hermitthrush

[hermitthrush]

Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal. Every excess breeds counterreaction.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 3. “Apollo and Dionysus”. Typification of the dichotomous energies at the core of human nature; ebb and flow, systole and diastole.

#camille paglia #apollo #dionysus #civilization #anarchy #creativity #rigidity #human nature #sexual personae #art

[hermitthrush]

Compared to dogs, slavishly eager to please, cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their "evil" look at such times is no human projection; the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it. Thus the cat is an adept of chthonian mysteries. But it has a hieratic duality. It is eye-intense The cat fuses the Gorgon eye of appetite to the detached Apollonian eye of contemplation. The cat values invisibility, comically imagining itself undetectable as it slouches across a lawn. But it also fashionably loves to see and be seen; it is a spectator of life's drama, amused, condescending. It is a narcissist, always adjusting its appearance. When it is disheveled, its spirits fall. Cats have a sense of pictorial composition: they station themselves symmetrically on chairs, rugs, even a sheet of paper on the floor. Cats adhere to an Apollonian metric of mathematical space. Haughty, solitary, precise, they are arbiters of elegance - that principle I find natively Egyptian. Cats are poseurs. They have a sense of persona - and become visibly embarrassed when reality punctures their dignity. Apes are more human but less beautiful: they posture but they never pose. Hunkering, chattering, chest-beating, buttock-baring, apes are bumptious vulgarians lurching up the evolutionary road. The cat's sophisticated personae are masks of an advanced theatricality. Priest and god of its own cult, the cat follows a code of ritual purity, cleaning itself religiously. It makes pagan sacrifices to itself and may share its ceremonies with the elect. The day of a cat-owner often begins with the discovery of a neat pile of mole guts or mashed mouse limbs on the porch - Darwinian mementos. The cat is the least Christian inhabitant of the average home.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 2. “The Birth of the Western Eye”. I love the way this woman typifies cats.

#camille paglia #sexual personae #feline #cats #egypt #egyptian culture #funny #insightful #humor #great writing #paganism #aesthetics #animals

[hermitthrush]

The Egyptians were the first aesthetes. An aesthete does not necessarily dress well or collect art works: an aesthete is one who lives by the eye. The Egyptians had "taste." Taste is Apollonian discrimination, judgment, connoisseurship; taste is the visible logic of objects... The Egyptians lived by ceremony; they ritualized social life. The aristocratic house was a cool, airy temple of harmony and grace; the minor arts had unparalleled quality of design. Jewelry, makeup, costume, chairs, tables, cabinets: from the moment Egyptian style was rediscovered by Napoleon's invaders, it has been the rage in Europe and America, influencing fashion, furniture, and tombstones and even producing the Washington Monument... In their cult of the eye, Egyptians saw edges. Even their stylized gestures in art have a superb balletic contour. The Egyptians invented elegance. Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 2. “The Birth of the Western Eye”. Apollonian aesthetics and their birth in ancient Egypt; elegance and the cult of the eye (as typified earlier in the Pharaoh, Ra, Horus).

#roman history #egypt #ancient egypt #aesthetics #camille paglia #napoleon #western literature #sexual personae #vision #perception #art

[hermitthrush]

The pagan dialectic of Apollonian and Dionysian was sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about mind and nature. Christian love is so lacking its emotional polarity that the Devil had to be invented to focus natural human hatred and hostility. Rousseauism's Christianized psychology has led to the tendency of liberals toward glumness or depression in the face of the political tensions, wars, and atrocities that daily contradict their assumptions. Perhaps the more we are sensitized by reading and education, the more we must repress the facts of chthonian nature.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. See the reflexive expression so familiarly springing from middle class acquaintances confronted with the nuance of something like drone strike civilian casualty percentages or the collapse of state mental health services exacerbating the homelessness crisis. And cue up the Phil Ochs.

