The "mountain of eternity" is very much like the logician’s tense of timelessness, so that here there is strictly no temporal meaning for "simultaneity." God cannot "see" the whole sequence of our past, present, and future simultaneously, but can do so only tenselessly, so to speak. His remembrance, foresight, and vision-indeed, his whole "knowledge"—must likewise be viewed as atemporal. It is not just that tensed statements concerning his knowledge are false; it is that in the strict sense they are (...) meaningless—meaningless in that such statements are not allowed by the formation rules of the language and are indefinable in terms of its primitives. Knowledge in the tense of timelessness does not then precede temporally the actual events and objects constituting the physical cosmos and its history; it is above them primordally, this knowledge itself being one of the creative factors of the cosmos. This knowledge is pre-temporal but contains implicitly the divine, predestined plan for all contingent happenings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD AND THE STATUS OF FACTS JOHN PETERSON University of Rhode Island Kingston, Rhode Island I EVEN BEFORE mid-century, Platonism was in such retreat that Croce could call it "traditional philosophy." By " Platonism " is meant any philosophy which admits transcendent entities, be they individuals or universals. This philosophy, complains Croce,... has its eyes fixed on heaven, and expects supreme truth from that quarter. This division of heaven (...) and earth, this dualist conception of a reality which transcends reality, of metaphysics over physics, this contemplation of the concept without or outside judgment, for ever imprints the same character, whatever the denomination the transcendental reality may bear: God or Matter, Idea or Will; it makes no difference, while beneath or against each of them there is presumed to subsist some inferior or merely phenomenal reality.1 Though few recent philosophers would follow Croce in his identification of philosophy with history, most would applaud the Italian idealist's castigation of Platonism. Between their acts of mutual criticism, idealists, existentialists, logical empiricists, pragmatists, Marxists, philosophers of language, neo-Nietzschians, deconstructionists and most phenomenologists unite against the transcendent. The metaphysics of Plato and Kant are dead, they chant. No timeless Reality lurks behind appearences, eluding eye, ear, language and inner sense. Insisting on the reality of at least relational universals, the early Russell for a time resisted the tide. But his abandonment 1 Benedetto Croce, " History as the Story of Liberty " in Morton White, ed., The Age of Analysis (New York, 1964), pp. 50-51. 635 636 JOHN PETERSON of logical atomism weakened his case for Platonism and a turn to empiricism followed. Moreover, even as he defended universals in his early days, Russell shunned transcendent individuals. In this effort his most celebrated ploy was the Theory of Descriptions, according to which commitment to individuals such as the king of France and the golden mountain is eschewed. Less famous was his move to spike that metaphysical individual known as substance. This he did by attacking the traditional subject-predicate form of the proposition. If all simple propositions are of the subject-predicate form and if true propositions map facts and thirdly if there are no facts which cannot be mirrored by propositions, then, says Russell, either there is only one substance or there are many substances between which there are no relations.2 And under both alternatives-the one Spinozistic and the other Leibnizian-substance is a hidden, transcendent thing which accounts for all phenomena without itself being part of any phenomenon. But be it from Croce or James or Dewey or Sartre or the Marxists or Quine or whomever, is this anti-platonism really justified? Are these celebrated philosophers right or even consistent in eliminating the transcendent? To see that they are not, one need only consider the case of facts. If facts are timeless and not temporal, then there are transcendent entities after all and the anti-platonists are wrong. Take, for example, the fact that Napoleon was defeated by Wellington at Waterloo on June 18, 1815. Defenders of temporalism as regards facts must either count this as being a past fact or else hold that this fact is no different from the historical event, "fact" being just another name for "event". But both of these options fail. That facts are not events is shown by the difference in how the following questions are answered: (a) " Why did I not hold class this morning in Adams Hall "? and (b) "What is meant by saying that the statement ' I did·not hold class this morning in Adams Hall ' is true "? While (a) may be answered by citing some event which prevented my hold2 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York, 1975), pp. 9495. GOD AND THE STATUS OF FACTS 637 ing class in Adams Hall this morning (for example, a fire broke out in Adams Hall just before class), (b) is never answered this way. Though the event of the fire in Adams Hall (or some other event) may be what prevented my holding class this morning in Adams Hall, it is nonsense to cite either that fire or any other event as an answer to (b). Yet, a perfectly sensible answer... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Laws, & Gods: Magistrates & Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican RomeT. Corey BrennanGargola, D. J. Lands, Laws, & Gods: Magistrates & Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. x 1 270 pp. Cloth, $43.95. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome)“Nothing could have contributed more to the safety, strength and (...) profit of the state.” Thus Niccolò Machiavelli (Disc. II 6), one of the first of a long line of moderns to expatiate on the phenomenon of Roman Republican colonization. The latest (at time of writing) is D. J. G[argola], with his learned Lands, Laws, & Gods, which has its origins in the author’s 1989 University of North Carolina dissertation. The book takes as its general subject not just Republican colonization but also another well-trod area of Roman public policy—the agrarian legislation that distributed state land and regulated its use—as well as the religious and technical aspects of Roman land definition.Can we really expect much new on these traditional topics? Perhaps not, [End Page 143] especially now that we have Dieter Flach’s Römische Agrargeschichte (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 3.9, Munich 1990)—a masterly synthesis that G. oddly has missed. Yet G. independently manages to come up with a work of value. The bulk of G.’s book (chapters 2–7) consists of detailed reconstructions, especially from the evidence of Livy 21–45 (not much used by Flach), of how colonies were established, viritane plots assigned, and land sold or leased in the mid-Republic. Here G. has sifted through a small mountain of difficult evidence (and bibliography) of widely varying worth and succeeded in shaping a coherent narrative. He has a keen eye for technical and conventional language, and sound judgment on the limits of applying evidence from the various Gromatici (none of whom were writing much before the second century a.d.) to the Republican situation. In short, G. in these pages has crafted a reliable and readable English language work of reference on all sorts of res agrariae.The emphasis in chapters 2–7 is not so much on evolution in the administration of agrarian and colonial legislation—G. argues (somewhat provocatively) that there was not much development of institutions within this period—but on creating a composite picture of how things worked. G. realizes “the result is necessarily an idealized portrait,” in which the system appears more regular than it perhaps was (10–11). One additional trouble, however, is that this approach sometimes flattens potentially significant details. Take for instance the two commissions of colonial IIIviri created under a lex Aelia of late 194 (Liv. 34.53.1–2), one of which went on to found Copia (193), the other Valentia (192). Now, the reported terms of this law provided that the commissioners hold imperium—quite striking, though G. misses that detail—for three years (i.e., 193–91) to colonize the ‘ager Thurinus’ and the ‘Bruttii’ respectively. G. is over-optimistic in calling these territories “stable, long pacified regions” (63). If so, why the imperium? One possible explanation. The territorial parameters placed on each of these commissions (especially ‘the Bruttii’) were quite loose. Those IIIviri may have been expected to take wide-ranging measures to strengthen Roman control over dissidents in this area (cf. App. Hann. 61.252–53), even after they established their colonies. (Note that each of these commissions completed their ostensible tasks before their triennium expired.) If true, how many other colonial commissions were like these?It is only in chapters 8 and 9, where G. surveys agrarian programs from the Gracchi to the end of the Republic, that we see an attempt to show real development. The Gracchi in their agrarian legislation sought to achieve broader effects than any of their predecessors, argues G. in chapter 8, and so introduced agrarian laws that “ended the rigid separation of categories found in mid-Republican legislation” (176). Consider the lex Sempronia agraria of 133, which, in its final form, established IIIviri a(gris) i(udicandis) a(dsignandis) to settle coloni on public land taken from illegal possessores. In this law... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deep Mysteries: God, Christ, and Ourselves by Aidan NicholsGerard T. MundyDeep Mysteries: God, Christ, and Ourselves by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2020), vii + 133 pp.Basic Catholic teaching declares that God's will must be trusted and that perfect knowledge of all that is resides in the Creator. An implication of this claim is that all of God's work within time and history—in man's linearly conception of (...) time and history—is meaningful. For, as perfect order himself God's work is neither random nor coincidental. God's perfect understanding means that he is able, colloquially speaking, "to connect the dots" perfectly. Thus, the historical particulars of the New Testament events are not random and coincidental, but they connect perfectly within God's plan.In terms of biblical events, then, what are the significances of the time periods during which, and places at which, they occurred? "Why was Jesus born on a particular date, at a particular time, and in a particular manger in Bethlehem? Why was the womb of Mary, Mater Dei, chosen at that exact time, and at that exact place? Why did Jesus stand on that particular mountain and not upon another? There are perfect answers to all of those questions and more, for, as Proverbs declares in this vein: "The LORD has made everything for a purpose" (16:4).In Deep Mysteries: God, Christ, and Ourselves, Father Aidan Nichols, O.P., meditates on questions related to the potential reasons for some of the historical particulars of "the principal Christological mysteries." Fr. Nichols defines the mysteries as these: "the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism, the Transfiguration, the Passion and Death, the Descent into Hell, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, and the Second Coming." (41).Attempting to understand how all of the parts of the New Testament fit together perfectly in an historical sense—as God's mind would see it—is a fascinating intellectual endeavor. The primary difference between the innocent inquirer and the vain one, however, is that the former understands that God's reason is infinite and that only the First Mover has the ability to see and to put together all particulars. Thomas Aquinas elucidates the essence of the endeavor to connect the particulars when, in reference to man's ability to understand "the truth of faith," he argues: "Yet it is useful for the human reason to exercise itself in such arguments, however weak they may be, provided only that there be present no presumption to comprehend or to demonstrate. For to be able to see something of the loftiest realities, however thin and weak the sight may be, is... a cause of the greatest joy" [Summa contra gentiles I, ch. 8).Posing the question of what the particulars of history might mean brings immediately another question. As Fr. Nichols asks: "How can the Eternal [End Page 386] and time be conjoined in a phrase, and the truth of such conjoining made credible?" (29). Indeed, if God transcends the man-conceived conception of time, how can man even understand God's movements if man can see time only in linear fashion? Fr. Nichols contends that Christ's "mystery-events are not just historical occurrences that, like all such events, belong to the human past" (31). Rather, argues Fr. Nichols, the mysteries "are permanently able to affect the intended beneficiary of the mysteries: namely, the human race" (31). In other words, contends Fr. Nichols, the mysteries are past, present, and future, in the human conception of time.Attempting "to connect the dots" in Christological historical particulars is a subjective endeavor that requires a great deal of individual deciphering, with reliance especially on the interpretation of perceived symbolism. Fr. Nichols's broad theme-based meditations can provide starting points for further study on more concentrated topics.The most exceptional part of the book is Fr. Nichols's discussion on how Jesus's mysteries exist, simultaneously, in the past, in the present, and in the future. This point is of great significance for both theology and philosophy. For, until the Second Coming, God, not being tied to man's limited experience of time, simultaneously, and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RANSOM'S GOD WITHOUT THUNDER: REMYTHOLOGIZING VIOLENCE AND POETICIZING THE SACRED Gary M. Ciuba Kent State University From tree-lined Vanderbilt University of 1930 Nashville, the modernist poet and critic John Crowe Ransom longed to hear in his imagination the God who thundered fiercely in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. The God of sacrifice who in Homer's Iliad, "his thunder striking terror," received libations from the warring armies (230). The God (...) of jealousy who in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound "drove the sleepless thunderbolt, / plunged the fire spurting shaft/ down" on Typhon for defying heaven with his violence (46). The God of vengeance who in Ovid's Metamorphoses sent "blinding / Thunder [to shake] Olympus, and Pelim / Thrust down by heaven's bolt crashed over Ossa" when the giants piled mountain upon mountain to reach Jove's throne (35). The God ofviolence who in Psalm 78:48 delivered the cattle ofthe obstinate Egyptians "to the hail, and their flocks to hot thunderbolts" or who in 1 Samuel 7:10 "thundered with great thunder" to smite the Philistines. In God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy Ransom attacked the modern heresy that deprived the deity ofsuch awful might and summoned Americans to live under a new myth of sacred violence. IfRansom listened with the ears ofthe Methodist faith in which he had been raised, he might have heard how the god of old was muted at the university where he studied and later taught. Ten years before Ransom was born, Methodist-sponsored Vanderbilt had eliminated the lectureship of naturalist Alexander Winched because hisPre-Adamites had challenged the Creation story in Genesis. But in 1914, when Ransom returned to his alma Gary M. Ciuba41 mater to begin more than two decades of teaching there, the Methodists ended their affiliation with Vanderbilt because of a dispute about church governance of the university (Bailey 9-10, 31-4). When the Scopes Trial caused a furor in 1925, Ransom was invited by Vanderbilt to condemn the Fundamentalists to the southeast in Dayton. He refused-not because he sided with the anti-Darwinists but because he believed that the tyranny of science was threateningthe poetic foundation ofreligion (Quinlan 40, n. 3). Ransom's thunderless plight was virtually imagined by H.L. Mencken, one of the most stinging critics of the creationists, when in 1922 he penned a tongue-in-cheek lament forthe passing ofthe ancient deities. "Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king ofthe gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus," Mencken mock-elegized in "Memorial Service." "But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today?" (95). God Without Thunder provides the answer to Mencken's archly lugubrious question: it is John Crowe Ransom. Grieving the demise ofthe deity ofyore, Ransom's treatise on the religious imagination heralds a one-man revival of Jupiter Tonans. Ransom believes that the god ofantiquity has been muffled bythe spirit of scientific abstraction that reigns notjust in Tennessee but across all of America.7 Hetraces this modern cult ofthe mind beyond the current efforts ofreligion to seek a rapprochement with biology and physics; beyond the science-driven Prometheus of Shelley, the rationalism of the Protestant Reformation, and the inquiry of Copernicus; beyond the errors of early Christianity, to a kind of primal sin. Humans have used their intelligence first to set themselves above nature, then to order the world according to their ways, and finally to exploit all ofcreation for their use. Demystified by science, thunder has become not the mighty weapon ofthe ancient God who tolerated no rivals but only the noise of heated and expanding air. Ransom views science as having such ultimacy that it exercises a mimetic function: it provides Girardian models for desire. "Science directs us to amuse ourselves, between desires," Ransom writes, "by simulating 7 Louis Rubin reads Ransom's "Armageddon" as a poetic companion piece to God Without Thunder, for it tells how divine wrath has been compromised amid the suavities of the modern world At the apocalyptic battle of the poem's title, a militant... (shrink)

