luka

Well-known member
There is something self-mutilating about being a clown, but also mutilating of everything else - it's either sprung from or nurtured a deep nihilism in me, a deep conviction that nothing really matters, which I'm trying to address. Nietzsche '“A joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.”

Yes that's right. But this stuff is not set the stone, that's the whole point. Today a nihilistic jester, tomorrow a self actualising Lord of light. The day after, a heap of broken images. And on and on.
 

luka

Well-known member
Obviously it comes from fear - you fear even taking yourself seriously in case you're being ridiculous

Right exactly, and a lot of learning to write is about these fights exactly, where you identify an enemy combatant and use the page as the circumscribed field of battle. And you win.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Henry IV is almost a play about this - Falstaff vs Hal's father. The competing claims of clownery vs victory.
 

luka

Well-known member
I mean, looked at through another set of eyes it not remotely serious. It's like Eliot dismissing a wasteland as vaguely musical bleating or whatever his phrase was. Sort of pathetic. There's an interesting essay on bathos in Prynne

Like, it IS ridiculous, objectively, at some level. The poem I posted last night is ridiculous. In all sorts of ways. You can occupy a vantage from which pretty much everything is ridiculous. Blake had this word of especial opprobrium, but I can't remember it.... Mockers, or scoffers, or something along those lines.

You do have to let bathos in, but I don't think you necessarily need to have it as base line objective reality with anything else a kind of willed illusion (probably serving the interests of Power).... But this is all up for grabs.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And another reason Shakespeare's so brilliant - the mixture of high seriousness and low comedy, with neither completely undermined by the other.
 

luka

Well-known member
Henry IV is almost a play about this - Falstaff vs Hal's father. The competing claims of clownery vs victory.

Yeah right I've been Pulled in both directions this year. I think ultimately I have said my goodbyes to falstaff but he keeps dragging me in for one last go on the carousel.
 

luka

Well-known member
And another reason Shakespeare's so brilliant - the mixture of high seriousness and low comedy, with neither completely undermined by the other.

This is why he's the best and it's also very interesting in terms of what it means to have characters. Voices which temper, contradict, assault, undermine, other voices. This is why poetry is not typically univocal now, mine at any rate. It allows for this fracturing and conflict, these unstable energies which come into alignment for an instant, a momentary balance of power, then collapse again, reassemble in some other shape.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
In Henry IV you have both the moving nobility of Hal vs Hotspur (and Hal's eulogy over Hotspur's corpse) and Falstaff's convincing rejection of honour (and kidnapping of the same corpse) - and neither is destroyed by the other.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Like, it IS ridiculous, objectively, at some level. The poem I posted last night is ridiculous. In all sorts of ways. You can occupy a vantage from which pretty much everything is ridiculous. Blake had this word of especial opprobrium, but I can't remember it.... Mockers, or scoffers, or something along those lines.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain;
You throw the sand against the wind
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back, they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel's paths they shine.

The atoms of Democritus
And Newton's particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.
 

luka

Well-known member
Good one, thanks! Exactly. Partly this is a question of how something becomes 'real' how we invest something with value, these kinds of questions.
 

luka

Well-known member
The sun isn't objectively either a shining tuppeny piece or a choir of angels, both these things exist, and more and imposing the coin on everyone is an act of violence. Again a mutiliation. A degradation of experience.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I stumbled across a book of interviews with David Hockney yesterday in a bookshop and bought it - it's all about his experiments with photography, and why (in his opinion) photography is more artificial (and limited) a way of seeing the world than painting, because it always takes place from a fixed position, and fixes motion and perspective (and how this was inherited from the perspective-obsessed Renaissance), whereas Picasso et al were really grappling with how we *Actually* see things, which is fluidly moving through space and time. We see more than one thing at once, always (our thoughts, our memories at the very least overlaying our vision).
 

luka

Well-known member
What's interesting about the national gallery is how quickly the photographic asserts itself. You have it very early on, Caravaggio etc, these moments of arrested time, drama in motion, wine spilling from a cup. Time-pause, screen grab.
 

luka

Well-known member
"It's you?! It can't be" all eyes directed to interloper, mouths agape, candle flame lurches in the wind of that collective movement.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Yeah he talks about that, about the frozen cape at the centre of Titian's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchus_and_Ariadne

- this is the book, possibly worth seeking out (probably not though lol)

The only thing is I actually find the way he talks about Picasso more convincing (from the point of view of it showing he we really see) than the paintings themselves.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Yes that's right. But this stuff is not set the stone, that's the whole point. Today a nihilistic jester, tomorrow a self actualising Lord of light. The day after, a heap of broken images. And on and on.

