City Consciousness & a Soul in every Stone

[cathy hawley]

To mix up two subject lines and recommend a further Georges Perec <Species
of Spaces and other Pieces>:

<There's nothing inhuman in a town, unless it's our own humanity.>

On Fri, 07 Jul 2000 05:23:30 -0400, Terrance wrote:

>  The City is an extension or what is that amputated term
>  McLuhan has, of the "poor cripple" that "deformed and doomed
>  thing" which is human consciousness on the  Grid, on wheel, 
>  under the blows of the hammer. Play those mortal blues, boy,
>  play....
>  
>  The Hammer loud rages in Rintrah's strong grasp swinging
>  loud  Round from heaven to earth down falling with heavy
>  blow 
>  Dead on the Anvil, where the red hot wedge groans in pain. 
>  					
>  			---Blake's Jerusalem 
>  
>  
>  
>  "Where's the city Slothrop used to see back in the newsreels
>  and the National Geographic
 If there is such a thing as the
>  City Sacramental, the city as outward and visible sign of
>  inward  Spiritual illness or health, then there may have
>  been, even here, some continuity of sacrament,  Through the
>  terrible surface of May. The emptiness of Berlin this
>  morning is an inverse mapping of the  White and geometric
>  capital before the destruction
except that here everything's
>  been turned inside out" [372]. 
>  
>  What then is a city? A city reflect the new masculine
>  aggressive psychology of revolt 
>  against the female principles of dependence and nature...In
>  the new space of the city, which is always a sacred space,
>  man succeeded for the first time in constructing a new life
>  which is wholly sacred...What is new is the primacy of
>  sublimation in the domain of the sacred. "Come let us build
>  a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven"
>  [Gen.11.4]. "These stone visages that have incorporated in
>  their light-world the humanness of the citizen himself and,
>  like him, are all eye and intellect--how distinct the
>  language of from they talk, how different from the rustic
>  drawl of the landscape" [Spengler, Decline]. 
>  
>  
>  >From Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
>  
>  Mysticism is a definite stage in the historical development
>  of religion and makes its appearance under certain
>  well-defined conditions. The first stage represents the
>  world as being full of gods whom man encounters at every
>  step and whose presence can be experienced without recourse
>  to ecstatic meditation.  In other words, there is no room
>  for mysticism as long as the abyss between man and God has
>  not become a fact of the inner consciousness. That, however,
>  is the case only while the childhood of mankind, its
>  mythical epoch, lasts. 
>  
>  
>  
>  >From McLuhan's "Cliché to Archetype"
>  
>  Between the ancient and the modern worlds there has been a
>  kind of reversal of roles for cliché and archetype. The
>  inventor, the discover of new forms and new technologies,
>  was for archaic man someone that was more than a man.
>  "Surely some power more than human gave things there first
>  names," says Socrates in the PHAEDRUS. A modern Eskimo said
>  to Professor E. S. Carpenter, "How could I know stone if
>  there were no word 'stone'?" To archaic man language is an
>  immediate evoker of reality, a magical form. In the same
>  way, he thinks of the "apple   of his eye" as constituting
>  his visual world, not as receiving it. The idea of words a
>  merely corresponding to reality, the idea of matching, is
>  characteristic only of highly literal cultures in which the
>  visual sense is dominant. Today in the age of quantum
>  mechanics, for which the "chemical bond" is, according to
>  Heisenberg and Linus Pauling and others, a "resonance," it
>  is perfectly natural to resume a "magical" attitude to
>  language. The poetry of statement became the crux of one of
>  the great critical upheavals of the twentieth century. This
>  change corresponds to the discovery that consciousness is
>  also a multileveled event with its roots in the "deepest
>  terrors and desires." It might be argued that the main cause
>  of the merging of the archaic attitude to cliché with the
>  modern notion of archetype as a more intense reality
>  resulted from our great variety of new techniques if
>  retrieval. Both past cultures and primal individual
>  experiences are now subject to ready and speedy
>  access....Today the means of retrieval of historical
>  cultures and events is so extensive that it involves our
>  time in depth in ancient cults and mysteries.
>  
>  >From Brown's LIFE AGAINST DEATH, Part Six: The Way Out, The
>  Resurrection of the Body
>  
>  Wordsworth...with the sublime (and sublimating) tendency of
>  Milton, "considers that his revelation can be expressed in
>  the forms and symbols of daily life" and "sees Paradise
>  possible in any sweet though bare nook of the earth."
>  Hopkins "is engaged on a theodicy, and has taken for his
>  province  the stubborn senses and the neglected physical
>  world"; "no one has gone further than Hopkins in presenting
>  Christ as the direct and omnipresent object of perception,
>  so deeply ingrained in the eyes, the flesh, and the bone
>  (and the personal sense of having, eyes, flesh, and bone),
>  that the sense of the self and the sense of being in Christ
>  can no longer be distinguished." Rilke plaint throughout his
>  career is what "we do not know the body any more than we
>  know nature": Rilke believes (in his own words) that "the
>  qualities are to be taken away from God, the no longer
>  utterable, and returned to creation, to love and death"; so
>  that the outcome of his poetry is that "Rilke, the body
>  becomes a spiritual fact." 
>  The "magical" body that the poet seeks is the "subtle" or
>  "spiritual" or "translucent" body of occidental mysticism,
>  and the "diamond" body of oriental mysticism, and, in
>  psychoanalysis, the polymorphously perverse body of
>  childhood.
>  
>  Brown's LOVE"S BODY
>  
>  The history of mankind goes from the natural cave to the
>  artificial cave, from the underground cave to the
>  above-ground underground. Mr. And Mrs. Antrobus are getting
>  nowhere. The pyramid, with its winding corridors and
>  labyranthine galleries inside, is an artificial cave; the
>  ziggurat an artificial or architechtual mountain with spiral
>  stairs on the outside
Troy, the archytypal city, is the
>  archetypal maze.





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