M&D c50 The Golem

[alice wellintown]

The golem is, one one very important sense, an unfinished work, a man not
fully formed, an unfinished man, as Yeats calls him in his masterpiece on
the subject, "A Dialogue of Self and Soul", so Hamlet, who becomes, not
Prufrock, but Lear, a finished man. And, to stick to Shakespeare, we can
combine Hamet & Lear, so, Richard III, Glouster, who, in that famous
opening soliloquy
On the Winter and discontent, describes himself as an finished man, a
pre-Notre Dame, Quasimodo, a King or Pope of Fools, a champion of the ugly
image of God, of, in Lear's world, Bastards & Fools, but, of course, we see
but through a darkly glass, and sometimes in one, the Self, and Vanity,
when one is bereft of the Soul, can but laugh and sing, as Yeats has it at
the end of his poem, or in "Sailing to Byzantium", clap for the tatters of
mortal dress upon the stick of Self. Of course, thus Self elevated, to
Humanistic Hubris unrestrained, to Enlightenment in a clockwork universe
wound and left to its internal laws, or to navel gazing Buddha
Elightenment, the glory be to god for Pied Beauty, is a Paradise Lost. So
Man must finish Man's work. God has finished His. And ours is but a Golem,
a pornograhy, an imitation of God's Granduer. In ritual, in sacred spaces,
of course, we imitate the creation. But otherwise we are not blessed by
anything and nothing we look upon is blessed.

On Friday, April 5, 2013, David Morris wrote:

> It's officially OK for God (AKA Jesus) to make life from clay.  The Golem
> is a cautionary tale, pure & simple.  Man's attempts to be God via man made
> life is likely to backfire on friend and foe, become catastrophic.
>
> I don't know how this becomes American Religion.  Heresy isn't the heart
> of the Golem story, but hubris, the sin that cast down Lucifer, is.
>
> "American Religion?"
> I don't have a clue what you mean by that.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Friday, April 5, 2013, Lemuel Underwing wrote:
>
>> Also, the wonderful bit about Golem-making being a Vital Part of the
>> Gospel of Christ, because he was known to have made clay pigeons and
>> animated them through the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (far from canonical).
>>
>
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