"If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise"

Because I've ended up actually reading Evola (because it turns out that doing so gives you a handle on a whole current of thought whose roots and ramifications were previously obscure to me), I've been struck by the particular promise he makes to his readers, that cultivating a spiritual-aristocratic indifference to the turmoil of this fallen age is the path to self-actualisation as a divine, regal figure in the age to come. This is obviously a powerful myth to associate one's own aspirations and tribulations with. And maybe there are better and worse versions of that story that one can tell oneself: Evola's is kind of maximally grandiose, and requires an enormous apparatus of circumstantial woo to sustain it, but at the level of personal myth I can identify strongly with more John Barleycorn-ish cycle-of-death-and-renewal narratives, where your powers lie fallow for a time because some new dimension of selfhood is in preparation. These stories help us sit out periods of seeming stagnation, times of weariness or disorientation, and see them as part of a necessary and ultimately fruitful process. We can do that without imaging ourselves Lords-of-the-Earth in waiting. The "king" may be a projected figure of our own ability to rule ourselves, enact changes, set things to rights. The "fisher king" is that self-rule in abeyance, biding its time by the water. (I'm very moved by the Terry Gilliam film of the same name, because it's evidently about broken selfhood, selfhood in abeyance, and the mechanisms of secret repair which are at work at such times - but like "They Might Be Giants", it's also about how we repair one another, how human connection restores us to the world)
 

luka

Well-known member
"If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise"

Because I've ended up actually reading Evola (because it turns out that doing so gives you a handle on a whole current of thought whose roots and ramifications were previously obscure to me), I've been struck by the particular promise he makes to his readers, that cultivating a spiritual-aristocratic indifference to the turmoil of this fallen age is the path to self-actualisation as a divine, regal figure in the age to come. This is obviously a powerful myth to associate one's own aspirations and tribulations with. And maybe there are better and worse versions of that story that one can tell oneself: Evola's is kind of maximally grandiose, and requires an enormous apparatus of circumstantial woo to sustain it, but at the level of personal myth I can identify strongly with more John Barleycorn-ish cycle-of-death-and-renewal narratives, where your powers lie fallow for a time because some new dimension of selfhood is in preparation. These stories help us sit out periods of seeming stagnation, times of weariness or disorientation, and see them as part of a necessary and ultimately fruitful process. We can do that without imaging ourselves Lords-of-the-Earth in waiting. The "king" may be a projected figure of our own ability to rule ourselves, enact changes, set things to rights. The "fisher king" is that self-rule in abeyance, biding its time by the water. (I'm very moved by the Terry Gilliam film of the same name, because it's evidently about broken selfhood, selfhood in abeyance, and the mechanisms of secret repair which are at work at such times - but like "They Might Be Giants", it's also about how we repair one another, how human connection restores us to the world)

My friend who writes the grapejuice blog has read and admires Evola, up to a point. Do you have experience of occult reality? That other world? Are you familiar with it? The upper air? The trance. The Great Ball of Crystal.
 

luka

Well-known member
. the commodity fetish will always kill left mysticism. your mate should understand that. it's not that it's not possible, but its only possible for a few isolated people. ok brilliant but that was going on long before capitalism, and the *left*. In which case it makes more sense to look into things like kaballa, ibn arabi's concept of annihilation, mulla sadra's existentialism siriwarti's illuminationism etc etc...

I've said this a million times before. the problem with the guennon types is they think there was an *tradition* which got subverted by modernity. their concept of phenomena seems to be static, totally enthralled to utilitarian logic where oppositions, contestations and boundaries are somehow not less porous. like the thing is you can't tell someone from 18th century syria that they are living in an *traditional* society because that would not make sense. A lot of it is just naked orientalised depictions of islam, as if islam was not a living breathing worldview with huge amounts of divergence and variation. it's quite nauseating in all honesty.
.

..
 

luka

Well-known member
There is some excellent stuff within Evola's work, but it's fundamentally flawed. This can be analysed. But it does require a new sense of spirituality. Not all paganism is equal. Evola's version is race/nation-based, hierarchical, solar and patriarchal, but throughout his work he opposes an earlier polyracial/inter-tribal, egalitarian, lunar and matriarchal/gender-balanced spirituality. His work can be deconstructed to find these threads. And systems like Tantra and Taoism exist in a crossover zone between these two versions of paganism, making the situation even more difficult to disentangle. Yet just throwing all of this out with the bathwater, as this Open Letter seems to advocate, condemns the Left to the worse type of soulless, reductionist materialism and, because nobody is really satisfied with this for long, it eventually pushes anyone of spark and spirit into the hands of the Right.

Grapejuice
 
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