A Celebration of the Culture Industry

In Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment we come across a rant of the poverty of western arts seeing as they have become consumed in the larger culture industry.  With the rise of the techonological rationale comes the homogenization of expression (in its mass production).  All expressions despite input, varying budgets, and plots all come to the same end.  With regard to television they write, "Televison aims at the synethesis of radio and film, and is held up only because interested partes have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverisment of aesthetic matter so drastically, taht by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wangerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk - the fusion of all arts in one work."  Then referring to producers they go on to say that, "Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but teh specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change.  The details are interchangeable.  The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero's momentary fall from grace, the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter's rugid defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all th other details, ready-made cliches to be slotted in anywhere; they do anything more than fulfill the purpose allotted them in the overall plan."
In a response to Ben's 10 Theological Theses on Art poserorprophet (p.o.p.) offered an alternative 10 theses based primarly on the work of Adorno. p.o.p. questioned aesthetic form and expression in the west because of its implication in the larger system of death.  I appreciated his rigorous response but in the end I felt that they first of all were not really alternative theses at all but instead placed a kind of control on beauty which is simply not appropriate.  p.o.p. ended up affirming though limiting much of what Ben was getting at, I think but on his own terms.  The trajectory of the Messiah is indeed towards the cross and much of (and perhaps most of) the beauty in this world is born of suffering.  Above this though the trajectory of Christ is one of freedom, the most truly free life.  I do not see p.o.p.'s articulation allowing for both the judgment and freedom of Christ.
This was actually not meant to be a very theological post.  I just wanted to set up the following videos by Girl Talk.  Adorno and Horkheimer expose the monolithicity of western art and Girl Talk seems to celebrate it.  If indeed all songs are the same and the details interchangeable then Girl Talk may herald the end of the world bringing them all together in one apocalyptic anthem.

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Marion on the Visible

I quite struggled through chapter 2 of Jean-Luc Marion's In Excess where he establishes some of his methodological framework. There was however a decisive shift in mood in the third chapter as Marion appeared to me to be now expressing his project for which he has considerable passion. The chapter on the idol and paintings begins,

The visible surrounds us. Wherever we turn, it is unveiled, ready, brilliant, iconic. When I open my eyes, I fall on it, unfolded from head to foot all across the horizon. Does it seep through the sides? But there is no place for anything 'on the side' of the visible, since it faces me with the envisageable breadth of space. Would I escape from it in turning my back on it and fleeing? But if I turn around I always run into it, as it preceded me and gets around me in advance. When I raise my head, it is already hanging over me. When I lower my eyes, it always still expects me. The visible obsesses us because it lays siege to us. Wherever I turn, it surrounds me.

Marion goes on to establish the reality of the painting as offering pure visibility, something greater than its 'original'. In a painting all is visible. "The painting adds presence to presence, where nature preserves space and thus absence. At this point Marion introduces the work of Paul Klee who I had never heard of. Marion then offers an interpretation of one of his paintings. I am still not quite sure what to make of it. I have never heard a reading with so much serious drama. The interpretation is of Klee's Ad Marginem.

It is a well-named painting: the red sun, which, a little raised from the center, would have to crush with its dense, nodal mass and its dark, explosive heat the greenish marshland which, spread out, surrounds it - crush it to the point of draining it, even fade it to the point of whitening it - this quasi-atomic sun seems impreceptibly, but indisputably, to be narrowed under the pressure of the green that lays siege to it, turning it yellow and digesting, so to speak, its redness, as if asphyxiated by the exponential growth of the quasi-plants that push on the margins of the painting . They buttress themselves there all the more visibly as the painting is narrowing in on itself in sketching an ocher frame, already wood, on the inside of its physical, material frame. The redoubling of the frame renders visible, almost foreseeable, even inevitable, that the clash of the elementary forces of the sun and of the magma, both in fusion, ends in the implosion of enormous energy - the same energy of the visible struggling in the rarified space to rise, in spite of it all, to the day. The painting imposes itself like a double-armored casket, which tries to hold back the explosion of the immense visible, which will end inevitably by taking it apart and dispersing it. The painting attains the highest saturation possible of the visible in such a restrained frame. The saturation of the visible becomes, to the one who knows how to look at it as it gives itself really unbearable.