Leibniz in Paris -- Philosophy on the Left Bank -- Le Grand Arnauld -- Theodicy -- The kingdoms of nature and grace -- Touch the mountains and they smoke -- The eternal truths -- The specter of Spinoza.

Leibniz in Paris -- Philosophy on the Left Bank -- Le Grand Arnauld -- Theodicy -- The kingdoms of nature and grace -- "Touch the mountains and they smoke" -- The eternal truths -- The specter of Spinoza.

This is an addendum to an earlier essay on the Purāṇic cosmograph interpreting it in terms of the principles of stereographic projection: Kloetzli (Hist Relig 25(2): 116–147, 1985). That essay provided an approach to understanding the broad structures of the Purāṇic cosmograph but not the central island of Jambudvīpa or its most important region (varṣa) of Bhārata. This addendum focuses on the works of Ptolemy as a resource for understanding the Purāṇic materials. It reaffirms the broad outlines of earlier conclusions, (...) but by understanding the major concerns of Ptolemy’s Geography, is able to provide a far ranging interpretation of the Purāṇic central island of Jambudvīpa. Viewed in the light of the main features of Ptolemy’s Geography, Jambudvīpa, the central island of the Purāṇic cosmograph, can be seen as a geograph modeled on the principles of Ptolemy’s Geography embedded within a larger cosmograph modeled on the principles of Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium—the earth at the center of the universe. Parallels between the seven Ptolemaic climates and the Purāṇic varṣas, the Nile and the Ganges, and the inhabited world (oikumene) and Bhārata deepen our sense of shared tradition as do representations of Bhārata alternately as Alexandria and Babylon. (shrink)

Joseph Sheban attempts to prove that there is neither an Aryan nor a Semitic race, but rather one white race. He tells us that, according to the Bible, Abraham told his servant "Thou shalt go to my country and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac." The servant went to Nahor in Mesopotamia. Now archaeologists have not found Nahor but they have found Ur, the inhabitants of which were Aryan Sumerians. Sheban concludes, "Therefore Abraham must have (...) been of the same race of his city. If the inhabitants of Ur were Aryans, Abraham must have been an Aryan boy." The Jewish people are not distinct as belonging to a Semitic race but only as a religious group, a group which includes diverse members of the single white race. Sheban first discusses the origin of the white race; it was located in the mountains east of the Mediterranean. This single race was a mixture of people with differing physical characteristics, with blond hair, black hair, brown eyes, blue eyes, etc. They had a religion, gods and a code of laws, much of which we still use. Sheban traces the migration of the white race by considering the movement of their gods. Sheban also argues that the Phoenicians are the original discoverers of America, that the Phoenicians did business with Solomon, which enabled Solomon to acquire the silver from America that made him one of the richest men of his age, that Columbus set out to rediscover America, not to go to India. In the opinion on this reviewer, the arguments in support of these points are unconvincing.—E. M. (shrink)

El artículo recuerda la filosofía de Nietzsche, su crítica a la religión cristiana y sus propuestas: nihilismo, voluntad de poder… Recuerda el error del análisis y el vacío de su propuesta. Nietzsche se confunde a la hora de interpretar el hombre y el cristianismo. El Sermón de la montaña y las bienaventuranzas no nacen del resentimiento hacia la vida, sino de la alegría de la auténtica vida humana y personal. This paper reminds Nietzsche’s philosophy and his critique to the Christian (...) religion and his offers: nihilism, will of power … Reminds the mistake of the analysis and the emptiness of his offer. Nietzsche gets confused at the moment of interpreting the man and the Christianity. The Sermon of the mountain and the Beatitudes are not born of the resentment towards the life, but of the happiness of the authentic human and personal life. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of studying the relationship between language and ethnic culture. It analyzes Bashkir toponyms associated with the cult of fire. The Bashkirs, like many nations, including the Turkic and Mongolian, have thought that fire symbolized home and was the protector of the family. The Bashkirs worshiped fire as cleansing and healing power, while at the same time the fire represented formidable and dangerous force. Fire in the Bashkir mythology is closely related to its opposite (...) element - Water, with the gods of the upper world - the Sun and the Moon and the deity of Earth, geographical names of Bashkortostan testify this. On the material of Bashkir toponymy and related beliefs it was attempted to do a semantic etimological-onomasiological reconstruction of the Bashkir deity of fire Otukan, which dates back to the old Turkic deity Yduk Otuken//Otukan. In Mongolian mythology, it corresponds to the deity Etugen//Otuken, associated with the cult of the mother goddess, earth and fire, and in Japanese mythology - with the god, the owner of the land, - Ootukonu-si-no kami. According to the author, the formation of names connected with ‘fire‘ in the Bashkir toponymy was promoted by the worship of the deity of fire, the tribal fire, the tribal habitat and the family by Tatar-Mongols. Interesting is the fact, that the base ‘ut‘, which is connected with the ancient Turkic beliefs, also builds a theonym, a toponymic term, a geographic name, an ethnonym and anthroponym, i.e. it permeates the entire onomastic and appellative vocabulary. However, at the appellative level, this lexical item has no religious significance. For example, Otukan, TÓ©kÓ©n, Ò®tәgәn, Ò®tәk, otaq in Turkic languages have the meanings of ‘home‘, ‘yurt‘, ‘mountain valley‘, ‘flat place in the mountains on the hillside‘, ‘southern winter quarters‘. This relationship is explained by the fact that, initially, perhaps, yet there was the worship of a female deity Otukan that embodied fire and was associated with the earth, with the habitat and the ancestral hearth, where the original base morpheme was ‘fire‘, then it was associated with the deification of family and tribal territory, and later with the deification of the person of the ruler, this lexic item has spread throughout the onomastic vocabulary and in the appellative lexicon within the meaning of the place of residence. (shrink)

On rivers, mountains and secrets : an introduction to the study and its subjects -- Talking to God-- and God talking back -- Mind embodied : spiritual practice and consciousness -- Place and the making of religious practice -- The spirit of the work : challenging oppression, nurturing diversity -- Conscious sex, sacred celibacy : sexuality and the spiritual path.

