*AtD, p. 853 Zeugnisbuchlein or The Book of the Masked*
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 15 08:40:40 CDT 2008
Let's think and free associate about this, which seems quite important in TRP's AtD vision, yes? I mean, WTF? Why is it here, stated this way?
p.853..Zeugnis: attestation -- das Zeugnis
certificate -- Zeugnis, Urkunde, Schein
letter of recommendation -- das Zeugnis
report -- das Zeugnis
testimonial -- Zeugnis
testimonial -- Zeugnis, Leistungszeugnis
testimony -- Zeugnis
to bear witness to -- Zeugnis ablegen fuer
Little Book of Testimonials? or
p. 853 Book of the Masked...Austrian in origin, not a good thing therefore, I suggest.
Is it the fact that it is "written down" that makes it
bad?..Seems to be part of the meaning. "I thought it was supposed to be spoken, passed on face-to-face."
"encrypted field notes"...........field?.like people who study others---in the field? Like spies?
'impenetrable code"......see spying motif.........................
"occult scientific passages"..............is 'occult science' the same as 'magic' ? deep secrets into 'dangerousness'---how life works?----that could be appreciated, at least?
Great lines here:
'mindscape'.................layers emerging like mist, a "distant country' of painful complexity.
"the past is another country"---a writer's aphorism
'unmappable flow of letters and numbers.....images....full spectrum of inks and pastels---[color again]---visited by, under assaults of his home wind....................
'what could not be paraphrased"....the reality was specific, meaningfully beyond reduction
[Old Slavonic script---see Gagolithic alphabet, one of first to 'write down' religion:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet]
'visions of the unsuspected'...........
'breaches in the Creation" where something else might be
"luminously glimpsed".....................the Word unspoken?
'God chose to hide within the light of day"..........inside, not against the day.
[from Eliade, wikipedia: Eliade's understanding of religion centers on his concept of hierophany (manifestation of the Sacred) a concept that includes, but is not limited to, the older and more restrictive concept of theophany (manifestation of a god).[123] From the perspective of religious thought, Eliade argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order.... In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself. A hierophany amounts to a "revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse".[125] ]
"chance encounters with details of God's unseen world"..............chance, spontaneity, the invisible that surrounds (as in Eliade above)......'the tacit dimension' as one thinker, Michael Polanyi, has put it..... [Michael Polanyi placed a strong emphasis on dialogue within an open community]
Or Clifford Geertz, famous anthropologist: "But he also recognised the difficulties that research has in getting at an adequate description of that objective reality: caused by the fact that people tell ethnographers what they believe to be their own motivations, but those people's actions then often seem to contradict their statements to the researcher. This effect is partly due to: the problems that people have in verbalising aspects of their life that they usually take for granted; partly due to how ethnographers structure their research approaches and frameworks; and partly due to the inherent complexity of the social order."
[the list was probably endless---cf. the infinite variety of love just read]
Then look at the chapter titles: To Listen to the Voices of the Dead---very P attitude
To Pass Through the Impenetrable Earth----AtD
To Find the Invisble Gateways--------here in AtD
To Recognize the Faces of Those with the Knowledge-----those faces again, the wise ones
I want to suggest that this wonderful paragraph summarizes much of TRPs vision of a traditional society, the depths of a culture, of a natural community, of the good complexly lived life........an unmappable mindscape still open to ....God's everyday 'revelation'...............
And, that written down, THE BOOK OF THE MASKED, by definition, destroys that unspoken variety......................
Which is why Vlado says it may be a fake then.....It is, of course, done to 'sell' native artifacts to American millionaires..........(Cf. "The Recognitions" here)
and modernity in the 20th Century is full of masks.....deceptions, the faked and unnatural.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask
I thought those flaneurs Baudelaire or Benjamin had "masks' as major tropes to understand modernity. But I don't know and can't find much.
Baudelaire has a famous poem called "Le Masque"....
"Baudelaire's mask is this series of poses by means of which he releases his language from the burden of telling the truth;"---an essay.....
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin - Google Books Resultby David S. Ferris - 2004 - Literary Criticism - 264 pages
de Man suggests that the concept of prosopopoeia, a rhetorical term signifying the impersonation or mask of an absent, distant, or dead speaker ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0521797241...
between 0000-00-00 and 9999-99-99
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