[...]g at the distance---what Rostam radically is unable to understand]

(a network of relations and nonrelations depends on the way we address how Ferdosi greets Sudabeh, failed in the exam and examination ==> fire creating a network of relations [Rostam, Siyavosh,] and nonrelations [Sudabeh, King,])
-what are the conditions enabling the delivery of the Sudabeh [to the beyond (of Shahname)]? (of greeting her?) which poetic sites [we don't want to enroll]? (we don't want to enroll in Rostam's department. the tragic hero, he ‘hits’, always after to save his sovereign, good at haft-khan, ending beasts [we are interested in the beasts, and not in his “seven” trails], so hurried in killing that he finshes his own son, not invincible to treachery and that is his end. but what was treachery again? (in Shahnameh) anything other than athletism and boys sord play: female “mouth”)
-Ferdosi resisting any project of fusional gathering
[unlike Sudabeh, Tahmineh--Rostam's wife--was after having a child with him. she gets a pass, passing Ferdosi's test of maternity. is Sudabeh's fault that she doesn't want to mother? And Rudabeh wants Zal az far as he plays the classic male role model in stealing her?]

[there is a moment in Shahname when it conjoins women and [disgust?], enmeshing them] [and why am i taking upon myself to defend woman? interrupting the abyssal enjoyment of the poem in punishing Sudabeh?]----of Ferdosi not allowing a feminine drift and deviation, from the Law. ***it's Father Time.
--> am i reclaiming otherness by enforcement? (recover her? =/=? understand her) why zoom in her? why teaching myself how to trust and desire her? (allowing myself being lured by her. why it is imperative to let ourselvse to be lured by the “her-idea”?) (is Ferdosi mobilizing forces in iranian hearts? militarize them? “jang-avari”) (the point is not to take critical power in disclaming the fire that valorized Siyavash and then take Sudabeh's side. rather the point is to energize the experiences of metamorphic transformation that animated fire of the fire-temple in the mind of Ferdosi. by participating in Sudabeh's case, her assemblage, i am also recovering my own capacity to care for Ferdosi's fire too and accept being mystified by its telling flames. [end of Sudabeh part])

in a world where humans were increasingly rendered particularly lively (than the creatures without nervous systems ~= objects) with intense awarenesses, fire seemed to be even more lively, with an access to a/its/the beyond
(from stone as a fellow being to the fire the authority figure---by the end of Pleistocene)

(Jesus) will baptize you with fire. (the Old Believers)


moses in fire: stop the representation! stop the constant demonstration! show me body! show me a flesh i can feel! put your hand in the fire moses! i am that which is not burning your hand. i am what that lies beyond. you are my creation, you are of mediation. if your body was my creation, your hand would burn.
it is told that Zaratustra had a fire that was everlasting and would not burn.

باور ‘bavar’ ba+var (var = tested ~= just or fairly judged)
Ibrahim's case is a *warm var

water trial, drowning women to examine if they are witches
water+fire trial -- azmun-e ab-o-atash آزمون آب و آتش



The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian Period witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Fish, arthropods, amphibians, anapsida, synapsida, euryapsida and diapsida all evolved during the Paleozoic. Life began in the ocean but eventually transitioned onto land, and by the late Paleozoic, it was dominated by various forms of organisms. Great forests of primitive plants covered the continents, many of which formed the coal beds of Europe and eastern North America. Towards the end of the era, large, sophisticated diapsida and synapsida were dominant and the first modern plants (conifers) appeared.

The Paleozoic Era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic extinction event. The effects of this catastrophe were so devastating that it took life on land 30 million years into the Mesozoic to recover.[4] Recovery of life in the sea may have been much faster.[5]

[4] Sahney, S. & Benton, M.J. (2008). “Recovery from the most profound mass extinction of all time” (PDF). Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological. 275 (1636): 759-65. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1370. PMC 2596898free to read. PMID 18198148.
[5] http://www.economist.com/node/16524904 The Economist



not a naturalistic schema of the geometry of hot point, nor a geometric schema of naturalistic fire.



i am loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from greek geometric,) i am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (in the San'an text, the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced.)



greet and grid you

...................................

a word on anxiety*

For Kierkegaard and Heidegger, anxiety deals with “nothingness.” It is a breakdown of both world and self. For Goldstein, the drive to overcome anxiety by the conquest of a piece of the world is expressed in the tendency towards order, norms, continuity, and homogeneity. Deleuze and Guattari echo this diagnosis when they claim that striation is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies and erects the constancy and eternity of an in-itelf.

[can we say that the whole enterprise of the beyond is a striation of the unkowable, motivated by anxeity?]

The affect can be inhibited; it can remain in consciousness but attached to another idea, or it can undergo transformation, notably into anxiety.

automatic anxieties

poetry of the others

...................................

my text, like Mohsen Feyz (one of the most brilliant students of Mullah Sadra) will wait for me at the end, greet me at the meeting-place of the Vadegah-e Ghiamat وعده‌گاه قیامت (The Resurrection, The Last judgment)

like Mohsen Feyz (one of the most brilliant students of Mullah Sadra,) I hope to meet again this text as it is waiting for me at a “beyond” that Mullah Sadra beautifully and rigorously theorized. At the meeting-place of the Vadegah-e Ghiamat, at The Resurrection, The Last judgment, this text will greet me, as all writing is resurrected and approaching their authors, while we tremble together to the other-side.
#For those who love stones.



better that your tomb be the hearts of men


a symbolic geography of the land of fireplaces, poses a landscape which creats its own generation of eyes.

their minds each a fireplace

...................................

Sohrevardi, in one of his stories, proposes a creature in darkness with no senses, blind and deaf. still he recieves a mail, an incoming call, in the dark.

elsewhere, the agency of fire (khasiate fa'ale atash) <-- bizari az khala (abhorrence of vacuum/void?)

the extraordinary honor of fire is because of its ability to move more sublime than any other. fire is related to movement. stillness is darkness and lack of ‘cause’ --> if you move, you create the ‘cause’ of movement in the world, in the beings that sense that movement, interpret it, and absorb your movement: the movement is semiotic, because it generates/proposes/sustains/initiates causality--not in the sense that your movement has consequence, but it that it risks semiotically in the eyes of the beholder a causation ‘of’ movement prior to the mover.

tabiate atash shabihe jan ast (nature of fire is like essence of life)

(for ancient iranians) fire became thus Qibla

fire: atashe mahsus (sensable fire,) khalife anvare maghul (deputy of intellectual illuminations)
(not stewardship?)

(Empedocles) “only with fire fire can be seen.”

...................................

(what complicates?) the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions

the expansive fields of immanence and trancendence we can read in fire fossil


our contract with Allah

with fire we are at a testing site, at least of the the God of the Old Testament who showed a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture, fire is a testing device for subsidiary admission policy. this function or figure is precisly that which permeats modern existance

...drafts that describe an outer domain of signification

contaminative and communicative

...................................

in talking about our agreements with fire, i like to read how our rapport to the beyond has mutated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)

what kind of grid the fire produces?

beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***

testability? we want everyone and everything tested

after testing the fire...

monitor time according to the pulse of German/Iranian Idealism/Metaphorism,

[God] singular infinity (~= beyondness) --> [death of God] unlimited finiteness


the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire

what ciruits are installed by this?

how the mediality of talking fire designs an actual real materially enabled?

what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?

what form of trial discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps even invents the ground (on which Sudabeh has no standing)?

how my threading between black-box, darkness, and beyond helps us to spot those figures that makes claims of absoluteness?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)

interpretation <--?--> experience

fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation


...................................

[Serres]

technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire

(ice and fire) is only relatively cold

fire, and transcendental subject

[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]


siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognizes the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognize a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavosh and Sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (Rostam and Siyavosh do that)


transsubstantiation

...................................

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

...................................

against the curtain of fire trial stands a stack of iranian proverbs about stone triggering often ideas of rigidity ~= stupidity:
aghlesh par-sang barmidare عقلش پاره سنگ برمیداره (crazy, imagination, thinking, excess,)
divane sangi be chah miandazad... دیوانه سنگی به چاه می اندازد... (stupidity, tool, irreversibility, questions of agency and responsibility,)
naravad mikhe ahanin dar sang نرود میخ آهنین در سنگ (stupidity, penetration,)
shamshir bar sang azmudan شمشیر بر سنگ آزمودن (uselessness, stupidty, destruction, test, inattention,) [~= shekar zire ab penhan sakhtan (شکار زیر آب پنهان ساختن --> story of the apes, Buzinegano Kerme Shabtab بوزینگان و کرم شبتاب) ~= mosht dar tariki zadan مشت در تاریکی زدن]
sang az pase divar andakhtan سنگ از پس دیوار انداختن (uselessness, wrongness, chance,)
pay dar sang amadan پای در سنگ آمدن (random trouble, naturaly unforseen hardship, cripeled,)
sang dar kise kardan سنگ در کیسه کردن
del dar sang shekastan دل در سنگ شکستن (to keep quite, benefit of silence, resist speaking the rumorical utterence,)
dele sang دل سنگ (cold-hearted,)
آتش از دل سنگ بیرون آوردن atash az (ضمیر چوب zamire chub va) dele [darune] sang birun avardan (possiblity through work, interrogatory turture,)
sang سنگ =/= la'l لعل --how?--> sang (in Pahlavi) ~= value
sang سنگ =/= abgine آبگینه (glass, mirror, sky, diamond,) (سنگ آبگینه sange abgine: a rock to create mirrors with, abgine ze sang mizayad--khaghani آبگینه ز سنگ می زاید)
sange emtehan سنگ امتحان, az sang birun amadan از سنگ بیرون آمدن, bar sang zadan بر سنگ زدن (trial, test, valuate, messure, quality check,) --?--> related to mine and mineral that gave metal and gold (in many parts of iran sang is the unit of messurment for water ---> go to Dehkhoda) (sang is just a mean to put other things in weight, due to its abundance and nonshiny surface in front of reflective materials: diamond, water, etc.)
sang dar darya andakhtan سنگ در دریا انداختن (positive chance, relying on destiny, butterfly effect, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang andakhtan سنگ انداختن (causality, scale, benefiting from the nature, lever, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang bendaz baghalet baz she سنگ بنداز بغلت باز شه (stupidity, uselessness, unrewarded hardship, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang az mum sakhtan سنگ از موم ساختن (impossibility, stupidity, wrongness,)
sang bar shishe zadan سنگ بر شیشه زدن = not drinking wine anymore (breaking the wine glass) (sometimes stone has come to mean the wine glass itself: sang ~= bade باده)

sange ghali سنگ قالی (to put a rock on an iranian carpet so the wind doesn't take it away. the stone is invited into the culture. doesn't matter why. it is there sitting with us.)

as a unit of measurement, it apears that in farsi stone associates with quantitative nature, and in Ajayeb (therefore) fire with qualitative production of nature(?)
atash is pure quality
sang has no quality, it has only quantity
---this is undermind:
a trip to the archive of stones, muze jawaherat tehran (Treasury of National Jewels موزه جواهرات ملی ایران)
ahjare nafise احجار نفیسه (diamond, gold, etc.)
ahjare karime احجار کریمه (zomorod زمرد, yaghut یاقوت, la'l لعل, etc.)


exposure to its antibodies
risks contamination

...................................

(to address) unmarked territory and unmarked destiny

...................................

stones tell destinies, they are old old old, they are carriers of memory, witnesses of the past, no to wipe out its rough-edged remainders

another take on rock: Stromatolite (are the real telling stone, once bacteria) --> fossilization (~= stone) {structure, morphology,
(gaining sale [Stromatolite is bacteria preying] --> predation --> Multicellularity)
-distinguish between biologically formed and abiotic stromatolites is (hopefuly) still open
•a stromatolite from 2000 million years ago made by a comunity of bacteria, the same bacterial who produced oxigen (that we have in the atmosphere today) (Lynn - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlxqeSXyPd8)
•landscape made by bacteria: cyanobacteria became the first microbes to produce oxygen by photosynthesis. (although the excess of free oxygen was toxic to anaerobic inhabitants, therefore responsible for one of the most significant extinction events in Earth's history.)