Two continents. Three countries. Mountains, archipelago, a little red dot & more to come. BERIT SOLI-HOLT (Editor): When I think of introductory material, I think of that Derrida documentary when he is asked about what he would like to know about other philosophers. He simply states: their love life. APRIL VANNINI (Editor): And as far as introductions go, I think Derrida brought forth a fruitful discussion on philosophy and thinking with this statement. First, he allows philosophy to open up the (...) personal and second, the ability to conjure the notion of thinking in relation. After all, love lives are spawned from relations, and such are philosophical encounters—the co-emergence of thought and affect. This brings us to discuss the concept of the special issue of continent. called drift . From the Statement of Intent : The discussion that has become drift , a special issue of continent. began in the glow of a bonfire beside a lake near the Thousand Islands of Ontario when co-founders April and Berit came across a conception of a journal that would decline to follow traditional models of invitation and editorship, instead following a generated discourse through relational means. Shedding preemptive articulation of expected outcome and cohesion, we hope to light a fuse of chain interactions with each contributor active in authorial, editorial, and curatorial roles. drift seeks to allow the framing mechanism to choose itself, to find where something can flow or emerge in relation to a series of participants. By setting out a thread of thought to work its own way through writers and artists of various locations, drift operates through links, breaks, pauses, new directions, unintended consequences, twists, holes, bridges. We are attempting to give the scene for an emergence and what can become conceivable when given the opportunity to create chains of thought—linking, welding, fusing, looping, stitching. We hope to explore what is attainable when scholarly/artistic relationships transverse on their own terms instead of articulated by an institutional environment. JEREMY FERNANDO (Guest Editor): I think he was actually more interested in their sex lives. Though at the same time completely refusing to discuss, disclose, his own: I found it rather touching that he blushes whenever speaking of his life with Marguerite. So perhaps in this sense it is very apt to speak of it in terms of love; and the secret that is in each love: that even though it is a relationality between, there are parts of it that remain hidden, not just from everyone else, but even those in that relation itself. What the editors intend to ^do^ to impart this conceptualization is to provide a framework through the choice of a theme and by minimal standardization of form and content guidelines. As initial instigator, each editor will send their contribution to the issue to a fellow colleague, thinker, artist, friend with the invitation to send (via post) the accruing materials to another possible contributor. In this, we hope to engage with many individuals on ideas surrounding a specific theme determined but not limited by the editors of the drift . The end result will take the form of whatever is at hand (as materials can only stay with each contributor for two weeks) and whomever is at hand (the availability of interested and capable parties) through a course of five months. We are curious. What are the ways in which thought can emerge between individuals and places? What occurs when our fundamental mode of inquiry is between each other? How are ethical, social, spacious, political, aesthetic practices created between a chain of contributors. BSH: To introduce what to look forward to in June with the publication of drift isn't quite possible yet. It is in the stages of preparation, barely started, but already begun. I have been thinking about drift as an insect that goes through life cycles, chrysalises, pupas, larva. Each moment of the production and publication of this issue of continent. is its own life. A bug under a pin is not as interesting as one in flight or crawling up your leg. JF: Though the one crawling up your leg is also more likely to bite you. There is always already a danger in letting be, thinking …. Then again, there is also a potential rupture in attempting to seize, pin down, capture. BSH: I think a word we haven't thought about enough yet is capture. I think we are perhaps trying to capture something, or to allow for the moments of this capture along the way, the resulting material being the ripples left in the sand when the water waves away. AV: This question comes to mind when speaking about captures, waves, ripples: How can we activate a ripple? What I find interesting about a wave is the difference in frequencies, movements, forms, style that are activated in between intervals. What is interesting about a wave is that it is activated in relation to what came before. What remains in the sand is a ripple that forms in relation between multiple intervals of stylistic waves. As Deleuze and Parnet have taught us, "We were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being 'author'. And these 'between-the-twos' referred back to other people, who were different on one side from the other. The desert expanded, but in so doing became more populous." 1 Drift is activation for thinking-with and possibly much more—who knows? There is the intent to subvert the relational qualities between people in journal publishing, but also important to the editors is the subversion of materials. The editors do not shy away from use of contemporary technology and, in fact, have relied and will continue to rely on the wonders of internet connectivity to midwife the drift. The connective infrastructure chosen to relay the developing issue is simply one of bodies, of postal workers and the varying postal systems. Some may find it to be merely be a call of an already dying form, but the editors believe that the conversation exchanged from hand to hand is of explicit difference in quality of engagement due to the complexity of peripheral information transported by physical matter. Different hospitalities and responsibilities are at play in keeping hold of one-of-a-kind materials for a time and entrusting various postal systems to bear the message forward. To have work physically transported through space and time through this kind of infrastructure that is reliant on individuals to literally carry a message is crucial in incorporating traces of bodily presence. AV: Thought is contingent and emergent process that folds, twists, pulls, shifts in multiple directions and we are interested in these multiple directions. JF: And even as thought is contingent on, hinged around, its place, time, venue—on its continents, as it were (we still tend to speak of gestures of thinking as Continental, British, American, European, Asian, etc.)—we might also attempt to respond to the landscape within each thought: its folds, unfoldings, rolls, manoeuvres, geography. BSH: How different is this than Morelli's screw that Julio Cortazar or Horacio Oliveira recounts in Hopscotch? The fable recalls a man who regarded a screw everyday on his stoop. When he perishes, the screw disappears, perhaps into a fellow neighbor's pocket for secret contemplation. Whoever is writing the passage remarks that "Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw." JF: Perhaps even more intriguing is the notion that we do not quite know who is inscribing these remarks on Morelli. That even as someone says that it is a screw, perhaps because it is shaped like a screw, the one who names it “screw”—the one whom we are in a relation with in relation to the screw—remains veiled from us. But even as this is so, the notion of the object as “screw” is marked, etched, onto us. BSH: A periodical, marking a period of time, but where? An issue, a magazine, a storehouse of information. To show the remainders of thinkers connecting and surfing. With all this stated, we, as editors of the drift are aware of the active fault, quaking potential, and ethical catastrophe of such a proposed project — the inheritance or the gifting of a project without consent. We are certain that there may be possible oversight on the process of such a project. If such is the case, we hope that oversight and misdirection will not leave this project dormant but rather open up promising new directions, questions, and potential considerations. We are very excited about the accidental propositions that can occur in between. In sum, we'll see what happens. JF: Perhaps, all we can know of the screw is that we are screwed ... NOTE Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet. Dialogues II . Revised edition. (New York: Columbia University Press). 2007: 17. (shrink)

European intellectuals diagnosed the end of the nineteenth century as “the sickness of an age.” Schopenhauer's pessimistic books suddenly became popular; Nietzsche announced the “death of god”; and Max Nordeau's Degeneration was an international best seller. To be sure, this mood of despair was initially limited to a handful of poets and philosophers. But once the outbreak of World War I revealed what “the treacherous years were all the while making for and meaning,” the sense that the West had somehow (...) been betrayed by its own most fundamental accomplishments and beliefs was globalized. Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain captured the idea neatly by describing Europe as a tuberculosis sanatorium behind whose walls splendid accomplishment rapidly rotted toward calamity. Spengler's Decay of the West and the early volumes of Toynbee's Study of History argued that decline was inevitable. As Europeans lost faith in their ability to erect The Heavenly City Of The Eighteenth Century Philosophers [Becker, 1932], the era of “enlightenment optimism” gave way to Auden's “Age of Anxiety.” If, as T.S. Eliot put it in East Coker, “the quiet-voiced elders” bequeathed us “merely a receipt for deceit,” then, to cite again W.B. Yeats’ famous poem, it became increasingly obvious that “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” “[F]ollowing some rough beast” that “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born,” modern civilization began a desperate search for new values that could orient society in an unexpected world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Model for the Many Senses of ScriptureFrom the Literal to the Spiritual in Genesis 22 with Thomas AquinasChristopher S. Morrissey (bio)Introduction: Many Senses Require Many TranslationsOn the mountain the Lord appeared (NETS, Gen. 22:14b)On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided (RSV)1In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen (KJV)On the mountain the LORD will see (NAB)ἐν τῷ ὄρει κύριος ὤφθη (LXX)in (...) monte Dominus videtur (Nova Vulgata)in monte Dominus videbit (St. Jerome’s Vulgate)In his book Abraham’s Curse, Bruce Chilton argues that in Gen. 22:14b, “the Septuagint’s Greek renders the Hebrew text” correctly (i.e., “with Yahweh as the subject of the verb”), whereas English translations like the King James Version (KJV) prefer to imply that the ram is the verbal subject. Chilton contends that “This is a case of translators caring more about doctrine than wording, and attempting to legislate what the Bible can say.”2Chilton’s textual exegesis does have some value. He notes that “Contextually [End Page 231] as well as grammatically, God is the subject: Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah, liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention.”3 But with his polemics against the KJV, he fails to affirm the rich polysemy of the passage. He replaces one literal reading with another and then argues as if the two are at odds. But Scripture has many senses, a truth famously expressed in the medieval distich of Augustine of Dacia, best known in the version of Nicholas of Lyra: “The literal sense teaches what happened; what you believe, the allegorical; the moral, what you should do; where you are going, the anagogical.”4 Therefore Chilton is wrong to impute bad motives to anyone who would attempt to unfold the spiritual sense of a passage (“caring more about doctrine”), or even to anyone who would note that a passage has more than one literal meaning.Chilton’s own insistence on uncovering the univocal original meaning of a passage (through his preferred historical method of “generative exegesis”)5 is excessively literal, as if recourse to grammar would allow one “to legislate what the Bible can say.” When Chilton says “Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah,” he is not contending that God was seen directly, literally, but rather interpreting the metaphorical or parabolical sense of the phrase “Yahweh was seen” (in Gen. 22:14b), because he glosses the meaning of the metaphor as “liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention”;6 that is, God is seen indirectly, cognitively, rather than literally with the eyes. Because literally seeing a ram is not opposed to cognitively understanding God’s action, the KJV, pace Chilton, can be defended contextually. To my mind, the Revised Standard Version (RSV), echoing the KJV, does the best job of rendering the Hebrew text literally, with “On the mount of the lord it shall be provided,” because this leaves open the many senses of the third person singular “it,” to be unfolded by exegesis. Thus more than one translation is required in order to appreciate all the significations being deployed in the treatment of “seeing” in Gen. 22:8 and 22:14. “It shall be provided”: More than one univocal sense of the “it” has to be uncovered by exegesis in this Scripture, in order to see what “it” is all about.To justify my opinion that the RSV most felicitously translates the Hebrew, I would like to prepare the way to a conclusion in which I compare the Septuagint’s translation (which follows Chilton’s preferred rendering of the context) with the Vulgate Latin translations. The path toward this conclusion will show that Chilton’s polemics, indicative of an exegetical attitude that is hostile to an appreciation of the many senses of Scripture, fail to see how the RSV translation is also defensible as keeping the reader’s mind open to the many senses of the Scriptural passage. But first things first. With the help of St. Thomas Aquinas, let me distinguish the various senses of Scripture and then point out how they are all exemplified here, all being signified by the text. [End Page 232] Click for larger view View... (shrink)

Imagine a scene sometime in the 1750s in the depths of west Wales. This was wild country. Even a century later, George Borrow called it a ‘mountainous wilderness … a waste of russet-coloured hills, with here and there a black craggy summit’. Through this desolation rides the Reverend William Williams. As he rode, he read – and the book in his saddlebags on this occasion was William Derham'sAstro-Theology, first published some twenty years earlier. Williams was a leading figure in the (...) Methodist revolution that had been sweeping through Wales for the past two decades. Disenchanted with an Anglican Church that seemed increasingly disconnected – culturally and linguistically – from their everyday lives, and attracted by powerful and charismatic preachers like Williams himself, men and women across Wales turned to Methodism. They organized themselves into local groups worshipping in meeting houses rather than in their parish churches. Leaders like Williams usually had a number of such groups under their care, and spent much of their time on horseback, travelling between widely scattered communities to minister to their congregations. That Williams read in the saddle is well known. As shall become clear, he had certainly read Derham's book as well. It is not too much of an imaginative leap, therefore, to picture him reading about God's design of the cosmos as he rode through the Welsh hills – and it is a good image with which to begin a discussion about Wales, science and European peripheries. (shrink)

Craig, Barry M A characteristic feature of Luke's Gospel is that of the journey, with Jesus from chapter 9 resolutely heading to Jerusalem; of the more than eighty verses naming Jerusalem in the New Testament only a handful are not in Luke-Acts. Last Sunday's gospel reading was taken from the last day of teaching given after entering Jerusalem and reclaiming the Temple, and before the Passover and arrest. But Jesus is not the only one to whom the journey motif applies. (...) Last Sunday reference was made to the Son of Man coming in power, and the exhortation to the disciples to stand ready is akin to that of people prepared for a journey. Today we return to just before the commencement of the public ministry, with John the Baptist exhorting people to prepare a way for the Lord. A simple reading of this text suggests that it is the way on which God proceeds that needs making straight, but it is not: it refers to the path on which those God rescues are brought in procession. This is the procession referred to in the second reading, for which mountains are levelled and the valleys filled so that Jerusalem's captive children may be brought back safely from the land of bondage, Babylon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Five Poems DEBORAH WARREN Bugonia hic vero subitum dictu mirabile monstrum aspiciunt, liquefacta boum per viscera toto stridere apes utero et ruptis effervere costis. —Vergil, Georgics IV The covert’s dark, but Aristaeus sees —beyond it, in the oleandered meadow, walking to her wedding with her maids— Eurydice, as sweet as early windfall apples to the gods of the bitter dead. She runs, from shifting shade to sun (...) to shade until, in a shock of sudden sun, she sways, blinded, blundering into an adder’s kiss, and while the bridegroom waits by the bridal bed, she waits to be undressed by worms instead. But Aristaeus pays for the assault. The mead-gods visit on his apiaries wax-moth, mites, foulbrood and chalk-disease until an oracle orders a hekatomb: after nine days the myrtle-nymphs perform a miracle, and out of the carcases crawl fat new sun-furred drones to work the comb, a gift of the mead-gods who, with the poet, praise the teams of bright collaborating bees as little Romans—parvos Quirites. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 And what about Eurydice? The swarm goes humming on, a small Rome in a hive. The story’s not about Eurydice’s second chance, or whether she’ll survive. Eurydice’s a minor character; she’s only one girl, sui generis. Besides, no cattle-trick exists for her. The gods can let the apiaries thrive and armies—even empires—endure; one girl’s more complicated to replace. 44 five poems The Tithonus Club We can begin our visit with the Day Room where, in wheelchairs, some with canes or walkers, members sit: a fraternity so ancient that the confrères mostly ignore each other (club tradition). The dues are paid in decades; no one has an outstanding balance—Sir? Whoa, steady, there! Sit down... yes. Here’s your blanket. The badge of membership—the club regalia? Laminated ceremonial bracelets bear the motto Do Not Resuscitate (legend which, in practice, is seldom honored). Eleven-thirty, gentlemen; lunch is served, and now a little toast while the television mesmerizes the aides: Messieurs, your health! Deborah Warren 45 Aphrodite at the Old-Age Home —for Aphrodite Kalogeris “Honey,” the night nurse said to Aphrodite, “let me fix your bib. Look, Aphrodite! Here’s your juice and crackers, Aphrodite! “She doesn’t speak a blessed word of English,” the night nurse told us, “but she understands as good as if we spoke to her in Greek.” Aphrodite’s ears were as grotesque as the pore-coarse nose that bloomed across her face, but she heard her name: When Aphrodite rose and, beatific, dreamed across the room, traversing a happiness none of us could hear, she spoke a language older than herself but still her own—a dialect of beauty able to translate the fetid air. 46 five poems Climbing Etna We’d see the lava, nights, from the town square, as if the sun—an egg of fire—broke at dusk, threading its incandescent yolk down a mountain hanging in black air. Every night we’d scan the dark horizon looking for those streaks, and every night they took a while to find, however bright: Etna, it seemed, had spent the evening rising off the earth, to hover even higher, as if the mountain meant not to be found. And then, today, we ran the flows to ground, climbing up to the rolling burns of fire— closer, into the shimmering air and hiss that glanced up from the thick and red-flecked river —until our soles were smoking. But the lava sang, inside the mountain: Come, discover the fire’s origin and genesis; more—the heart of the world, in its enceinte of blind white heat. Seeing the lava course wasn’t enough, or watching the rock decant the sun; what brought us up here was the force— the hot loins—of a lightning god as dark as thunder; and, like Eve, like Semele, we wanted to approach. But there’s a spark, a jewel older than geology: stop shy of it—of finding the fire’s source, of closing in on what you shouldn’t see. Deborah Warren 47 Human Sucking strength... (shrink)

In these skeptical and disillusioned times, there are still groups of people scattered throughout the world who are trying to live out utopian dreams. These communities challenge the inevitability and morality of dominant political and economic models. By putting utopian religious ethics into practice, they attest to the real possibility of social alternatives. In Seeds of the Kingdom, Anna L. Peterson reflects on the experiences of two very different communities, one inhabited by impoverished former refugees in the mountains of El (...) Salvador and the other by Amish farmers in the Midwestern U.S. What makes these groups stand out among advocates of environmental protection, political justice, and sustainable development is their religious orientation. They aim, without apology, to embody the reign of God on earth. The Salvadoran community is grounded in Roman Catholic social thought, while the Amish adhere to Anabaptist tradition. Peterson offers a detailed portrait of these communities' history, social organization, religious life, environmental values, and agricultural practices. She discovers both practical and ideological commonalities in these two comparatively successful and sustainable communities, including a strong collective identity, deep attachment to local landscapes, a desire to preserve non-human as well as human lives, and, perhaps unexpectedly, a utopian horizon that provides both goals and the hope of reaching them. By examining the process by which people struggle to live according to a transcendent value system, she sheds light on both the actual and the potential place of religion in public life. Peterson argues that the Amish and Salvadoran communities, geographically and culturally removed from the industrialized West, have relevance for the political and environmental problems of the developed world. These communities have succeeded in the face of significant internal and external challenges, offering important practical and theoretical lessons on how to achieve ecological sustainability and social justice in the wider world. (shrink)

AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in theIliadmust begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says, ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had losttwelvechildren. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine days in their blood and there was (...) no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parmenides: The Road to Reality A New Verse Translation RICHARD MCKIM introduction i. In the history of Presocratic Greek philosophy, the poetry of Parmenides seems to loom up suddenly out of the blue like a spectral mountain peak. Depicting a vision of ultimate reality that transcends the sensory world, his towering verse manifesto revolutionized both how philosophers thought and what they thought about, with profound repercussions that still (...) reverberate today. Parmenides has not, however, been well served by his English translators. He wrote poetry and yet is almost always translated into prose. His poem describes a divinely inspired revelation and yet is persistently translated as if it were an exercise in deductive logic. His Greek can be strange and difficult but is never unintelligible, which is more than can be said for the Anglo-gibberish his translators too often force him to speak. Too many subscribe to the misguided notion that a “literal” translation, as close as possible to word-forword, best represents the original. In fact, the painful English that results, so far from being faithful to the Greek, actually betrays it, creating the obscurities it purports to reflect. Parmenides ’ reputation for being hard to understand is largely his translators’ fault, not his. I’ve undertaken to make amends by translating his poem as a poem, in a loose English approximation of the same meter. My goal is to capture some of what gets lost in prose—to mirror, however dimly, the vital role of poetic form in shaping Parmenides’ vision. The demands of meter make literal translation impossible—not at all a bad thing— while paradoxically freeing the translator to be more faitharion 27.2 fall 2019 ful. I’ve tried to use this freedom to demonstrate that Parmenides is not the obscurantist would-be logician of so many other translations but a philosopher who thinks in poetry, and whose thought is as clear and accessible as it is astonishing. ii. parmenides was a citizen of Elea, a Greek colonial town on the west coast of the ankle of Italy’s boot. Born around 515 BCE, he was an older contemporary of Socrates, who was born in 470 (according to Plato, the two men met when Parmenides was sixty-five). Several other so-called Presocratics were active even later—Democritus for one was Socrates’ junior by a decade. But the label is still useful: while Socrates reoriented philosophy toward moral values and politics, the later Presocratics maintained their predecessors’ focus on physics and cosmology. Their project was to account for the physical workings of the universe—its origins, its elements, and the forces or laws that govern its behavior— without falling back on the gods of traditional myth. But Parmenides splits their story in two. Before him, Presocratics took the reality of the sensory world for granted— a world of multiplicity and variety, motion and change, becoming and passing away. Parmenides radically rejected this assumption. The sensory world, he declared, is an illusion. What really exists is what he calls “being,” whose true nature can be perceived only by the mind. And by clearly perceiving what being must be like, the mind perceives that it can’t be anything like the world as our senses perceive it. Being is the exact opposite of the sensory world in every respect. It is timeless, motionless, changeless and imperishable, an eternal and indivisible One. After Parmenides, the reality of the sensory world needed defending. Subsequent Presocratics had to explain, at a minimum, how it could circumvent his ban on multiplicity and motion. Most notably, he provoked Leucippus and Democri106 parmenides: the road to reality tus into developing their theory of atomism—that the universe consists entirely of atoms in a void. Atoms are microscopic Parmenidean beings insofar as they’re indivisible, indestructible and immutable, but they can be infinite in number, they can move, collide and combine, thanks to the roominess of the infinite void, defined as the absence of being. Never mind that Parmenides ruled out the existence of such an absence—by inspiring atomism, he became, in his otherworldly way, the unwitting godfather of modern physics. As for metaphysics, it may be debatable whether he arrived at the idea... (shrink)

Political Theologies of Justice: Meritocratic Values from a Global Perspective Michael Puett In fourth century BCE China, a religious revolutionary named Mozi emerged. In opposition to much of the religious practices and assumptions of the time, Mozi announced that Heaven, the highest god, was a just and non-capricious deity who had created the world for humanity. As a just deity, Heaven rewarded good humans and punished bad ones. And Heaven charged humans with creating a political order that did the same: (...) Moreover, there are ways that I (Mozi) know Heaven loves the people deeply. It shaped and made the sun, moon, stars, and constellations so as to illuminate and guide [the people]. It formed and made the four seasons, spring, autumn, winter, and summer, so as to weave them into order. It sent down thunder, snow, frost, rain, and dew so as to make the five grains, hemp, and silk grow and prosper, and sent the people to obtain materials and benefit from them. It arranged and made mountains, streams, gorges, and valleys, and distributed and bestowed the hundred affairs so as to oversee and supervise the goodness and badness of the people. It made kings, dukes, and lords and charged them with, first, rewarding the worthy and punishing the wicked, and, second, plundering the metals, wood, birds, and beasts and working the five grains, hemp, and silk so as to make the materials for people's clothing and food. (shrink)

The article discusses the ecological aspects of John Milbank’s thought in the context of the growing climate crisis. For this purpose, the concept of integral ecology is interpreted in the spirit of Milbank’s integralism, which rejects the notion of “pure nature” as a manifestation of secularism and calls for theological grounding of the environmental discourse. This perspective allows us to see the limitations of the modern way of thinking, caught up in the metaphors of “conquest of nature” and “return to (...) nature.” As an alternative, the concept of “kenotic anthropocentrism” is proposed, which sees man as a rational, social, creative and religious animal, that somehow transcends his own nature, being called to union with God. On the one hand, such an approach proclaims the ontological superiority of man over other creatures, and on the other, it reminds us of his role as the guardian—and not the owner—of the Earth. Thus, it differs significantly from Clive Hamilton’s “modest anthropocentrism,” whose call to care for the environment is ultimately based on arbitrary freedom and the imperative of self-preservation. Milbank’s position is closer to Bruno Latour’s anthropocentrism emphasizing the role of man as a political representative of silent earthlings—rivers, mountains and animals. However, Milbank advocates a strong ontological hierarchy rejected by Latour, which makes him less sensitive to the material dimension of climate change. Moreover, Milbank’s militant anti-secularism may be an obstacle to a much needed broader discussion of the ecological crisis, even if his critique of modernity is hard to ignore. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Victorian DoorsErnest L. FontanaILet us begin with a simple observation. If we confine ourselves to mid- and late-nineteenth Anglophone (Victorian) poetry that employs traditional verse stanzas or rooms, it is perhaps not surprising that a line terminating with door most often rhymes with more, particularly as more is found in such locutions as no more or evermore.1 For example, in the work of Emily Dickinson, door rhymes with a (...) more phoneme in 14 of 20 instances. What is of special interest, and the focus of this essay, is the use of door as a rhymed word at the end or near the end of a poem. Of related but secondary interest is its appearance as a rhymed word at the end of an intermediate stanza. Since more signifies a quantitative concept, the frequent use of it to rhyme with door suggests that the designated door often demarcates a site of transition from a state that is quantitatively different (most often less) from the state to which one passes through the door. This imagined other state often involves quantities of time as in the frequent use of no more and evermore. In the first instance the time imagined is completely negated, in the second it is affirmed as a perpetual duration. Poe acknowledged the significance of the door/evermore rhyme in the "The Raven" in which this rhyme occurs at the end of 5 of its 18 stanzas.2 Thus this common English rhyme of door and more requires a signification of transition from one state to another that differ from each other in quantity. Often, particularly in Dickinson, the other state lies beyond the walled or enclosed room of [End Page 277] the self. My essay raises the question of whether without this accidental acoustical concurrence in English, the signification in Anglophone poetry of an implied transition from certain quotidian or phenomenal states to certain visionary or noumenal states would be as frequent or so easily rendered. Does this accidental rhyme in fact generate certain significations or metaphors?3I shall begin my demonstration with what I believe are telling examples of doors as a closural effect of both poems and stanzas.4 In the second, revised version of Hopkins's sonnet "In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez: Laybrother of the Society of Jesus," written in Dublin in 1888, the concluding sestet of this Italian sonnet ends with door.Yet God (that hews mountain and continent, Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment, Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more) Could crowd career with conquest while there went Those years and years by of world without event That in Majorca Alphonso watched the door.5The sonnet is built on the contrast between honor that is "flashed off exploit," the highly visible exploits of the early Jesuit martyrs and missionaries, with the "Unseen," apparently un-heroic life of the obscure Spanish Jesuit laybrother and hall porter, whose war was "within." While God, through his Jesuit martyrs, "could crown [His] career with conquest," Alphonsus's life passed "without event" as he "watched the door." Hopkins's rhymes his terminal door with the more that results from the silent "trickling increment" of God's ongoing creative act. The foregrounded closural door of the poem becomes, through its position and rhyme, a metaphor for a passage to the abundance resulting from God's creative action, a quantification that extends beyond the perceptible world.Alphonsus is the guardian of the passage to this abundance, one that is subtly implied by the more/door rhyme. The sonnet ends with the reader and Alphonsus positioned on the threshold of an unnamable abundance that is signified by the silence and blank space that follows upon this terminal door. In Browning's "A Lovers' Quarrel," from Men and Women (1855), the male speaker recalls, during the advent of an Italian spring, the amatory intimacies he and his beloved shared during the past winter in their Tuscan farmhouse: "'Twas a time when the heart could shew / All'" (ll. 75–76).6 But the amatory union of the [End Page 278] two lovers has been ruptured by an unidentified, chance "hasty word" spoken... (shrink)

