This is an excerpt of an essay on a masterwork of poeisis that illuminates the West’s relation to Israel.  The notes have not come through but it is a valuable meditation on Shelley’s “Julian & Maddalo” (1818-19). Look for forthcoming work, The West, Image-work & the Wasteland.” — en

A broken Prometheus, a Hunger Artist still strong, angry and hopeful enough to sing, the Maniac knows his madness is heightened by wearing a “mask of falsehood,” a smiling mask over the tangle of his bifurcated history; “no scorn or pain or hate could be so heavy as that falsehood is to me,” he emphasizes, expressing the true agony or passion of the meta-fiction, the one it inflicts on itself. He also epitomizes the use of art as disguise, to avoid further scorn, not to impose imperial schemes. Read the rest of this entry »

Like traditions, moral norms, economies and families centered on a husband and wife, the borders of nations are collapsing. One also could say they are being treated as obsolete, relegated to the dustbin of history. This is more than bad faith; it is the logic of culture.

The ancient Hellenistic fascination with shape-changing and transformed identity has a lot to do with the modern collapse of norms and boundaries of all kinds. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »