Popular Superstitions and Old Habits

Giotto Di Bondone, Allegory of Obedience, ca. 1330

"...hitherto nothing has been practiced and cultivated among men better or longer than obedience..."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

Giotto Di Bondone was born in Del Colle, a village in the commune of Vespignano near Florence in 1266 (Woltmann and Woermann, ed. by Sydney Colvin, History of Ancient, Early Christian and Medieval Painting, 1880). Giotto was an architect and painter in cities across Italy. Only three years before his death in 1337, Giotto was appointed by the comune of Florence to the position of chief architect of the Florence Cathedral, a testament to the high esteem in which he was held by both his cohorts and the civic leaders of his time. Dante and Petrach both laud him for his mastery in the arts and one scholar has written that "the opinion of his contemporaries entertained of Giotto as the greatest genius in the arts which Italy in that age possessed..." and, "It was not only the artist Giotto, but the whole man, that impressed the minds of his contemporaries."

The beginning of Giotto's artistic vocation was devoted to the Franciscan order at Assisi. Later in his career Giotto would return to Assisi and it is there at the Lower Church, above the tomb of St. Francis, that he painted the Allegory of Obedience shown above. The central, winged-female figue is Obedience and she is flanked by a Janus-faced Wisdom and Humility holding a torch to the viewer's right. Obedience places a yoke upon a Franciscan monk while angels and other characters look on. Above the scene St. Francis himself is pulled up to heaven by two arms while two angels appear to recite the laws of the Order of St. Francis.

All well and good, except according to Alfred Woltmann, Giotto didn't really like the monkish way of life:

"he who had to put so much of his art at the service of the Franciscans had, in doing so, become disgusted with the monkish temper, he protests with rare independence against the mischievous wolves who, in their false clothing, seem the mildest of lambs, and against disguised lust of power and hypocrisy. Poverty unsought, he says, is bad enough, but voluntary poverty, at least, did not lead to wisdom, morality, virtue, or knowledge, and it was a shame to call that virtue which consisted in despising what was good."*

* For the full text on which Woltmann bases his claim see, The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Vol. II, Boston, 1887, pp. 212-214, "Giotto Di Bondone, Canzone. Of the Doctine of Voluntary Poverty."

The Materialism of National Pride: the Case of the Coin and the Body

Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands' right-wing, Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom)

This is sort of longish, but here it goes...

On the BBC World Service broadcast this morning a correspondent interviewed some folks from Holland on their views of the Euro-zone crisis and what they thought of the option, now promoted by Geert Wilders and the PVV, of returning to the Guilder. The Dutch interviewed liked the idea and supported the PVV for their anti-Euro stance. The PVV is already relatively popular, it's the third-largest party in Holland and wields some not so insignificant influence on the policies of the ruling coalition government because of a "support-pact" made after the last elections. However political insiders and cynics like Matt Steinglass of the Financial Times have stressed that Wilders' new platform on the Euro is nothing more than political opportunism for a party that until the crisis began, focused singularly on the immigration "crisis" and the menacing threat of creeping Sharia law and so-called Islamo-fascism in Europe (www.FT.com, 11/13/2011). Yet Gilders himself made a tantalizing and perhaps compelling connection between his party's two favorite bogey-men when interviewed by the BBC. I paraphrase: "We have hundreds of thousands of immigrants in our country who are given housing and money and we get nothing out of it and on top of that we have a foreign coin."

Christopher Howgego writes in Ancient History from Coins (London, 1995), "it is wrong to deny that there is a connection between coinage and autonomy." Coins make political statements about national identity and prestige. "they assert the identity of the polis, kingdom or state which produced them... It might be a matter of pride for the badge of the city to be current, and the act of coining itself might be an affirmation of the status or autonomy of a polis..." I write this during Chanukkah and I'm reminded of a passage from I Maccabees that expresses exactly this type of civic pride and assertion of national identity. Antiochus the VII grants Simon the Hasmonean the right to mint Judea's own coins: "και επετρεψα σοι ποιησαι κoμμα ιδιον νoμισμα (your own stamped coin) τη χωρα σου."

Halfway across the globe, the struggle over national pride and identity is playing out around and over a Pakistani woman's body. Never mind that Veena Malik appeared on India's equivalent of Big Brother, which she ably defended in a head-to-head verbal brawl with a cleric on Pakistan's Frontline, she then had the gall to pose "nude" for India's FHM magazine with the initials, 'ISI' prominently emblazoned on her arm.

