Alfred Kubin's The Other Side

[rich]

check out the etymologies of Vheissu from Tim Ware's site (from The Modern Word)

Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien

 While certainly of interest to Borges scholars and modern
Rosicrucians, Bemerkungen is most notorious for its chapter on the
ideal community of Vheissu, the major inspiration behind the infamous
Zweite Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. Better known to history as the
Commune of Prague, the ZFG was an isolated group of philosophers,
Rosicrucians, and Lutheran radicals who attempted to recreate the
ideals of Vheissu by establishing a closed community outside Prague in
1773. Their experiment was a disaster, ending two years later in a
spiral of cannibalism, violent orgies, and mass suicide. (For further
details, see "Rosiges Glühen, Blutiges Kreuz," by Kristoph Gross, Der
Annalen Metakarus, 1934, pp. 345-78; or "The Prague Commune and its
Influence on DeSade's The 120 Days of Sodom," by Josephine Pinto,
Lingua Franca, Vol 10/No. 3, April 2000, pp. 22-25.)
______
Kubin was a Czech--who knows, maybe he knew about the Commune of
Prague--orgies, suicide, violence--sounds alot like The Other Side's
Pearl.

rich

On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Rich,
>
> Mucho thanks....I am definitely going to read it. Never had heard of it.
>
> Mark
>
> --- On Sun, 9/6/09, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Alfred Kubin's The Other Side
>> To: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Date: Sunday, September 6, 2009, 11:55 AM
>> http://dxsuperpremium.blogspot.com/2007/10/other-side-by-alfred-kubin.html
>>
>> another Vheissu-like dream of annihilation. Kubin's only
>> novel. known
>> more for his artwork
>>
>> Written in 1908 and hailed by artists such as Kandinsky,
>> The Other
>> Side describes a dream kingdom that becomes a nightmare and
>> a journey
>> to Pearl, a mysterious city created deep in Asia that is
>> also a
>> journey into the subconscious'
>>
>> http://calitreview.com/1624
>>
>> wonderful drawings. if u like Goya and the Wall
>>
>> In Munich and Berlin it reached for a vehement, grotesque,
>> fantastic
>> linguistic means, for a wild primitive-sounding syntax,
>> from which an
>> “other modernism” gradually emerged. Kubin helped
>> create this anarchic
>> opening, which ignored the norms of taste of peinture and
>> ultimately
>> still avowed the ancient Horatian delectare—that is, an
>> experience of
>> the moment in which we recognize a variation of Lessing’s
>> “pleasure.”
>> Kubin had something quite different in mind: with his
>> hallucinatory
>> incantations he was seeking to disturb the viewer; he felt
>> driven to
>> solve the riddle of humankind and creation in a
>> spellbinding act. In
>> the process he exposed himself to the anxiety that
>> Worringer wrote had
>> been controlled by the Oriental peoples, since they see
>> “in the world
>> nothing but the shimmering veil of Maya.” Kubin’s
>> studies of occult
>> doctrines and Buddhism did not provide him with the refuge
>> for which
>> he had hoped, however. As early as 1908 he was warning his
>> friend
>> Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando against Buddhism: “a
>> watertight but
>> sterile system” that “is incompatible with an
>> artistically creative
>> existence.”
>>
>> rich
>>
>>
>
>
>
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