PB Shelley: .....a glorious Phantom may Burst

[perezoso]

England in 1819 ( or America 2004)


An old, mad, blind, despis'd, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn--mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starv'd and stabb'd in the untill'd field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edg'd sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,
Religion Christless, Godless--a book seal'd,
A Senate--Time's worst statute unrepeal'd,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

[perezoso]

Prometheus Unbound
PB Shellley

(1792-1822)


(excerpt)


SCENE.--A Ravine of Icy Rocks in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is discovered bound to the Precipice. Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet. Time, night. During the Scene, morning slowly breaks.

Prometheus.

Monarch of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair,--these are mine empire:--
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!

No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,
Has it not seen? The Sea, in storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below,
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!


The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
Heaven's wingèd hound, polluting from thy lips
His beak in poison not his own, tears up
My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by,
The ghastly people of the realm of dream,
Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind:
While from their loud abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm, urging the rage
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail.
And yet to me welcome is day and night,
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn,
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs
The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead
The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom
--As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim--
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood
From these pale feet, which then might trample thee
If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.
Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin
Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven!
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror,
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains,
Whose many-voicèd Echoes, through the mist
Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell!
Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost,
Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept
Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air,
Through which the Sun walks burning without beams!
And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poisèd wings
Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss,
As thunder, louder than your own, made rock
The orbèd world! If then my words had power,
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish
Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate, let them not lose it now!
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.

[stilltrucking]

Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,

I can't help but wonder what dreams our dear leader dreams in his righteous sleep

The orbèd world! If then my words had power,
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish
Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate, let them not lose it now!
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.

No Herr Professor I had not read that. Thanks.

Have you read any of this, I been surfing with a dim story idea in mind, has to doo with moo

CAPITALISM INC.
THE »PHAGIC« CHARACTER OF CAPITALISMAn Essay by Anil K. Jain
"But there is a good point in Webers analysis, too:
the link between capitalism and religion – although it might be the »wrong« link. And herewe can come back to Freud: In the beginning of »Civilization and Its Discontents« he quotes»a friend«, Romain Roland (a famous French intellectual and spiritual seeker with a strong
affinity to Hinduism), with the statement that religion is, more than anything else, about »a
sensation of ›eternity‹, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ›oceanic‹«.Maybe it is exactly that search for an »oceanic feeling« that builds the common ground of religion
and capitalism – a drive to both dissolution and (unbounded) expansion."
http://www.power-xs.de/jain/pub/capitalisminc.pdf

http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/ ... Notes.html
German 390/Comp. Lit. 396/Engl 363/CHID 498
"Freud and the Literary Imagination"Lecture Notes: Civilization and Its DiscontentsI. Background
Written 1929, published 1930. First World War as defining experience for Freud and his contemporaries. WWI as the first technologically advanced war, with the use of tanks, poison gas, etc. Death became anonymous in the trenches, mass killing took place for the first time in this war. This experience generated a new sense of pessimism about the human being and human nature.
–Freud himself represents a profoundly pessimistic point of view in this treatise. He transfers the intra-psychic conflict (between ego and id; pleasure principle and reality principle; unconscious and conscious mind; etc.) that he had analyzed in his psychoanalytical writings over to the domain of human civilization. Civilization itself comes to be defined as a space of conflict, or as an extension into cultural community of the tensions that stigmatize the individual psyche. , mirrors narcissistic echoes