Malik bears the inscription of the (in)famous Pakistani intelligence agency on the cover of an Indian magazine, the literal sign of Pakistan's secretive arm augmented by the fact that she, a Pakistani for crying out loud, has no clothes on! Oh, she says she was duped by the mag and never intended to pose nude... more to come.

Liriodendron tulipifera

Fall in New York: Cones of the American tulip tree

Divine Meadow

On the Bear Valley Trail to Arch Rock,

Point Reyes National Seashore, California

Being and Value

Zeus impregnates Danae with golden rain, who begat Perseus

Gustav Klimt, Danae, 1907

"Thanks to the mysterious potential of my purse... we succeeded in overcoming time."

Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, 1814

So here's another one of Zeus's exploits and we're back once more to the subject of money, if it's not coming out of your ears already! In the myth depicted above, the mysterious power of money is yet again on display. Money, here in the form of gold coins, the measure of value and medium of exchange, becomes the instrument of exchange and insemination between god and mortal. Money overcomes, money creates, and as for the body, money gives pleasure.

There's a poetics to money, but often we're simply unaware of it, we tend to focus on larger social structures, institutions and systems instead of the way in which money or the money function is internalized by people. What is the interior life of money, does it pattern thought, and is there an existential dimension that we must be attuned to? This is why the image above and the myth portrayed are so powerful.

One dissonant feature among the showering gold coins is the black rectangle. Apparently, though I have not looked into this, Klimt used the rectangle in other paintings as well, and it connoted maleness. But there is a tangential quality to the symbol here in Danae. Why is it necessary? Doesn't the torrent of coins suffice as a symbol of male virility?

Answers to come...

But I need your help readers... If you're out there.

Ok, so I'll venture to guess that Klimt wanted his viewers or Danae's viewers as it were, to perceive in the form of a glaring, golden image, the homology of the Phallus and money. The connection between the two was old and new in Klimt's time. Let me explain... Klimt shared Vienna with Freud and Egon Schiele, and if you haven't seen his paintings, please look them up. It is my suspicion that Lacan was impressed by their works (but remember Lacan never pronounced the analogy between Money and the Phallus explicity*). Why the proposed connection between Lacan and Klimt and maybe the German Expressionists in general? While it is true that Klimt and Schiele did not depict headless women like the later Surrealists... Klimt and his crew were Viennese... and so was Freud, so why not? Incidentally, there's an article about the Lauder's, and the Neue Gallerie, and their paintings, in the Times today. 'Nough.

-

*more on that issue soon!

The End of Storytelling

"Modern man no longer works on what cannot be abbreviated."

-Walter Benjamin

I should be working on my dissertation, Reading Money and Exchange in Talmudic Literature, but instead I'm "busy" writing on this blog that no one reads. I just read that Qaddafi's Little Green Book was just that, short and it seemed to one journalist that it would have taken no time at all to produce it. But Qaddafi was in power for over 40 years! Good riddance.

By contrast, I was told by a professor of renown, as a college student, all green but raring to go cut my teeth on some ancient Jewish text, to go slowly as it took Jacob seven years to gain the hand of Rachel in marriage. The reader should know that the Torah is an object of erotic veneration so to speak, and is bride to those who study Her. This same professor, the leading scholar outside of Israel on the Kabbalah and especially the Zohar, related that he had spent his years as a student simply transcribing manuscripts of Hebrew and Aramaic mystical tracts before he was ready for any writing on the level of analysis of these texts.

For the professor, the story could not be abbreviated and would lose its power if not conveyed by one who is "at home in distant places as well as distant times." But information can be distilled and must be verified to be palatable.

Walter Benjamin loved Buber's Hasidic tales; all of the dynasties of the Chasidishe Velt trace their lineage to the Ba'al Shem Tov, whose entire biography is woven together from the stories of his disciples - the one shred of "verifiable" evidence of his existence comes from a Polish tax log. And today, well, the descendants and adherents of a movement whose progenitor was a pipe-smoking, ragamuffin storyteller (who also had a knack for telling people which towns in Poland they should avoid), are the fastest growing segment of the Jewish population. Yes, this is only one side of the coin: the chapter title "Sermons, Stories and Songs: the Marketing of Hasidism," from Dynner's Men of Silk, is sure to whet your appetite for another take on the "story."

