More than six decades ago a wise and valiant man described the manic celebrations over the UN vote to partition Israel into a ‘Jewish’ State without Jerusalem. In doing so he quoted comments by Uri Zvi Greenberg, poet of the [truncated] War for Liberation: “Only once before has the nation experienced such a horror, such an abomination as the dancing of that night. The dancing around the golden calf must have looked the same.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Dominion of Edom is filled with crosses, burdens for the rest of us to bear; for its own people too, not only the consequences of the power games of their rulers who are the precipitate of its cultural principles but of its way of experiencing the world, its habits of thought and expression. As explained in other essays, the drive to idealize its identity and gloss over its hybrid and, in many respects, contrived, self-irritating nature leads Edom in every field of endeavor from idyllic dreams to apocalyptic fantasies and events and then to elegiac laments. It is a culture of aesthetics and a cult of bathos, glory and grand games; of fireworks, memorial displays and blissful bad faith; a culture of images served by the media distraction machine that helps keep Edom (the West) from seeing in itself the horror its surface beauties veil. The counterpart of the beautiful show of fashion pages, sports and preening politicians is horror films and a vast array of  social and political terrors. Read the rest of this entry »

The fascinations of Othello are many; perhaps most essential and foundational is Iago’s corruption of Othello’s mind, mainly by inflaming his erotic fantasies. This happens the more readily because Othello is a very passionate man, a man of appetites for battle and sexual play. He loves “not wisely but too well” he says poignantly but incorrectly, proving the side of the Renaissance debate that insists that erotic love undermines the warlike manly spirit.

But the main point for our studies of Western poiesis, particularly the link between idealization, image-weaving and the wasteland is that Iago functions in the play (with Roderigo, Cassio and others as well as Othello) like Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s own ambitions: he displaces fact by plausible fictions embedded in erotic desires. The conquest of life by images, like Macbeth’s “fatal dagger” or Edmund’s vision of being Earl of Gloucester and even King of Britain is the core fact of Western creativity and culture; it is the antechamber and womb of virtual reality, the displacement of life by phantoms. Read the rest of this entry »

This study of Western poiesis has examined the idealization and doubling of identity.  Based on analysis of great texts, it has proposed that the drive of Western poiesis to idealize itself in imagery is rooted in the metamorphic impulse of Greek culture and in the hybrid (Hellenic – Hebraic), self-irritating nature of this culture. Further, I have found and sought to explain that this drive to idealize often is rooted or involved in erotic trauma and follows a distinctive tragic trajectory. The dream of idealized being, the early stages of image formation (doubling) is an idyllic or pastoral phase in the process. As the image is formalized, separates, possesses and confronts its source an apocalyptic stage ensues resulting in the death or madness of the individual or cultural body. Sometimes this is matched by disillusionment with the image: it is unattainable (Narcissus), it is dead, it is a delusion (Camelot, Kurtz), and its subsequent collapse or petrifaction. Idealism, by its nature contains its own collapse for, as etymology tells us, idol worship and the dream of an idyll inevitably is idle. Thus, the apocalyptic awareness of the doubling, attenuation and displacement of self into ideal elicits an elegiac phase where the death and or disillusion, the realm of lies and phantoms is mourned. In Western poiesis the elegiac phase often includes forging a new idyll meant to last forever, the testament or shrine of the dead that because it is an idyll (eidellion from eidolon) is a lie. Thus Marlow says to Kurtz’s fiancee, “the last word he spoke was… your name.” A culture of imagery is a culture of lies and of horror. Even Marlow who “hates and detests a lie” must lie to save the illusion because the darkness of false idols are so horrible. The process is self-perpetuating and irreversible as the economy, pop media and political discourse show. Read the rest of this entry »

History shows that the great powers do not want peace: in the 20th century they perfected the art of contriving wars of attrition which ‘require’ or ‘justify’ management by the diplomatic-military cadres of the powers and UN to “secure lasting peace.” In Orwellian fashion, this War Process is defined as “security.” It is the kerua shalom whose numeric values equals that of Esav and that grows in the rotting of integrity (shaleim) from whose kindness and truth alone genuine peace can spring. Read the rest of this entry »