Christians and the Sublimation of Sex: Mud and Poetry by Tyler Blanski

 
Here is an opinion piece on CNN.

Here is my advice: to avoid spilling your seed on the ground, wear a condom.

And what was the view of gay marriage in that piece?  Let me see, the gay Youth Minister at Fountain of Life Bible Congregation.  Hmmm.  Counselling your son?  I think not ...

Yesterday, looking through colour plates of Breugel, there is no mention in the commentary of the sort of codpiece on the male garments or the seeming erection of a bagpiper.  Gesell, in commenting a film on the developing young male, failed to comment on an erection of the filmed subject.  In another book, no mention  that the fig leaves were added very late to some paintings and sculpture.  Omission and emissions.

Of course, the concerns in that CNN opinion piece are not those of Italian teens or French teens or Polish teens or educated Brazilian teens or educated Chilean teens or Austrian teens: but remember that those non-Americans are members of the congregation of the Antichrist.  So naturally they can marry in a Church with little guilt.  Or shame.

The message is sublimation.  CNN does not link this page to http://www.goodinbed.com/ nor to Google Books Moregasm.  And masturbation AFTER marriage?  Now we are talking guilt, betrayal, SODOMY.

Yeshua, called the Nazarene, was not married. Period.  Nor was Saul of Tarsus (although possibly Peter had been married.)  And we have a good idea about the self-flagellation as Pope of Karol Wojtyla, sometime phenomenologist of action and a young man before he was a priest.

The critical years of the composition of Being and Time or „Sein und Zeit“ correspond to the relationship of Heidegger with Arendt.  It is quiet possible that Heidegger's teaching on sex was also that of her first husband, a sycophant.  It was almost certainly not that of her second husband, however much he aped Heidegger in his curious life as a professor of philosophy at Bard.

Perhaps the later Heidegger arrived at eros through Friedrich Hölderlin and Plato's Symposium. Reading the CNN post, I think of Bertrand Russell and his American Quaker bride. Oh vey.  Are we one hundred years later?

Chastity and priests: how is that working out for you in Ireland? Boston? Oh, I forgot, Catholics.

What Americans are nor likely to hear in this CNN Belief Piece is the voice of extremism: this is the same voice heard in fundamentalist Islam.  It is the voice of ignorance and hypocrisy across cultures, languages, timezones and millenia.  The earth is still flat.

Here is a firm BELIEF for CNN: if you want to hear crap, ask uneducated American religious fundamentalists about sex and Homo sapien sapiens.

Truth: try starting with sex among young Hindu men sharing apartments in America while they wait for their IT salaries to justify an arranged marriage back home.  Truth: look at the sale of young boys to be abused by men in Islamic lands.

Falsehoods: start with Hesiod on semen.  A good place for a poet to start.

A lie to consider: that placed in a poem by Ezra Pound and repeated by Canada's Robertson Davies in an interview with the sycophant who went on to try to usurp royal powers in Canada to pertain to the title of Gov-General, one Adrienne Clarkson ( a good Anglican.)  The lies of Northrop Frye, the lies of Irving Layton.  The poet navigates between them.

Now as to that poetry in Mud & Poetry: Love, Sex, and the Sacred by Tyler Blanski it may be worth coming back to two liars on sin and the sacred: Paul Ricoeur and Mircea Eliade now to be read only with complete distrust of their veracity, their respect for not deceiving their readers, toying with their readers, those "little people". [to be continued]

Tyler Blanski's embarrassing Clay Eyes is visible on Google Books. This collection is published by Ezekiel Records & Creative Group of Minneapolis, MN which appears simply to be tylerblanski.com and while the book is subtitled "a poetry collection" it should be subtitled "unedited and uneditable sophomoric drivel; self-published."