It is perhaps that final line that really set me off. I had not thought too much of the hermeneutics of sight. I considered interpreting a painting as looking and then internally processing its meaning as opposed to how I might look at it.

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Everybody Knows

I wish had more time to blog on this experience but two nights ago I came home to find a message on my answer machine telling me that someone from my church had an extra ticket to see Leonard Cohen that night. Arriving at the theatre my friend kept ushering us closer and closer to the stage until we arrived at our fifth row centre seats. Leonard emerged a frail man of 75 in his black double-breasted suit . . . but his voice. Johnny Cash maintained a certain texture in his voice into his old age but Leonard Cohen's remains full and robust. Early in the concert I needed to overcome a slight dissonance in hearing some of his more critical songs sitting among what was a majority of hipster throw-back yuppies. But after every song I was reminded of the raw depth of his lyrical ability. The dissonance is of course acknowledged by Cohen himself. This was made plain to me as I heard Everybody Knows with new ears. I am coming to recognize that poet does not look for truth nor for change but rather the poet looks for honesty, simple honesty to the fullness or particularity of their experience.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that youve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows youve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that its now or never
Everybody knows that its me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when youve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black joes still pickin cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows its coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

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A Miraculous Disincarnation

There is another tremendous scene towards the end of Swann's Way. The young boy of the story begins to anticipate a journey to Italy. His anticipation and wonder of this foreign land begins a process of increasing excitement within him.

During this month - in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person - I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could be cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into Paradise.

And in a nod to my own childhood fascination with Atlases.

And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again then guide-books, the railway time-tables.

I was genuinely becoming excited as his anticipation grew until its climax. This climax was triggered by his father's words for him to be prepared for the weather there. (And in good Proustian style most of the following is all one sentence)

At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy; a thing I had until then deemed impossible. I felt myself penetrating indeed between those 'rocks of amethyst, like a reef in the Indian Ocean'; by a supreme muscular effort, a long way in excess of my real strength, stripping myself, as of a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at work within me a miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat; and they had to put me in bed with a fever so persistent that the Doctor not only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the question, but warned them that, even when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year, give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me.

Oh snap! The young boy dissolves so fully into the imagination (his disincarnation) that his body begins to suffer from withdrawal. No further energy to comment at this point.

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Proust On Belief

Tis a season for rejoicing. I finally finished Swann's Way. It was not that it is a particularly difficult read but most of my more literary friends have begun and not finished it. In fact the local bookseller had a standing $25 gift certificate for anyone who could prove they read it. The book certainly lends itself to being dropped. It is not a page turner and it does not have what I would call 'flow'. The movement rather is like a type of emerging or organic still frame. The image developing in your mind becomes more nuanced, more unpredictable. And in the end the book is simply beautiful.
The book is an exercise of and a commentary on memory. In returning to a place that held rich and meaningful memories the young boy, nearing the end of the story, becomes disorientated by the present reality.

And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity, life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured, as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there survives it - more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomenon - an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause - the death of the gods.

This appears at least on the surface to indicate a loss of youthful imagination in the possibilities of reality. What it offers more profoundly is a commentary in the work it takes to experience reality. Reality is not a given in its basic thereness. Rather the present reality must be joined with belief and belief is the medium for the imagination required. And if we loose that belief we will suffer the increasing idolatrous attachment to the past which we will attribute divine presence (rather than our present bodies). The book concludes with the young boy's reflection on memory.

How paradoxical it is to seek in reality the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. . . . The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are fugitive, alas, as the years.

The book ends, in my mind, in a type of liminal space where belief is the hardest and most necessary of tasks. Belief of the past can be recalled in memory but cannot engage the present. And without belief reality moves about pixalated without any form emerging and in this account the emergence of form signals the emergence of meaning.

