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.

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*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.