The prologues are over. It is a question now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.    [1]

Thus the West’s anchor of Judaic sobriety gave another sign of letting go. Grand arbitrary gestures, a rhetoric of the egotistical sublime by which the magus sweeps away the past with his fictions triumphs: one must choose ‘counter-factual history’ or the grand cynicism of postmodern dogma, life as artifice, as assemblage and construct. This is the madness toward which the art-cult rushes, the simulations of an “insatiable actor” seeking his identity that Macbeth, disenchanted at last but only to despair, identified as “a poor player who struts and frets… and then is heard no more.” The “tale told by an idiot,” a curse of life aimed, glancingly at the Creator, pinions the modern masters of de-personalization who reach back for the original pagan magic and, wishing to “jump the life to come” with their “vaulting ambition” find G-d only in involutions and terror. (more…)

PREFACE

The West is defined by its artifice complex, a compulsion to represent and fix its identity in images, likenesses, statues and representations. But as the root suggests, images derive from magic and magike tekne, “the weaving of images,” art, leads to apparitions, ghosts, shadows and madness. Neither a person nor a culture can create or clarify an identity through representations; it only can lose itself in reflections, shadow worlds and enchanted bowers. Essaying the magic of the semi-divine Perseus, a cult of images winds up on an endless, circular shield of art, fleeing from the gorgons it would charm, the gorgons that are all the ambiguities in its soul [1]. (more…)