Subordinate Notions...for 58.65

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The Redeemer-Victim Within

However you may consciously define
what it means to be a woman, there is an image within you of woman as
compassionate redeemer, and sometimes as victim. This image is strongly
activated in you through your relationship with Jacqueline. It is best portrayed
by the Christian figure of Mary, the Mater Dolorosa who weeps for the sins and
suffering of humankind. But the image of woman as redeemer and victim is really
much older than the Christian one. Its roots lie in the ancient oceanic
mother-goddesses such as the Babylonian Tiamat, who create the universe and are
then dismembered by the hero-gods. These goddesses are terrifying as well as
life-engendering, for they also swallow up their creations and start all over
again. The most positive attribute of this inner figure is a deep sensitivity to
human suffering, and a compassionate response to others' needs. These gifts of
the heart form part of your essential character. Even if you are not really
conscious of this dimension of your femininity, nevertheless others are probably
aware of it because they are the beneficiaries. The dark side of this image,
however, is reflected by the devouring propensities of the mother- goddesses of
ancient myth. The close emotional identification which you feel toward other
people also means that you may have difficulty in establishing your own
boundaries and containing your own emotional needs. It is possible that you saw
an example of the more difficult face of this archetypal image enacted by your
mother during your childhood, and have recoiled against this aspect of your own
character as a result. But if you are able to separate your early and perhaps
negative experiences from the true meaning and potential of this inner figure,
the great depth, insight and compassion inherent in your personality can be
expressed without the victimisation and martyrdom that so often accompanies
these gifts.

The conflict between openness to others and firm
personal boundaries is a difficult one, and you will need at some point in your
life to confront this issue honestly if you are to live your inner image of
woman in a creative and personally fulfilling way. Probably your mother had few
boundaries and great emotional needs, and her dependency on others may have put
her into situations where she suffered without having the power to take charge
of her own life. You might also have experienced her suffering as somewhat
manipulative, and may also have perceived her sacrifices as bearing very high
price tags in terms of what she required in return. There might indeed have been
a good deal of unconscious manipulation in her behaviour and situation. You seem
to carry a certain amount of guilt and a deep sense of obligation toward her
which you unconsciously express in your relationship with Jacqueline as well as
with others who need you. However independent you may appear on the surface, it
is often difficult for you to say "No" to others' demands because you fear the
separateness and isolation this might bring you. But if you placate your partner
or martyr yourself because of a fear of loneliness, you will also accumulate a
large reservoir of resentment and bitterness which will in turn make you
unconsciously manipulative in the same way your mother might have been. Your
compassionate response and empathy with others' pain are very real and beautiful
attributes of your character. But they may be mixed up with guilt about what you
felt you owed to a suffering parent in childhood. If you believe you are only
lovable and worthwhile when you are needed and useful, you could also
inadvertently try to live for and through your partner, thus compensating for
your own lack of a firm, coherent identity.

At the core of your inner life the image of woman as
compassionate healer stands as the foundation of your emotional world within
this relationship. You can live this figure at the same time that you develop
other aspects of your personality, for these qualities are not mutually
exclusive with a full and independent creative life. But it is likely that you
will need to explore your more negative unconscious assumptions about this
archetypal facet of the feminine. It seems that some element of sacrifice or
suffering which you perceived in your mother's life has driven you into
believing that you cannot have a close and emotionally fulfilling relationship
with your partner while at the same time maintaining healthy boundaries and your
own psychological and material self-sufficiency. The dark side of your inner
image of woman is the passive victim and martyr, where sacrifice may also be a
kind of manipulative tool to generate guilt and a sense of obligation in others.
It is likely that you saw quite a lot of this darker side acted out in
childhood. If this was so, try not to let it drive you away from your own
emotional needs. For in your efforts not to be a victim you may inadvertently
dissociate from the voice of your own heart and wind up victimised anyway - not
by your partner, but by your own internal conflict. The mythic figures who
personify this subtle but powerful face of the feminine are hardly victims. They
are usually omnipotent goddesses who create the manifest universe. When you have
discovered the great strength that lies in your vulnerability and need of
others, you will have found the key to the most creative expression of this
inner woman.

Lucía y el sexo

Speaking as someone who has lost all of her decorum...I collapse the vital memory of this film in its entirety with the striptease por la mala rodriguez "Tengo lo que tu quieres" with Federico García Lorca's Romance de la Luna or La Casada Infiel...