His music has a promo page which is up at wikipedia for the moment and has some connection to http://thinktwincities.com/ThinkOutLoud/Welcome.html and may connected with proselytizing with the poor and homeless and not merely the young and confused [my public school in Saskatchewan had a uniformed Salvation Army Officer do our weekly bible lesson - the one Jew and one JW were excused - the Catholics had their own schools; Tyler and company are without the uniform.]  There is a misleading web page at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=172593413578

See: http://foodforthebeloved.wordpress.com/

See: http://www.ststephensmpls.org/contact.htm

See: http://dougpagitt.com/churchintheinventiveage/

See: http://www.freshairbooks.com/ for this trend to proselytize with no clear theology. It may seem the inverse of Joel Osteen, the uneducated pastor to millions, but it is the same fundamentalist movement.  Churches, over time, tend to moderate.  These fundamentalists prefer the Madrasah or the coffee house or the "Trini-Tea" tearoom where they do not face the rational objections of mature liberal Episcopalians, emancipated Moslems or liberal Jews or liberal Lutherans.  Their greatest prizes remain the young lapsed Catholic and the non-religious teenager.  After that their focus is on the poor, the homeless, the disillusioned and the addicted.  They are a plague on Africa, India, Indonesia, Malaysia just as were the armed Islamicists before them.. They will yet be a plague in Vietnam, China and Cuba.  They have already become an issue in Russia and former Soviet republics where they are a less rational block than the Marxist fanatics before them.  Campaign for "religious liberty" are very often campaigns to remove restrictions on these fundamentalist missionaries who claim to be bringing a well, a photo-electric water pump or to be building a school but they are importing one form of ignorance to supplant another.  A theology is open to rational discussion: this is blind faith in revelation through the literal word of God as found in a translated Bible or other ancient venerated text.

One can admire Hesiod and reject his claims.  Ditto for Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx.  But Moses?  Saul of Tarsus?  Those seated at the table which decided the credo i the early centuries?  What can the "trinity" mean to someone who does not embrace a church tied by doctrine to those early Church Fathers? They debated.  What we have to today is utterly irrational, whether in the form of Joel Osteen or Tyler Blanski whether for the promise to get happy or the promise to get rich.  Professor Hilbert was wrong.  Astrology is not the ultimate in human folly and gullibility.

Old Testament Hebrew: what the angel feared is that he would be raped.  Not that a man would fall in love with him or he with another man and not that his daughter would fall in love with a woman.

The chastity movement is as frightening as the president of a large nation state claiming that there are no homosexuals within their borders. And he will also tell you that they are not trying to develop nuclear weapons.  His lies are obvious.  They lie to each other and then to the world about their not lying.  They are the more perverse.

The lies of another age were told to young women before marriage and among the fathers and uncles concerning the brothels frequented by themselves and their sons and nephews.  That was the world of many of Freud's patients.  But it can now be foisted upon our college age children by proselytizing fundamentalists.

The only defense that I see is to ridicule them on sight whether they appear in print or at my elbow on the sidewalk.  This is not a place for civility: their doctrines are a threat to civil society and science.  Fundamentalism here in North America  is not sweet and genteel.  It is a growing force among poor and under-educated Latinos.  It has an inordinate weight in public policy discussions in both Canada and the USA.  It is not to be tolerated: it is to be combatted.  There is now no reason to believe that it diminishes with the advance of science.  It does not. It is as irrational as addictive gambling or casual unprotected sex with strangers.  It is the heroin and crack cocaine of the human spirit but it comes leather-bound or on a new CD or iTunes.

What I can credit Tyler Blanski is that he does not repeat the lie of Robertson Davies which may have been the lie told by Heidegger to Arendt.  On that, see Ezra Pound, Personae.  But what Blanski cannot see is that his fundamentalism is one step from the crude clitoridectomies of North Africa and will afford no barrier as this alternative fundamentalism is exported to the Third World.  Does the Christian circumcise his sons?  Yeshua, called the Nazarene, was circumcised as were Peter and Saul or Tarsus.  What alternative could there be?  This was the practice of messianic Jews.  What can medical science and ethics say to the practice of those who either spoke or wrote the very word of god?  The word of god.  No translation or interpretation required.  No context. He requires none and had none.  Eternal.  Unchanging. Omniscient.

If omniscience is not a rational notion, then there is the beginning of debate and doubt and moderation.  A doctrine evolves.

Truth is important to poetry in a way in which doctrine is not.  A poet who places the great mountain of Africa in the wrong nation is in need of an editor.  Eliot had Pound just as Hemingway sometimes had Pound.  This importance of truth is what ultimately undermines both romanticism and didacticism.  A moral does not make a tale any more than a sorrow makes a threnody.  Truth is of value in poetry.  It is not sufficient but it is often essential.  In poetry what rings false is false.  A poem is somewhat like a carefully constructed carillon or a carefully considered closing chord, diapason, caesura or lack of rhyme or break in rhythm or line or voice or tone.

