luka
Well-known member
I mean, I think you should read the poetry, of course I do, but for this set of concerns, I dunno. Do read his aristeas though.
space for my spitballs on esoterica (yours too)
I mean, I think you should read the poetry, of course I do, but for this set of concerns, I dunno. Do read his aristeas though.
other_life
bioconfused
this is an extract from a larger collection? what's that called
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
And yet what faculties
other_life
bioconfused
thread is closed
other_life
bioconfused
i did a cursory reading but i'm taking notes now. it helps a lot and confirms many suspicions. god bless and keep luke davis
other_life
bioconfused
bodily presuppositions of logos and gnosis
other_life
bioconfused
changing substantial and reproductive bases of the talisman in time
other_life
bioconfused
man is permanently howling?
other_life
bioconfused
SERIOUSLY UNDERRATED POST^^^
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
I'd love to take credit but
"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! How like an angel in apprehension. How like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither. Nor woman neither."
- Withnail reciting Hamlet. Best film eva.
"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! How like an angel in apprehension. How like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither. Nor woman neither."
- Withnail reciting Hamlet. Best film eva.
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
May as well
Chin chin.
Chin chin.
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other_life
bioconfused
oh i've seen withnail and i :q at a really pivotal time, too. one of my favorites.
early-modern counter-hermetica. all classical elements are present and seen for what they are. the continuity of roman-collapse-era cynical-gnosis
early-modern counter-hermetica. all classical elements are present and seen for what they are. the continuity of roman-collapse-era cynical-gnosis
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
As a youth I used to weep in butcher shops
other_life
bioconfused
am i getting this luke... can we play the game...
[editing to make certain phrases italic]
Prelude: Questions raised by Prynne on Metal; his more salient points; spitballs/medications/meditations:
“...the theory of quality as essential...” - Does he mean by this that the concept of qualitative change itself starts here, in the mirror of metalworking? [He does.]
Gist of a brilliant passage – Prynne's starting point looks a magical-religious one, so he contrasts metal and stone by comparing the internal, practical qualities which lend them their magical properties, and the sort of artifacts they lend themselves to, in turn. Weight is the thing of stone. I immediately thought of the earliest symbolic artwork: a 70,000 year old compact stone, scratched with a rudimentary diamond-chain pattern (see paragraph in next section). Prynne must know small talismans and idols of this type would be the first thing to come to mind, because he instead invites us to consider the cave-surface and the chamber-tomb. These are communal, and large scale.
Copper, tin, and everything which follows from their discovery and first applications, lends itself to “less mixed and specific” qualities: Prynne lists “brightness, hardness, ductility and general ease of working.”
A metal artwork glints in the sun, and announces itself this way (though its material must be mined). A cave insides are obscured, it must be lighted for the art to be seen. Small stones embed in the earth and are covered with dirt (though they can more easily be cleaned than ores mined). Stone and wood tools wear much faster than metal. Ore can easily be shaped as its worked into tools, stone and wood do not so easily lend themselves to this (wood especially not without metal).
Prynne also does seem to assert that the working of metals is the basis in practice for later concepts of internal properties and their qualitative change (even in psychology). The mirror of metalworking...
How did the Sumerians pull off importing so much tin? With tin scarce where they ended up, how did they first come into contact with it, and get the idea of smelting bronze? Prynne intimates subjugation. The acquisition of durable metal also improved the means of subsistence/reproduction: “Animal hides could be sewn up with metal bodkins and fish taken with fine wire hooks. The metal ploughshare could cut deeper into the soil with less effort.” The ability to feed so many more people and clothe them with such durable clothing is the basis for large concentrations of people, and metal-worked weapons the basis for defending these large populations, and expanding the continuing acquisition of these means... Was Prynne familiar with Morgan, or Marx and Engels? What did he think of them? [He bases his arguments on Vere Gordon Childe, and later mentions an “exilic (left-wing) history of substance”, so probably he was, and thought well of them.]
“The new quality of spiritual transfer was concentrated in these most durable forms of leading edge, seen especially in the flattened motive of ornament, and the history of substance (stone) shifts with complex social implication into the theory of power (metal).” I don't even have anything to add, it's just brilliant on different levels, innit. Encapsulates the entire development in one sentence. The whole next paragraph, too. Salient points: metalwork sends man deeper into matter; knowledge of death is both the condition of life and its limit, and a, if not the central metaphor of all ritual: “...persistence through transmutation was an ego-term (even when socialised), rather than one concerned chiefly with the outer world...”. The marked grave or the chamber-tomb, the teraf in likeness, or shaped around the skull, of an ancestor.
Sendentary horticulture and agriculture lending to fundamentally different religious conceptions than hunting: “transfer of life as power” vs. “reap what you sow”.
Sedentary agriculture as complementary to the practice and intentions of mining: the rudimentary bases of cities, classes and states? [Yes.]
The subtle and specified qualities of worked metal and processed grain lending to an abstraction of value, and thus to “specialised function”, “rate of exchange” and “a politics of wealth” (literally the germs of capital).
Gradual developments in turn from value by weight to value by numeracy. Perhaps even the genesis of the very concept? [Yes!] Aes rude > aes signatum > aes grave (refining currency forms).
Relative connectivity of the 'ancient world': “In the early Bronze Age, peninsular Italy, central Europe, the west Baltic coastlands, and the British Isles were united by a single system for the distribution of metalware, rooted in the Aegean market [and from there presumably connected to climes much further east...].”
Mediterannean sea-farers contrasted with inland polities of western and central Asia: 'transfer as exchange [displaced matter, abstraction, numeracy...]' vs. 'substance as exchange [wealth measured in real means of subsistence: flocks, herds, storehouses, tools, etc.]' Minted coin, and bimetallic currency-systems emerge in the eastern Mediterranean of the late Bronze Age.
Lydians and Ionians in a central place: “...received goods from the caravan routes and river communications across Asia. They had access to safe and sheltered harbours for easy coastwise trade. They exported their famous Chian wines, their purple dye [Phoenicians?...] which gave its name to Erythrae, and their Samian pots, but above all they were renowned for their gold [is the metal with the broadest shoulders], which provided the fabulous wealth of Croesus, and still more the fabulous wealth of Midas.”
Development of political economy from earliest metallurgy is a history of increasing diplacement and abstraction; the objective role of middle classes is to refine the very same displacement and abstraction [barbarianism transformed into civilisation].
Reminds us these developments [i keep mistyping this one it seems] are discontinuous, yet accelerated. Transformation of displacement and abstraction of matter: from keen awareness of “the mirror of metalworking” as new base for magic, into prosaic money economies. “Stone is already the abstraction of standing; and dying is still the end of man's self-enrichment, the 'reason' why he does it.”
Questions left standing:
“How did the Sumerians pull off importing so much tin? With tin scarce where they ended up, how did they first come into contact with it, and get the idea of smelting bronze?”
“If we are confident over the more developed consequences, at the unrecognised turn [oops] we are still at a loss to say where or why.”
[editing to make certain phrases italic]
Prelude: Questions raised by Prynne on Metal; his more salient points; spitballs/medications/meditations:
“...the theory of quality as essential...” - Does he mean by this that the concept of qualitative change itself starts here, in the mirror of metalworking? [He does.]
Gist of a brilliant passage – Prynne's starting point looks a magical-religious one, so he contrasts metal and stone by comparing the internal, practical qualities which lend them their magical properties, and the sort of artifacts they lend themselves to, in turn. Weight is the thing of stone. I immediately thought of the earliest symbolic artwork: a 70,000 year old compact stone, scratched with a rudimentary diamond-chain pattern (see paragraph in next section). Prynne must know small talismans and idols of this type would be the first thing to come to mind, because he instead invites us to consider the cave-surface and the chamber-tomb. These are communal, and large scale.
Copper, tin, and everything which follows from their discovery and first applications, lends itself to “less mixed and specific” qualities: Prynne lists “brightness, hardness, ductility and general ease of working.”
A metal artwork glints in the sun, and announces itself this way (though its material must be mined). A cave insides are obscured, it must be lighted for the art to be seen. Small stones embed in the earth and are covered with dirt (though they can more easily be cleaned than ores mined). Stone and wood tools wear much faster than metal. Ore can easily be shaped as its worked into tools, stone and wood do not so easily lend themselves to this (wood especially not without metal).