think christ as a stand up comic think lenny bruce
With pressure from the Karaites and Muslim sects, RaMBaM felt that it was necessary to delineate the fundamental Jewish beliefs. After much controversy, they became accepted by the traditional Jewish community, and they are sung today at services in the Yigdal hymn. The thirteen statements of Jewish faith are:
1. There exists a perfect God who created everything.
2. God is one/
3. God cannot be viewed in bodily terms.
4. God is eternal.
5. Jews pray directly to God with no intermediaries.
6. The prophets are true. 7. Moses was the greatest prophet.
8. The entire Torah was given to Moses.
9. The Torah is eternal and unchanging.
10. God knows what we do.
11.God rewards and punishes according to our actions.
12. The Messiah will come.
13. There will be a resurrection of the dead.
http://www.chairetmetal.com/alex-a.htm
Freud already warned us that nothing is more repulsive to a narcissistic fantasy than another's narcissistic fantasy. Love and jouissance on the Internet are nothing but the maximum extension of the alienation of desire in objects (and first and foremost in words); it is not the liberation of desire, but the false liberty of projections and identifications. Sherry Turkle mentions the case of a 23 year old physics student named Stewart, a lonely neuropath whose only experience of love was a MUD character. His success as "Achilles" the romantic seducer only made the abyss between his real identity and his fantasy more profound. The false cure of the Net caused an even greater dereliction.
At the same time as it aims to displace the Gothic from some of its existing cultural associations, the conjoining of the Gothic with materialism also aims to provoke a rethinking of what materialism is (or can be). Once again, Deleuze-Guattari are the inspirations here, for a rethinking of materialism in terms closer to Horror fiction than to theories of social relations. Deleuze-Guattari’s abstract materialism depends upon assemblages such as the Body without Organs (a key Gothic concept, we shall aim to demonstrate), while in their attacks on pyschoanalysis (their defence, for instance, of the reality – as opposed to the merely phantasmatic quality - of processes such as becoming-animal) it is often as if they are defending Horror narratives – of vampirism and lycanthropy – against a psychoanalytic reality principle. Moreover, the Deleuze-Guattari take-up of authors as various as Artaud, Spinoza, Schreber and Marx can, we hope to establish, be seen as quintessentially Gothic: what Deleuze-Guattari always emphasise in these writers is the theme of anorganic continuum. But the non- or anorganic Deleuze-Guattari introduce us to is not the dead matter of conventional mechanistic science; on the contrary, it swarms with strange agencies.  The role of cybernetics as we shall theorise it is very much parallel to the theoretical direction Deleuze-Guattari have taken. Cybernetics, it will be argued, has always been haunted by the possibilities Deleuze-Guattari lay out (even if, in certain cases, it has inhibited or impeded them). As a materialist theory, it, too, we will attempt to show, has tended to challenge the boundary between the animate and the inanimate. Like Deleuze-Guattari, it has questioned the confinement of the attribution of agency only to subjects. The kind of fiction with which this study will be concerned - what has variously been labeled cyberpunk, imploded science fiction and body horror (amongst other things) - has been exercised by many of the same concerns as cybernetic theory. Specifically, these texts have been fascinated by the concepts of agency-without-a subject and bodies-without-organs, emerging in the ambivalent form of the blade runners, terminators, and AIs that haunt current mass-mediated-nightmare.  Gothic Materialism is interested in the ways in which what would appear ultramodern - the gleaming products of a technically sophisticated capitalism – end up being described in the ostensibly archaic terms familiar from Horror fiction: zombies, demons. But it will resist the temptation to think of this “demonization of the cybernetic” as the revival of something “something familiar and old-established in the mind.” (PFL 14 363), preferring to think of it as the continuation of a nonorganic line that is positively antagonistic to progressive temporality. As Iain Hamilton Grant puts it, “the Terminator has been there before, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent and fuel the primitives’ fears.”[4] As we shall see, the nonorganic line as occupied by Gothic Materialism is to be distinguished both from “the supernatural” (the supposed province of Horror fiction) and “speculative technology” (the home of Science Fiction). The phrase “something familiar and old-established in the mind” belongs, of course, to Freud, who will emerge in the terms of this study as a somewhat ambivalent figure, sometimes an ally, sometimes a foe, of Gothic Materialism. Writing of “animist traces”, Turkle is alluding to Freud’s famous essay on “The Uncanny”, from which this phrase comes, an essay written almost directly contemporaneously with The Golem. Here, Freud famously flirts with the problem of the inanimate becoming-active. I say “flirts” because Freud – in what, in the terms of the present thesis, is a clear anti-Gothic gesture – moves to dismiss the importance of this theme. (Nevertheless, his own compulsive need to repeatedly reiterate it, has led to a persistent association in critical writings of the uncanny with exactly the question of what should not be alive acting as if it were.) Feelings of the uncanny, Freud insists, are not to be attributed to the confusion of the animate with inanimate, but to a fear of castration. We shall examine Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny” in more detail later, but will note, for now, Freud’s own failure to keep at bay the problem of animism ; the theme has its own kind of living death, stalking him posthumously with the implacability of any zombie. Its very persistence constitutes a powerful argument for another of Freud’s theses in “The Uncanny” – one that Gothic Materialism will find much more congenial - the strange, nondialectical, functioning of the “un” prefix. Thinking, no doubt, of his own remarks on the absence of negation in the unconscious[5], Freud establishes that the “un” of “unheimliche” does not straightforwardly reverse the meaning of the word “heimlich”. In a – fittingly –disturbing way, “unheimliche” includes heimlich.  “The Uncanny” leaves us with the impression that the source of Freud’s critical deflections and circumlocutions is something powerful indeed. Castration may be terrifying, but it is not as disturbing  as what Freud seems so keen to bury - precisely because it is a matter of terror, or fear. Terror or fear have an object – what is feared – and a subject – he[6] who fears – whereas the “ominous foreboding” Meyrinck’s character experiences arises from the inability to differentiate subject from object. There is a dispersal of subjectivity onto an indifferent plane that is simultaneously too distant and too intimate to be apprehended as anything objective.  This thesis will approach this plane via theorists who have been associated with a critique of psychoanalysis: Deleuze-Guattari, whom we have already introduced, and Baudrillard. Provisionally, we could identify Gothic Materialism with the work of Deleuze-Guattari and “Cybernetic Theory-Fiction” with the work of Baudrillard. But this – simple – opposition, whilst schematically useful, is ultimately misleading. Baudrillard, we shall see, can make a contribution to Gothic Materialism, whilst Deleuze-Guattari’s work can certainly be described as Theory-Fiction. Baudrillard’s interest in cyberpunk fiction and film, his fascination with automata and simulacra, make him both the object of a Gothic Materialist theory, and a contributor to it.  http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/FCintro.htm


