If the family is destroyed, that kind of love ceases to be generated. Perhaps the ideal Republic will generate its own watery kind of of affection, but we must not use the language of the family to describe it. It will be diluted beyond recognition. If you insist on equality, freedom, separation, you must accept the consequences, and recognise that you have created an entirely new world which cannot be kept warm by the old love.
We are getting close here to the cause of the evasiveness which surrounds the idea of brotherhood. It is not that people are reluctant to discuss dilution. On the contrary, dilution is the commonplace of modern Western thought. It is familiar to us as a historical thesis, a therapy, and a political and social programme. But only rarely do its proponents have either the clarity of mind or the courage to accept consequences. Dilution is most generally put forward in the guise of a theory of history. In one form or another, that theory runs: in the old days – variously identified as the Middle Ages, feudalism, pre-industrial or variously pre-capitalist society – society was a network of communities. Despite poverty, disease, oppression, man was essentially at ease with himself, reposing in a kind of hammock of kinship which both protected and defined his identity. This slumbrous security was disturbed by the incursion of a new and irresistible force – variously described as the Reformation, the Calvinist or Puritan ethic, capitalism, technological rationality, the Industrial Revolution. This dry, hard, calculating force destroyed the old sense of community. No longer was man to be defined as the sum of his connections to family, clan, guild and village. He became a naked, calculating, independent, rational, individual atom, shorn of relationship. No longer could he find solace in the warmth and close mesh of his hammock and the protection it afforded him against the cold indifference of the outside world. All at once everywhere was outside him. He was alone, equally separate from all men.
This view is implicit or explicit in Marx, Weber, Tönnies, Tawney, Sombart and a hundred others. Disraeli wrote: 'There is no community in England; there is aggregation, but aggregation under circumstances which make it rather a dissociating than a uniting principle.' D.H. Lawrence echoes this in Lady Chatterley's Lover: 'Even in him [Mellors] there was no fellowship left. It was dead. The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness.' Gemeinschaft gives way to Gesellschaft, community to association. In the words of the Mike Nichols-Elaine May sketch, there is 'proximity but no relating'.
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
... perhaps none lived more gently, more secretly, more invisibly than Rilke. But it was not wilful, nor forced or assumed priestly loneliness such as Stefan George celebrated in Germany; silence seemed to grow around him, wherever he went, wherever he was. Since he avoided every noise, even his own fame — that "sum of all misunderstanding that collects itself about a name," as he once expressed it — the approaching wave of idle curiosity moistened only his name and never his person. It was difficult to reach Rilke. He had no house, no address where one could find him, no home, no steady lodging, no office. He was always on his way through the world, and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction he would take. To his immeasurably sensitive soul, every positive decision, all planning and every announcement were burdensome. It was always by chance that one met him. You stood in an Italian gallery and felt, without being aware whence it came, a gentle, friendly smile. And only then you recognized his blue eyes which, when they looked at you, lit up his otherwise unimpressive countenance with an inner light. But this unimpressiveness was, precisely, the deepest secret of his being. Thousands may have passed by this young man, with his slightly melancholy drooping blond mustache and his somewhat Slavic features, undistinguished by any single trait, without dreaming that this was a poet and one of the greatest of our generation; his individuality, his unusual demeanor were only apparent in a closer association. He had an indescribably gentle way of approaching and talking. When he entered a room where people were gathered together, it was so noiselessly that hardly anyone noticed him. He sat there quietly listening, lifted his head unconsciously when anything seemed to occupy his thoughts, or when he himself began to speak, always without affectation or raised voice. He spoke naturally and simply, like a mother telling a fairy tale to her child, and just as lovingly; it was wonderful how, listening to him, even the most insignificant subject became picturesque and important. But no sooner did he feel that he was the center of attention in a larger circle that he stopped speaking and once again sank down into his silent, attentive listening. Every movement, every gesture was soft; even when he laughed it was no more than a suggestion of a sound. Muted tones were a necessity to him, and nothing annoyed him so much as noise and, in the realm of feeling, all violence. "They exhaust me, these people who spit out their feelings like blood" he once said; "that why I swallow Russians, like liqueur, in small doses." No less than measured conduct, orderliness, cleanliness and quiet were physical necessities; to ride in an overfilled streetcar, or to have to sit in a noisy public place, disturbed him for hours thereafter. All that was vulgar was unbearable to him, and although he lived in restricted circumstances, his clothes always gave evidence of care, cleanliness, and good taste. At the same time they showed thought and poetic imagination; they were a masterpiece of unpretension, always with an unobtrusive personal touch, such as perhaps a thin silver bracelet around his wrist. For his aesthetic sense of perfection and symmetry entered into the most intimate and the most personal details. Once I watched him in his rooms prior to his departure — he declined my help as superfluous — as he was packing his trunk. It was like mosaic work, each individual piece gently put into the carefully reserved space; I would have felt it to be an outrage to disturb this flowerlike arrangement by a helping hand. And his sense of the elements of beauty accompanied him to the most insignificant detail. It was not only that he wrote his manuscripts on the best of paper with his calligraphic round hand so that every line was related to another as if measured with a ruler; the choicest paper was selected, for even an occasional letter, and even, clean and round his calligraphic writing filled the space. Even in the most hurried notes, he did not permit himself to strike out a word and whenever a sentence or an expression did not seem correct, he wrote the letter a second time with his marvelous patience. Rilke never allowed anything to leave his hands that was not perfect.
This muted and yet integrated quality of his being impressed itself upon anyone who came close to him. It was as impossible to think of Rilke being noisy as it was to imagine a man in his presence who did not lose his loudness and arrogance through the vibrations that emanated from Rilke's quietness. For his conduct vibrated like a secret, continuous, purposive, moralizing force. After every fairly long talk with him one was incapable of any vulgarity for hours or even days. On the other hand, of course, this constant temperateness of his nature, this never-wishing-to-give-himself-completely put an early end to any particular cordiality; I believe that few people may boast of having been Rilke's "friends." In the six published volumes of his letters, one rarely finds such form of address, and the brotherly, familiar du was hardly ever applied to anyone after his school days. To permit anyone or anything to approach him too closely burdened his extraordinary sensitivity and everything that was pronouncedly masculine caused him physical discomfort. He gave himself more easily to women in conversation. He wrote often and gladly to them and was much more free in their presence. Perhaps it was the absence of the guttural in their voices that pleased him, for he suffered particularly from unpleasant voices. I can still see him before me in conversation with a high aristocrat, completely bent over, his shoulders tortured and even his eyes cast down, so that they might not betray how much he suffered physically from the gentleman's unpleasant falsetto. But how good to be with him when he was kindly disposed toward someone! Then one sensed his inner goodness — although he remained sparing of words and gestures — like a warm, healing outpouring deep into one's soul.
Shy and retiring, Rilke seemed most receptive in Paris, this heart-warming city, and perhaps it was because here his name and his work were still unknown and because he always felt freer and happier when he was anonymous. I visited him there in two different lodgings which he had rented. Each was simple and without ornament and yet immediately assumed character and calm through his dominant sense of beauty. It was never a huge house with noisy neighbors, rather an old, even though less comfortable, one, in which he could feel at home; and no matter where he was, his sense of orderliness made the place meaningful and harmonized it with his being. There were only a very few things around him, but flowers always shone in a vase or bowl, perhaps the gift of women, perhaps tenderly brought home by himself. Books gleamed from the walls, beautifully bound or carefully jacketed in paper, for he liked books as he liked dumb animals. Pencils and pens lay on the desk in a straight line, and clean sheets of paper perfectly straightened; a Russian icon and a Catholic crucifix, which, I believe, accompanied him on all his travels, gave his working cell a slightly religious character, although his religiousness was not connected with any specific dogma. One felt that everything had been carefully chosen and as carefully preserved. If you lent him a book with which he was unfamiliar, it was returned faultlessly wrapped in tissue paper and tied with colored ribbon like a gift. I can still recall how he brought manuscript of Die Weise von Liebe und Tod into my room as a precious gift. I have kept the ribbon that was around it. But it was nicest to walk with Rilke in Paris, for that meant seeing the most insignificant things with eyes enlightened to their meaning. He noticed every detail, and he liked to repeat aloud the firm names on the signs if they seemed rhythmic to him. It was his passion — almost the only one that I ever observed in him — to know every nook and cranny of this Paris. Once, when we met at the home of mutual friends, I told him that on the day before I had chanced upon the old Barrière where the last victims of the guillotine had been buried in the Cimetière de Picpus, and André Chénier among them. I described to him the affecting little meadow with its scattered graves, rarely seen by strangers, and told him how on the way back I had seen in one of the streets through the open door of a convent a sort of béguine, silently telling her rosary as in a pious dream. It was one of the few times when I saw this gentle composed man almost impatient. He had to see the grave of André Chénier and the convent. Would I take him there? We went the next day. He stood in a sort of entranced silence before the lonesome cemetery and called it "the most lyric in Paris." On our way back the door of the convent was closed. And now I had an opportunity of testing the silent patience which he had mastered in his life no less than in his work. "Let us wait for an opportunity," he said. With head slightly bent, he stood so that he could look through the door when it opened. We waited for perhaps twenty minutes. One of the sisters of the order came down the street and rang the bell. "Now," he whispered softly, with excitement. But the sister had become aware of his silent waiting — I have already said that one sensed everything about him from afar — and came up to him and asked if he was waiting for someone. He smiled at her with his gentle smile that immediately created confidence, and said warmly that he much desired to see the convent corridor. She was sorry, the sister smiled in turn, but she could not let him in. However, I advised him to go to the little house of the gardener next door where he would have a good view from a window in the upper story. And so this too, like so much else, was granted him. Our paths crossed a number of times thereafter, but whenever I think of Rilke, I see him in Paris. He was spared the experience of its saddest hour.
_________________ 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 modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies. What we have today is a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, but whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions—what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. "If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment." [God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse]