This essay looks at the concept of AKEDAH, the essence of which is the travail of the human condition and the trust in vindication and victory, as a salient and deep metaphor for bioethics. The author first delineates the symbol, then shows its theological and ethical significance, and finally suggests its bioethical applications.The LORD said, “Go get Isaac, your only son, the one you dearly love! Take him to the land of Moriah, and I will show you a mountain (...) where you must sacrifice him to me on the fires of an altar.” So Abraham got up early the next morning and chopped wood for the fire. He put a saddle on his donkey and left with Isaac and two servants for the place where God had told him to go.Genesis 22There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:- Our universe is home to millions of galaxies, thousands of different species of flora and fauna, inhabited on different ecosystems, like under the ocean surface, in the air, on the surface of land, and inside the earth. Every single organism, whether biotic or abiotic, has a role to play in the universe. Above all these things, there is a crown of all the creation, and that we call as ‘man.’ Man has a significant place in the universe; therefore he (...) has a significant role to play here. What distinguishes a man from all the other creations is the possession of conscious, which according to the philosophers makes him the ‘desired creation.’ Every other thing, ranging from an atom to the mighty oceans and mountains are for the use of man, but the human is created for doing justice in the world with the creations of God. Keywords:- Existence, Human, Justice, Universe, Wonder. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 303-321 [Access article in PDF] "The Peak on Which Abraham Stands": The Pregnant Moment of Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling Lasse Horne Kjaeldgaard When Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s began his one-man crusade against the predominant philosophy of his time and place—the right Hegelianism that was en vogue among his contemporaries in Copenhagen—he chose his weapons with great circumspection. The indirect (...) form of communication, which he later advocated in more direct terms in his "Point of View," 1 was not only a maieutic means that helped the reader conceive of the latent and strictly private messages of the texts; it was also a strategy for Kierkegaard's undercover assaults on the Hegelian turn of the Geistesleben around him. By interweaving many of the Hegelian platitudes and self-confident pronouncements that circulated in the intellectual life of the day into the pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard contested them with parody rather than argumentation. This is the local background against which these texts are structured and to which they are addressed in multiple and very subtle ways. That also goes for that of the pseudonymous writings which has become the best known but which may also be regarded as the most private and most secretive of them all, Fear and Trembling, published pseudonymously in 1843.Secrecy, silence, and unspeakable messages are abundantly thematized in Fear and Trembling, as one could expect from the name of the narrator, Johannes de Silentio. Silentio is a prominent member of the choir of pseudonymous figures Kierkegaard invented to communicate indirectly with his audience and in [End Page 303] the name of which he published his most celebrated works. The silence that Silentio speaks of is that of Abraham of the Old Testament, who was commanded by God to sacrifice his only son on Mount Moriah. Although Genesis 22 includes fragments of the dialogue between Abraham and Isaac on their way to the mountain, Silentio insists that Abraham remained silent on the essential issue: the command he acts upon. The unmediated message Abraham had received from God could not be conveyed, and he was therefore barred from communication and bereft of his community as he journeyed to the Mountain. Yet Silentio's discourse upon this silence in Fear and Trembling has given impetus to innumerable pages of commentary. The questions and answers he poses in his reflections upon Abraham's ordeal have called for critical attention and controversy since the time of its publication. His obsession with the biblical narrative certainly seems to have been passed on to many readers of Fear and Trembling, which, a recent commentator has remarked, "continues to haunt us like no other of [Kierkegaard's] writings." 2 So far, it would seem, then, that Kierkegaard was right when he predicted, in an undated journal entry, that "Fear and Trembling will be enough to immortalise my name." It has indeed been "read and translated into foreign languages," as he foresaw it would. 3Even so, what has passed unnoticed in its long history of reception is the significance of the titles that the manuscript text bore before it came to be called Fear and Trembling. On the title page the definitive appellation is placed together with two alternatives with less suggestion of pathos: "Movements and Postures" (Bevægelser og Stillinger) and "Between-each-other" (Mellemhver-andre). 4 Not much can be discerned from these unpeculiar phrases in isolation. However, tracing their history and significance through Kierkegaard's writings and beyond, will make it clear that Fear and Trembling was also dispatched to the narrow Hegelian community in Copenhagen for the purpose of questioning their literary and visual aesthetics and philosophy of history. Into the guerrilla warfare against them Fear and Trembling introduces a weapon of such sophistication that it has remained undetected so far: the power of the "pregnant moment." My aim here will be to demonstrate the way in which Fear and Trembling appropriates a principle of selection intended for the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Triumph Of SisyphusJeffrey GordonThe gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of the mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.1The words are, of course, Albert Camus's. They were first published in 1942. Since then, this voice—at once lyrical and (...) austere, personal and oracular—and the ancient image he calls up in these lines have become permanent parts of our postmodern consciousness. Like all the images that capture and create the character of our age, Sisyphus is always there for each of us. In the intimate space of our imagination, we can turn to him at will, and with only the slightest effort, we will find him as before—solitary, weather beaten, resigned, without illusion. I want to make that effort now, not to disturb Sisyphus in his labors, nor to uproot him, surely, but to try to be precise about a matter which is, perhaps, fatally elusive of precision, to try to make explicit the significance of this figure whose implicit significance has haunted us now for over half a century. Let us turn to Sisyphus, then, as we might turn, one aimless afternoon, to some old photographs of a person close to us, perhaps even of ourselves, in the hope that we might find in them something we had missed, some expression or gesture that inadvertently reveals the essence of a life.But we must be silent now, for the figure is emerging. There is the hill, and it is morning, a slight chill in the soundless air. The landscape here is treeless, the land covered only with broken rock and scattered brush. A wide path of sterile earth has been cut in the thick brush of [End Page 183] the hill. And there, at the base of the hill, the rock—grey, mottled with holes, enormous. Slow, laborious breathing is audible. The rough hand comes into view, the flesh thick, sun-burnt, heavily veined. It finds a jut on the rock to grip. And now the weather-worn clothes, the thick trunk and powerful back. And here at last the face of Sisyphus—our own face, of course, or the face of one of our own personae, the eyes squinting against the sun, hair disheveled. He takes his hand from the rock and brings it to his side. Perhaps he is not quite ready yet, perhaps he needs a moment longer of rest. He stands motionless, eyes turning up. What is he gazing at? The summit of the hill, every square inch of which he has seen a million times before? What could he hope to discover there? Is it the cloudless sky that has his attention? Is he noting the progress of the sun? Does he seek in reflection on its course some inspiration for the renewal of his labor? He continues to stare without expression. We can afford to leave him for a moment.The legend abounds in perplexities, or at least this is true of that retelling of the myth that has made it so important to us. Camus calls Sisyphus "the absurd hero." This is, then, the best that we can hope to be, for our lives, too, according to Camus, are absurd. But why should we believe this? Surely it is ludicrously question-begging to conduct an imaginative exercise in which we strip a life of all that could possibly make it worthwhile, then appeal to this figment of ours as proof of the futility of human existence.If we are tempted to see in Sisyphus's eternal rock-rolling a revelation of the emptiness of our own labors, we should be easily dissuaded from this when we consider what little alteration is required to transform this myth from the perfect image of meaninglessness to a perfectly serviceable conception of a meaningful life.2 All we need is to introduce some point, some minimal, common, everyday point to his labors, such as any one of our lives abounds in, and the transformation is accomplished. Assume, then, that Sisyphus rolls... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Two Creations: Metamorphoses: i.5–162, 274–415 OVID (Translated by C. Luke Soucy) The Metamorphoses of Ovid opens with the creation of the world, only to recount its destruction and recreation almost immediately after. These stories begin Ovid’s mythic anthology with a sustained exploration of the uncertain origin of humanity, the conflicts in its nature, and its uneasy place in a world governed by divine forces. The following excerpts endeavor (...) to reproduce and contextualize that exploration in a blank verse translation, preserving much of the original wordplay and employing the same number of lines as in the Latin. Before there were seas, lands, and arching skies, Throughout the whole world, nature bore one face, Which was called Chaos, an unordered, rough And tumble mass of lifeless weight, wherein Lay packed the jangling elemental seeds. 10 No Titan1 then brought sunlight to the earth, No Phoebe2 yet wrought full her lunar curve; Nor hung the Earth self-poised in swaddling air, With Amphitrite’s3 arms stretched round her banks. For though the land, the sea, and air were there, 15 The land could bear no tread, the waves no stroke, The mist no light. No being retained its shape, And each opposed with each, for in one self arion 28.3 winter 2021 1. The Sun, son of the Titan Hyperion. 2. Diana, here representing the moon. 3. A Nereid and the wife of Neptune, here representing the sea. 46 the two creations Heat battled cold, wet strove with dry, soft parts Struck against hard, and weight fought weightless things. 20 A god—and better nature—broke this strife. He tore the lands from sky and seas from land, And from the dense air split the crystal heaven. Then, after he released the separate forms, Plucked from that sightless mass, he fastened them 25 In place with common peace. Next, weightless fire Leapt up and claimed its place in vaulting heaven, With air beneath, the next by lightness placed. But denser earth sank under its own weight And drew down heavy masses by its side. 30 The circling water took hold last of all, And wrapped the solid earth inside its flow. Once he, whichever of the gods he was, Had so reduced the whole to living parts, He spun the land into a giant sphere, 35 And, to begin, lest all sides be alike, He ordered straits to stream and swell beneath The sweeping winds and clasp the circled earth. And he made springs and lakes and boundless pools, And tilted banks hemmed in by slanting streams, 40 A share of which the earth absorbs; the rest Runs to the sea, where, in a freer flood, It pounds no banks, but breaks on ocean shores. He ordered fields unrolled and valleys sunk, The forests wreathed with leaves, the mountains raised; 45 And, as two regions on both left and right Divide the sky (a fiery fifth between), So did the might of god segment its load: The same five bounds are stamped upon the earth. The middle zone is home to heat alone, 50 The outer two to snow, but those between He gave both flame and frost in measured fare, And over all, the air—as great a weight Compared to fire as water feels from earth. Ovid 47 He ordered there the mists and there the clouds, 55 And thunder, soon to frighten mortal minds, And, mixed with bolts of light, the flashing Winds. To them, the maker did not grant the air Outright (for even now, when each one blows In his own realm, the brothers quarrel so 60 They scarce withhold from shattering the world). So Eurus sought Arabian lands of dawn And Persian peaks aglow with morning rays, While near the western shores by sunset warmed, Dwells Zephyrus; and wintry Boreas seized 65 The Scythian north, while southern lands drip wet With constant clouds and rain by Auster’s hand. Above them all, the god let aether flow, A liquid lacking weight or earthly trace. Such boundaries had he scarcely set in place 70 Before the stars, which had so long been crushed In sightless gloom, began to light the sky. And... (shrink)

