Understanding Auto-Fellatio, etc.

[Glenn Scheper]

To my quoting
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/alchemy.html
> Romanticism, then, as a metarational reaction to empiricism,
> entails a reconnection to the archetypal realm and a
> corresponding reactivation of alchemical themes and symbols.
...
> The quest for unity or wholeness central to both alchemy and
> Romanticism thus replaces the moralism of a redemption
> grounded in reasoned theological belief systems.

Michael Joseph replied:
> Yet if one actually reads alchemical texts or the writings of 15-16th
> century magi, one finds them very like the texts of contemporary
> Humanists, with whom they knew and frequently consulted, in their
> scholarly interest in getting the texts right. (See Anthony Graton on
> this.)  For them apparently the quest for "wholeness" was no less a
> rational enterprize, although ultimately concerned with praxis. Moreover,
> I'd challenge the hypothesis that they sought to replace "moralism," or
> conceived of their project in a way that superceded the prevailing general
> principles.

My only window on knowledge, the Internet, shew no Anthony Graton.

The alchemy branch of that paragraph is less important to me than
the romantic poets. I'm not sure I even have any AF fellows amongst
the 15-16th c magi, despite the word magi implies they have gnosis.
The alchemist Vaughn sticks in my memory, I found him near Ficino.
I recognized in Vaughn's alchemical vessel, the mouth, and clearly
the philosopher's stone has the transformational properties of AF.

But mostly these chemists leave me cold. Since the pistics crushed
the gnostics in early CE, I am not found in the majority of works,
certainly not in those acceptable in the mainstream. Certainly not
in humanists, who deny supernaturalism. Not in simple chemists who
seek the philosopher's stone amongst objects; Not in the Kabbalists
seeking power in names of angels, instead of in a reflexive speech
act that at once recreates them angels and confers their true name;
Not in all dogmatists who've given up hard referents for symbolism.

I thought Crowley was a fellow, but now I think that Egyptologist
simply carried off and mimicked some of the choicer ancient ideas.
I thought Heidegger's Dasein spoke of me, but after wading through
_Being and Time_, I am not in Heidegger: He carried off something
he'd obtained from the earlier Germans in his philosophy vocation.
I shine when Plato quotes Socrates, but not in his other thinking.
Although a great foundation for logic, I am absent from Aristotle.

My true fellows are among the abject, institutionalized, crucified.
In fact, I remember another V.A. inpatient, somewhat dysfunctional,
telling me Jesus Christ would be coming back in a mental hospital.

In case I did not appreciate abjection from the psychosis itself,
the aide taking me to my room on my first hospitalization, when I
casually related AF in what brought me here, closed the door and
banged me up against the wall: "Do you know what you have done?!"

Years later, in my first-ever letter to exposit AF in religion,
I instructed the recipient to burn this letter after reading it.

I recognize Jesus was my fellow, and he certainly wanted change.

I recognize Nietzsche was my fellow, and this essay suggests he
disparaged the "enlightenment", yet was not against rationality,
for he wished himself to establish some new rational foundation:
http://www.scrye.com/~station/dissertation.html

Leveraging his abyss quote, I can claim, "Had the enlightenment
not excluded the sacred, the sacred would not have excluded it."

Consider fellow Artaud's "to have done with the judgment of god":
http://www.snarkout.org/archives/2002/11/24/
http://www.cercacultura.it/entries/20030912134019/view_details
http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/GreatDJ/artaud.html

Consider recluse female fellow Emily Dickinson's many poems:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickinson/1129.htm
On 1129 ("Tell all the Turth but tell it slant--")

I recognize a fellow in Pynchon, who appears paranoid, recluse;
who planned to produce around a central metaphor never revealed.

It is a true gem to find adept and successful Nabokov my fellow.

But fiction is already one step removed from threatening change.
Coleridge recommended not to seek the source of poetic symbols.
Poe's criticism of Raven jumps over the reasons for writing it.
I've only read one Dostoevsky story; Abjection recommends him:
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/chabrieres/underground.html

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.