#camille paglia #sexual personae #psychology #historiography #social issues #harsh realities #repression #avoidance #rousseau #christianity #paganism #contemporary politics #phil ochs

[hermitthrush]

Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. The first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature's daemonic energy in a moment of perceptual stillness. Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as a stasis and fixation as an obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line on a page is still trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. Art cages the summoned daemon. That is essentially how I've described poetry's value to friends who have engaged me about mine. A thread here to Asher Lev.

#art #poetry #culture #artists #writing #creation #painting #camille paglia #sexual personae #nonfiction #my name is asher lev #asher lev

[hermitthrush]

Historiography's most glaring error has been its assertion that Judeo-Christianity defeated paganism. Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media. Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition (as during the Italian Renaissance) and diluting its dogma to change with changing times. But a critical point has been reached. With the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, with the eruption of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media... the latent paganism of western culture has burst forth again in all its daemonic vitality.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. See the Virgin Mary and the Cult of Athena. Although, I realize writing that, that it's possibly the most G-rated example that could come to mind, relative to the work I'm quoting.

#judeo-christianity #christianity #catholicism #paganism #cultural borrowing #modern society #camille paglia #sexual personae #literature #art #religion #repression

[hermitthrush]

Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind, or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality... The artist makes art not to save humankind but to save himself.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. Maximum Asher Lev.

#my name is asher lev #camille paglia #chaim potok #art #poetry #creation #creative expression

[hermitthrush]

This is what Camille Paglia means by the chthonic.

#camille paglia #sexual personae #chthonic #chthonian

[hermitthrush]

We are moving in this chapter towards a theory of beauty. I believe that the aesthetic sense... is a swerve from the chthonian. It is a displacement from one area of reality to another, analogous to the shift from earth-cult to sky-cult. Ferenczi speaks of the replacement of animal nose by human eye, because of our upright stance. The eye is peremptory in its judgments. It decides what to see and why. Each of our glances is as much exclusion as inclusion. We select, editorialize, and enhance. Our idea of the pretty is a limited notion that cannot possibly adapt to earth's metamorphic underworld, a cataclysmic realm of chthonian violence. We choose not to see this violence on our daily strolls. Every time we say nature is beautiful, we are saying a prayer, fingering our worry beads.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. "Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art". Rousseau, Wordsworth, and the Romantic interpretation of primal Nature as a realm of transcendent beauty are, to Paglia, glossing over the raw brutality with an Apollonian patina of self-preservationist misapprehension only possible within the order of a society that removes us from the day-to-day reality of life in nature. What man has made of man, indeed. Also, Emerson's eye re-evaluated.

#william wordsworth #camille paglia #rousseau #wordsworth #sexual personae #non-fiction #beauty #sanity #perspectives #emerson #psychology #literature #art #culture #violence #sex and violence #sex

[hermitthrush]

... the poet's perspective: "what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and imitable way." Whilst this stand distinctly echoes Bergson's privileging of an artistic vision, whereby 'man glimpses reality through the film of familiarity and conventionality that obscures it', it also deploys the Russian Formalist process of ostranenie, or 'making strange', whereby art serves to reveal the aesthetic and hyper-real qualities of ordinary objects by disrupting habitual modes of visualization and confounding perceptual expectations. Nabokov's emphasis on 'making strange' is also suggestive of the presence of 'other' worlds, or an 'anterior reality', reminiscent of the Russian Symbolist impulse, which sought to reveal a transcendent essence that lay beyond 'the concrete presence of an object'.

Barbara Wyllie, Vladimir Nabokov (2010) | Chapter 1. Hyper-reality underlying/behind/beyond/alongside the mundane. The eternal and transcendent in the aesthetic. On "other worlds", they go on to highlight Nabokov's use of reflections in water and glass. Fits well with my concurrent reading of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer: Binx being abstracted from doing research by motes in sunlight.