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Christmas Image

In searching for nativity images for our Christmas Eve service I came across the beautiful (and apparently little known) work of Macha Chmakoff.

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A Fertile Absence

Now and again I have been turning to the writings of Evagrius of Pontus who lived in the fourth century. He is credited for having collected or articulated the Eight Deadly Thoughts (long before the Seven Deadly Sins took prominence). I was intrigued by the opening lines for the first two "thoughts" Gluttony and Fornication.
He begins on Gluttony,

Abstinence is the origin of fruitfulness, the blossom and beginning of the practical life.

Then on Fornication he begins,

Abstinence gives birth to chastity.

These statements struck me first as counter-intuitive (at least to most contemporary sensibilities) and second as having a certain ontological importance. There are means and resources which the individual and social can draw on that are not easily perceptible. We show great admiration for those who can live a life of voluntary poverty but do not embrace the underlying ontology that informs it. The word "abstinence" in our vernacular evokes images barrenness, repression and sterility. It should be re-endowed with the fecundity that is latent in it.
In his treatise against "boredom" Kierkegaard writes of the principle of "limitation" as "the only saving principle in the world". In offering a variety of examples he comes clearly to the maxim that "the more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention." We equate fertility with its "fruit" its end product and not so much its actuality which is ironically its potentiality, its ready absence.
This feeds into my overall thoughts on aesthetics as the sensing of possibility and the allowing of its birth and also the role that absence (often articulated as the sacred) plays in conception. This is of course part of a monastic culture only tangentially observable in our culture but worth greater consideration.

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Letter 10 - Rilke, Art and Life

This is the final paragraph in the last letter that Rilke wrote to Franz Kappus,

Art too is only a way of living, and, however one lives, one can, unwittingly, prepare oneself for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neighbored than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism does and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature. I am glad, in a word, that you have surmounted the danger of falling into this sort of thing and are somewhere in a rough reality being solitary and courageous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that.

I suspect that most of us with some appreciation towards the arts feel a little sting in Rilke's parting words. I also suspect that Rilke is not interested in criticizing professions as such but in criticizing those who "pretend proximity". Nature, reality and truth will not be fooled. Rilke believes that they can be trusted, but this in turn means that they must be trusted. We cannot fool or manipulate art and beauty. Proximity and presence is key both to the formation of identity and to the healthy relationships with others. Rilke's call inward demands that we begin analyzing or most primal walls, those interior walls that divide our passions, goals and compulsions. What have ghettoized in our self? What is it in us that remains hermetically sealed? This movement is necessary first because it in turn affects our external sensual reality. In greater self-understanding we develop courage and stability to allow ourselves to "presence" reality and not pretend proximity. There is no peer review here that can validate our interior and the movement is not natural. Much of Rilke's admonishing focuses around receiving the difficult. This can of course be reduced to pathology and veiled masochism, but this is not truly difficult. The relationship between presence and difficulty is key here. To experience presence we need identify particular dividing walls and either dismantle or at least gate them. Walls, however, are the very essence of our grasp for control and power. To take down a wall is contrary to the nature individual self-preservation, or at the very least it is an act of trust beyond one's self. The movement of difficulty is the movement of de-centralizing a personal position of power. This however, is also the movement and possibility of presence, even communion.

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Letter 8 - Rilke on Solitude and Transformation

With respect to our place in the future Rilke concludes the preceding paragraph,

The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

In an attempt to get my own head around Rilke’s thought in the following paragraphs I will quote in full with perhaps some brief comments clarifying what I am focusing on or perceiving.

And to speak of solitude again, it becomes always clearer that this at bottom not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accustomed to rest are taken from us, there is nothing near any more and everything far is infinitely far. A person removed from his own room, almost without preparation and transition, and set upon the height of a great mountain range, would feel something of the sort: an unparalleled insecurity, an abandonment to something inexpressible would almost annihilate him. He would think himself falling or hurled into space, or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a monstrous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!