Stromatolites (/stroʊˈmætəlaɪts, strə-/[1][2]) or stromatoliths (from Greek strōma, str?ma, mattress, bed, stratum, and ?????, lithos, rock) are layered bio-chemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria.[3] Fossilized stromatolites provide ancient records of life on Earth by these remains, some of which may date from 3.7 billion years ago.[4][5] Lichen stromatolites are a proposed mechanism of formation of some kinds of layered rock structure that are formed above water, where rock meets air, by repeated colonization of the rock by endolithic lichens.[6][7] (Wikipedia)


*oxygen

[img https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oxygenation-atm-2.svg]

O2 build-up in the Earth's atmosphere. Red and green lines represent the range of the estimates while time is measured in billions of years ago (Ga).
Stage 1 (3.85-2.45 Ga): Practically no O2 in the atmosphere. The oceans were also largely anoxic with the possible exception of O2 gases in the shallow oceans.
Stage 2 (2.45-1.85 Ga): O2 produced, and rose to values of 0.02 and 0.04 atm, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock.
Stage 3 (1.85-0.85 Ga): O2 starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces. There was no significant change in terms of oxygen level.
Stages 4 and 5 (0.85-present): O2 sinks filled and the gas accumulates.[1]

[1] Holland, Heinrich D. “The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. Vol. 361. 2006. pp. 903-915.


metazoan phyla : animal

history of life is tight to hisory of oxygen --> fire
Aerobic metabolism is more efficient than anaerobic pathways

Abiogenesis: the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life on Earth
•self-replicating molecules
•RNA world --> catalyze peptide ligation or amino acid polymerization --> protains, specialized biocatalysis --> RNA + iron ==> DNA : data storage
•synthesized from inorganic compounds
•catalysis in chemical systems =?=> molecules necessary for self-replication
•this is a protain writing


*water
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4.4 Ga, very soon after the formation of Earth [...] water with similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio was already available at the time of Earth's formation, as evidenced in ancient “eucrites” meteorites originating from the asteroid Vesta. (wikipedia)


(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire

...................................

[with Guy Debord]

fire media theoretic

‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)

(its social practices)

fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”

therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it

thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection

the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21)

[fire and brimstone, an idiomatic expression of signs of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)

fire's mechanisms of contemplation

(in my preaching here i won't do what christians used to encourage repentence)

it is important not to put fire in abstract opposition to concret stone activity

mystic order ~?-> spectacular order

the spectalce of fire reciprocal alienation was part and parcel of human social life and its essence underpinning its relations to the real

diversities and contrasts in looking into the image of flame

what is already in society that fire (spectacle) gives expression? the beyond

(fire, we are) governed by its agenda

***monopolization of the realm of appearances*** (excluding other illusions, apparition, tellings, etc.)

-with fire a new brand of storytelling
***fire's spectacular aspect (accumulated to the point that) produces an image-object that is a seperate entity [accumulation --> generality/category --> new object], that of the mediated, from the fire itself, a second objecthood detached from its materiality, introduing transcendent immateriality --?--> metaphysics
-taking over life and existence


from vision to wisdom
categories of visulaity took human cognition hostage, gave rise to a metaphysical tradition/abundance imposing itself upon existence, regulating the perception of material life, philosophizing ‘reality’ to ‘beyond nature’ : *alienated thought* (due to the alienated power of fire) --- immaterial specatle of the afterlife, the world-beyond rendering life dead

abounding in metaphysical subtleties
-metaphysical abundance

...allegiance to the frozen

(Rumi's calling) “You must burn!” - this is very selfish
[to Siyavash?]

still today in sci-fi we are talking to a technoilogized light (as the messenger of beyond)

fire, transforms the world, not in terms of changing manifest matriality, rather the mind and thinking

fire in its temporal animation renders space fixated, giving the illusion that (visual) animation = life {~= spectacle}


the fire spectacle colonizing our participation with the beyond, colonizing the way our flux of senses make tentative contact with the other sides,
(what a stone suggests? the senses that never stop participating, never stop throwing themselves beyond the immediatly visible)

every phase of existence

...................................