#vladimir nabokov #literary analysis #writing #writing technique #symbolism #reality #archreality #the moviegoer #walker percy

[hermitthrush]

"Discovery that someone in whom you had placed great hopes was suddenly not there. It is like leaning on what seems to be a good stalwart shoulder and feeling it go all mushy and queer."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961) | Chapter 5, Part 1. Aunt Emily after the Chicago tryst. Echoes of All My Sons.

#walker percy #fiction #novel #american literature #western literature #expectations #reality

[hermitthrush]

"Merle! Listen, with Merle I could break wind and he would give me that same quick congratulatory look. But you. You're nuttier than I am. One look at you and I have to laugh. Do you think that is sufficient ground for marriage?"

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961) | Chapter 4, Part 2. Kate to Binx, on the way to Chicago, and the foundation of their relationship. They are both recipients of death-knowledge, similarly out of step with polite society. His "nuttiness" is a comfort to her. Makes me think of a kind of inverse Aglaya Ivanovna and Prince Myshkin (The Idiot), with Binx being a dark ideal vs. the Prince's light.

#walker percy #the moviegoer #fiction #american fiction #american literature #western literature #nonconformity #sanity #insanity #bedfellows #relations

[hermitthrush]

Despite the 'unbelievable success' of Lolita, Nabokov felt it 'ought to have happened 30 years ago'. Still, his psychic sensibilities confirmed that this was, in fact, the right time. When he saw the names of Harris and Kubrick on his Hollywood contract they broke a dream that he had had in 1916, shortly after the death of his Uncle Ruka, in which his uncle told him he would return as 'Harry and Kuvrykin'. Suddenly, the mystery of the dream was solved, his destiny sealed, and the inheritance promised to him over 40 years before restored.

Barbara Wyllie, Vladimir Nabokov (2010) | Chapter 5. Synchronicity and superstition in the explosive success of Lolita coming to film.

#nonfiction #nabokov #vladimir nabokov #synchronicity #lolita #literature #russian literature #film #stanley kubrick

[hermitthrush]

Yet love revives as we spin homewards along the coast through the early evening. Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad. Sharon's beauty and my aunt's bravery, and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson's and the motels and the children's carnival.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961) | Chapter 3, Part 1. Binx and Sharon cruising in his red MG. I find these musings particularly resonant because, in my own experience, joy and melancholy are the two intrinsic ways you can slice life.

#joy #melancholy #musing #life #driving #novel #walker percy #the moviegoer #american literature

[hermitthrush]

"I am always at my best with doctors. They are charmed with me. I feel fine when I'm sick. It is only when I'm well that--" Now in the shadow of the camphor tree she stops suddenly, takes my arm in both hands. "Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck-- people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961) | Chapter 2, Part 3. Kate on the condition of tragedy creating "real" moments, compared the banal quotidian.

#walker percy #literature #reality #tragedy #death #disaster #illness #novel #fiction #mortality

[hermitthrush]

"-- you have too good a mind to throw away. I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961) | Part 1, Chapter 5. Aunt Emily to Binx.

#walker percy #american literature #southern literature #western literature #dignity #struggle #life #fiction #melancholy #death

[hermitthrush]

They could be called love affairs, I suppose. They started off as love affairs, anyway, fine careless raptures in which Marcia or Linda (but not yet Sharon) and I would go spinning along the Gulf Coast, lie embracing in a deserted cove of Ship Island, and hardly believe our good fortune, hardly believe that the world could contain such happiness. Yet in the case of Marcia and Linda the affair ended just when I thought our relationship was coming into its best phase. The air in the office would begin to grow thick with silent reproaches. It would become impossible to exchange a single word or glance that was not freighted with a thousand hidden meanings. Telephone conversations would take place at all hours of the night, conversations made up mostly of long silences during which I would rack my brain for something to say while on the other end you could hear little else but breathing and sighs. When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over. No, they were not conquests. For in the end my Lindas and I were so sick of each other that we were delighted to say good-by.

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961) | Chapter 1. Mutual Vronskys.

#walker percy #novel #fiction #american literature #death of love