It is a commonplace in our histories of Greek philosophy that the first thinker to fashion deductive arguments was Parmenides of Elea. One corollary of this view is that Ionian philosophers before Parmenides provided no arguments in support of their views. In what follows I offer a critique of this dismissive characterization, focusing on the first thinker for whom we have a substantial body of evidence, Xenophanes of Colophon. Specifically, Xenophanes argued that retelling the old stories of divine strife and (...) warfare was out of keeping with the qualities of cleanliness and purity considered essential to a proper symposium. He held also that the presence of fossilized remains at inland and mountainous locations was best explained by positing cycles of worldwide flooding and drought, and he linked many other phenomena with the presence of earth and/or water. He also distinguished between having direct perceptual access to events and knowing the clear and sure truth about them, and concluded that about far-off matters such as the gods and the nature of all things no man can know the certain truth. He held also that a series of contrasts between divine and human attributes followed from an initial assumption of divine greatness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pentheus and the Spectator in Euripides’ BacchaeJames BarrettIn an article examining the various reports from Cithaeron in Euripides’ Bacchae, Richard Buxton argues against reading the narratives of Euripidean messengers as impartial or transparent accounts of the events they describe. In concluding his careful analysis of the messengers in this play he claims that “these narrators too stand firmly within the drama” (1991, 46).1 From articulating what distinguishes the narratives (...) of these figures, Buxton proceeds to including the messengers with the other dramatis personae in a single category of those “within the drama.” The narratives of the messengers, like everything else said onstage, Buxton argues, are imbued with their own distinctive emotion and rhetoric: “in no two cases is the relationship between content and narrator identical” (1991, 40). His argument directs itself against a tendency among critics silently to grant a distinct and privileged status to the narratives of tragic messengers.2Buxton’s analysis complements that of de Jong (1991), who argues against the practice of regarding the messenger’s narrative as a privileged form of discourse. Buxton in fact rejects the use of the term “messenger” in the singular as injuriously general and neglectful of “the subtle divergences between the reports” (1991, 46). But laudable as it is for [End Page 337] the attention it pays to rhetorical variation in the narratives it studies, Buxton’s formulation simplifies the status of the messengers in Euripides’ play. Rather than being “firmly within the drama,” the messengers occupy a place on the stage very different from that of the other dramatis personae. A reading founded on metatheatrical studies of the play shows that an important part of Bacchae’s self–conscious interest is directed at the status of the messengers, particularly with respect to how they define and are defined by Pentheus. I argue here that the play produces messengers substantially “outside” the drama—virtual “spectators–in–the–text”3—and in so doing expands our notion of what is possible on the tragic stage while clarifying the status of the spectator within the play’s metatheater.The metatheatricality of the play has found extensive critical exposition in recent years. The studies of Segal (1982, 215–71) and Foley (1985, 205–58)4 remain central to any discussion of the play as meta-theater, while that of Bierl (1991, 186–217) pushes the fundamental insights of Segal and Foley close to their limits. All of these studies depart in principle from the fact that Dionysos is both the god of theater and the focus of the play: with this as a foundation, the text amply suggests that we read it as a prolonged reflection on theater itself.Both Segal and Foley astutely discuss the play–within–the–play, Dionysos as director and Pentheus as unwitting protagonist. Segal remarks: “As an actor among actors, Dionysus stands on the same level as the other characters in the orchestra. But he is also director, dressing and instructing his ‘actors’ for the role they will have to play” (1982, 225). Pentheus’ pilgrimage to Mount Cithaeron to watch the Maenads and the sparagmos that forms the climax of the play become under Dionysos’ direction a performance akin to tragedy in the theater of Dionysos at Athens. Indeed, the play–within–the–play coincides largely with the play we call Bacchae.As Segal and Foley have shown, Pentheus’ status as would–be spectator is central to the play’s metatheatricality: much of the elaborate “drama” organized by Dionysos turns on Pentheus’ desire to watch the Maenads in the mountains while remaining unseen himself. He, like the audience in the theater, wants to be a (829). And like the spectator in the theater, he is tempted by the offer Dionysos makes to [End Page 338] see the “performance” on the mountain. In fact, the persistent thematic importance of vision underlies much of the metatheater of the play: the prospect of seeing the Bacchants marks a turning point for Pentheus. Dionysos asks him:(811)Do you want to see them sitting together in the mountains?And if Dionysos’ taunt,(829)You are no longer eager to be the spectator of Maenads,suggests the parallel with... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Persians TIMOTHEUS (Translated by John Warden)... urging on their floating bronze-beaked chariots ram by ram furrowing the waves with pointed teeth....... with humped heads stripped away arms of fir, thumped ’em on the left, mariners tumbled, smashed ’em on the right in their pinewood towers, back on their feet again. Ha! Tear off flesh to their rope-bound ribs, sink ’em with thunderbolts, rip away gilded splendour with iron-helmed (...) rams. Thonged javelins fly fire-like, shafts trembling in pierced limbs, wood slivers ablaze long-winged brazen-headed, slaughtered victims swarm. ◊♦◊ Sea with glass-green hair its furrows stained with blood; shouts of victors, screams of vanquished; the barbarous fleet borne away over the fish-crowned gleaming curves of Amphitrite’s breast. ◊♦◊ Lord of a daywide land, islander out for a sail ha! listing, tipping, arms and feet arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 96 the persians thrashing in the buffeting waves, cries to the sea god, “Father...” Winds drop and veer, smite him on the other side. No Bacchus poured that liquid into his wine jar belly. He vomits up the boiling sea flood, screaming through clenched teeth against the defiling sea: “Was once not enough to have your proud neck yoked with bonds of hemp? See, now my lord will churn you with pine trees born in the mountains, encompass your watery plains with mariners, you madcap, long-loathed, faithless plaything of the swift-surfing winds.” Gasps out the words and a disgusting stream of sour sea water comes belching from his belly. ◊♦◊ Homeward they scurry, the Persian fleet, the foreigners squadron smashing into squadron in the long-necked strait jolts from their hands their mountain feet, leap from their mouths their gleaming helpmates; bodies without breath, without light, festoon the starsprent sea, weigh down the headlands. Survivors on the shore sit naked and freezing, tears dripping from their howled laments. Possessed by the dirge-song of grief, they keen and beat their breasts: “O vales of Mysia with your trees like a woman’s hair, take me home. For the winds are carrying me away. Timotheus 97 Never will the dust of earth receive my body....... in a cave where nymphs are born, below the ocean floor. Protect me from Helle, ship-bridged bringer of war. Had my lord not built that far-travelled causeway, never would I have come from Tmolus or Lydian Sardis to keep at bay the Greek war god. But now where shall I find sweet refuge from unbending fate? Who will free me from suffering and bring me home to Troy? Could I but fall at the ivy-robed knees of the Queen, the Mountain Mother, embrace her lovely arms and pray: ‘Goddess of golden hair, mother, I beg you rescue me, rescue me from the devious steel that slits the throat, from the wave-skimming gales, ship breakers, from Boreas that freezes by night. The winds will dash me to pieces. Already the cruel waves have torn the clothing from my body. Now I shall lie wretched, my flesh a feast to the tribes of birds.’” ◊♦◊ See a Greek with a sword of iron grab a man from Celaeno, rich in flocks, bereft in battle, drag him by the hair. Arms twined around knees, he breaks the seal of his lips seeking Greek in the shrill voice of Asia: Listen Mister not me why come. Not me, no never, big master send me, me no never come fight. Stay home Sardis, Sousa, Ecbatana. Great god Artemis 98 the persians Ephesus guard me. Swift-running backward-running they pursue their flight, cast from their hands the twin-mouthed javelins, tear the flesh from their faces, rip from their breasts their sumptuous Persian gowns, raise in one voice their Asiatic wailing. Those round the King are loud in panic at the coming disaster. The King looks down at the mingled host in flight, falls to his knees, defiles his body. Tossed in fate’s waves he speaks: Root and branch my house has fallen! The flaming ships of the Greeks have slain the flower of our youth. There is no way home, our ships consumed by the blazing might of harsh... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women Poets and the Origin of the Greek Hexameter W. ROBERT CONNOR A very considerable question has arisen, as to what was the origin of poetry. —Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.57 i. a road trip with pausanias Tennyson called the dactylic hexameter “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but he did not say whose lips first did the moulding. Despite much arguing we (...) do not know for sure where it came from, or who developed it. But some ancient Greeks did, or thought they did. For them, the hexameter came with a personal history, a legendary one to be sure, but no less powerful for that. The legend, moreover, started with a woman poet. The trail that leads to this is a long and devious one, but a good guide presents himself, Pausanias, author of A Greek Guidebook (Hellados Periegesis). Although he is now valued primarily as a quarry cordoned off for topographers and archaeologists, he had a strong interest in poets, especially women ones. These include Sappho, of course, the valiant Telesilla of Argos of whom he tells two stories (2.20.8, and 2.35.2), and Praxilla of Sicyon (3.13.5). In his account of Boeotia he mentions another woman poet of the fifth century before our era, Corinna of Tanagra. She, he says (9.22.3f.), once defeated Pindar in a poetry contest, and was, he thinks, the most beautiful woman of her time, judging by a statue of her he had seen. He also speaks of Myro of Byzantium (9.5.8). Pausanias was confident that she had written epic and elegiac verse. arion 27.2 fall 2019 Pausanias chooses, moreover, to end his work with an enigmatic story about another woman poet, Anyte of Tegea. He had not mentioned her in his lengthy account of her home town in the mountains of Arcadia, but now her story seems to speak to him. It is set at a ruined shrine of Asclepius near the port town of Naupactus. The reason that Anyte had come there was a strange one: She had had, he says, a vision—not a dream, but a real vision—at the end of which she found herself holding a sealed tablet addressed to one Phalysius of Naupactus. He was, it turns out, a prosperous citizen of the town, but was going blind. Anyte made the journey, surely not an easy one, and delivered the tablet. As soon as Phalysius broke its seal, he found he could make out the letters—a wondrous improvement in his vision, which he attributed to the healing god Asclepius. That is why he built the shrine that Pausanias saw many years later. And the content of the message? Give Anyte two thousand gold staters. Phalysius did so. End of story. End of the Guidebook. So, indeed, Pausanias paid attention to women poets, and there were plenty of them to pay attention to. There is good evidence of a vibrant tradition of women’s poetry among the ancient Greeks. Pausanias is not the only writer of his time to note this. In fact, if on his journeys Pausanias had encountered the well-travelled rhetorician Tatian, the two near-contemporaries could have challenged one another to see who could name the largest number of women poets and identify the sculptors of statues honoring them. Tatian might have won, to judge from his Address to the Greeks, ch 33. But then, Tatian had an agenda. As a convert to a “barbarian” cult he wanted to show that his co-religionists had precedents for respecting women’s intellects: “My object in referring to these women is, that you may not regard as something strange what you find among us, and that, comparing the statues which are before your eyes, you may not treat the women with scorn who among us pursue philosophy.” So much for the Christian Tatian. Did Pausanias have an agenda, too? His stories of two women from Delphi, Boio 86 women poets and the origin of the greek hexameter and Phemonoe, help answer that question. ii. boio’s disruptive poetry when pausanias’s work describes Delphi, the plot thickens. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Canti VI, Bruto Minore GIACOMO LEOPARDI (Translated by Steven J. Willett) To Peter Green After Italian Valor, lying in Thracian dust an immense ruin, had been uprooted, then in the valleys of green Hesperia, on Tiber’s shore, Fate prepares the tramp of barbarian horse, and from naked forests oppressed by the freezing Bear, calls forth the Gothic swords to overthrow Rome’s renowned walls; sitting alone, soaked in brothers’ (...) blood, through black night in a desolate site, Brutus is determined to die, and the implacable gods and Hell itself he accuses with savage cries and strikes the somnambulant air in vain. Fatuous Valor, the empty mists, the fields of unquiet phantoms are your schools, and behind you strides remorse. To you, marmoreal gods, (whether you reside in Phlegethon or the clouds), to you a laughingstock and mockery is the miserable race from whom you extort temples and a fraudulent law insulting to mortals. Is heaven’s wrath, then, so provoked by terrestrial piety? and do you then sit, Jove, impiety’s protector? and when storm clouds exult through the air, and when arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 you hurl the swift thunderbolt, do you cast the sacred fire on the just and faithful? Invincible destiny and iron necessity crush the sickly slaves of death: and if nothing avails to end their indignities, the common man takes comfort in their necessity. Is the evil without cure less harsh? Does he feel no grief who’s stripped naked of hope? War to the death, eternal, o ignoble fate, the valorous man wages, incapable of surrender; and your tyrannical right hand, victorious as it bears him down, indomitable he shrugs off with a valiant show, when in his noble side the bitter blade runs with blood, and malignly he smiles at the darkening shadows. He displeases the gods who violently breaks into Tartarus. No such courage could be found in their feeble, eternal breasts. Perhaps our torments, perhaps our bitter accidents and wretched passions heaven created as a pleasing spectacle for their idle hours? Not between calamities and crimes, but free in the forests and pure Nature appointed us, once our queen and goddess. But since on earth impious custom has destroyed the blessed realms and subjected our miserable life to other laws; when a virile soul rejects his luckless days does Nature return, and accuse the arrow that’s not hers? 166 CANTI VI, bruto minore Ignorant of guilt and their own misfortunes are the fortunate beasts; serene old age guides them to an unforeseen passage. But if they dash their foreheads on rough tree-trunks or from a mountain cliff cast bodies headlong to the winds, moved by their anguish, against that miserable desire would stand no arcane law or shadowy conception. You alone, among the numerous progeny that heaven created, alone among all, children of Prometheus, regret life. Alone o wretched ones, to you Jove bans, if sluggish fate delays, the shores of death. And you, from the sea stained by our blood, you rise bright moon, and explore the unquiet night and the deadly battlefield of Italian Valor. The victor tramples on kinsmen’s breasts, the hills shudder, from her highest summits ancient Rome collapses— and are you so placid? You saw the birth of Lavinia’s offspring, and their years of happiness, and the memorable victories; and on the mountain peaks you pour your immutable silent light when, in the wreck of the servile Italian name, this solitary place will echo beneath the barbarian tramp. Giacomo Leopardi 167 Here among naked rocks or on green boughs, beast and bird, breasts heavy with their habitual oblivion, ignore the profound ruin and the altered destiny of the world: and as the rooftop of the industrious peasant first glows red, with its morning song the one will wake the valleys, while through high slopes the other will startle the helpless multitude of smaller creatures. Oh destiny! oh insensate race! we are an abject part of things; neither the bloodstained soil nor the howling caves has our calamity ever perturbed, and no human cares stain the stars. Neither to Olympus’ or Cocytus’ deaf kings, or to the unworthy earth, and... (shrink)