So in 1936 Benjamin announced that "the art of storytelling is coming to an end..." - but remember: that's the same year Faulkner published Absalom! Absalom!

In Memoriam: The Marriage of Scholasticism and Ethics

Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel, zts"l

(March 12, 1943 - November 8, 2011)

Rosh Yeshiva, Yeshivas Mir Yerushalayim

אשרי מי שעמלו בתורה ועושה נחת רוח ליוצרו

New discovery: From the great bowl of treats that is the blogosphere, I have seen the Rosh Yeshiva's old yearbook entry from Chicago. This is touching; his quote is the bold line from the poem, Lady Clara Vere de Vere by Tennyson:

From you blue heavens above us bent,

the gardener Adam and his wife,

smile at the claims of long descent.

Howe'er it be it seems to me,

'tis only noble to be good.

kind hearts are more than coronets,

and simple faith than Norman blood.

Salmonidae: Oncorhynchus mykiss

Caught in New Hampshire

"Rainbow trout fishing is as different from brook fishing as prize fighting is from boxing."

- Ernest Hemingway, "The best Rainbow Trout Fishing,"

Toronto Star, August 28, 1920

Seeking Icons in the Distance

Vincent Van Gogh, The Red Vineyard, 1888

My dear friend J showed me a wonderful passage from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (1961, National Book Award, 1962):

"Then it is that the idea of the search comes to me. I become absorbed and for a minute or so forget about the girl. What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple... so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life... To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

I was immediately reminded of a poem of Rilke's from "Eingang:"

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,

leaving your room, of which you know each bit;

your house is the last before the infinite

whoever you are.

Which got me thinking, how do we as readers understand and contextualize this rendering of the search or the going out of the everydayness and known, into an object of veneration - turning the search itself into an almost religious way of being in the world?

"Modernism has never been theorized as a discourse that incorporates spiritual symbolism." So, Wendy Faris and Steven Walker set out to fill this lacuna in their essay, "Latent Icons: Compensatory Symbols of the Sacred in Modernist Literature and Painting." Allow me to unpack this weighty title. You see with the "death of God" in the modern period and the apparent demise of the religious in modern literature and art, many significant modernist writers and artists, according to Faris and Walker, expressed "the need for contact with the sacred through the creation of a new set of subliminally perceived iconic representations."

"The painting, The Red Vineyard is a particularly good example of this iconizing project. The figures in the painting are minimally articulated in comparison to the complexly worked field that surrounds them, a complexity and concentration that help raise the field itself to iconic status. The icon remains latent, however, because the canvas depicts the ostensibly sentimental subject of peasants working."

In the case of The Moviegoer we are presented with an author whose project depicts a thoroughly modern man on a spiritual quest, the iconized search mostly latent, behind a myriad of Binx Bolling's escapades.

Qua Vadis Euro? "To Athens to be crucified."

A confident Europa rides the bull

First, if you're a real stickler you're probably wondering why I chose to depict the 2 Euro coin from Greece instead of the 1 Euro coin. I'm so happy you've asked because it allows me to express two important ideas worthy of further reflection. The Euro crisis and especially the looming possibility of a Greek default are once again the biggest news of the day. I'm not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say the Euro currency is in some kind of trouble.

When I first saw this coin today after the news broke from Greece on the referendum, the symbol or icon above took on a special multi-layered significance. How ironic it seems, the Greek coin is the most flamboyantly optimistic and proud and yet it is Greece who is shaking the foundation of the Euro monetary union to its core. However, upon further study I learned of the origin of the image on the 2 Euro coin.

















Floor mosaic, Sparta, Greece, 3rd cent. A.D.
Zeus carries Europa across the sea in the guise of a bull. They are accompanied by a pair of winged Erotes (love gods).

The mythological accounts concerning Europa differ to varying degrees but this image clearly reflects the myth recorded in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and other sources, that tells of the
abduction and rape of Europa by Zeus. Zeus snatched her up in Tyre in Phoenicia and took her to Crete where he inseminated her under a plane tree (the leaf Europa holds in her right hand may be from this tree). This much I have gathered from a number of sources. It's not unusual behavior at all for the father of the gods. I refer the reader to Walter Burkett's account of Zeus' "victims" (both male and female) in Greek Religion, III.2.1.
You can really run with an iconic symbol like this on the Euro coin from Greece! So the money above shows Europe personified about to be raped by a bull! Hmmmm....














Finally, I chose the 2 Euro because the notion that 1 coin be inscribed with the number 2 is according to one theorist of art, the earliest conceptual art: "it fiduciarily dissociated symbol from thing (Marc Shell, Art and Money)." This is but one representation of the conceptual revolution introduced by the invention of money.

Die shayne Artisten kempf'n far die Aniyem

Brooklyn Bridge: Beautiful hipster arrested for the poor

... און דען: פון פרייהייט, גלייכהייט

א גן עדן אויפבוין וועט דער ארבעטסמאן

"And then: From Freedom and Equality a Paradise will be built by the Worker!"

Hard Times

"Father earned today some money and daughter is sent for milk," Roman Vishniac, 1937

Occupy Wall Street has placed the alarming gap between rich and poor in our country front and center. For me the first images of poverty and destitution that come to mind, aside from the actual scenes of everyday life in some parts of New York, are the photos of Roman Vishniac from pre-war Jewish Galicia. For those of you who don't know, the photographs that made up the famous book of pictures, "די פארשווונדענע וועלט", The Vanished World were probably, in part, commisioned by The Joint Distribution Committee, an organization founded by Jews in 1914 to assist Jews (mainly in Palestine) in dire need during WWI. Its mission soon widened to funnel monies to poor and distressed Jews across the globe. As it turns out Vishniac was very selective in his photographing of Jews in Galicia; this is obvious to anyone with eyes in his head. So the New York Times ("A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac," Magazine, 4/1/2010) broke the story of Vishniac and the Joint's collusion in presenting a very particular picture of Jews in Eastern Europe. The "damning" evidence, this sentence from a biography of the famous photographer: "The Joint Distribution Committee representatives in Berlin asked Roman, who was known for his photographic work, to travel to Eastern Europe, in order to document daily life in the shtetls." So what? Yes, later Vishniac would present the work in a different light, but for God's sake the man, an artist, went on a mission for the poor to the region his family had fled from years earlier and yes, produced propaganda on behalf of the poor! Halevay! If only in our day we had a Roman Vishniac...

Adirondacks

From 'Wild Northern Scenes: Or Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod' by S.H. Hammond,' New York 1857

I have been to the Adirondacks several times and in all seasons, and this tome is one of the most interesting I have found. The dedication page is worth quoting in full:

To John H. Reynolds Esq. of Albany.

You have floated over the beautiful lakes and along the pleasant rivers of the broad wilderness lying between the majestic St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain. You have, in seasons of relaxation from the labors of a profession in which you have achieved such enviable distinction, indulged in the sports pertaining to that wild region. You have listened to that glad music of the woods when the morning was young, and to the solemn night voices of the forest when darkness enshrouded the earth . You are therefore familiar with the scenery described in the following pages.

Permit me then to dedicate this book to you not because of your eminence as a lawyer, nor yet on account of your distinguished position as a citizen, but as a keen intelligent sportsman, one who loves nature in her primeval wilderness, and who is at home, with a rifle and a rod in the old woods.

With sentiments of great respect,

I remain your friend and servant,

THE AUTHOR

Please God! A gut'n Kvitel far 5772

Hans Beckert appears before the court. 'M', Fritz Lang, 1931

"Do you know your case is going badly?" asked the priest. "That's how it seems to me too," said K. "I've expended a lot of effort on it, but so far with no result. Although I do still have some documents to submit." "How do you imagine it will end?" asked the priest. "At first I thought it was bound to end well," said K., "but now I have my doubts about it..."

"You don't understand the facts," said the priest, "the verdict does not come suddenly, proceedings continue until a verdict is reached gradually."

-Franz Kafka, 'The Trial'

Buteo platypterus

Broad-winged Hawk on the deck

"I first met the Broad-winged hawk as a child in the forests of southern Kentucky. I saw it only occasionally during the breeding season... Like the early naturalists, I knew nothing of its extraordinary migration and assumed, in my ignorance that it lived in the area all year... A few years ago, in Costa Rica, we watched Broad-wings, Swainson's hawks and turkey vultures stream over the rain forests of La Selva, a seemingly endless procession gliding northward on motionless wings."

