[oathtoblood]

Hugo Höppener (1868-1938)

[arachnesmuses]

[arachnesmuses]

After a hundred years Nobody knows the place, — Agony, that enacted there, Motionless as peace. Weeds triumphant ranged, Strangers strolled and spelled At the lone orthography Of the elder dead. Winds of summer fields Recollect the way, — Instinct picking up the key Dropped by memory.

— Emily Dickinson

[arachnesmuses]

[arachnesmuses]

“Free for death and free in death, a holy naysayer when the time for yes has passed: that is his understanding of death and life. That your dying be not a blasphemy against humankind and the earth, my friends: that is what I beseech from the honey of your souls. In your dying, your spirit and your virtue should still glow like a sunset upon the earth; otherwise, your dying has turned out badly.”

— Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

[jxn-xoxo]

[arachnesmuses]

“The subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the center of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the center is the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return. A residual subject of the machine, Nietzsche-as-subject garners a euphoric reward (Voluptas) from everything that this machine turns out, a product that the reader had thought to be no more than the fragmented oeuvre by Nietzsche. "Nietzsche believes that he is now pursuing, not the realization of a system, but the application of a program... in the form of residues of the Nietzschean discourse, which have now become the repertory, so to speak, of his histrionicism." It is not a matter of identifying with various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time Nietzsche-as-subject exclaims: "They're me! So it's me!" No one has ever been as deeply involved in history as the schizo, or dealt with it in this way. He consumes all of universal history in one fell swoop. We began by defining him as Homo natura, and lo and behold, he has turned out to be Homo historia.”

— Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

[dailyclassicart]

Arnold Böcklin - "Seaside Villa" (1877)

[arachnesmuses]

“Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Cæsar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build therefore your own world.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

[nostosphotography]

Athens (2025) Theater of Dionysus

[arachnesmuses]

“Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than any other thinker—after all, the whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so-called "moral world order"—what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist" who flees from reality; Zarathustra has more intestinal fortitude than all other thinkers taken together. To speak the truth and to shoot well with arrows, that is Persian virtue. — Am I understood?— The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.”

— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

[arachnesmuses]

Life magazine’s coverage of FSU Class of ’52, Loomis Dean

[arachnesmuses]

“Even Freud never went beyond this narrow and limited conception of the ego. And what prevented him from doing so was his own tripartite formula—the Oedipal, neurotic one: daddy-mommy-me. We may well ponder the possibility that the analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex led Freud to rediscover, and to lend all the weight of his authority to, the unfortunate misapplication of the concept of autism to schizophrenia. For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers—”

— Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

[arachnesmuses]

John Flaxman, neoclassical drawing of Homer's Iliad, "The Gods Descending to Battle", 1795

[arachnesmuses]

[arachnesmuses]

“There are only three civilised peoples: the French, the Chinese and the Persians. I am proud to be a Persian.”

— Nietzsche to Moser, January 21, 1824, Pfeifer, ibid., p. 6

[arachnesmuses]

“The comedy of Sexual Personae separates it from Bloom’s work, for whatever riches may be harvested from my distinguished mentor, it cannot be said that reading him is a barrel of laughs! My double view, taking in the primal with the artificial, is a rite of intellectual reconciliation. My appreciation of glamour and aristocratic style (anti-bourgeois and anti-liberal, as in Baudelaire and Wilde) is another point of divergence from Bloom. We belong to different Western traditions. Bloom, who prefers the Bible to Homer, is Judeo-Christian. His consciousness is completely literary, an orchestral dynasty of the [w]ord. I am Greco-Roman, ruled by visual images and formal theatrics, in art, sports, politics, and war.”

— Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture