esoterica

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3gNTOlZ_dI

http://www.nybooks.com/media/photo/2014/01/29/stauffer_2-022014.jpg

The Thomasschule and Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was the choir director from 1723 until his death in 1750; painting by Felix Mendelssohn, 1838

While well aware that Bach’s music “is an expression of Lutheranism” (Drury 147), he considered it “more like language than Mozart’s or Haydn’s” (C&V: 34e). And he concurred, as we have seen, with what “Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work” (Drury, “Conversations,” 182). “Most sublime,” says Engelmann, “were Fritz Zweig’s renderings of Bach’s organ music (which he played to us at the synagogue when it was not in use)” (64). This is one of those typical sentences that is worth some decoding in its own right.

Berl, in his book on "Das Judentum in der Musik" ("The Role of the Jews in Music"), differentiates oriental from occidental music by designating them as linear and harmonic art, respectively; or—in still broader conception—as temporal art and spatial art. The Jew (so he says), a man of an eminently temporal frame of mind, is a melodist and only a melodist, as exemplified by the Jewish musicians Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Bizet (?), Offenbach, Goldmark, Mahler, or the at least anti-harmonist Schonberg.

Even if Berl's theory is not wholly conclusive (and there is no question that Schonberg's atonality derives from harmony, not from melody) he has, perhaps, with this accentuation of the linear element in Jewish music, offered a valuable suggestion. Certain it is, that music, as the sphere of mentality lying deepest in our subconsciousness, most immediately establishes our contact, so to speak, with the remote ancestral past. Just as the fully assimilated Jew even after generations betrays his origin in one way or an- other by speech, gesture, glance or mental cast, similarly, in the music of that "most German" of composers, Mendelssohn, or of the "most French" of composers, Offenbach, or of any of the "most Viennese" operetta composers, a sensitive listener can instantly detect the Jewish tinge. But what is it? It may be a something in the melody that strikes us, who are still living in the harmony of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in some way un- worthy of art. And as to-day one faction violently rejects Men- delssohn, Meyerbeer, Offenbach, Mahler, while another lauds them to the skies, so it was in all probability with those old Jewish musicians of the seventeenth century. Only it seems likely that the Jewish "linear" element was much more strongly stressed, because the assimilation was then younger by three actively influential centuries.

"Some Early Jewish Musicians," by Paul Nettl, Musical Quarterly 1931

Hence, among those races whose music is dependent on speech, with its unstable tonal intervals, the pure "linear" element in music would probably be retained the longest. To this species belongs the "distance-music" of certain peoples like the Javanese and Siamese, who still have no idea of the harmonic principles derived from the overtones. And the experience of the Jews was probably similar to that of the peoples mentioned by Hornbostel.

This would explain why, in orientalized Spain, the variation- forms were developed, and why Orientals, and peoples akin to them, such as Spaniards, Jews, Slavs and southerners, brought forth on the whole reproductive rather than productive artists. (Production, in the occidental sense, demands originality and stability in the work of art.) Furthermore, why the Spaniards, Jews and Slavs (with the exception of the Czechs under Germanic influences) show a preference for minor melody, i.e., for music not controlled by the overtones.

And now we return to our old Jewish musicians of Prague, of whom we are willing to believe that they not only made "a trifle free with the melody," but likewise treated the rhythm (in itself a resultant of European harmony) most irrationally. And having begun our remarks by speaking of the Jewish musicians of the Italian Renaissance, we may be allowed to close with the state- ment that the highly cultivated Italy of that period had assimi- lated the Jews far more intimately than Germany, where the Jews, in their enforced isolation, could preserve their racial peculiarities far longer in fuller intensity.

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8820/17085569951_38e2107816_c.jpg

That Fludd would choose to do this is not surprising. His own syncretic philosophy combined elements of Neoplatonism, hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah, with a touch of alchemy, music theory, Renaissance mechanics and Rosicrucianism. Trained as a physician, Fludd was influenced early on by the work of Paracelsus, and was intrigued by the idea of God as an alchemist, mixing matter to produce the strange brew that is the universe. At one point, Fludd describes the state prior to creation as “the mist and darkness of this hitherto shapeless and obscured region”, in which the “impure, dark, and dense part of the abyss’s substance” is dramatically transformed by divine light.1 The black square is quickly followed by a series of images – almost like a stop-motion animation – in which the divine fiat of creation and light flows forth. The Neoplatonic theme of the divine as a central source of radiating light takes over, producing the macrocosm and the microcosm, the ethereal and the earthly domains, all the stuff of the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46kXH6GGtT0

Das Nichts nichtet.