On average, the count of Broad-wings migrating over Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania is 8,527 a year, the biggest count of any raptor seen during the migration season.

From Kenneth P. Able's, Gatherings of Angels, Migrating Birds and their Ecology, 1999.

We owe a cock to Asclepius

Ganymede, Attic red-figure krater, 5th century BC

Holding the traditional pederastic gift of a rooster from his lover Zeus (on obverse of vase)

"Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius, pay it and do not forget." (Phaedo 118a)

Eva C. Keuls (The Reign of the Phallus, 1985) had this to say about the enigmatic last words of Socrates: "It was in fact a joke and by our taste a coarse one, understandable only against the background of the consistent portrayal of Socrates as satyr-like in appearance and perpetually randy." Keuls then goes on to claim that Socrates actually uncovered his groin rather than his face as is conventionally understood and revealed an erection (the Greek as far as I can tell only says that he uncovered what was veiled); it is then that he uttered the famous last words quoted above. Then in a nod to the god of health for his last hard-on, Socrates offered the rooster.

Money, Sex and Power

Fresco of Priapus, Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii

"Depicted weighing his enormous erect penis against a bag of gold."

This is neither the time nor the place to go into the connection made by some after Lacan between the Phallus and Money. However I believe it is appropriate to point to some ancient Mediterranean cultural convergences with respect to the fresco above. As I look at this image I can't help but think of some other Mediterranean characters.

Judas Iscariot, as is well known, betrays Jesus to the Priests for 30 pieces of silver. Many Christian writers elaborated on the story as it is related in the Gospels, and one lesser known legend of the demise of Judas is from Papias of Hierapolis, preserved in the writings of Apollinaris of Laodicea (d. 390).

"Judas was a terrible walking example of ungodliness in this world, his flesh so bloated that he was not able to pass through a place where a wagon passes easily... His genitals appeared more loathsome and larger than anyone else's, and when he relieved himself there passed through it pus and worms from every part of his body, much to his shame." (trans. from Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, pg. 757)

Susan Gubar writes in Judas: A Biography, "Having grown larger than a cart... flabby Judas... sprouts enlarged genitals. Yet unlike the Greek god Priapus, who is endowed with a huge erection, Judas gains no phallic potency."

And there's more of the "grotesque" to add to this cultural mix. From the Talmud, Baba Metsia we read of another Jew who informs on his fellow, only to regret it later. In what may be a parodic adaptation of the Papias tradition of Judas we read of the trials and triumphs of the enormous sage Rabbi Eleazar the son of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (what follows is a series of excerpts strewn together so the reader here will have to make sense of the picture portrayed in quotations): "When R. Ishmael son of R. Jose and R. Eleazar son of R. Simeon met, one could pass through with a yoke of oxen under them and not touch them. Said a certain [Roman] matron to them, ‘Your children are not yours!’ They replied, ‘Theirs [sc. our wives’] is greater than ours.’ ‘[But this proves my allegation] all the more!’ [She observed]. Some say, they answered thus: ‘For as a man is, so is his strength.’

... The member of R. Eleazar the son of R. Simeon was [the size of] a wineskin of seven 9 kabs... [n.b. not in the vilna shas but in many mss.]

Every evening they spread sixty sheets for him, and every morning sixty basins of blood and discharge were removed from under him...

Then there came sixty seamen who presented him

with sixty slaves, bearing sixty purses.

One day she [his wife] said to her daughter, ‘Go and see how your father is faring now.’ She went,

[and on her arrival] her father said to her, ‘Go, tell your mother that our [wealth] is greater than

theirs’ [sc. of his father-in-law's house]."

Circumcision and Covenant

"Beschneidung Jesu," Friedrich Herlin, Oil on Panel, 1466

"The metaphysical notion of covenant transcends the physicality of circumcision." Thus writes Sharon R. Siegel in the journal Meorot. From there Siegel proceeds to formulate a theological basis for the formal religious incorporation of a baby girl into the Jewish people and then proposes a liturgy that stresses the girl's entrance into the covenant. Sound familiar?

Yes, if you know anything about Pauline Christianity. Daniel Boyarin has written in A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994), that a significant topos of Christian writings from Paul forward was that "the materiality of physical, national, gendered human existence is transcended in the spirituality of "universal" faith."