A startling and thought-provoking work from one of the most powerful philosophers in the Western canon Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Philosophy Classic, is Friedrich Nietzsche’s classic masterpiece of philosophy and literature. Nietzsche writes from the perspective of Zarathustra who, after years of meditation, has come down from a mountain to provide his wisdom to an unsuspecting world. He offers enduring observations on God, the Übermensch, the will to power, and the nature of human beings. This deluxe hardback Capstone edition (...) includes an insightful introduction from leading Nietzsche scholar Dirk R. Johnson Perfect for students and scholars of philosophy, literature and history, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Philosophy Classic belongs in the libraries of anyone interested in the philosophy of Nietzsche and in his powerful explorations of God, life, power, and humanity. (shrink)

This essay examines how C. S. Lewis, in Till We Have Faces, illustrates the Christian’s journey of sanctification through the pre-Christian story of his main character, Orual. She must gain two ‘faces’ in this process that correspond to the two books she writes. First, she must gain the face of self-knowledge through humility. The key components to this face are her memory and the act of writing of her first book, which together create a mirror to reflect her sin back (...) to her. Second, Orual must gain the face of transformation through divine agape love. The humility she learned from her first face now allows her to enter what Lewis describes as the dance of self-giving, which is a crucial element to the second face of transformation in its mortification of Orual’s sin and selfishness. In the second face, Orual gains access to an ‘actual language’ that transcends merely verbal words and involves worshipping the god with her whole being, as do we in being transformed to reflect Christ more clearly. Orual’s writing is a form of this ‘actual language’, and her second book that shares her personal encounter with the god of the mountain reflects to others the beauty of the divine. Similarly, Christians should reflect Jesus with their lives and their art, which are inextricably intertwined because a life lived for Him is the highest form of artwork they can create. (shrink)

In classical and Christian literature mountain symbolism takes many forms deriving from height and center. In so far as mountains are tall, lofty, and rise abruptly to touch heaven, they form part of the symbolism of transcendence and, in so far as they are often numinous places where the gods have revealed their presence, they share in the symbolism of manifestation. According to Gospel’s tradition, in Nonnus’ Paraphrase of St. John’s Gospel, the mountain, visible home of the (...) invisible God, situated next to the deity on account of its high peak and solitude, takes on a symbolic value in revealing the role of Christ and his future elevation on the Cross. (shrink)

In a letter to theologian Thomas Burnet in the early 1680s, Newton suggests a chymical interpretation of the Mosaic account of Creation. He postulates that the System of the World, the Sun, the Earth and its landforms were formed through a succession of separations and coagulations from a “common Chaos”. The seas and the mountains resulted from the irregular coagulation of the parcel of Chaos assigned to our planet, in the same way as a saltpeter solution coagulates. All the transformations (...) of the primeval Chaos are performed by a formative force that played on a large scale the role alchemical theories attributed to ferments. That force is gravitation, which Newton associates in this text with the spirit of God. In this respect, the philosopher’s reconstruction has much in common with the chrysopoetic treatises that develop the analogy between the alchemical Magisterium and Genesis. Newton himself had drafted commentaries around these readings, in a period close to the time of his letter to Burnet. (shrink)

Suppose you are hiking in the mountains of Slovenia and encounter the forest god Zlatorog. Zlatorog wishes to bless you, but the nature of their blessing is time-dependent. You can accept the bless...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 115-132 [Access article in PDF] Schiller's Theory of Landscape Depiction Jason Gaiger This paper offers a critical discussion of the theory of landscape depiction which Friedrich Schiller developed in an important but neglected article on the work of Friedrich Matthisson, published in 1794. 1 The question of the value and status of landscape painting and poetry was far from settled at (...) the end of the eighteenth century, and Schiller's essay should be seen as making an important contribution to an ongoing debate. 2 The second half of the eighteenth century is marked by a profound ambivalence towards the natural world. On the one hand there is a remarkable "rediscovery" of nature, evidenced in such diverse but related phenomena as the vogue for English gardens and the appreciation of wild and "untamed places," such as the Alps and the Herz mountains. It is also the age of "sentiment," embracing a heightened sensitivity to all aspects of the physical world. And yet when we turn to the visual arts, we find landscape painting ranked far below history painting and portraiture. Precedence is given to the representation of human actions and emotions, and the depiction of the human figure remains the highest goal of ambitious art.The modern hierarchy of the genres was first established on a firm theoretical and practical basis with the founding of the French Royal Academy in the seventeenth century. The painter of living animals is ranked higher than the [End Page 115] painter of inanimate nature who depicts "choses mortes et sans mouvement." 3 The painter of human subjects, who imitates "the most perfect work of God," stands higher still. The highest achievement to which the artist can aspire, however, is history painting, the depiction of groups of figures in themes derived from biblical and mythical sources. To achieve this, the artist cannot depict what he sees but must employ both knowledge and imagination. The fundamental opposition here is between painting as a merely imitative or mechanical art, which is addressed to the eye alone, and painting as a work of "invention" or "imagination," which is addressed to the mind. Only the latter constitutes a properly liberal art, entitling the painter to stand alongside the poet as "un auteur ingénieux et savant" over and above the mere artisan or skilled laborer.The great popularity enjoyed by landscape painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not met by any comparable elevation in its status as a fine art. Addressing students of the Royal Academy in London in 1770, Joshua Reynolds could continue to dismiss landscape and still-life as the "meaner walks of painting" which require only "mechanical" expertise. 4 For Reynolds the status of painting as a fine art is established through its treatment of the great subjects of history painting, that is, the depiction of human passions and the intellect. Only in tackling such themes does the artist succeed in addressing the imagination, which Reynolds describes as the "great end of art." 5 Although of comparatively recent origin, the genre of "landscape poetry" remained equally problematic and could not easily be reconciled with classicist ideals. New categories seemed to be required to comprehend the work of poets such as Albrecht von Haller and James Thomson, in which the varied and ever-changing aspects of the natural landscape were made the central protagonists of the poetic drama. While traditional forms such as the bucolic, the Arcadian, and the pastoral allowed the depiction of rural existence, the new "descriptive poetry" sought to celebrate the life of nature independently of man's intervening presence: it is nature itself rather than man's relation to nature which is made the poet's primary concern.Schiller's review of the third, expanded edition of Matthisson's poetry appeared in two parts in the Jenaer Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 11-12 September 1794. While the second half of the review is given over to a detailed discussion of Matthisson's poetry, the first part is reserved for an extended theoretical discussion in which Schiller... (shrink)

