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XI: Fraction
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XI Fraction To eat and to be eaten. The grain must be ground, the wine pressed; the bread must be broken. The true body is a body broken. Nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent. Yeats, "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop." Cf. Dylan Thomas, "This bread I break." Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 290. To be is to be vulnerable. The defense mechanisms, the character-armor, is to protect from life. Frailty alone is human; a broken, a ground-up (contrite) heart. Cf. Weil, La Pesanteur et la gr&ce, 125. In the upper sector, the realm of the gods, "whose carefree life, dedicated to aesthetic pleasures, is indicated by dance and music. On account of this one-sided dedica184 /5 Fraction tion to their own pleasures, they forget the true nature of life, the limitations of their own existence, the sufferings of others, their own transiency. They do not know that they live only in a state of temporary harmony. . . . They live, so to say, on the accumulated capital of past good deeds without adding new values. They are gifted with beauty, longevity and freedom from pain, but just this lack of suffering, of obstacles and exertion, deprives the harmony of their existence of all creative impulses." "Rebirth in heavenly realms is not an aim which Buddhists think worth striving for. . . . It leads to a strengthening of the ego-illusion and to a deeper entanglement in the samsaric world." Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 238-239. There is a seal or sepulcher to be broken, a rock to be broke open, to disclose the living water; an eruption. Begin then with a fracture, a cesura, a rent; opening a crack in this fallen world, a shaft of light. Cf. Richard, Mallarme, 539. Literal meanings are icons become stone idols; the stone sepulcher, the stone tables of the law. The New Testament remained hidden in the Old, like water in the rock; until the cross of Christ broke the rock open. Iconoclasm , the word like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces. Cf. Luther cited in Hahn, "Luthers Auslegungsgrundsatze," igon. Jeremiah XXIJI, 29. Open is broken. There is no breakthrough without breakage. A struggle with an angel, which leaves us [3.15.156.140] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 17:10 GMT) LOVE'S "BODY 186 scarred, or lame. Every dream is a struggle; the possible confronting the real, abruptly. Man the measure of all things is the microcosmic man; in little all the sphere. Stretch yourself, then, to the breaking point: "Ehr sey also hoch, dicke, breyt und fang, wye er am kreuz gehangen hat." To be so stretched is to be crucified; it is the crucified body that is the measure of all things: statera facta corporis. Muntzer cited in Holl, "Luther und die Schwarmer," 437. Weil, La Pesanteur et la grdce, 109. The crucified body, the crucified mind. The norm is not normality but schizophrenia, the split, broken, crucified mind. "If we throw a crystal to the ground, it breaks, but it does not break haphazard; in accordance with the lines of cleavage it falls into fragments, where limits were already determined by the structure of the crystal, although they were invisible. Psychotics are fissured and splintered structures such as these. We cannot deny them a measure of that awe with which madmen were regarded by the people of ancient times." Split the stick and there is Jesus. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 80. Cage, Silence, 70. Stretch yourself, to the breaking point. It is not true unless it hurts; the evidence is martyrdom. "All truths are bloody truths for me." We do not know the truth because we repress it; and we repress it because it is painful. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 68. To the breaking point. Carrying the thought through to the end; crucial experiments, experimentum crucis. A 187 Fraction witness (martyr) steadfast to the end, tested in extremis. Extremism. Truth is not in safety or in the middle. "Les oeuvres d'art naissent toujours de qui a affronte le danger, de qui est alle jusqu'au bout d'une experience." Rilke cited in Bac'helard, La Poetique de I'espace, 198. Aphorism is exaggeration, or grotesque; in psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations; and in poetry, "cet extremisme est le phenomene meme de Telan poetique" Aphorism is exaggeration, extravagant language ; the road of excess which leads to the palace of wisdom. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 78. Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pi. 7. Bachelard, La Poetique de I'espace, 198. Exaggeration or extravagance; not to count the cost. Go for broke. Aphorism is recklessness; it goes too far. Intellect is courage; the courage to risk its own life; to play with madness. "Poetes, void la loi mysterieuse: Aller au dela. Aller au dela, extravaguez, soit, comme Homere, comme Ezechiel, comme Pindare, comme Salomon, comme Archilogue, comme Horace, comme Saint-Paul, comme Saint-Jean, comme Saint-Jerome, comme Tertullien, comme Petrarque, comme Alighieri,comme Ossian,comme Cervantes, comme Rabelais, comme Shakespeare, comme Milton, comme Mathurin Regnier, comme Agrippa d'Aubigne , comme Moliere, comme Voltaire. Extravaguez avec ces doctes, extravaguez avec ces justes, extravaguez avec ces sages. Quos vult AUGERE Jupiter dementat." Aphorism , the form of the mad truth, the Dionysian form. Hugo, "Promontorium Somnii," 309. Only the exaggerations are true. Credo quia absurdum ; as in parables or poetry. Aphoristic form is suicide, [3.15.156.140] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 17:10 GMT) LOVE'S "BODY 188 or self-sacrifice; for truth must die. Intellect is sacrifice of intellect, or fire; which burns up as it gives light. Cf. Bhagavad Gita, IV, 19. Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech. Truth, a broken body: fragments, or aphorisms; as opposed to systematic form or methods: "Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest." Bacon in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 102-103. Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings on it, and so it remains dead. Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt. The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wooden crosses, Procrustean beds on which lie living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: "the form of eternity." Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 66. Aphorism, or symbolism, as in Finnegans Wake: "A mode of broken or syncopated manipulation to permit inclusive or simultaneous perception of a total or diversified field. Such, indeed, is symbolism by definition—a collocation , a parataxis . . . without a point of view or lineal connection or sequential order." Symbolism, or grotesque: "A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection , of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, i8g Fraction left or overleapt by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character." McLuhan quoting Ruskin, Gutenberg Galaxy,266-267. Systematic form; generalities. All knowledge is particular , goes into the natural man in bits, a scrap here, a scrap there. Food is taken in bites. Bread broken to feed five thousand. Cf. Blake in Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 15. Pound, Kulchw, 98-99. Broken form. Against beauty as such. No form nor comeliness. Abrupt; uneven; inconsistent. By Ciceronian standards, mutila quaedam et hiantia. Isaiah LIII, 2. Cicero, Orator, 33. "A new heroic era has opened," Mandelstam wrote in 1921, "in the life of the word. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering." Fanger, "The Prose of Osip Mandelstam," 47. Beyond atomism. Fragmentation unto dust, and the word becomes seminal again. The sower soweth the word. Dionysus broken and scattered is seed scattered. But if it die it bringeth forth much fruit. The body is made whole by being broken. John XII, 24. Sanskrit bindu: "This word, which has many meanings , like 'point, dot, zero, drop, germ, seed, semen,' . . . It is the point from which inner and outer space have their origin and in which they become one again." The [3.15.156.140] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 17:10 GMT) thought, poem, is a cell or seed; a germ of living thought: growing from nothing to ripeness. Instead of the dead wood of systems, the tree of life; ramifications; branched thoughts new-grown with pleasant pain. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 116. Broken speech; speech broken by silence. To let the silence in is symbolism. "In symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance." Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book III, ch. Ill, "Symbols." LOVE'S "BODY 190 ...