Work in progress

Future vestige

[ammonitetestpatterns]

i am now in love with these showa era generic sleeves

[velvetkisses28]

!!!!

[ammonitetestpatterns]

james staples, poynts and spots: molecular revolutions, mystical desires, and the pearl-poet, 2019.

[kiersau]

I'm sure someone has posted about this already, but I was curious about the book Sister Illuminata wanted to destroy. Long post under the cut.

The book is "The Mirror of Simple Souls" and it is a long poem written by Marguerite Porete around 1300. Porete was an educated woman associated with the beguine movement (a lay religious order), which allowed her more freedom to write and travel than most women of the time had.

The poem is a work of Christian mysticism and deals with "agape," or Divine love. It's unique in a couple of ways, not only because it was authored by a woman. It was in Old French at a time when Latin was the only approved language for religious texts, which was already a strike against her in later investigations. The book was also very popular - until, of course, it was condemned by the church. All existing copies were seized and burned, and circulation of the text was banned.

Marguerite Porete was arrested by inquisitors, likely around 1308 after she gave a copy of her book to a bishop. She was tried before William of Paris, the Inquisitor of France, where she staunchly refused to cooperate with any of the proceedings. She would not recant her views nor commit to stopping circulation of her work. She was burned at the stake for heresy in 1310.

I don’t understand it well, but from what I can wrap my tiny little brain around, the book essentially covers the way to unite one's soul with God, and includes characters like Love, Reason, and the Simple Soul. By giving up reason, she says, the soul can be filled with only Love and achieve oneness with God, transcending earthly troubles. She says a soul that is filled only with God's love has its sinful nature erased and therefore cannot sin - this is likely where the claims of heresy arose.

The text did survive the inquisition, though, and it was circulated anonymously until Porete was identified as the author in the 1940s. It is a foundational text for people studying Christian mysticism and the beguine movement.

(And if you wanted a translation of the above images, here is my own shoddy attempt:

"The soul touched by God and empty of sin in the first state of grace is ascended by the divine graces to the seventh state of grace, the state where it possesses its perfection in full in the land of living by divine enjoyment.

"Love says here:

"O, you active and contemplative, perhaps even annihilated by true love, you who will listen to those wonders of pure love, noble love, uplifted love of the liberated soul, you who are going to listen how the Holy Spirit has set his sails both in it [the soul] as in his ship. I beg of you out of love: listen, with great application, to this subtle understanding that is within you, and with great diligence. Otherwise, for lack of being so disposed, all those who hear this will misunderstand it. Now understand, with humility, a simple example borrowed from mundane love, and apply it equally to divine love.")

[ryebreadgf]

the dots

[jahsonic]

In search of sexual symbolism in medieval art, I find Wound of Christ, Psalter and Prayer book of Bonne de Luxembourg (1345).

“… In this image, Christ’s wound is both seal and vagina …” —Constructing Medieval Sexuality.

[valerie2776]

ok i was looking through blaze’s likes and saw this and we spent a whole class a few weeks ago in medieval art discussing side wound imagery. there is so much of it and a lot of it is much more sexually suggestive than that.

(Side Wound page from a Book of Hours. England and the Netherlands. 1410.)

people went nuts over the side wound. that one up there also, in addition to looking wildly like ladyparts, has the other crucifixion wounds inside it

there were multiple pieces that had text that told the viewer that the side wound was the exact dimensions and size of the actual wound christ had. here is one.

