Tuesday, November 22, 2005

"fallenness in reverse" (Reply)

thanks for the comment on the blog, Devon. It is the best first comment I could have hoped for -- other than ones selling penis enlargement pills. Of course there is no "perfect pulse" / perfect infamous willful body -- except in the imagination? Hence "the survival of images"? The virtual body?

I was just reading today the debate between Kojeve / Leo Strauss after Strauss's *On Tyranny* and Kojeve's quotation of Hegel (which I paraphrase): Spirit is that wound which leaves no scars. Maybe I want to reverse that -- wanting to locate scars where there were never wounds. A "perfect" scar? My ongoing "traumatic discourse".

Haunted also right now by these Mandala tapestries I just saw at the Natural History museum, especially the spaces reserved for "tortured souls" and wondrous masks hanging behind displays. Of the Mandalas we might say the same thing my friend Gordon observed of the dinosaurs: that they are entirely "too much of this world," where I take the normality of tortured souls and dinosaurs alike as a sign of our virtuality or fallenness in reverse (perhaps more terrifying than being fallen, Felix Culpa, etc.)

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