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/014/cache/niepce-first-photo_1459_990x742.jpg

http://www.psyche.com/psyche/images/cube/cube000.gif

This is why the future will be far better than it is now. In the coming digital world, we may be perfect, or very close to it. Expect a much more utopian society for whatever social structures end up existing in virtual reality and cyberspace. But also expect the real world to radically improve. Expect the drug user to have their addictions corrected or overcome. Expect the domestic abuser to have their violence and drive for power diminished. Expect the mentally depressed to become happy. And finally, expect the need for religion to disappear as a real-life god—our near perfect moral selves—symbiotically commune with us. In this way, the promising future of atheism and its power will reside in achieving this amazing transhumanist technology. Code, computers, and science will one day replace formal religion and its God, and we will be better as a species for it.  

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/mind-uploading-will-replace-god

https://proactiontranshuman.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/wendy-goog.jpg

^maybe that should've gone in exoterica

ahaha

love how the hebrew cube looms inscrutably above it all

http://www.nybooks.com/media/img/blogimages/chardin_jpg_600x780_q85.jpg

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/apr/18/guts-spring/

Three flayed squirrels on the road enact Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion.

In the ancient world, it was the liver, with its mysterious folds and lesions, that was believed to hold the most information. “For the king of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he made his arrows bright, he consulted with images, he looked in the liver” (Ezekiel 21:21).

The melting snow-bank slowly yields its hoard: a Sunday Times, buried by the snowplow in January; a flattened can of Red Bull; an opossum’s corkscrew tail.

On the first day of spring, I find a notice in the mailbox: time for my routine colonoscopy. I make an appointment to have my entrails read.

“Gut it out,” we say. This chipmunk did, all across the driveway.

My dog circles the dispersed feathers. It would take a forensics expert to divine what happened to this pigeon.

“I thought you were writing about divination,” my friend said. “What’s with all the road kill?” “Well,” I answered, “you don’t expect me to sacrifice animals myself, do you?”

Splanchna (singular splanchnon) are the innards, the general collection of heart, liver, lungs, gallbladder, and attendant blood vessels. English translations of splanchna depend on context. The lexicon reaches for words like “entrails” (in contexts of divination) and “bowels” (in contexts of emotion). “Feeling,” “mood,” “temper,” or “mind” often seem more apt. Splanchna feel. They feel anxiety, fear, grief, and sometimes love and desire. In the New Testament, splanchnizomai is “I feel pity.” Splanchna soften in worry. The bully Menelaus “will soften his splanchna” when his daughter is at risk. But in vehement feeling they are hot and taut. A young man “has a stretched splanchnon and says foolish things.”

How physical is this word? Sometimes the physicality seems obvious. When the Erinyes have chased Orestes, their splanchnon “pants with many labors.” But sometimes it is less obvious. The word can read like “character.” It is unfair, for instance, to dislike someone before you “clearly learn their splanchnon.”

Rather than prejudge this word’s concreteness or abstraction, let us watch how the word behaves and what ideas it attracts to its neighborhood. Splanchna contain feeling, but also hide it. One may conceal feeling “under one’s splanchna.” The very inner thing that must be learned, if we want to know people, masks their feeling. Tragedy, especially Euripides, gives voice to a Greek sense of lack here. There is no “clear proof” by which to understand phrenes (which I take, for the moment, to mean “mind”). If good people lived twice, then, “it would be possible to know the bad, the good.” External judgment is confusing. “There is no clear boundary set by the gods between the good and bad.” One cannot “judge” people by a “clear” outside token, there is no “accurate” test of their value.

This thought is voiced increasingly through the fifth century. Only being with people helps us judge them. We cannot see into another’s splanchna. Would it were possible, says a fifth-century drinking-song,

to see what sort of man each person is,
divide up (dielonta) his breast
and look at his mind (nous), then close it again,
and think with an undeceiving mind (phren)
that he’s your friend.