The “rediscovery” of landscapes in the 14 th Century marks one of the great innovations in western European painting. For centuries the theme of landscape was of little interest. Of course landscapes existed as scenic or narrative elements, but painters never aspired to a mimetic description of a particular landscape. However motifs of landscape do appear as signs embedded in a long formal and also literary tradition. For example, a single mountain or a single tree can function iconically by (...) representing as an entire forest or landscape tout court. Often a single mountain merely signifies the locus of a narrative action, but the appearance in the picture of mountain landscape opens a wider field of meanings. Mountains are – in Greek mythology as well as in the biblical tradition – places of the appearance of God, they are places of inspiration, of passion and of asceticism. Indeed, in some pictures a close relationship unfolds between actor and mountain. Nature gains vivid emotions and assumes an active role, which often surpasses that of humans. In these cases the mountain may suffer with the hero, may augment the sense of pride associated with victory, or may even vicariously outperform him. These different meanings of the mountain are explored through exemplars drawn mainly from medieval illuminated manuscripts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 33-36 [Access article in PDF] How I, a Christian, Have Learned from Buddhist Practice, or "The Frog Sat on the Lily Pad... Not Waiting" Frances S. Adeney Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary As a Christian, I have practiced various forms of silent meditation. I remember sitting under the grand piano as a child of three, watching the sun flit through white curtains during our one-hour home (...) communion service of the Plymouth Brethren. Most of the hour was spent in communal silence, gathered around a small table upon which was placed wine and bread. My memories of these meetings are filled with a sense of awe and presence.I practiced a different kind of silent meditation as a young adult when I spent six weeks living on a beach in Greece. I saw few people apart from my two companions and the shepherdess who brought her flock to the meadow each day. I spent hours watching the waves or studying the grains of sand at my feet. I never missed a sunset.At certain times of my life, there were more intentional, prayer-filled kinds of silent meditation. Wordless yearnings and grievings were brought to those meditations as I sought understanding and peace during times of illness, loss, and confusion. I wouldn't call any of those experiences Buddhist meditation. They were intentionally focused on either worshiping Christ or experiencing nature. There was no attempt to leave behind desires, no longing for emptiness, no intentional focus on being in the present moment, qualities that I associate with Buddhist meditation.The first time I joined a group of people practicing Buddhist sitting was in 1997. Yet I felt like I had been doing this kind of silent meditating for years. Here is how that convergence came about.During the early 1990s, while living in Indonesia, I frequently visited a Trappist monastery in central Java. The nuns there didn't practice Buddhism, but my spiritual director, a German priest who lived down the mountain, said to me, "Come and see." Father Hamma introduced me to sitting in a gentle non-technique-oriented way. He called it "contemplative prayer." I took up this practice daily during a difficult time of loss in my life. Spiritual retreats at the monastery up the mountain helped me learn to let go of what I could not hold onto in life. It was there that I began to experience the delight and calm that comes from a practice of meditative silence. [End Page 33]This silent meditation differed from other practices of silence that I had known in significant ways: (1) It was not focused on an interchange between God and myself. I was not listening for God's voice. I was not bringing my concerns to God. I was simply entering a place of silence. (2) It was not predicated on specific ideas about God or thoughts from writings in the Bible. I did not need to frame this time of silence with religious meanings. (3) It was not focused on an outcome. I neither expected nor did I ask for any changes in myself or the world.Yet there were ways in which this practice of meditative silence was framed by my Christian faith. In taking up this practice, I felt I was intentionally entering God's presence. While not looking for spiritual experiences, I was somehow seeking life, and I did believe that God met me in those silent moments. More than once I had experiences that were "sightings" if not meetings with the Divine. During the seven years that I have practiced entering silence, the space that I enter has grown larger, and the conviction that I am entering and becoming part of God's presence deepens. The frog sat on the lily pad not waiting. This Haiku poem resulted from one such experience. I had taken the bus out from the city. It dropped me at the foot of one of hundreds of small mountains in Java covered by... (shrink)

In his commentary of Dionysius the Areopagite’s Mystical Theology Albert the Great outlines the allegorical exegesis of Moses’ ascent of the mount as a way to the unknown God. Step by step Moses has to purify himself, to leave behind his natural knowledge. Separated from all human beings he alone proceeds to the cloud of unknown. At last the infusion of divine light lets him know God through negations. The normal, human way of knowing God is limited, so the mind (...) should attain the paradox of knowing in unknowing. Albert claims that all we cannot properly predicate by names obtained from things known to us, is best indicated by negations. The peak described by Dionysius as union, Albert shows to be intellectual perfection. Guided by divine illumination man contemplates the Trinitarian God. Thus contemplation supports any theological investigation. Descending the mountain, as Albert says in his Summa, Moses spoke to the people. Likewise after contemplation the theologian has to illumine others about what he... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Athenian Religion: A HistorySusan Guettel ColeRobert Parker. Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xxix 1 370 pp. Cloth, $55.Parker begins by acknowledging Durkheim’s claim that “religion is something eminently social” (1), but he is not interested in demonstrating how ritual activity was embedded in Athenian social relationships or even how traditional rituals colored Athenian political life. His target is not Athenian society itself, and his project (...) is not an analysis of the ways and means by which ritual created or defined community. His real interest, in fact, is not religion at all, but rather the administration of public ritual.Parker admits that issues of topography and the organization of space are important for understanding Attic ritual, but his preference for Athenian literature and epigraphical sources inevitably shapes his view of a “web of religious life in Attica... spun by the spider at the centre” (25). The calendar of the Salaminians is more important to his argument as a source on institutions than it is as a source for administration of ritual at the edges of Attica. This preference for center over hinterland overcomes even the lack of sources. Solon’s calendar of festivals and that shadowy ghost, the Attic genos, assume more importance than the great sanctuaries at Eleusis and Brauron.Recognizing archaeological material when relevant, Parker is nevertheless skeptical about current work that claims a relationship between material culture and the expression of polis identity (citing in particular Snodgrass, De Polignac, and Morgan). For Parker the “polis” is an abstraction, and an abstraction, he claims, cannot have a history. He does comment on issues of identity and community organization, but these issues are important only in the context of the community’s regulation of ritual, where Parker prefers the written word, preferably inscribed, to the material artifact.The history of Athenian religion, as laid out here, is a history of collective decision making and collective ritual. Parker begins with mountain rituals of Zeus, chiefly because Mount Hymettos preserves our earliest Attic inscriptions, but his interests and chronological range are otherwise limited by the evidence for Attic public record keeping. His interests are also limited by a narrow definition of collective ritual, conditioned perhaps by modern notions of political autonomy and an exaggerated affection for the institutions of Athenian democracy. His targeted time period therefore begins rather conventionally with Solon’s calendar of “sacrifices from the kurbeis” (Lys. 30.17) and ends with the latest evidence for tribe and deme decrees, evidence that trails off in the middle [End Page 293] of the third century b.c. In between we have chapters arranged chronologically, on hereditary priesthoods and the Attic genos, the sixth century and the organization of festivals, democracy and empire, new gods in the fifth century, the trial of Socrates, and the ritual innovations of the fourth century. This looks like a conventional list of topics, but with Parker’s interest in public institutions this sequence is actually only a chronological framework for his real project, the administration of ritual. Seen in this context the Attic genos is not, as once argued, a relic of archaic aristocratic institutions or a privileged group within the phratry, but an administrative solution to an organizational problem. In Parker’s view, the genos provided priests for public cults. Expansion of political rights in the fifth century eventually required ritual by committee, and although, he argues, the genos, as an institution, did not go out of existence, the privileged families that controlled the traditional priesthoods had to yield to the boards of officials that now supervised some of the more important public rituals.Innovations, perhaps because they are more easily detectable in the kind of evidence Parker prefers, stand out more than tradition. Ritual innovations of the fifth century included rites modeled on those elsewhere in Greece (Artemis Agrotera, Pan, and Boreas, for example). Parker explains these innovations in political terms, describing their introduction as a reflection of Athenian pride in overcoming the Persian threat. Religious innovations of the second half of the fifth century (rituals associated with Adonis, Sabazius, and Cybele, for instance) are treated not as an incoming surge of foreign influence (as... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spiritually Bilingual:Buddhist Christians and the Process of Dual Religious BelongingJonathan HomrighausenSociologists studying convert Buddhism in America have found that a surprisingly large number of Buddhists also identify as Christian.1 However, little empirical literature examines these Buddhist-Christian “dual religious belongers.”2 This study aims to fill that gap. Based on extensive interviews with eight self-identified “Buddhist Christians” of varying levels of doctrinal and experiential understanding, this study examines the conversion process (...) of these dual belongers and how they combine these religious traditions. Building on Michael von Brück’s contention that one’s first religion is like a mother tongue, I compare taking on a second religious tradition to learning a second language.3 As practitioners become more “fluent” in the second religion, they differentiate the two religions more clearly while combining them more seamlessly in their daily lives.methodologyThis study employs grounded theory and a qualitative, inductive methodology. Grounded theory is designed to elucidate the dynamic changes involved in a social process, with rich descriptions of categories and explanations for variations between different people’s experiences.4 While the use of qualitative methods with a small sample size means that my results have little statistical significance, such methods have been used in recent research on conversion and dual belonging and yield deep theoretical insight.5Eight participants for this study were solicited via word of mouth, personal acquaintance, and posting in a Buddhist-Christian Yahoo Group. In particular, I focused on Buddhist-Catholic practitioners to limit my sample group. Interviews were conducted and recorded in person or on the phone over a three-month period in fall, 2011. Interviews were open-ended, each lasting from sixty to ninety minutes. Several participants later received a draft of the paper to ensure they felt adequately represented; five participants responded. Names of participants have been changed for [End Page 57] confidentiality. To complement these interviews, I also incorporate written accounts of Buddhist-Christian conversion from both Catholic and Protestant authors.6participants’ backgroundsIt can be difficult to define Buddhist identity in the West, as many people who regularly practice meditation in a sangha do not self-identify as Buddhist.7 This study focuses on those who both practice Buddhist and Christian spirituality and belong to religious groups of both traditions. The eight participants have a range of religious expertise and commitment to both traditions. In terms of Catholic identity, six are laypeople (one in a secular religious order), one a priest, and one a nun. Three participants are theology professors. Seven have been Catholics from birth. One spent a decade living in a Buddhist monastery, two of them are roshis, and five give Buddhist teaching or meditation instruction formally. Seven of them practice various forms of Ch’an or Zen, while one practices Tibetan Buddhism.Cathy went not from Catholicism to Buddhism, but from Buddhism to Catholicism. A former Mormon and Unitarian, she began learning meditation at a Ch’an temple. This Ch’an temple normally only reached out to the Chinese community, but there was a Taiwanese nun there who wanted to reach out to non-Chinese community members. After practicing there for a few years, Cathy moved to another location, where she could not find any sangha that fit her needs. After attending Mass with a friend, she decided to become Catholic because she needed a community. It was not a hard transition for Cathy, who described feeling in meditation “some kind of entity, whether you call it God or Creator or atomic process.” She was confirmed as a Catholic in 2011.Rachel has been a nun for fifty years and a practicing Zen Buddhist for thirty, ten of those years living and working in a Zen monastery in the mountains of California. She described feeling an emptiness in her faith, a lack of practical knowledge of how to attain the spiritual goals that her Catholic tradition had for her. After hearing Zen teacher Cheri Huber speak at a conference, she took Huber on as her teacher. She has facilitated meditation workshops for many years. Though meditation instruction is not her full-time ministry, “meditation is my life … so in a sense... (shrink)