Femme Farouche: the past tin days, ten or so

NPR Science Friday is a major part of J's fantasy life.
J constellates meaning, while she sees the morphology of desire, a major source of consternation for her.

J would like to point out that the glyph for Jupiter, which looks like a "2" superimposed over a "4," is also the alchemical symbol for tin.

The half-measure of infinity is you.

J considers the ascending crescent of Jupiter's glyph, which could be generally taken for all forms of rarified travel: the arch, and then the earth-bound, parabolic curve. Could she be wildly optimistic about the limits imposed on matter?

J thinks in the color PC1088, much like the combusted process metal finish of earth tongues , earth stars , and bird's nest fungi.

Tin compounded the bronzes of the ancient world, yet its pure lattices, when broken, cry audibly.

Napoleon's soldier's fled Moscow after their uniforms--fastened with tin buttons that crumbled in the cold.

J is intrigued by moon spots, mirror experiments, and indelible "watermarks" ...all appear in Paradiso.

J likes the way some filigrane or watermarks, once bruised documents.

Feather-light, silvery tin has the greatest number of stable isotopes, of which there are ten.

Sour, Sole Romance

High Windows
by Philip Larkin


When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise


Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide


To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark


About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately


Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Dead Can Dance - Mesmerism

The Shape of My Heart

« Comme il est dit en l'ordinaire histoire des châtaignes. »

Triptych: What I Know About How I Read

Rest before you sleep
by Dionisio D. Martinez

Requiem after Fauré, for my father

Rest before you sleep You’ll be walking for hours
then as usual away from home your shoes in your hand
your feet not yet used to the road
Perhaps they need to feel the gravel
to know where they’re headed

A woman I knew who lived mostly in the woods
mentioned the danger in presuming to know
what an animal thinks The fox for example
stopping by her open tent and looking in

I suppose she would’ve felt this way about your feet
She would’ve said how could anyone know
what a pair of tired feet need along the way

I would’ve asked her how she knew the feet
were tired Such discourse produces nothing
but anything less would be silence
and that would be intolerable
I wish I knew why I was telling you this

It’s easier to read the mind of a fox than to guess
what a man’s about to say when he returns
from the woods head full of roots veins
more like branches shoes in one hand feet
blistered and none of this necessarily
an indication of how the feet feel what miles
uphill and back have done to the soles
and to the small bones that propel a man

It’s safe now I think to speak for the fox
who is only as cunning as we say it is
We’re the only creatures that claim to be anything
then build a house of facts around the claim

I’ve come for vindication No point in trying
to disguise it as a lesser wish Wake up stop
while you still know where you are Put away
your elusive country Give your sleep a rest

...

The Saint and the Crab
by William Logan

Along the campo, Manin’s bronze winged lion prowled
among the tanned intruders, licking their hands.
Pools of iridescent shellfish
lay open in the restaurant window,

a shop of otherworldly opals, the mussels’ sheen
the skies of a closed heaven, crabs flat on their backs,
their armor intricate trapped plates and escapements.
The squid slumped in its own ink, the octopus appalled

in its slime. Many and ingenious are the postures of death.
But look! There, in a corner, beneath a willowware plate,
a lone crab clicked its claws, creeping
over a casket of walleyed fish,

through a valley of oysters keeping their counsel,
only to shift warily under the shadow of a wine bottle.
Which saint, O saints, watches over the saintly crab?
The man of forks and spears, the man of arrows?

In the Ca’ d’Oro, the stiffened Sebastian takes
each arrow through his flesh like a skewer.
He wears a little napkin around his middle.
Saint, watch over the fragile boat of the runaway crab.

Let him steal his way back to the green lagoon,
go floating down the Grand Canal on his own motoscafo.
Let him take second life, a later martyrdom.
Let him wave his bent claws in a mockery of farewell,
lest we eat in his hollow shell his captive meat.

William Logan, Poetry, "The Saint and the Crab," The New Yorker, October 16, 2000, p. 205
...