(Woodcut with Measure of the Side Wound and Body of Christ. Germany. Late 1400’s.)

this one also shows off the other wounds inflicted upon christ during his crucifixion with the wound obvs a substitute for christ’s body. the text on the print also says that if you multiplied the length of the wound by 40, you’d get christ’s exact height.

some of the depictions, including the one directly above, also had instructions on how to be protected from misfortune by meditating and kissing the wound. it even stipulates that you had to turn it sideways. so it’d be like a mouth.

there was also one printed work that had a slit through the wound part so it was actual a literal wound and the red ink of the blood had bled through the cut onto the back side of the piece. (i couldn’t find any pictures of this one online, so)

and the back

(Sacred Heart. Germany, c. 1465.)

we have been talking a lot about the performance and performative nature of medieval art and what that means, how and where pieces were viewed by common people and if they held significance in religious ritual or experience (altarpieces, stained glass etc), if they were public or private pieces and if they were made and individualized for one specific patron (lots of prayer books were made for wealthy people that had actual depictions of the owner in them praying, sometimes even holding the book they were actually reading. instructional and very meta), whether the art was created to be physically interacted with (like some of the aforementioned) or to be kept on one’s person or displayed in one’s home.

medieval art is kind of nice in a way because at least to us, there’s less of an emphasis on the artists themselves, since the vast majority of that information was lost to time or was never meant to be known, so there’s so much more about interpretation and the personal experience of the viewer. artistic intention usually is not focused on so much though medieval art is really big on symbolic, codified objects/references in images rather than mimetic likenesses–no printing presses and all that sorta lent itself to a shying away from literal likeness in portraits to a bunch of symbols and characteristics that a person could see and decode information from, like oh this guy is sitting on a throne that’s being held up by an earth mother with the clergy and military peeps on either side underneath him and the icons of the four gospels surrounding him like in the book of revelation plus he’s holding a crossy sphere and the hand of god is reaching down from heaven almost touching his head and he’s got a full body halo even DANG he must be a mega powerful ruling guy in good standing with god and pretty much the son of god maybe but not quite and he is on top of stuff

(Otto III enthroned in majesty from the Liuthar or Aachen Gospels. Germany, c. 1000.)

instead of like hey this looks like otto III cause he had a weird freaky nose and big chin or something like that. i think that’s awesome and very very interesting.

to go back to the vagina / side wound thing…in class the teacher asked everyone if they thought that that interpretation was valid and if it was intended and i was SO surprised that many of my classmates said that it was a ridiculous and almost offensive idea to foist that kind of sacrilegious view/implication on it. but like come on. it’s not like medieval art was otherwise some kind of super holy pious clean deal. which is what the prof said. “just wait until next week when i show you the penis trees.” (but then she couldn’t find images of them and i was disappointed. but if you want to see some really strange medieval stuff, just google “medieval marginalia”). and also check out this

and a closeup

(Bible Moralisèe: Genesis. France, c. 1225)

christ giving birth from his side wound to a personified version (ecclesia) of the church. into god’s arms! bam.

okay that is pretty much all i have to say. actually i could say a lot more stuff because there’s so much cool stuff in medieval art (check out the bible moralisee because it’s super interesting and i’m not gonna talk more about it because jeez this is a lot of text already and i’ve spent too much time getting excited about all this. also ps the original image i reblogged has got the arma christi in it and that’s a neat thing too).

learn stuff and think about stuff. it is awesome to do.

[a-typical]

The Greeks were among the first to make serious attempts to sort through the chaos of the world around us. Philosophers like Aristotle believed that everything could be reduced to a mixture of four fundamental ingredients: earth, air, fire, and water. But how do these four elements give rise to the rich complexity of the world? The Greeks proposed at least two answers to this question. The first was given by the philosopher Democritus, even before Aristotle. He believed that everything could be reduced to tiny, invisible, indestructible particles he called atoms (meaning “indivisible” in Greek). The critics, however, pointed out that direct evidence for atoms was impossible to acquire because they were too small to be observed. But Democritus could point out compelling, indirect evidence. Consider a gold ring, for example. Over the years, the ring begins to wear down. Something is being lost. Every day some tiny bits of matter have been worn off the ring. Hence, although atoms are invisible, their existence can be measured indirectly. Even today most of our advanced science is done indirectly. We know the composition of the sun, the detailed structure of DNA, and the age of the universe, all due to measurements of this kind. We know all this, even though we have never visited the stars or entered a DNA molecule or witnessed the Big Bang. This distinction between direct and indirect evidence will become essential when we discuss attempts to prove a unified field theory.  A second approach was pioneered by the great mathematician Pythagoras. Pythagoras had the insight to apply a mathematical description to worldly phenomena like music. According to legend, he noticed similarities between the sound of plucking a lyre string and the resonances made by hammering a metal bar. He found that they created musical frequencies that vibrated with certain ratios. So something as aesthetically pleasing as music has its origin in the mathematics of resonances. This, he thought, might show that the diversity of the objects we see around us must obey these same mathematical rules. So at least two great theories of our world emerged from ancient Greece: 

