John
At 05:37 AM 10/27/2005, you wrote:
have been reading Hakim Bey's book Gothick Institutions
for the last couple of days, and was fascinated, blown away
really, by the entirety of it. and then something curious just
now. i was reading an article called _The Language of Birds:
Some Notes on Chance and Divination_ by Dale Pendell
and I ran across something quite remarkable or maybe
perhaps only slightly remarkable, but interesting to
me, and perhaps to the group.
There's some discussion of a Linnaean Hermeticism within the book
in the section on Erasmus Darwin so I found this quite appropriate.
First Bey's black violets which is VIIII in his
Eclogues (dedicated to the ghost of Warren G. Sherwood
(d. 1947)
black violets
Satyr with boner draws curtain back
to reveal scene now green with moss
algae snails & deep shade
a Green Messiah
not descending from clouds so much as
rising from Earth, from Hollow Earth
or Jesus as a snake
an ecology of the unnatural
a fishbowl we're
trying to escape even at the risk
that pure air will choke us.
==
Now I think most of you know I'm a pretty irreligious
and for the most part blasphemous sort of fellow
so when I came across this I kind of had to shift
out of my usual ruts and fall into a more Norman
O. Brownian kind of reading of 'Jesus'..
I liked the poem and related it in passing to the
context of the eclogues and book. I did I will admit have
a flash from the film Lair of the White Worm
of a snake on the cross.. I also was reminded
of an image I used to get which is more normal
for me which was of a kind of cathedral where
these erotic slave nuns are sort of imprisoned
in a cathdral using crucifix dildoes and then a giant
satyr breaks in through the wall and lets in pure
light and birds and petals etc and frees these deludees..
something from a dream i had.. the emancipation of the nuns or some
such.. pretty crass.. the usual.. anyway
'Jesus as a snake' did work on me a bit, in a symbolic sense,
an inversion perhaps within biblical context, or even
coniunctio as in forking paths of knowledge rejoined, but not
in any definite way really other than in the context
of the poem's Green Messiah and trying to think of how
N.O.Brown would read this.
Then I was reading the article I mentioned and found
this:
Hebrew prophecy came from snakes: Nehushtan, the bronze
serpent that Moses affixed to a cross.
Nachash nechosheth, the serpent of bronze.
Both words from nachash, 'to hiss, whisper, to divine.'
Nachash = Mashiyach = 358:
the Serpent is the Messiah.
Not sure about the Qabbalistic numerology..
At any rate, I thought this was a fascinating detail.
There is also, before this (above) section:
The serpent in the tree, offering knowledge.
Mercury's snakes, the Hermetic power: hermeneutics,
the interpretation of signs, poisoning single vision.
(pure air choking us...)?
as if we would move from the 'poisoned' fishtank
of hermeneutics into the pure air of a single vision..
hmmm. works for me!
Anyway another strange thing was that the article
is dedicated to Norman O. Brown and the author
wrote it after NOB's death. He had been having
weekly walks with Norman for his last 10 years of
life.
Anyway, that was my little Eureka of the evening.
Not much I'm sure, but I thought it was interesting,
or something curious at least in terms of random
access / the temporal sieve / etc..
I know this happens all the time, but I just thought
this one was a little better than usual.
The last good one I had, was when I did the painting
with the Hermandades characters. I rented 5 movies
that weekend and 3 of them had the hermandades or similiar figures
in them completely by chance.. what's interesting
about that is that the hermandades figure is related
to a counterreaction within catholicism against protestant
reactions to Catholicism's fetishism of the image..
The Hermandades are in fact a kind of 'hyperfetish'..
This also directly relates to Gothick Institutions
where he talks about a liberation from the image, through
the image, which is exactly what I was trying to convey
more or less, with my appropriation of these hyperfetish
hermandades..
anyway best to all..
your tie-dyed Cladesmum
lanny
Dr. John M. Bennett
Curator, Avant Writing Collection
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall
Columbus, OH 43210 USA
(614) 292-3029
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.johnmbennett.net
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