The Blue
by David Baker

heron is gray, not blue, but great enough
against brown-tipped bowed cattails to be
well-named, is known for its stealth, shier
than a cloud, but won't fly or float away
when it's scared, stands there thinking maybe
it's invisible though it's not—tall, gray,
straight as a pole among the cloudy reeds.
Then it picks up one stem leg. This takes time.
And sets it down just beyond the other,
no splash, breath of a ripple, goes on
slowly across the silt, mud, algae-
throttled surface, through sedge grass,
to stand to its knees in water turning
grayer now that afternoon is evening.
Now that afternoon is evening
the gray heron turns blue, bluer than sky,
bluer than the mercury blue-black still pond.
So when did it snag the bullfrog
hanging, kicking, in its scissor beak?
To look so long means to miss the sudden.
It strides around like a sleek cat
from pond to bank and back, blue tall bird,
washing the frog, banging it against stones,
pecking almost as if it doesn't know
what to do now that it's caught such a thing.
How fast its beak must be to shoot out
like an arrow or that certain—as it's called—
slant of light. Blue light. Where did it go?

"Me and Armini" and the Walkup

Is it worthwhile to examine the ultimate fate of her home with the lop-sided landscaping partially shaded by an ivy-encrusted, infested Wild Cherry? Slow to be dealt its due, the tree has been raining its galled leaves and caterpillar lacework onto the slab concrete of a walkup framed by sad, mown-over stubs of varigated grass. The residence

hasn't seen any sustained improvements to the exterior since they bought the place twelve years ago, since their habits have been to move somewhere else when the bones of the house have suffered a thorough beating by the frustrated foreign bodies damned and (dis)lodged together (again).

In the dim light of evening, she notices the boxwoods, which over the years becoming diseased and dispatched by degrees, leave their blanched brains

beyond the reach of a solar light source staked somewhat haphazardly in the groundcover. There, the detailed feeds upon and feebly penetrates the shade zone. Wire grass, convolvulus and iris splittings grapple with the ivy planted underneath two winestained Japanese maples.

One thriving, one stunted, they complete a cultivated assymetry of the inhabitants themselves.

Memory's Mint Vault

"Castalia is a symbolic realm where all spiritual values are kept alive and present, specifically through the practices of the Glass Bead Game. It depicts a future society in which the realm of culture is set apart to pursue its goals in splendid isolation..." May 1969 - Theodore Ziolkowski

This, with its usual faults: garish coloring, lack of dimension, was chopped up for a Powerpoint on Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel. If I recall, I became too involved in this to attend to other things, which resulted in a dereliction of everything.

I prefer to make my own images, wherever possible. Not that my gestures toward a syncretic blend of irezumi and circuitry necessarily worked then, but I am tempted (after all this time) to venture another body tattoo inscribed with these precepts.

Difficult Divinities

(Intrusive narration: J read Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia by Roberto Calasso, and thought it rather unfortunate that metamorphosis is commonly discarded today. Calasso says, "[i]f, out of some perversity of tradition, only one version of some mythical event has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds.")
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, New York, Knopf 1993, pp. 148.

Courtesy of Ana Juan

Plumbing the Depths of κατάδεσμος

The first inscription was love's magnifying shield, where the writer and the beloved were happily divided, staring into each other's aegis. At once abundant and grave, lead tablets, or katadesmos, have taunted the topsoil of our archeological record of the Greeks and Romans, which in the latter case, they are defixiones. Their crude fact of being lodged in wells, crawlspaces, among colonies of the then dead, then begs the question, why?

Why has anyone felt passionately, and felt moved to shed one's fixations in a material? For some love spells and curses have mattered since they were remnants of the ancients. Lead was selected oftentimes over wax or papyrus or pottery fragments for its dulling sheen that pours back into chrome over the fire, yet it is also electroforming, nerve-dampening. Liquids poured through lead are sweet, in as much as revenge, remission or absolute resignation is. Word is sent to the world, then it becomes the world, in which we are nobody, existing in the chthonic currents of the underworld. Leading to nowhere but the wayfaring Hermes, Hecate, and their restless spirits, these writings are made for the darkness, the undifferentiated, the place where hope is not hardening into the profiles of day-to-day reality.

Another Object Lesson

Intimate Apparel *

If I consent to measurement, a near
fine condition in underwires, rounded shoulders,

Then it becomes by sheer artifice, perhaps,
Through the blind of officewear of what a fitting

Can accomplish, and what may be our blotted
Impressions through the day's articles
of black or sand dune.

So it tenses,
A nerve between the two, secured by fillets and eyelets,
The mind's forgotten straight pins in the body--
Starred sentences, silences
Between us and some mouth's remaining rust patterns
We must solder up to,
Two abreast in the deep plunge and push up.

* I like the brand's unsuggestiveness in color or "urchin" for that particular turquoise.