Prynne also does seem to assert that the working of metals is the basis in practice for later concepts of internal properties and their qualitative change (even in psychology). The mirror of metalworking...
How did the Sumerians pull off importing so much tin? With tin scarce where they ended up, how did they first come into contact with it, and get the idea of smelting bronze? Prynne intimates subjugation. The acquisition of durable metal also improved the means of subsistence/reproduction: “Animal hides could be sewn up with metal bodkins and fish taken with fine wire hooks. The metal ploughshare could cut deeper into the soil with less effort.” The ability to feed so many more people and clothe them with such durable clothing is the basis for large concentrations of people, and metal-worked weapons the basis for defending these large populations, and expanding the continuing acquisition of these means... Was Prynne familiar with Morgan, or Marx and Engels? What did he think of them? [He bases his arguments on Vere Gordon Childe, and later mentions an “exilic (left-wing) history of substance”, so probably he was, and thought well of them.]
“The new quality of spiritual transfer was concentrated in these most durable forms of leading edge, seen especially in the flattened motive of ornament, and the history of substance (stone) shifts with complex social implication into the theory of power (metal).” I don't even have anything to add, it's just brilliant on different levels, innit. Encapsulates the entire development in one sentence. The whole next paragraph, too. Salient points: metalwork sends man deeper into matter; knowledge of death is both the condition of life and its limit, and a, if not the central metaphor of all ritual: “...persistence through transmutation was an ego-term (even when socialised), rather than one concerned chiefly with the outer world...”. The marked grave or the chamber-tomb, the teraf in likeness, or shaped around the skull, of an ancestor.
Sendentary horticulture and agriculture lending to fundamentally different religious conceptions than hunting: “transfer of life as power” vs. “reap what you sow”.
Sedentary agriculture as complementary to the practice and intentions of mining: the rudimentary bases of cities, classes and states? [Yes.]
The subtle and specified qualities of worked metal and processed grain lending to an abstraction of value, and thus to “specialised function”, “rate of exchange” and “a politics of wealth” (literally the germs of capital).
Gradual developments in turn from value by weight to value by numeracy. Perhaps even the genesis of the very concept? [Yes!] Aes rude > aes signatum > aes grave (refining currency forms).
Relative connectivity of the 'ancient world': “In the early Bronze Age, peninsular Italy, central Europe, the west Baltic coastlands, and the British Isles were united by a single system for the distribution of metalware, rooted in the Aegean market [and from there presumably connected to climes much further east...].”
Mediterannean sea-farers contrasted with inland polities of western and central Asia: 'transfer as exchange [displaced matter, abstraction, numeracy...]' vs. 'substance as exchange [wealth measured in real means of subsistence: flocks, herds, storehouses, tools, etc.]' Minted coin, and bimetallic currency-systems emerge in the eastern Mediterranean of the late Bronze Age.
Lydians and Ionians in a central place: “...received goods from the caravan routes and river communications across Asia. They had access to safe and sheltered harbours for easy coastwise trade. They exported their famous Chian wines, their purple dye [Phoenicians?...] which gave its name to Erythrae, and their Samian pots, but above all they were renowned for their gold [is the metal with the broadest shoulders], which provided the fabulous wealth of Croesus, and still more the fabulous wealth of Midas.”
Development of political economy from earliest metallurgy is a history of increasing diplacement and abstraction; the objective role of middle classes is to refine the very same displacement and abstraction [barbarianism transformed into civilisation].
Reminds us these developments [i keep mistyping this one it seems] are discontinuous, yet accelerated. Transformation of displacement and abstraction of matter: from keen awareness of “the mirror of metalworking” as new base for magic, into prosaic money economies. “Stone is already the abstraction of standing; and dying is still the end of man's self-enrichment, the 'reason' why he does it.”
Questions left standing:
“How did the Sumerians pull off importing so much tin? With tin scarce where they ended up, how did they first come into contact with it, and get the idea of smelting bronze?”
“If we are confident over the more developed consequences, at the unrecognised turn [oops] we are still at a loss to say where or why.”
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