Master wrote:What is the sound of one Dennis dennissing?
You have (finally?) brought up an interesting point, and it is certainly a point that can and must be considered. Somewhere, perhaps high up on a mountain peak, a man sits and looks out over the wide expanse of snow-capped mountains, in the fresh, cold atmosphere, with brilliant, clear light and stark shadows, where the sound of the wind is heard and there are no persons. And he thinks: All there is, is just the enormity of this mountain world with its natural processes, its stark and brutal relationships, its awesome beauty, something timeless and infinite. But when I see this, and when it enters into me, and when I believe myself a product of this, everything of the human world just seems like delirium and madness and something that needs to come to a
stop!
And I think you draw a valid point with the introduction of instruments of science, those products of science, that allow for rational penetration into the (real) workings of the universal swirl surrounding us. And a new manner of seeing ourselves, conceiving ourselves, within the structures of matter which necessarily confronts and challenges all the Old Models, the decaying metaphysics, the outmoded cosmologies.
And it must naturally follow that a man would conceive of all this 'chatter of the ages', all this old conceptual order, all these mistaken metaphors, this haunting by assertive ghosts, should be tossed out, or better, dissolved back into silence, an eternal silence of the Infinite.
But, I would draw your attention (again, pardon me), to the Vedic understanding of the 'world', which is also the matrix out of which Buddhist and perhaps even Taoist view and method arose. If one conceives of the world and the universe as arising from a divine source, or from divine being (which may mean in fact something inconceivable and impossible to describe with language), and if all parts of it are 'non-different' from that which put it in motion, that could mean that within the structure of creation is something like a 'frequency' or a 'vibration' with which a man can learn to harmonize, and that he perceives a unity that pulses through all aspects of the created world, which would naturally include the conceptual world of man's imagination, and so within man's inner world move and relate all the analogous forces of nature that he sees moving around him---fire, air, water, etc.---then each manifestation in his imaginal world, which corresponds to what goes on in the 'real world' where he is taking place, is not
necessarily a manifestation of delirium, but an interface (if you will), a screen upon which is broadcast, as if through a projector (which is his own person), a kind of refraction of everything outside and, naturally, everything inside.
All religious systems have arisen from a sort of platform of science, an attempt to order an understanding of the world surrounding us with a kind of existential praxis. A man living in a jungle in South America has a means of conceiving the world he lives in, and he has all sort of 'tools' by which he gets from that world what he needs, and as well he has 'inner tools' and methods to reach back inside himself, or back inside some original, primordial 'stuff' (the platorm of being? the origin of selfness?) and he has here too some sort of 'method' for using it in his day-to-day life.
True, when we look at all the elaborations, and with your
- "A couple kilo's of gypsum, water placed into a mould turns into a Jesus on the Cross and starts thinging as a magical property."
I really hear you bringing up the fact or the problem of
simulacra which is a sort of an "elaboration of an elaboration":
Someone on Wiki, encapsulating Baudrillard's Ideas wrote:Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: All is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it" -- to the industrial revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.
Baudrillard wrote:The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.
This is all great stuff, naturally, but in itself it does nothing with the problem that confronts us: our own desire (?) and need (?) and/or 'external command' (?) to make sense of this 'world' in which we exist, and by that I mean the inevitable psycho-physical world of consciousness where we are 'taking place'.
And it also doesn't address what underlies the Image you have referred to---of a man sacrificed on a cross, or a god-man, or a unique juncture where man's factual world and his imagined world collide (as it were) and create a metaphor that contains a great deal of 'content' that must be 'processed'. And neither does it address another symbol, or the possibility of praxis or method: the rosary. Which is, I suppose, a derivative of a
mantra, which is a vibration or frequency that man can intonate and in that way resonate with something 'original' and potent within the created world, which of course brings us back to an idea expressed at the beginning of this thread: the notion of
SACRIFICE (yajna). What it is, what it means.
It would be fruitful to speak about certain principals that have been nicely described in Upanishadic literature, and to discover a means by which some of these ideas can explain what are (definitely) absurdities and partialities within Biblical literature, which we all are beginning not to be able to relate to or understand. But it requires (alas!) subtlety, dexterity, a free imagination, and something akin to 'education', and those qualities, at least among the
Professors of Absolutism, are in short supply...
Well, you know I'm working on a script for a Surfing/Sex/Genius/Philosophy flick with
LOTS of
dELiCiOuS rump, and I'd like to introduce the evocative Girl from Ipanema somewhere, who in addition to being the surfing beach zone's fellatio expert is really
pretty damned good on the guitar too. I'd like your opinion of
this tune, and also Could you wing this in Portuguese? With cue cards? (Elizabeth has agreed to handle the cello part...)
- "There's a difference between love and attraction..."
"Oh yes, of course, even though attraction sometimes feels like love..."
"That's a funny old business, isn't it?"
(laughs) "Yes, sometimes..."
What? Oh? You think
So Danco Samba would be better? I'd
really like a female vocalist, but very well. You're right though: the horn is
indispensable.
What?!? What the
fuck you talking about? I
LOVE Elis Regina! Alright! Twist my arm already. We'll
get her in somehow...(And I fully understand why you like Waters of March: you are, in a manner of speaking, a March Hare yourself...) ;-)
