Our lady of the dessicants, of dryness, tidiness, warmth and safeness,
Our lady of teetotalers, hypochondriacs, disabled and dissenters.
Our lady of planning and sterility, of choice and infertility
Who plans all things, who cleans all things
Who decontaminates and deconstructs all things
You may have heard the late sir Roger Scruton recall his experience of the soixante-huitard riots while he had been a student in Paris. The destructiveness of his fellow colleagues, their righteous indignation, the shallowness and irrationality of their anger produced such an impression on Roger, that he knew right then he wanted nothing to do with anything these pampered narcissists stood for, and decided he would oppose them in any way he could.
I had a very similar journey away from liberalism and the fashionable strands of thoughts forming the contemporary consensus. If you are a dissident of any kind, you certainly have your own tale to tell. A deep sense of betrayal is what unifies
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As Westerners we have lived for so long with this disembodied, mass produced entertainment masquerading as culture, that the only reaction we find normal to anyone taking their beliefs seriously is meta-irony. It suits us like a glove; the more layers of irony and cynicism, the better. Any midwit understands it and is able to engage in it.
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The film is specifically about timelesness, or the contrast between linear profane time and the cyclical, sacred time of the gods. The protagonists are two brothers, Justin and Aaron, orphaned in childhood when their parents died in a car crash, rescued and raised by the members of the desert cult, Camp Arcadia. Having grown up, they had decided to leave the cult behind, smear it in front of the press and return to wider society. After ten years, realising they still failed to adapt to contemporary society, despite periodic therapy sessions and failed attempts at socialising, Aaron receives a video cassette from Anna, an attractive female member of the cult
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The enormous supply-and-demand imbalance for both art and artists in 20th-century styles leaves these styles about as fashionable as disco in 1996. “Paintings” that used to sell for eight figures will be stacked next to the dumpster. “Artists” once celebrated in the Times will be teaching kindergarten, tying trout flies, or cooking delicious dinners.
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The wide kind of attention is participatory and contextual. It is a ‘gestalt’, a pattern of being-there. An organised whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. Imagine motherhood; the attitudes and inner dispositions of a mother towards her child. It does not exclude focused attention, but it is more than that
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Insight into illness generally is dependent on the right hemisphere, and those who have damage to the right hemisphere tend to deny their illness – the well-recognised, and extraordinary phenomenon of anosognosia, in which patients deny or radically minimise the fact that they have, for example, a blatant loss of use of what may be one entire half of the body.A patient with a completely paralysed (left) limb may pointedly refuse to accept that there is anything wrong with it, and will come up with the most preposterous explanations for
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When a society depletes its moral capital, we witness a Tower of Babel type situation; a cacophony of voices without any rhythm or common tune. ‘Treachery’ is on everyone’s lips; the enemy is seen as residing within. Religions factionalise, civil wars erupt.
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There is a problem with “garments of skin”, and religion is a garment, garments are dead and if you rely solely on them, you die. But this is the human condition, he have to use garments, we cannot live in the open, we need the animal skins to cover our nakedness. However these can be transformed [turn death into glory], technology included (another garment). In the book of Revelation the New Jerusalem is not a return to a garden where we are naked, but a garden in the center of a city, so the turning to glory of a dead garment, the city, also keeping the living core.
The purpose of the Cross is not to deconstruct and burn everything away, but to show that even death (and its avatars, the garments of skin) can be inverted and turned to glory. New Jerusalem is a city of light, a garment of death can be turned to a garment of light. Religion can be redeemed.
In his book, ‘The Master and his Emissary’, Iain McGilchrist makes the case that the worldview of the left hemisphere of the brain (the emissary) has been in ascendancy for many centuries, to the detriment of the more subtle right brain (the master). At page 14 of his book, Iain tells a parable (wrongly attributed to Nietzsche) that gives us the key to his central thesis – a tale of historical usurpation:
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