M&D c50 The Golem

[Lemuel Underwing]

book first came out* 1997


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 12:31 AM, Lemuel Underwing <luunderwing at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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