taliesin...meImyself......WORDS (10.10.97)
Alright, quit the pretension. The Post Card from Derrida's been dropped for a regression back to Sigy. That's Sigmund Freud. Discontent with being too civilized, I chose another smallest, Civilization and Its Discontents. Surprisingly good. And intelligible too. Or maybe I should have gone back even further to the dear old odd couple Socrates and Plato? Why you ask. To get to the fictitious origin of The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, which I started a few months ago.
Another recent encounter with Derrida's remains: a re-reading of his The Archeology of the Frivolous for only the second time. Not that I had a clue what he was writing about, but nonetheless I've had lots of fun stealing motifs and re-writing it in my own symbolic vocabulary as I read. Both snucked themselves into my Scritti section, in case you happened to have dropped by that section and were wondering what the **** I was on about with all that references to frivolity, analogy, postal paraphernalia, Plato & Socrates, inversion, arriving, love, psychoanalysis, etc.etc.
Prior to these, on a friend's recommendation, breezed -- well compared to Derrida at least -- through Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World catching up on the history of philosophical patriarchy. Bunch of male nuts! Just kidding of course. Some are okay, kind of. But I just hate the way Gaarder overlooks the Christian bias of some of these western philosophers and puts in a few good words for eastern religious philosophy while dismissing wholesale both archaic and neo Western pagan religious philosophy. Nonetheless, a perfect rounding off to the previous matriarchic offerings: The Spiral Dance by Starhawk and A Witches' Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar. Fascinating, these latter two, and sometimes thought provoking. Interesting how two matriarchic lines of thoughts -- deconstruction and wicca -- supposedly take after the two major lines of psychoanalysis -- Freud via Lacan and Jung respectively. One of these days I've got to do a comparasion of the two lines of inheritance. Speaking of psychology, there's an intriguing book on the 'psychology of menstruation' -- imagine that! -- called The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman by Jungian psychologists Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove which I've put on my list of readings for when the moon turns blue. Should at least give some inspirations for stupid PMS jokes if nothing else.
For those unfamiliar with the neo-pagan religions, no, Wicca, the religion of people who call themselves witches, isn't all about malicious supernatural manipulation of 'enemies' using voodoo dolls and needles, nor is it a cult. But I thought I'd better put in a good word for it as it has unjustly suffered centuries of negative publicity. The pre-occupation with Victorian psuedo-archaic literary and ritual formats is a bit too much for me; nevertheless, there are things to be learned from some of their thoughts.
Don't believe those old church slanders perpetuated by the 'popular' media! What utter non-sense. If you've read any influential Wicca book, such as The Spiral Dance mentioned above, you'd understand that Wicca is a much gentler and life-affirming religion than some of the testosterone filled crusading Judeo-Christian-Islamic sects or the world-denying Eastern religious sects. Or maybe that's precisely why witches are persecuted? First and foremost, wicca-practitioners don't proselytize, and they're speaking out only in self-defence against centuries of persecution and defamation. Witches respect non-witches' right to follow the spiritual path that they find personally appropriate. The divine is more omnipresent than any particular religious tradition and there's more than one road to 'heaven'. For more in their PR self-defense check out one of their own, a Boston-based informational web center The Witches' Voice.
When I'm not consumed by 'religious ecstasy' the books I tend to go for are books with fantastic or convoluted narratives that also incorporate academic language of one form or another and enlist poetic prose or poetry in their service. E.g. The White Goddess by Robert Grave, James Joyce's Ulysses, Jorge Luis Borges' short stories in Labyrinth...
By the way, while we're on the subject, I found a nice looking site with a section called The Brazen Head devoted to Joyce and another one called The Garden of Forking Paths devoted to Borges. The surprise is that the site belongs to a High School Chemistry teacher...I would have expected a graphic designer. Just goes to show that one's job isn't the necessarily beginning and end of who one is.