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” Rumi wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mullusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality [~-> mutation is not random])

(Waddington then launched into a) critique of the notion of “random mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.

...................................

...a perceptual game of risking linearity, collapsing discovery and jurisdiction (a judiciary not a branch of any map of governance)

...................................

(Haraway on Burning Man:) Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, te killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire is our times are at stake.
[]three icons (suggestions by Haraway, three “-cene” tuned tor the touch of its critters):
1- ‘missing ice’ of the Capitalocene
2- ‘flame’ of the Anthropocene
3- ‘red clay pottery’ of the Cthulucene




(Conley >) Rosolato treats perspective in terms of the origins of sensuous affect:
infant's projective activity + infant closes its eyes to fend off menace, hence negotiating with the real in a space and time prior to the mirror stage

...................................

The artful sandwich of Rostam-rock-div provides a thinking mode of who-caries-who: whose being is dependent on whose existence. The earth that the Rostam is laying on, is sacred, on the hands of an ancient creature, who has a very delicate way of “wounding” very much different than Rostam’s quick hit-man style.[23] The div does not “end” Rostam as efficiently as the protagonist might have done it, but introduces the intermediate being of the lithic and the riddle. The div engages in a game. Rostam wants to kill. Finish a job.

The techno-sci-story of the bacteria producing the air, earth and mitochondria,[24] is the one I like to delink-with the Rostam of Shahnameh from its chain of meanings and relations to the div that he must kill. The Rostam-stone-div compilation is about the abyssal div’s death-forming and life-forming powers. Rostam, himself coming from certain transvaluative body-buildings, is taking a nap on a billion-years-old stromatolite. Is the div’s self a form of fossilization story of the now? “Do you want to go to the mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”

The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures the great White-Div, Div-e Sepid,[25] a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.

The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.

...................................

“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy

more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*

[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized

Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts of Baja California “destitute” without asking the natices if they were misreable
*for many natives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead people there...
*the christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left [...] many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of christian hell delighted them ♥

Meloy > Steinbeck: “food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time”

better roads and bigger tourism = predatory brand of industrial leisure examplified by Cabo San Lucas (and Dubai in the middle east)

(Meloy herself part of a group) a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and ‘je suit’ literature


(clinging to) the delusion of *feral self-reliance* --> [*]fishing: citizenry in the public of resourcefulness

“do not go to the hunt carrying meat from home.”


in my work the technique of storytelling: to create a stage for a wider out-of-control explosion of gesticulating arms

...................................

    “wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need you attention. unplug your modem. slam shut your self-help books. quit standing around like a wall trout. get to work.
    invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed racoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.
    mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. east? south?
    let black widows live in your soffits.
    lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.
    admire the make midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender, know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
    crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
    take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous. we will need these things so that we may speak.
    the human mind is the child of primate evolution and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. animals have enrished this social intelligence. they give concrete expression to thoughts and images. they carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. they helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. we once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. their stories came off our tongues. we ate them. they ate us.
    close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware ont only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. ‘without mystery life shrinks,’ wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. ‘the completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.’”
(Meloy, Eating Stone p142-143)

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Jacobsen on ancient mesopotamian

*religion = response*

[*]numinous: a unique experience of *confrontation with power* not of this world, confrontation with a ‘wholly other’
--> terrifying, demonic dread, awe, sublime majesty, fascinating, demanding unconditional allegiance, etc.
*positive human response [in thought (myth, theology) + in action (culd, worship)] ==> religion*

metaphor: human psychological reaction to the experience [of numinous] by means of analogy
-in metaphors all that is shared by the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world

in attempting to interpret religious metaphors, one must seek to bring out as fully as possible its *powers to suggest and recall* the numinous
-to one generations is fresh and powerful may be to another seem old and trite
suggestiveness =/= representaive of its period --> literalness: attention to human purposes and va[...]