Why is it that the movement towards the solitary is so disorientating? I stated earlier that I cannot conceive of a non-relational reality. While that may be true I wonder if what Rilke is getting at is that our notion of connection or relationship is more often the connection to ourselves which we see in others. We love in others what we love in ourselves and therefore do not love others at all. We are disorientated in solitude because we have lost the self-perceived affirmation we find in others.

So for him who becomes solitary all distances, all measures change; of these changes many take place suddenly, and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, extraordinary imaginings and singular sensations arise that seem to grow out beyond all bearing. But is necessary for us to experience that too. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it.

This is where my sense of Rilke’s transcendence emerges. By transcendence I mean openness.

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the who so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. [emphasis mine]

Then of this in connection to human relationships.

For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own experience. [emphasis mine]

Rilke goes on to encourage Mr. Kappus to explore the contours of his world criticizing humanity for becoming to accommodating to their environment. He continues,

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Far from being an attempt to view the world through rose colored glasses Rilke here advocates a “narrow path” recognizing that we cannot trust the smooth and the easy. This path is both unstable and promises no fruit. Rather, this perspective opens wide the embrace of terror and abyss with the knowledge that they are not embedded or foundational in the created order. They too will be dissolved or as Rilke sees it transformed as we approach them in beauty and bravery.

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Further Thoughts on Immanence in Response

In the world of high-stakes blogging there are the quick and the dead. I am amazed at the speed and depth of post discussions that I have come across. I am beginning to realize that much of what is written feeds directly into or out of published or taught material. I thought I would pace myself and respond to helpful comments directed towards my questions and observations. The firs series of responses comes from the discussion that I directed you to earlier (see here).

Following this I will address the comments made directly in the below post.


The first quote is from Larval Subjects who responded sharply to my thoughts that perhaps notions of the sacred (or at least theologically sensitive aesthetics) may be helpful navigating some the issues being raised.
LS responded by saying that,

Philosophy has abdicated itself when it follows this path [of assuming or requiring transcendence] or ends up in a pious crypto-theology suitable to the needs of priests, despots, and demagogues– immanence, which is philosophy’s vocation since Thales’ declaration that the world is sufficient to itself, requiring no mythological explanation or transcendent beyond, always rejecting any sort of obfuscatory and hypnotic sacred.

I find it difficult to respond to this quote. I also find it hard to be defensible. Either position (assuming or defending either immanence or transcendence) desires a superior perspective; an ability to see behind the assumptions of the other. I will leave further commentary until later.

In a number of respects, I draw my distinction between theology and philosophy from Jean-Luc Marion who rigorously tries to define the limit of philosophy. I differ from Marion in holding that theologies that posit transcendence ought to be left behind. I read the history of philosophy as the history of attempts to think immanence. These attempts can be deployed in a variety of ways, can be more or less successful, and the question of whether or not immanence has ever been fully thought is entirely open. By immanence I understand the thesis that we don’t need to refer to anything beyond, or to any intervention outside the world, to explain the world or to account for value. Consequently, when Thales says “all is water”, he is appealing to a principle of explanation that is strictly immanent to the world and is breaking with mythos or narrative explanations of the world such as those found in Greek mythology.

LS desires to discard reference to anything "beyond" the world. This is a very problematic statement. Again, I can't help notice such a position assuming an indefensible perspective; a seeing of the other side of immanence. I appreciate the example of Thales saying that "all is water". But is the Christian doctrine "God is love" any less a statement of immanence? Or conversely is water the "strictly immanent" principle LS takes it to be? Certainly the use of "water" as ontologically basic differs from speaking of there being "turtles all the way down" though perhaps not by much.
What I hope to clarify in my own articulation is that my using words such as transcendence and sacred are not to be pictured as portals to another dimension. Though I do not have a clear concept of a personal God I also do not consider God and spirit to be somehow "outside" of reality. Speaking of the sacred refers to the relational nature of truth and our inability to control or manipulate it. Transcendence refers to the movements and possibilities of "presence". We are boundaried people but that does not exclude the possibility of communion (and also the transgression of boundary).
What I am wondering is if LS's notion of immanence requires "truth" to always be clean, clinical and reproducible. To be scientific in the most modern sense of the word. I would find this much more frightening that the subscription to fairies and goblins as clinical dissection always requires the death or manipulation of the object and not a relationship with her.

Stay tuned LS had much more to say on the matter.

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Transcedence, Immanence and the Sacred

Much of my thinking and reading lately has come to a head over the issue of immanence and transcendence. In recent blogosphere ventures I encountered several posts on the issue (Larval Subjects here and here, Rough Theory, Transcendental Enquiries). There is understandable criticism over forms of transcendence which need to appeal to something outside in order to explain things or solve things. This of course is the common domain of much religious expression as well as Hollywood plot making where a miraculous visitor or event intervenes to change the course of someone’s life. This is part of the overall criticism of the weakness of religion, religion as a crutch.

My interest in transcendence does not grow out of a need to appeal to something beyond what we can see, experience or explain. However, I also do not assume that humans have the resources or senses to bring all of reality under a loosely scientific model of inquiry and explanation. That may lead some to view my thinking or theory as weak. I am beginning to understand that what I am concerned with is the relational aspect of reality. To paraphrase Nietzsche, “Suppose truth was a relationship – what then?” This is definitely a structural approach to reality. Meaning arises in contextual relationships.

I am however not satisfied with the view that this leads to an evasion of meaning, that meaning is endlessly deferred. This is I suppose where people explicitly or implicitly appeal to a transcendent source to stabilize or deliver meaning. This is where I begin to move towards what may be viewed as an incarnational (any other terms available?) view of reality. What I mean by this is that all of reality, reality as such, has its being (ontology) in a certain potential which as of yet has not bowed and submitted to human colonization. This is where the poetic and aesthetic become most helpful. The poetic respects the possibility of reality. My guiding quote in the header is becoming more and more significant for my thought, “There is another world, and it is the same as this one.” Beauty has not yielded her secrets but she still invites. This is not some plea for something “outside” to clarify or correct. This is the eternal task of relationship, of taking ourselves out of a perceived centre and hovering around the sacred absence necessary for relationship. This in turn leaves not a deferral of meaning but honouring its abundance.

Criticize where necessary. This is certainly a work in progress.

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Rilke - Letter 3: Part II

Rilke offers interesting commentary on art, sexuality and gender. Though many comparisons exist between the birthing process of human life and of art Rilke encourages further that the artist offer the truly human in the artistic process. In this letter Rilke refers to the poet Richard Dehmel as one who writes in heat. He acknowledges that such writing indeed moves him, that Dehmel’s “poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out of him as out of mountains.” But he continues to say that, “this power is not always honest.” Rilke claims that Dehmel’s artistic urge as “it comes to the sexual” does not find a “clean” sex world, that is it is not sufficiently human.

“[It] is only male, is heat, intoxication and restlessness, and laden with the old prejudices and arrogances with which man has disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves as man only, not as human being, for this reason there is in his sexual feeling something narrow, seeming wild, spiteful, time-bound, uneternal, that diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful. It is not immaculate, it is marked by time and by passion, and little of it will survive and endure. (But most art is like that!) Nevertheless one may deeply rejoice in what there is of greatness in it, only one must not lost oneself in it.”

In the realm of art and beauty categories of male and female carry significant currency. In earlier posts I reflected on the role the feminine womb or interior played in spiritual formation. Here Rilke warns of the heat and restlessness of the masculine. It is receiving the artistic urge “in community,” in the “clean” sex world of the human that abiding beauty emerges. I am intrigued by Rilke’s notion of a “clean sex world”. This image both evokes and distances itself from cultic representations of the sacred in the Hebrew Bible. Having sex rendered one ceremonially unclean and required a distancing from the holiness of God. However, the union between God and humanity is often rendered in sexual terms. As with Rilke this too is conceived of as a (ceremonially) “clean sex world”. In the New Testament this would be expressed with the image of “the pure spotless bride”. In the Bible as with Rilke this union emerges only in trust and humility. In the Bible this is conceived in the act and life of worship for Rilke this is conceived in the space within and beyond ourselves (trust), “in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence.” In this space the artist is called to “await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity.”

