M&D c50 The Golem

[Lemuel Underwing]

Hm.. I have read and considered all the replies and greatly enjoy them...
as to what the "American Religion" is, it is a term I hijacked from Harold
Bloom which can be seen basically as a *Personal Relationship* with Christ.
the uniformity of supposed Security this brings as if a Golem were at one's
beck and call... the Religious "freedom" founded here always in the shadow
of some vast all-but-unknowable Mercantile Urge.

I feel like I've missed something when it comes to the sort of
Gnostic-Light as Science Thing I'm picking up on, being just a boy when the
first book came out I wasn't aware of Pornography, much less the Internet,
I missed the List's initial discussions and have such a Jaded view of this
place that I am wary of turning to the Archives...


On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 11:37 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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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