[...]ces)

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

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[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.

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

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(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

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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.

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“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

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    “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 values ==> [flase] sense that all has been explained and understood

human's recognition of dependency upon power not of this world --> religious expressino = transcendent hope and trust (=/= Nietzsche)


*(mesopotamian) numinous = immanence (in feature of confrontation) =/= all transcendence

mesopotamian experience of numinous power = revelation of *indwelling spirit* --> power at the center of something that caused it to be and thrive and flourish =/= Old Testament's numinous = transcendent {---> go to the experience of Moses with the burning bush: ‘God =/= bush’ --> **God happened as it were sojourn there موقتا but he is altogether transcendent, and there is nothing but a purely situational ephemeral relation with the bush}
--✕--> a mesopotamian would have experienced the burning bush differently: numinous power of the bush's being (not just “in” it) --> numinous = immanent =/= transcendent

power speaking to Moses in the desert disassociates itself from the bush and identifies itself as the god of Moses's father --> needs introduction =/= numinous power speaking to the mesopotamian Enkidu in Gilgamesh Epis does not choose to disassociate itself from it locus and so needs no introduction. --{"the sun god heard the word of his mouth; from afar, from the midst of heaven, he kept calling to him.” <-- the power is here seen as immanent in the visible sun, is what animates it and motivates it, *is the god who informs it*}

in Akkadian (the language in which epic of Gilgamesh is written): ‘the word for X = the numinous power in X’
•(word for) visible sun = sun god
•the sumerian word for sky, the visible blue dome overhead, which turns black and full of stars that make their wat across it at night = the name of the numinous power in the sky, its power and its will to be, the sky god

the form given to numinous encounter may adjust to the content revealed in it

*sometimes the form-giving imagination reads details and meaning into a form beyond what is given in simple observation* --> the numinous power in thunderstorm developed from the dark thundercloud into an enormous black eagle, but since the mighty roar of the thunder could not well be imagined as issuing from other than a lion's maw, this bird was given a lion's head

**form-giving imagination**
rings the changes on a basic meaningful form in a whole series of variations, each expressing the underlying num[...]