Hearts

We might claim that ‘our hearts are turned to stone’ but, as Shakespeare so cunningly puts it, even a hardened heart can pain us (‘I strike it and it hurts my hand’).

The sleep of reason ...

We might, as a thumbnail definition of madness, voice the idea that mad people have an insufficiency of reason (they're more like beasts, they manifest the fallenness of Adam's children etc); but the mad scientist is the reverse of this, mad through a sort of excess of reason.

It's not even a case of the sleep of reason producing monsters; it's the waking moments of reason that produce the monsters. The sleep (that moment in Frankenstein where Victor just, you know, passes out, wakes up and goes on with his life forgetting that he's just created a hideous monster) is the psychotheraputic part.

This microscopic god

'God' is another word for 'immortal'. Across its long history humankind has deified most of the things around it that has seemed, to its impermanent eyes, to possess undyingness: the natural world, the sun and stars, the sea and rivers, they were all here before we were and they'll all be here after we've gone.

Now we know better; but it sometimes strikes me as odd that nobody has thought properly to deify the one living process we know to be immortal: DNA itself. Is it the smallness of the object that makes this unappealing to people? We prefer not to confer deity upon the microscopic. We deny DNAity.

Death is all metaphors

Imagine an allegory; a large-scale, coherent and world-building allegory, something like The Faerie Queene. You got it, in your mind? Good. Have your knight, Virtue, ride in. Have him slay the dragons, Error, Sin and Doubt, and rescue the beautiful Lady Truth, good, good. But--next on the road he encounters the Monster Allegoria herself. After long fight he destroys this monster.

What then?

Amazing rare things

The only true ground for amazement is rarity. Consequentially, amazement is always a relative judgment.

Postmodernism

Of postmodernism Jameson says ‘the end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have called the waning of affect’ [Postmodernism, 15] But what would the world look like if, the bourgeois ego having been dissolved, its attendant psychopathologies somehow, spectrally, remained? Bourgeois bogeymen haunting a postmodern wasteland.

nondum amabam, et amare amabam

We sometimes speak of, and occasionally medicate, the desire for desire. But could there be such a thing as a desire for the desire for desire?