The Byzantine scholar Eustathius aligned this song with an Aesopic fable that blamed Prometheus for placing pulai, “gates,” in the human breast. He interprets the splanchna here as gates of thought and feeling, gates we close against outsiders. We are doubly masked. Our innards in themselves are hard to see, and they mask the feelings they contain. Perhaps these are two ways of saying the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

http://www1.ind.ku.dk/complexLearning/zachary1977.pdf

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O my friends, there is no friend.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Prado_-_Los_Desastres_de_la_Guerra_-_No._03_-_Lo_mismo.jpg

homo homini lupus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0

When the Kachinas entered the kiva without masks, I had a great surprise. They were not spirits, but human beings. I recognized nearly every one of them and felt very unhappy, because I had been told all my life that the Kachinas were gods. I was especially shocked and angry when I saw all my uncles, fathers, and clan brothers dancing as kachinas. I felt the worst when I saw my own father— and whenever he glanced at me I turned my face away. When the dances were over the head man told us with a stern face that we knew who the Kachinas really were and that if we ever talked about this to uninitiated children we would get a thrashing even worse than the one we had received the night before.

http://www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStudies/files/Sam%20Gill/DISENCHANTMENT.pdf

http://www.singingdesert.com/rock-art-images/Hopi-kachina-Powamu.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3945/15356846688_9703f9263f_b.jpg

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/hopi-drawings-of-kachinas/

Public domain so good. Do you know the third world force field thread?

Do you know the third world force field thread?

thank you for that revive; <3 it

http://www.class.uh.edu/classes/Arth1380/ArtConceptPages/HomerDeChirico/EnigmaOfTheOrace.jpg

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http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/13/MedicinalPlants.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg

https://users.polisci.wisc.edu/avramenko/Methods/Derrida_PlatosPharmacy.pdf

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/pmahon/pharmakon.html

http://www.drugabuseinscripture.co.uk/assets/images/Manual_Greek_Lexicon_of_the_New_Testament.-_p.466._Abbott-Smith._Third_Ed._1937_Courtesy_T-T_Clark-.jpg

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i had a long chat the other day about whether it's ok to get your palm read ironically bc maybe it doesn't count as sorcery if you don't believe it's real

haha what was the verdict?

(btw that problem reminds me of essay by psychoanalyst octave mannoni--

http://ideiaeideologia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Mannoni-I-know-very-well.pdf

-- which relates to post on kachinas above. haven't read it in a long time, but iirc idea is that psychoanalytic concept of Verleugnung or disavowal ("i know very well, but all the same...") is underlying structure of fetishism, some religious practices, and (as zizek would have it) ideology in general

imo even total disbeliever in fortune telling, as i am, likely has something like this going on, if only subconsciously, when they engage in the fortune telling ritual)

the following ideas were posited:
a. fortune telling acc to the torah is probably true, and the law against consulting it is because the fate of Jews comes from a level above that of Mazel (um, astrology maybe?), so using fortune telling that you don't believe is real might not be covered under those laws.
b. however, it could be to consult a fortune teller invites in a level of intervention that breaks yr bond to this higher-than-mazel level of divine providence and should not be risked, even if meant trivially
c. we discussed the scenario of if you went to get your fortune told and were told something horrible, like that you'd die, do you not believe enough that it wouldn't on any level penetrate your consciousness?
d. whether fortune tellers ever actually tell clients that they're going to die bc that sounds very bad for business

interesting! essay i linked relates to c.

"do you not believe enough" is the catch: i.e. do you know very well (it's not true) enough" that you're not on any level thinking "but all the same..."

yeah this is i feel like a very common idk if dialectic is the word but phenomenology in the religious jewish community. the talmud says about the evil eye that it can only bother you if you think about it, but if you don't, it can't. maimonidies goes much further and denies any kind of supernatural reality. i feel like jews split the difference and essentially hold a position of 'i don't believe in it' but also 'it's best not to think too much about it,' which kinda makes sense i feel like in that often you can give power to fictional constructs by devoting your attention to them, ie it is your attentiveness + obsession that ends up eating you alive. it's not the pure kind of disbelief of atheism which proves it doesn't believe by mocking the object of disbelief. it's more like some phenomenon of belief by way of disbelief.

again that is v interesting!

makes me wonder if freud's complex theorizing re different forms of negation/ denial (one of which is disavowal), different relations of denial to the negated (i.e. various failures of repression, return of the repressed) is related to his familiarity with talmudic/ jewish treatments of analogous issue

“phenomenon of belief by way of disbelief” seems very psychoanalytic!