Sequoia sempervirens

Humboldt Redwoods State Park

"The root system of the coast redwood is surprisingly shallow for such a tall, heavy tree. But it compensates by being unusually broad, reaching a radius of as much as 100 feet (30 meters), particularly in the case of the tallest trees along streams."

Peter R. Dallman, 'Plant Life in the World's Mediterranean Climates,' 1998

Amanita muscaria

Gold Bluffs Beach, California

"The most splendid chief of the agaricoid tribe... which might lower the pride of many a patrician vegetable."

Robert Kaye Greville, 'Scottish Cryptogamic Flora,' 1820

Blue Mountain

Squirrel Mountain Swamp

Harriman State Park

"Blue Mountain you're azure deep, Blue Mountain your sides so steep... I drink at the Blue Goose Saloon, I dance at night with the Mormon girls and ride home beneath the moon."

F.W. Keller, 1920

Poses, or the kh'hob nisht keyn koyach Look.

Daniel Boyarin, my mentor and Rebbe

Dimitri Shostakovich and Hannah Arendt

As a half-assed luftmensch I can appreciate this persona but consider my friend ZZ:

Ga-Nus-Quah

Away With Urban Thoughts:

Backpacking, for the Head and the Legs

"Then I came to Ga-Nus-Quah Rocks, or the Stone Giants... Many of the place names in Harriman State Park are pseudo-Indian, but apparently Ga-Nus-Quah was Real."

Fred Powledge, Mother Jones, 1976

Language, Materiality and God's Hands

It is well known that scholars of ancient Jewish hermeneutics (Midrash and Talmud) subscribe to the theory that Jewish reading, conceptions of language, representation, and "the very meaning of meaning itself," were radically different than their "Greek" counterparts (Platonists and the Philonic Jewish tradition). Way back in 1982, Susan Handelman wrote,

"Indeed, the Greek term term for word, onoma, is synonymous with name. By contrast, its Hebrew counterpart -davar- means not only word but also thing. It was precisely the original unity of word and thing, speech and thought, discourse and truth that the Greek Enlightenment disrupted."

This is by no means the only work to put the radical divergence of Hebraic from Hellenic in these terms. But where did this scholarly cultural meme begin? And is there more out there than meets the eye? If this is a matter of competing ontologies as Handelman would have it, is it only language in Rabbinic culture that is really real?

I recall that in my late teens, as I became more fervently religious and engaged in more rigorous text study in Yeshiva, a contemporary took me aside and said, "remember S., they're just words." Of course it didn't occur to me at the time how laden with meaning and history this phrase was, nor was I aware of the vast philosophical discourses that surrounded it.

Had I known of Handelman's work at the time (The Slayers of Moses), I might have responded, "no my friend you don't understand, for my tradition does not know from this Western understanding of language and reality; 'For the Rabbis... the primary reality was linguistic; true being was a God who speaks and creates texts, and imatatio deus was not silent suffering, but speaking and interpreting.'"

Yes, compelling... but consider this Rashi:

ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו - בדפוס העשוי לו, שהכל נברא במאמר והוא נברא בידים, שנאמר (תהלים קלט ה) ותשת עלי כפכה, נעשה בחותם כמטבע העשויה על ידי רושם שקורין קוי"ן בלע"ז [מטבע] וכן הוא אומר (איוב לח יד) תתהפך כחומר חותם

"... everything was created with an utterance and he was created with the hands."

Adam, the pinnacle of creation, was not created by speech, but by hand out of coarse material.

Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt

Nothing, no matter how low or high, profane or sublime, escaped P’s prescient eye. The weightiness of her representation in arrangements of found objects of art and the everyday was only apprehended by perspective – it was as Arendt observed of Benjamin’s quotations… But I’m getting ahead of myself here, and have theorized without having rehearsed my first encounter with P and all those subsequent intimate moments, which ultimately led to a rupture that haunts me to this very day. What I will attempt to do, is to create a Figura, an earthly drama which has been embellished only in its duration, and “without aesthetic restriction in either subject matter or form,” present an allegory for our age.

Let us first grant that we stare into windows, habitually and with great obsessive uniformity. Every one knows these windows, their type, their particular form and manner of display, but we will spare the prose the name we have given these windows of late. It seems that finally we are all flaneurs and connoisseurs...

