Plato & Spengler - sorry very long, but little cfa

[Terrance]

The City is GR is an extension of the "poor cripple" that
"deformed and doomed
thing" which is human consciousness on the  Grid, on the
wheel, 
under the blows of the hammer. 

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]. 

There are no Mystics in GR, only parodies of Mysticism.


>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. 

Magic and the WORD? 

>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 of
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.

BTW, searching for Vaska's posts on M&D I ran across some
wonderful posts
from Doug M, S~z, and Paul on the Resurrection of the body. 

>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.