I took a class in undergrad at YU called German Jewish Philosophers which argued that the dialectics that show up with Freud, Benjamin, Marx etc are products of their doubled identities in Western society both insiders and outsiders and experiencing both simultaneously. Interesting to contrast that to Levinas and Derrida who maybe reflect a more French Jewish sensibility?

find that plausible, & promising to think about, have read v little taking that tack

i'm only a few pages in but that Mannoni so far is great

yeah, reread it myself last night

read in passing once long ago, but that schema (‘i know well, but all the same’) really struck & has stuck with me

(after reread, should correct reference above to ‘repression’; thing about many though not all examples is it’s ’conscious’, ambivalent (dis)avowal)

also interesting distinctions of knowledge/ belief / faith, reminds me of some points you made in atheism thread

yr posts yesterday also connect with thinking/ reading of 'the prophets’— which, after interruptions & delays, do plan on finishing soon :) & will report

edit to: relatively 'conscious'

mordy is it yr bday today?

if so, happy birthday!

My dear son,

It was in the seventh year of your age that the spirit of God began to move you to learning. I would say the spirit of God speaketh to you: “Read in My book; there will be opened to thee sources of knowledge and of the intellect.” It is the book of Books; it is the well that wise men have digged and from which lawgivers have drawn the waters of their knowledge.

Though hast seen in this Book the vision of the Almighty, thou hast heard willingly, thou hast done and hast tried to fly high upon the wings of the Holy Spirit. Since then I have preserved the same Bible. Now, on your thirty-fifth birthday I have brought it out from its retirement and I send it to you as a token of love from your old father.

my gregorian birthday is tomorrow - thank you for the well wishes. my hebrew birthday is the 27th of iyar which this year fell on May 16th. i had a farbrengen at synagogue to celebrate. it's traditional at a birthday farbrengen to make a hachlata - essentially a 'resolution.' i resolved to finish tractate yoma by my next birthday (i had already committed to finishing the first half by yud alef nissan in honor of the rebbe's birthday, so this committed me to doing the other half as well). in honor, i will share some of what i learnt Shavuot night (when it is customary for some to stay up all night learning) (i added the bold to emphasize what i think the big takeaway is):

Why was the first Sanctuary destroyed? Because of three [evil] things which prevailed there: idolatry, immorality, bloodshed.

Idolatry, as it is written: For the bed is too short for a man to stretch himself and the covering too narrow when he gathereth himself up. What is the meaning of ‘For the bed is too short for a man to stretch himself’? R. Jonathan said: It is: This bed is too short for two neighbours to stretch themselves. And [what is the meaning of] ‘the covering too narrow when he
gathereth himself up’? — R. Samuel b. Nahmani said: When R. Jonathan [in his reading] came to this passage, he would cry and say: To Him, concerning Whom it is written, He gathereth the waters of the sea together like a heap, the cover became too narrow!

Immorality [prevailed] as it is written: Moreover the Lord said: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and make a tinkling with their feet. ‘Because the daughters of Zion are haughty’, i.e., they used to walk with proud carriage. ‘And wanton eyes’ i.e., they filled their eyes with kohl. ‘Walking and mincing as they go’, i.e. , they used to walk with the heel touching the toe. ‘And make a tinkling with their feet’, R. Isaac said: They would take myrrh and balsam and place it in their shoes and when they came near the young men of Israel they would kick, causing the balsam to squirt at them and would thus cause the evil desire to enter them like an adder's poison.

Bloodshed [prevailed] as it is written: Moreover Manaseh shed innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another. They were wicked, but they placed their trust in the Holy One, blessed be He. For it is written, The heads thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money; yet will they lean upon the Lord and say ‘Is not the Lord in the midst of us? No evil shall come upon us’.

Therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, brought them three evil decrees as against the three evils which were their own: Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest.

But why was the second Sanctuary destroyed, seeing that in its time they were occupying themselves with Torah, [observance of] precepts, and the practice of charity? Because therein prevailed hatred without cause. That teaches you that groundless hatred is considered as of even gravity with the three sins of idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed together. And [during the time of] the first Sanctuary did no groundless hatred prevail? Surely it is written: "They are thrust down to the sword with my people; smite therefore upon my thigh," and R' Eleazar said: This refers to people who eat and drink together and then thrust each other through with the daggers of their tongue!

hapy birthday from the future

thank you for sharing that, mordy

what you bolded is something like principle i try to practice myself

love the idea of the farbrengen! please forgive my ignorance— what do you mean by “finish tractate yoma,” does it involve more than reading & studying a text by yourself?