The qualities of ambiguity, traumatic possession, displacement and metamorphosis denote the Wasteland, a demonic substrate of confusion and violation whose veiling and idealized representation is the goal of image-work or “the cult of aesthetics” that defines the West. Its epitome is the achieved vision and naming of the Sankgreal, the Romance of the West’s formative century . Read the rest of this entry »
The West is a hybrid culture; it is a work of art that always has sought to establish and sustain its identity by images and artifacts. Its core organizing element is a passion play whose cast of characters is well known. The imagery is backed by armed force, burnings and terror because history and logic expose the play of fictions. Read the rest of this entry »
“…and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my wicked little ways…” [1]
This study has developed an interpretive model to examine the singular drive of Western culture to purify, idealize and define itself by fictions, by visual or written images, the latter also being termed by convention “figures” or “tropes.” The compulsion of the West to create an artifice by which to present itself readily becomes a need to transform itself into an artifice. Western identity is a project of transformation and the result, like the heads of Orpheus or Medusa, otherwise so different retain an image-making power in the mesmeric horror of their attenuation that mirrors the traumas in which the drive to the artifice began. The death and loss of Eurydice and the rape by medusa by Poseidon are the founding traumas; the decapitations and the song, sculpture that eventually result are artistic forms the idealize the horror from which they sprung. As the trajectory of culture plays itself out, the internal horror becomes discussed and represented with increasing clarity in mages of Medusa, Sphinxes, the death of Orpheus, sexual ambiguity and novels like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ultimately, with the birth of the early Modern period, in the mid-Victorian and Symbolist era the horror and ambiguity is seen as good by increasing numbers of intelligentsia first and then, seeping downward the lower classes, “workers, puppets” or “cattle” of the idle nobility who alone know beauty, as Ruskin put it [2]. At that point, I should say, this point, whichever way one seeks to flee is hell because institutions, assumptions and ideals have been redefined in hellish, that is traumatic ways with the ultimate terror being the arrival of a virtual reality, an ultimate artifice that displaces life as utterly as the Demonic triumphs in “Christabel.” Read the rest of this entry »
I was born on the 25th Kislev, the month of dreams and the first day of Hanukkah, the day of re-dedication and victory…
About ten years ago when my son was twelve and a half, my Mom sent us a Hanukkah gift. It was a blue plastic candle-holder and small candle; one of those little items that comes in cheap colored cardboard wrapped in hard, form-fitting plastic. It was Hanukkah and my son was with me: hence my Mom’s sweet remembrance. Before supper we took out the candle and set it on our collage table by the dining room windows near our familiar Hanukkiyot and precious items like the copper plate my maternal grandparents brought back from the Promised Land in the 1960s, incised with a picture of the huge Eshkol (Bamidbar 14).
The little candle was supposed to burn for fifteen minutes, the writing on the cardboard said, and the base would play “Maoz Tzur” for thirty minutes. “Wonderful,” we thought. How sweet and homey, like Mom Mom. Read the rest of this entry »
One might describe an apparition as a perceptual joke, perhaps a cruel one. Certainly it was a predatory joke when imperial Rome, after crushing three Jewish wars for independence in the desert-making process called “Pax Romana” stole the identity of the Promised Land by re-naming Judea (properly, Yehuda), “Palestina” after the sea peoples of the Mediterranean who, plundering the Nile delta and nearby coasts were called by Egyptians and Israelites “Peleshet” or Pilishtim, “trespassers” and “invaders.” The deformation of language and history in the imperial term “Palestina,” this early bit of virtual reality took on a demonic life of its own, eventually bequeathing a father dearth to the West and haunting it with a demonic ghost its cult exalted. The uprooted or vilified and discarded or degraded father becomes a nagging void, a phantom the mind cannot banish and that appears with increasing insistency over time; the more its original nature is denied, the more horrible the images grow. A large part of the demonic Gorgon within the West’s cultural confusion is the deformed and repressed Judaism and Judah within it, and with it, the degradation of the father. But the West, at least its leaders, cannot face the truth that would topple them from their godlike thrones or, rather, free them to live as humans rather than as highly wrought artifacts “of hammered gold and gold enameling…” To topple them would rid the West of its Satan obsession and all the terrors that stem from it. Read the rest of this entry »