Corpsey.
Well-known member
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject.
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject.
The eye may be prophylactic, but it cannot be beneficent—it is maleficent. In the Bible and even in the New Testament, there is no good eye, but there are evil eyes all over the place. (Lacan, Four 118–19)
Was reading Eliot's Ash Wednesday, of the first lines above, and got to thinking on something I left unturned when reading Blood Meridian- why the evil eyes? For Ash Wednesday, I think this supremely stupid Delueze quote is as good a place to start as any:
[T]he eye interprets everything—speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking—in terms of seeing.
Seeing is an an A to B relationship. This is the kernel thought of phenomenology, and hence all of continental philosophy, following in line with possibly the original philosophic impulse found in sun worship:
Here darkness is no longer, as it is in lunar mythologies, one of the modes of being of divinity; instead, it symbolizes all that the god is not, hence the adversary par excellence. Darkness is no longer valorized as a necessary phase in cosmic life; in the perspective of solar religion, it is opposed to life, to forms, and to intelligence. In some cultures the luminous epiphanies of solar gods become the sign of intelligence. In the end sun and intelligence will be assimilated to such a degree that the solar and syncretistic theologies of the end of antiquity become rationalistic philosophies; the sun is proclaimed to be the intelligence of the world, and Macrobius sees in the sun all the gods of the Graecooriental world, from Apollo and Jupiter to Osiris, Horus, and Adonis (Saturnalia, I, ch. 17-23).
This is that same impulse that Eliade will go on to say is at the heart of a modern desacrilized world, and the same impulse Eliot is fighting in part one of Ash Wednesday:
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign? Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
So the eye is evil because it decouples, diverges, takes us away from that universal Tantric substance and into a space of alienation, of cold calculation. The vanished power of the usual reign? Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
Why else is the eye evil?
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