The Self as Host of MemesIdeas can "infect" thinking just as viruses can invade the hard drive of a computer. Biologist Richard Dawkins--in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene--writes of self-reproducing ideas as "memes": ideas use human beings to reproduce themselves, and they compete, like genes, to replicate themselves. The word "meme" has recently been included in the Oxford English Dictionary where it is defined as a "self-replicating element of culture, passed on by imitation." "Just Do It" is a meme, as is "Christ died for our sins."
In her article "The Power of Memes" (Scientific American, October 2000: 65-73), Susan Blackmore makes the following comparison to clarify the definition of memes:
Memes and Complexes of Memes
Stories, urban legends, myths
Clothing, hairstyles, body piercing
Cuisine, cigarette smoking
Applauding, cheering
Language, accents, catchphrases
Songs, music, dances
Belief in UFOs, ghosts, Santa Claus
Racist slogans, sexist jokes
Religions
Inventions, theories, science
Judicial systems, democracy
Proust's story of the madeleine cake


Not Memes
Subjective experiences, complex emotions, sensory perceptions
Eating, breathing, having sex
Innate behaviors, even if contagious: yawning, coughing, laughing

Conditioned responses: fear at the sound of a dentist's drill
Cognitive maps: knowing the way around your neighborhood
Associations with sounds and smells


To clarify the distinction what is a meme and what is not, Blackmore suggests that memes are "copied from person to person and vie for survival in the limited space of human memories and culture" (66). Memes are not memes until they are transmitted. Culture is shaped by them, and the self is host to a variety of memes. Online communication is a fertile medium for memes--think of "LOL", or all the acronyms, jargon, and slang--partly because text is circulated so easily and quickly and partly because, on the new medium, there are emerging models of interaction and emerging ideas about the self. The new medium is fertile and competitive.
The cartoon about the dog makes us laugh because we don't know who we are (with such certainty) when we're online, and we often just don't know who, or what, we're dealing with.

Who Am We? Self as Multiple Distributed System
MIT professor of sociology Sherry Turkle received a great deal of press in 1996 after the publication of her influential Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. A Wired magazine article on Turkle's work--"Who Am We?"--provides a decent summary of her approach in Life on the Screen:
What has she found? That the Internet links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think and the way we form our communities. That we are moving from "a modernist culture of calculation toward a postmodernist culture of simulation." That life on the screen permits us to "project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star.... Computer screens are the new location for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual. We are using life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity.
Turkle's own metaphor of windows serves well to introduce the following samplings from her new book. Those boxed-off areas on the screen, Turkle writes, allow us to cycle through cyberspace and real life, over and over. Windows allow us to be in several contexts at the same time - in a MUD, in a word-processing program, in a chat room, in e-mail.
"Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system," Turkle writes. "The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." Now real life itself may be, as one of Turkle's subjects says, "just one more window."
Turkle claims that life on the screen allows us to "project ourselves into our own dramas, dramas in which we are producer, director, and star....Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple distributed system...The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time." (Wired 149)
To illustrate her central idea in the article Who Am We? that computers decenter notions of the self, Turkle discusses Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs, "a new kind of social virtual reality":
...text-based Muds are a new form of collaboratively written literature. MUD players are MUD authors, the creators as well as consumers of media content. In this, participating in a MUD has much in common with scriptwriting, performance art, street theatre, improvisational theatre, or even commedia dell’arte. (151)
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/media113/netself.htm

Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,

The orbèd world! If then my words had power,
Though I am changed so that aught evil wish
Is dead within; although no memory be
Of what is hate, let them not lose it now!
What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak.
_________________