Truth was centrally important in phenomenology precisely when it was not able to be thematic in a phenomenological description or adumbration.  Veracity.  Subject to validation.  Coherent when coherence was called for and seemingly paradoxical when we are denied from within, the view from without, as the past dissolves and the future has not yet coalesced.

When we know the poet is a liar who will not expose himself as a liar, we cannot read me except to deride him.  The putative hero who is revealed to have not been in the battle is hounded or shunned out of the same visceral reaction to lies.  Lies your father told.  Lies your priest told.  Lies the archbishop told. Lies the pastor told.

It is not enough to say that we are all sinners who do not sit in judgment.  I am an atheist and I judge.

We are all fallible.  Many of us seem to make explicit what is of value, what would otherwise pass unnoticed and leave us the less for being so unnoticed.  If we have a cause, we write prose.

We must not lie about what is most intimately carnal and we do not needlessly seek to detail what was supposed to be experienced as a whole. And otherwise we speak by indirection, but not by evasion.  Not the lie.

Falsify your science and risk being caught.  If so, change your profession.

Falsify your poetry and risk your very artistic soul and creative voice.  Lose your avocation.

Better not to be published than to self-publish what does not ring true.  And nothing in Tyler Blanski rings true, it all has the pleased nod from the youth minister, the assistant pastor, the drop-in centre.

Have we been spared poetry for chiropractic?  Poetry for podiatry?  For chiropodists?

Physiatry.  Because poetry is not in need of anatomy lessons.  The painters have occupied those seats in the amphitheater.  What I am talking about takes more time and patience.  The aim is a certain stance and not a pose.

Yes, physiatry.  A "physiatry" for poesis.  To spare us the Leonard Cohen and Irving Laytons and their needless poetic deformities.  ( Saul of Tarsus did not recover fully from his stroke. )

note:
The Osteen connection.
Blanski is a graduate of libertarian Hillsdale College ( a far remove from Minnesota's Perpich Center for the Arts which he also attended and which I know personally from many visits.)  In fairness to Blanski, Osteen is uneducated.  Osteen looks like a V-P with a CPA but Blanski affects the look of "maybe-Jesus-was-red-haired-like-me" Christ-in-the-picturebook with long hair and beard.  Oh vey.

Sappho, Selene and Phenomenology

   
φάεννον εἶδοσ

Late one night this week the moon passed between Aldebaran and the Pleiades leaving them and the Hyades invisible to our unaided gaze, the moon bright, blinding, as we stood at the patio door, shivering, toes shy of the snow, and then back into the lighted, warm room.

Wm. Carlos Williams: flame-white disc as the appearance of the sun at night in New England or on Lesbos.

Anne Carson 2002, has the Psappho [Ψάπφω] fragment (itself known only as a quote)  as 34 and it can be seen here as page 4.

Compare: Mary Barnard, 1958, fragment 24.

Contra: Late Husserl and his Heidegger on the phenomena in a world after that celestial world was made known to us, adumbrated for us, by a Galileo and a Kepler and a Newton.  Note the influence of Heidegger on Husserl after the loss of a son in the war and the loss of Reinach (flares, moonlight and trench warfare.)

Rilke Elegien / first Duino Elegy / poem markup

Over at my eclectic-pencil blog I have a note on my effort to offer Rilke's Elegies in a minimal HTML format.

The idea is that you can view and capture the German text or the HTML source and do your own work such as adding notes either to the text or to the web page.

In the days to come I will be testing a Curl poetry viewer which offers note-taking panes and translation snippets and the like.

Viewing poetry on the web so often is not 'reading' because even the F11 key leaves the 'page', well, let's say, "cluttered" with distractions.

Edmund Husserl and philosophy markup

Over at my eclectic-pencil blog I have a post on markup for philosophy in German.

The markup is used to try to make a dense and awkward text more readable and more approachable for someone new to that style of academic German writing.

The text in question is Husserl's 1927 article for the Encyclopedia Britannica - a text which has a connection with both Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger.

By comparing the two results for the same text input, the minimal markup can be seen to be very effective.

The markup used is the Curl web content language from curl.com

The reliable and secure Curl browser plugin is required.  Results are best on Windows in most browsers and on Linux in Firefox; I have not tested these new pages with the Mac add-on.