Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

Invisible worlds, full of energy and power: subatomic harems, each pulsing on the edge of a great explosion. Budur sighed as this image came to her. There was no escaping the latent violence at the heart of things.

In so many ways, the rulers and clerics have distorted the Quran to their own purposes. This has been true in all religions, of course. It is inevitable. Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered.

“Here are our conquerors, a culture where women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.”

Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter.

“Survived them, and the Six Great Errors, and the Three Incredible Fuckups, and the Nine Greatest Incidents of Bad Luck. A miracle! There must be hungry ghosts holding big umbrellas over us, brothers.”

One of the Japanese men snorted. “No one can take over the world,” he said. “It's too big.”

It's becoming clear to me that the island England was a sort of Japan-about-to-happen, on the other side of the world.

...the Buddhist monasteries here were already centers of metalworking and mechanics, and ceramics. The local mathematicians brought calculation to full flower for use in navigation, gunnery, and mechanics.

History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.

To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one center of power to another...

“No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.”

The Billy Graham Elegy

Nobody much mentions the floor of the Sistine Chapel
that’s touched so many more than the docents
or the ceiling or the premonitions on the wall. Come papal loafer
and heathen sneaker, come Ked and ECCO
mingling dog shit off the viale e strada on this scuffed stone...

One can’t, after all, be messiah forever. Eventually, the ball club needs a fresh message, a fresher messenger, fella in a silk suit maybe, a Carolina drawl, maybe another mother appointed chairwoman of the Pietà.

“Immoral?”
“Dancing and suchlike. Rhythmic motion during prayers—even the praying aloud.”
“It sounds fairly ordinary to me. Celebrations are celebrations, after all.”

“all the life stages”: milk teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood.

“When my days of rice and salt are over,” she would say, “I'll copy out the sutras and pray all day. But until then we had all better get to the day's work!”

Every dynasty begins well, cleansing the decay of the fallen one before it. But then their turn for corruption comes.

This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.

“You have had other lives?”
“We all have. Don't you remember?”

It gets so you wish there were actual
barbarians at the gate, anyone to crush with a mace,
but there is no gate, not one guy in a pelt
banging with any malice; just dad bods
and threenagers storming the bouncy castle.

Don’t blame me, cupcake, I voted for the other guy.
But somebody still has to pay for this shit.

When you sack the villain’s estate,
you have to raid the villain’s kitchen.
You dress in his topcoat and drink his gin.
You set his horses free and drive them
home through the rain. You see?

Proustian love anticipates a well-known Lacanian dictum: the object of my desire is not the cause of my desire.

In his seminar on identification, Lacan asks: What is the difference between my dog and the human subject? He answers that his dog never mistakes him for someone else, while misidentification of the other is constitutive of the human.

It is the symptom of a fascination with and terror of the ego-disintegrating jouissance of a fantasized female sexuality—a jouissance available to the male body, according to this fantasy, in “passive” anal sex.

Bersani on Freud: 'At bottom, we are all insatiable and unhappily repressed perverts.'

'All love is, in a sense, homoerotic. Even in the love between a man and a woman, each partner rejoices in finding himself, or herself, in the other.'

Huh?

'It is not only that bisexuality in Freud is nothing more than heterosexuality doubled.'

Oh dear Lord.

'It is doubtful that queer theory will be helpful in this enterprise. The most striking aspect in the evolution of this theory has been a somewhat troubled reflection on the question of sexual identity.'

Oh dear Lord.