The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 13 May 2015.
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| Grace Slick, mother Virginia Wing, and daughter China |
Guess she's one of them. I'm going to puke now...
To answer your question partially (partial credit?), I think all sorts of things can exist in the present, but none of them - sadly, sadly - have anything to do with stardom or storing up treasures. Music, contemplation, loving service, bricks, breathing, kissing the ground, crucifixion - yes, all these things can exist here and now. But I sense none of these is what the mind - fed on past and future, on virtual realities and on dreams of indefinitude - craves in its craven state. So it cowers in the darkness of the postscenium, becomes another rib in the radiating proscenium.
seeking the indefinite not the infinite
seeking knology not knowledge
seeking parthenogenesis not rebirth
We begin to hint at that insidious phenomenon by which we devalue those lovely beings that can populate the scenium, the individual bricks by which we build the Kingdom of God - music, prayer, breathing, service, children, faith, hope, love - in favor of some dream of permanence that doesn't exist anywhere and which young people rightly realize cannot be built.
And by what slight of hand does this firmest of ground become illusory, impractical, implausible, ethereal? Said another way, by what slight of hand do we depopulate the present?
And by what slight of hand do we disappear into past and future, into post- and proscenium, into regrets and ambitions, such that dreams of status and storing up treasures seems so real, so practical, so sensible, so sane, and not what it truly is sub specie aeternatis - utter and absolute insanity? Insanity of insanities!
I'm asking everyone, but this reminds me of Allison's work!
Formula for human greatness not amor fati but amor alterius?
I read this yesterday as I was researching Groundhog Day for AP English, which we're watching in the days after the exam (yes, that's where I got the word parthenogenesis). Some might reject her feminist reading of Nietzsche as too essentialist:
This gives us a clue that Luce Irigaray (1930-) is perhaps the right philosopher to furnish us with the key for unlocking the mysteries of Groundhog Day. Irigaray agrees with the conventional view of Nietzsche that his eternal recurrence concerns the return of the same, but objects to this view on the grounds that it’s a sterile thought that excludes any notion of ‘the other’. She writes, “The eternal recurrence – what is that but the will to recapitulate all projects within yourself?” (Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1991). In other words, recurrence is entirely self-referential, akin to a cloning process. We might think of it as a type of parthenogenesis, or ‘auto-birth’: it provides men with the ability to give birth to themselves over and over again, thus denying the role of the female as lover and mother.
Irigaray wishes above all else to promote the value of the other, which she largely conceives in female terms, in opposition to the traditional philosophical subject that she considers rigidly male and masculine. She says, “For, in the other, you are changed. Become other, and without recurrence.” In Groundhog Day, it’s Phil Connors’ love for Rita, his female colleague (played by Andie MacDowell) that proves decisive. By immersing himself in ‘otherness’ – by learning everything that makes MacDowell’s character tick – he is transformed. He sheds his old sexist, masculine carapace, and emerges as a far more rounded human being, in touch with his feminine side (his ‘inner other’). As soon as he has fully achieved this, he’s released from recurrence, thus seemingly endorsing Irigaray’s view.
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