-SeravaneNoli me Loquitur
Speak not of my beauty,
behind my mask you've never seen
Speak not of my loving heart,
behind it's beats you've never been
Speak not of my truthful mind,
you know not of the darkest lies
Speak not of my emerald eyes
you've never seen their deepest cries...
CHORUS. Virgins, who pour forth the rains, let us move toward Attica, the rich country of Pallas, the home of the brave; let us visit the dear land of Cecrops, where the secret rites are celebrated, where the mysterious sanctuary flies open to the initiate…. What victims are offered there to the deities of heaven! What glorious temples! What statues! What holy prayers to the rulers of Olympus! At every season nothing but sacred festivals, garlanded victims, are to be seen. Then Spring brings round again the joyous feasts of Dionysus, the harmonious contests of the choruses and the serious melodies of the flute.- Aristophanes, "The Clouds"
STREPSIADES. By Zeus! Tell me, Socrates, I pray you, who are these women, whose language is so solemn; can they be demigoddesses?
SOCRATES. Not at all. They are the Clouds of heaven, great goddesses for the lazy; to them we owe all, thoughts, speeches, trickery, roguery, boasting, lies, sagacity.
STREPSIADES. Ah! that was why, as I listened to them, my mind spread out its wings; it burns to babble about trifles, to maintain worthless arguments, to voice its petty reasons, to contradict, to tease some opponent. But are they not going to show themselves? I should like to see them, were it possible.
---
STREPSIADES. Tell me then why, if these really are the Clouds, they so very much resemble mortals. This is not their usual form.
-Bertolt Brecht, "Über die Verführung von Engeln"Angels can not be seduced at all or quickly.
Pull him into the entryway,
stick your tongue in his mouth and reach
under his robe, til he gets wet; put
his face to the wall, lift his robe
and fuck him. If he stares in anguish
then hold him tightly and let him come two times;
otherwise, by the end, he'll be in shock.
Admonish him so he sways his butt;
let him know he's free to grab your balls.
Tell him he can fall without fear
while he is hanging between earth and heaven -
but don't look him in the face while you are fucking him
and, for heaven's sake, don't crush his wings.
pro·vin·cial (pr-vnshl)Escape the Provinces! Seek to live a fuller and more sophisticated life, NOW! ;)
adj.
1. Of or relating to a province.
2. Of or characteristic of people from the provinces; not fashionable or sophisticated: "Well-educated professional women ... made me feel uncomfortably provincial" (J.R. Salamanca).
3. Limited in perspective; narrow and self-centered.
n.
1. A native or inhabitant of the provinces.
2. A person who has provincial ideas or habits.
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyOzymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Thus for instance Freud explored the different phases of a man's infantile attitude to his father: 'As long as his father was alive it showed itself in unmitigated rebelliousness and open discord, but immediately after his death it took the form of a neurosis based on abject submission and deferred obedience to him'.-Jean LaPlanche
Not in the strife of action, is the leader made, nor in the face of crisis, but when all is over, when the mind is swift with keen regret, in the long after-thought. The after-thought of one action is the forethought of the next.-Robert Frost, "The Robert Frost Reader, Poetry and Prose"
It is when alone, in converse with their own thoughts so much that they live their conventionalities, forgetful of the world's, that men form those habits called the heroism of genius, and lead the progress of the race. This, the supreme rise of the individual- not a conflict of the consciousness, an effort to oppose, but bland forgetfulness, a life from self for the world- is the aim of existence.
All this is doubly so of the theoretical. In it the after-thought of long nights beneath the universe, of soul stirrings, of the act of thought itself, is more clearly a part of the next action- its expression. Events influence the first class, the limits of language alone the second.
The poet's insight is in his after-thought. It is of varied heart-beats and converse with nature. ANd the grandest of his ideas come when the last line is written.
Life is an after-thought: how wonderful the world? that is the after-thought of life.
In the clip, through a series of close analyses of plot points and camera angles, Zizek concludes that Vertigo is the realization of a male fantasy, which necessarily involves violence and nightmarish transformations. In the “male libidinal economy,” he says, in the jargon-y psychoanalytic speak of his trade, women must be “mortified” before they are acceptable sexual partners. Slipping out of academic argot, he clarifies: “to paraphrase an old saying, the only good woman is a dead woman.” It’s this kind of blunt and utterly unsentimental way of speaking that raises the hackles of some of Zizek’s critics. But I’m not here to defend him. Watching (and reading) him for me is a game of edge-of-your seat “what outrageous or incomprehensible thing is he going to say next?” and I’ll admit, I enjoy it. So I’ll leave you with a final Zizek-ism. Perhaps it will scare you off for good, or perhaps you’re game for a few more rounds of “perversion” with this encyclopedic critic of the self, the social, and the sexual:Philosopher Slavoj Zizek Interprets Hitchcock’s Vertigo in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)
“A subject,” says Zizek, “is a partial something, a face, something we see. Behind it, there is a void, a nothingness. And of course, we spontaneously tend to fill in that nothingness with our fantasies about the wealth of human personality and so on, and so on. To see what is lacking in reality, to see it as that, there you see subjectivity. To confront subjectivity means to confront femininity. Woman is the subject. Masculinity is a fake.”
“After all, the best way to turn someone or something into an object is to kill it…But there are degrees of objectification. The process of mortification begins with how the other is seen, and supposedly known.”- Teresa Brennan, "Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy"
