Welcome to the blog, everyone. Thanks for making the first session of 08 come alive. Loads of ground covered: intervals and aporia, sacred porn (the crucifixion as a snuff movie through which we can live out our own death/orgasm and find our own redemption in the process), comedy and tragedy, and much, much more besides.
Being a writer 'n stuff, I'm going to paste two poems. One is Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which I cited as displaying the type of 'nostalgia in advance' that was so magnificently captured in the Herzog film we saw the first ten minutes of:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
(Another instance of this, in which the hero literally travels in time from after the disaster to just before, so that he can (pre)mourn things while they're still there, might be Chris Marker's brilliant 'La Jetée', which I believe you can now watch in its entirety on Youtube or Ubuweb (does someone more technically advanced than me want to post that here?)
The other poem I'd like to past is Auden's 'Musée de Beaux Arts'. I was reminded of it by what Marko said about the catastrophe that doesn't register because no one cares enough about it. Auden is commenting on Breughel's 'The Fall of Icarus', in which Icarus's disastrous plunge is ignored by the farmer and the sailors:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on
Again, perhaps someone can post the Breughel image here.
Best,
Tom McC
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