When I first viewed P through one of these windows I met a gaze as if I had scanned some distant object through a looking glass...

The glaring eyes of a siren or Svengali as some friends intoned later...

But I thought,

Child of the pure unclouded brow

and dreaming eyes of wonder

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary While I Pondered Weak and Weary

Herr Prof. Immanuel Rath at a low point,

'Der blaue Engel,' Josef von Sternberg, 1930

It's well past midnight and two Cohen albums in,

I'm running through my hermetic wheel again.

coveting while turning pallid, feckless and flaccid.

a coveted image in hand will wear and fade,

but this icon will lie hidden

in some damp piss-soaked corner of a shadow.

"Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day?

Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn,

Upon thy brow in alternation play,

Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn."

misery is a veil, it's terror that's real

just sit alone with Ravel

- where "even damnation is poisoned with rainbows,"

it could be two notes on the piano and I'll smile.

still terror lurks behind us, an awful noise,

a string quartet hell-bent on twisting the gut

in the mood of savage laceration

terror inscribed on the body:

Here lies misspent toil and too much spoiling rotten sentiment.

So the still small voice let forth a lyrical refrain;

And here we are all cold and numb, are you happy that I've come?

when you fell in aching pleasure, melancholic, in earnest tether

you found your place in the chain reviled after fits of lust and guile.

Now we know which side your on, please give in to passing on.

Davnen un Daf Hayomi far undzere tseyt'n; courtesy of Kropsky

The Lubliner Rav, Yehuda Meir Shapiro, founder of Daf Yomi

From Hans Morgenthau's Diary, 18 November, 1926: "It is easy to see why religions prescribe praying morning, noon and night, when I note the effect on me of reading one of Nietzsche's sentences...And is it not the equivalent of religion for modern man? We should impose on ourselves the duty to read one of Nietzsche's essays every day to live better lives, to achieve greater things."

At Walden

While hiking one day around Walden Pond, Sanford Kantrowitz, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and a votary of Elaine Pagels, made a remarkable discovery. As he gazed at a giant uprooted oak, evidently felled by the previous week's Noreaster, he caught a glimpse of a small leather pouch lying exposed on the ground where the great tree had once stood. Affixed to the pouch was a piece of metal inscribed with the name Sewall. Inside was a pocket sized manuscript on vellum, about the size of the Shambhala Pocket Classics that Kantrowitz so often carried with him. There was an inscription on the inside cover, almost illegible, but Kantrowitz could make out the words "gentle boy", followed by "Virtue" and "Beauty." Later research revealed that Kantrowitz had discovered a hitherto unknown Gnostic text, transcribed by a 19th century hand, perhaps Thoreau himself. Kantrowitz began the painstaking process of reconstructing the original Greek and translating, all in preparation for a critical edition to be published in National Geographic's new series, New England Gnosticism, under the title Sewall's Gospel.

Here is the first excerpt to be released to the public:

I am a lover of Nous and the boys in the forest are my teachers.

They are like trees with roots firmly trenched in Hades.

Orpheus leads them in sweet song and I am drawn to them like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. Brilliant golden Nous, the gift of great Priappus, whom having ravished me, is now become my divine darling.

I will know and be known round Attica and the whole world.

Lost in Red Hook: For P, Stylist and Connoisseur

When Mercury was in retrograde

And Saturn was in full glory

Dark eyes stared stone cold

From a woman in overalls

a statue seared in a space I’ve never known

So I called to you as if I’d grown

And you drifted lost across iconic city-scape.

You are the Owl of Williamsburg

The coin of a thousand dreams

Whom Athena chose

For your prescient eye and practiced pose.

When in a booth beneath the fox and crow

I asked bemused:

What ails you?

What do you fear?

You met me with irenic smiles

then solemn eyes slowly closed

but listless is treacherous and I can't play cool

splayed out supple and in the mood,

I fell for the artful ruse

as one more fitful fool.

If my guts could cry out across the elevated screaming highways

Brooklyn walls would fall

Eurydice would rise

We’d sit by cool lakes

I would catch trout

and you would bake pie.

Then we’d really feel it

first as a young boy and girl

Under iridescent skies

Then as great trees

rooted by rivers

Where no one dare cry.