mercurial/fond

I was reading up on Rudolf Otto and his conception of holiness in conjunction with Grant Morrison’s Gothic Batman book from way back—in that book Batman has to stop Mr. Whisper from using this gothic cathedral to trap all of Gotham’s souls and give to the devil so he can live longer—at any rate the book goes on at some length about this idea that the gothic architecture is occult in design and is made to be kind of an organ of soulness out up into God.  

Sort of working on that idea with some thoughts Bergman had on the sensation of walking into huge holy catherdrals and that sensation that you feel(holiness)—and then ruminating on that experience as one that as a Baptist growing up I sort of missed out on that sensation in terms of relating to God.  Contemporary American Christianity is usually practiced in things that either metaphor at a Wal-Mart super center or a trailer park and I think because of that they perhaps lose that connection with the holy.  There’s less a sombre holy tone in American religion and more a loud clattering.

Anyways.  I think this is somehow connected to the anger that a lot of American christianity has come to exemplify.  You don’t really get taught God with the reverence of a sacred holy place, but more as something reached through pure passion.  I mean you can go into some of those great old catherdrals and almost hit ecstasy just from the artwork.  But in America without that, we have relied more on passion as a bridge to that moment.  I think this results in a more emotional and less intellectual relationship with religion.  

It makes sense though that our churches would be how they are.  But I think one of the reasons you see middle america/bible belt america so disconnected from even the religious on the coasts is the complete lack of holy spaces.

It seems relevent to mention that I’ve gone to church in carpet stores, high school gyms, and with people in overalls as their sunday best.  

I dunno.  I’m mostly at a loss as to why I have no real experiences to point to as an intersection with holiness.  I think you need reverence to achieve holiness, and I don’t think I’ve ever been faced with anything demanding that in it’s archetecture.  Perhaps the closest would be the Cemeteries in New Orleans.  New Orleans has some gothic churches, but the ones I’ve been inside you feel more like you’re in a simulacrum than the essential real thing.

I’m also interested in percieving holiness without also percieving the profane.  I am trying to push my brain into seeing them not as oppository concepts but as just seperate concepts which describe their own separate things within their own natures.

These are the kinds of things that happen when you drop your History of philosophy class because you think Aristotle is a poop head.  Studying philosophy convinced me of the merits of studying fiction instead.

While thinking about the metamorphisis or disapearence of John Dillinger in contemporary culture, I had some stray thoughts about the tea party movement in the context of some of the communist and anarchist movements that came into vogue around the turn of the last century.

Initially I was thinking about the contrast between a working/labor/farmer class that fought for itself through what at the time were considered extremely radical ideas.  I was differntiating these people between the tea party movement people in that the tea baggers seem to be transparently serving corporo-political goals that in the end are antithetical to the end points of the message itself.

I was thinking that it seems one of the big developments over the past 100 years has been the ability of the landed corporate overseer to satiate and steer radical impulses toward their own impulses.

But then I had the thought that maybe they’ve always been able to do this, and we are only just more aware of it nowadays?

I think personally the difference between holding one view or the other is a measure of one’s optimism.  Whether we at one time had a chance, or that we’ve never had a chance.

Political movements are probably at their base always self-defeating.  You’re sort of just changing your position on the same snake and allowing a diffrent portion to become engourged.  It’s a shifting of shapes, but it’s still just a snake you’re riding.

In that way I think I view political movements and parties in the same way I view a music scene or a club atmosphere or a concert.  They are opportunities to jack into an electric ultra-consciousness and feel something beyond your own body.  so I think for me they are always more interesting in what they do for the individual.  I’m interested in what being a tea bagging fag hating gun nut does for you personally—at least moreso than I’m interested in the implications of your possible rise to power.

I think to that end I feel largely at sea in my ability to affect sweeping political changes in others.  I don’t even really have an interest in it.

So in that way I might bow at the feet of Bergman before I would Marx.  I don’t know whether that makes me apolitical.  I don’t think it does.  I do have political views.  But I also have views on basketball or spin art.

William Blake was probably the most transformatively important poet of my childhood.