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Rilke on Poetry - Letter 3: Part I

"Let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism - such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism."

I am attempted to be a little more critical (pun possibly intended) here of Rilke, although I am sure this is the wearied experience of many an academic. I am critical only to the extent that it is not necessary to rule out criticism as such. I would look more to George Steiner in his Real Presences whose project seems to be the banishment of the secondary. He did not outlaw criticism but only those criticisms that could not stand up with their own internal merit.
Even here I am hesitant only because following either Rilke or Steiner would mean the end of most of the blogosphere (not the worst thought of course). I have often been tempted to leave a final post telling people get off-line and sink their hands in the nearest patch of loose soil.

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The Poet of Ordinary

In his Letters to a Young Poet Rainer Maria Rilke rejects any notion that a poet require an "eventful life" to write good poetry.
He writes,
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious kingly possession, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention thither.

After reading this first letter of a collection of ten I turned to the other book I had with me, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The first 50 pages are an expansive and metaphysical/aesthetic account of his anxiety over being with his mother. Towards the end of this account he pours over a childhood experience of eating a piece of cake and tea.
He writes,
No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestions of its origin.

In an attempt to recapture this feeling he continues to eat and drink but realizes that the experience is only weakened and so concludes that,
It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony.

His reflection continues,
I put down my cup and examine my mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail nothing. Seek? More than that; create. It is face to face to with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

Proust continues to trace his pursuit for a few more pages before accepting the loss of what he could not retrieve and return to the routine of the everyday at which point he receives the gift he was searching for, the memory triggered by the tea and cake.

I am beginning to recognize the real significance of poetry. There is reckless and abundant meaning in its care. You begin to suspect that every room that you enter whether physically or in mind drips with meaning and possibility and that all that can be known is there to enter into. As the quote in my header suggests,
There is another world, and it is the same as this one.

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Well Aged Youth

I recently stumbled across Willy Mason (current video on IndieVision). The video to the right is from his first album. He released this around the age of 20 (jerk). His youth is fairly evident in it. However, his second album, If the Ocean Gets Rough (released about two years later) is ridiculously mature. When I first listened to it I assumed Willy was a seasoned singer/songwriter writing from the crucible of a long and weathered life. When I found out his age I looked into him a little more and found that I he came from a rich line of artists. You could begin to feel in him that there is a genealogy to beauty.
On his website there is such a self-awareness. Regarding his family's house-turned-studio we read,
3+ generations of personas and artifacts have passed through its moist, shady, and mostly mold-free interior, thus decorating its shelves and air molecules with a rustic and volatile stew of thought and melody. . . . [If] you think Willy Mason is some species of hot writer/musicianer, wait till you hear/read/see the unwieldy heavy brain matter of the ancestors/heroes/contemporaries he has ripped off over the years and is now shamelessly peddling.


Here is "The World that I Wanted" off of his new album. Sorry for the poor visual but the audio is alright.

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The Time That Remains

Giorgio Agamben's The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans is an exposition of the first verse of Romans and with it the Apostle Paul's concept of messianism and, eventually, its relationship to the work of Walter Benjamin. This was one of the more interdisciplinary works that I have read. The result was that I often felt critical of his linguistic approach to the NT text, appreciative of his philosophical sensibilities, and completely lost in much of his political theory.
Agamben is concerned with the implications of what he understands messianic time to be in the writings of Paul. Messianic time is neither historical-chronological nor apocalyptic. Messianic time is the space that opens up within our chronological experience. Agamben likens this to the reality opened up within the metrical system of rhyming poetry stating that "rhyme issues from Christian poetry as a metrical-linguistic transcodification of messianic time." The poem remains within historical time but opens a new space within it, what I would understand as a type of aesthetic space in which experience and meaning emerge in excess. Agamben is much more interested in the political and juridical implications of this thinking which I do not fully follow.
Interested in the role of law in Paul's messianism Agamben concludes that the messianic abolishes the space between the sign and meaning. Paul does not serve Jesus the Messiah but Jesus Messiah. "Paul does not believe that Jesus possesses the quality of being the Messiah; he believes in 'Jesus Messiah' and that is all." I take this to be communion and Agamben explores this as the living word within us. For Agamben this means that "there is no such thing as a content of faith." To believe in the messiah is not to believe something about him. This nearness to the word acts rendering the word of law inoperative "in de-creating and dismantling the states of fact or of law, making them freely available for use." And it is this nearness to the word that ultimately "extinguishes languages."