the idea that everything consists of invisible, indestructible atoms

the diversity of nature can be described by the mathematics of vibrations

Unfortunately, with the collapse of classical civilization, these philosophical discussions and debates were lost. The concept that there could be a paradigm explaining the universe was forgotten for almost a thousand years. Darkness spread over the Western world, and scientific inquiry was largely replaced by belief in superstition, magic, and sorcery.

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

[anaxerneas]

Not entirely sure how I feel about this yet.

[oneterabyteofkilobyteage]

original url http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Lights/8239/

last modified 2007-06-20 04:23:50

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

“Remember the advantage of keeping an open mind. Preparedness, after all, is not a lesson taught us by our friends but by our enemies. It is our enemies, not our friends, who teach us to survive.”

— from The Birds by Aristophanes 

[mikarchive2-deactivated20250714]

And for the verb “to read” ? Will we be able to say, “Today it reads” as we say “Today it rains” ? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.”

italo calvino, if on a winters night a traveler

[paulfrankjuliusthemonkey]

this is so real

[quotespile]

“What’s more, I was free to do anything that did not hurt others that strengthened me and helped me in the one thing that we are all put on this earth to do: help one another – because it is the only thing that, in the long run, gives us pleasure, as receiving love and friendship and affection is the only thing that gives us joy and ameliorates the dread of our inevitable extinction.”

— Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

[frankencain]

define hole / is a hole a real thing? / Marco Poloni, Black Hole, from The Majorana Experiment, 2010 / Flatfields Fotografien / What We Talk About When We Talk About Holes / Dark (2017-2020) / post / Disco Elysium / Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) / Donnie Darko (2001) / Outer Range (2022) / Kaveh Akbar, from “The Miracle,” Pilgrim Bell / post / Weizmann Institute of Science / Mathworld / post / post / post / post / Anne Boyer, from “Woman Sitting at the Machine,” in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate / Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords / Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh / The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio, 1601–1602 (detail) / The Incredulity of St. Thomas, Bernardo Strozzi, 1582-1644 (detail) / Don McKay, from “Twinflower,” Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay, intro. Méira Cook (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006) / thierryetherve / Pathologic / post / Gregory Orr, from How Beautiful the Beloved / Tomas Tranströmer, tr. by Robert Bly, from a poem titled “Track” / Disco Elysium / Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost / Pathologic 2 / Jonas Burgert, Sand brennt Blatt (2010) / Disco Elysium / Carl Phillips, from “Givingly”, Wild is the Wind / from “The Man With a Hole in His Head” by Rick Bursky / Rosario Castellanos, ‘Memorandum on Tlatelolco’ (tr. Maureen Ahern) / post / Pathologic / The Juniper Tree (Nietzchka Keene | 1990) / John Banville, Eclipse / Twin Peaks / Disco Elysium / VectorStock / True Detective / Night in the Woods

[oneterabyteofkilobyteage]

original url http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Garage/9227/

last modified 2007-05-30 19:31:06

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

M.R. James - Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary - Penguin - 1974 (cover photograph by Joe Gaffney)

[ccycles]

The Nativity scene from Jon Fosse’s Septology