Agamben's work has confirmed for me the enduring value of exploring an aesthetic understanding of the sacred and the potentiality of our world and experience.
"There is another world, and it is the same as this one."

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The Road Less Travelled

I recently stumbled across this picture. It is a picture of my dad. It is a great picture (I am not sure if the white Fifth Avenue perfects it or ruins it). For some reason the image as whole speaks deeply to my identity. A day later I came across this quote,

Road: a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A highway has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop.
Before roads disappeared from the landscape, they had disappeared from the human soul: man had stopped wanting to walk, to walk on his own feet and enjoy it. What's more, he no longer saw his own life as a road but as a highway: a line that led from one point to another. Time became a mere obstacle to life, an obstacle that had to be overcome by ever greater speed.
Road and highway; these are also two different concepts of beauty.
In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
In the world of roads and paths, beauty is continuous and constantly changing; it tell us at every moment: "Stop!"

This picture offers testimony to the road and more importantly to sacredness of space. It pulls me in through and past my father. The horizon absorbs me (and everything else) unflinchingly into its endless space and yet it still offers itself pouring back over the gaze.

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Poet of Fire

“We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried about. . . . We are children of the fire, made of it. . . . And this hidden truth . . . draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

"God's word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot." - Jeremiah ben Hilkiah

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To Taste and to Touch, to Feel as Much . . .

Graham Ward explores the nature of touch in his recent book Christ and Culture. He sees how touch in Jesus's ministry is to create a bridge for the movement of his "power" (remember also "laying of hands"; esp. Joshua and Timothy). Whereas sound offers what is perhaps the most primal context for communication touch may offer the most immediate and intimate form of communication. Though there is perhaps more immediacy Ward also comments that there is less specificity. "Touch intimates, it does not speak." This should not be misunderstood. Though there may be less specificity the impact or force is often more pointed. This would certainly be the case with biblical healings. However, we can all think of situations in which a simple touch has moved us to cringe, shudder, or swoon (yes, I swoon). I would also argue that that touch is the most contextual of all senses. By this I mean that a touch could have scores of meanings and nuances given the context. The touch itself becomes the word set in the paragraph of the situation.



For many touch becomes the climax of being human. We are never so aware of the world around us and in turn of our existence as when we touch. It is the goal of lovers and fighters. It is the desperation in the self-harm of the depressed. It is the requirement of Thomas for belief.


I think this discuss should move into reflection on the idea of a resurrected body but I feel that these posts have been lacking in rigour and so I will them for now.

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The Weight of the Wor(l)d

While this post may be read partially in continuity with the preceding, it is specifically a supplement to Blade's recent post.
From Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction,

The most extreme, cheerful, and fantastic view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener - no audience whatever - in order to do what it does, which is nothing less than to hold up the universe.
This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller's. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. Fuller's assertion was roughly to this affect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people, on the other hand, put things together. People build bridges and cities and roads; they write music and novels and constitutions; they have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it were needs somebody to keep it from falling apart.
Now, for a long time I have taken this notion of Fuller's to mean something even he probably did not intend: that imaginative acts actually weigh in the balance of physical processes. Imaginative acts - even purely mental combinations, like the thought that a certain cloud represents a top hat - carry real weight in the universe. . . . A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to to the sum of the universe's order. It remakes its share of undoing. It counteracts the decaying systems, the breakdown of stars and cultures and molecules, the fraying of forms. It works."

I can't remember if that related to your post Blade but I thought it was a good quote anyhow.

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