Then and now

The sacrifice of men or animals on whom the burden of sin of the whole community is loaded is something quite different. We know of such acts from primitive cultures too.[...]They also have nothing to do with the materialistic and mechanistic thinking which seems so natural to us. That which distinguishes them from cult practices per se is an idea which must seem just as absurd to the scholarly mind of our day as all cultic matters do. This is the stupendous idea of redemption through a life which has taken upon itself the guilt of all.

This is a passage from Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult. Otto was a German writer, and I'm reading him in translation, of course. 

The book is primarily about the Greek god of harvest, winemaking, fruit, fertility, ritual madness...It's a long and entertaining list. Greek, but very likely adopted from peoples elsewhere in Eastern Europe or Asia Minor. 

Otto does not shy away from the fact that the Greeks, like most people of their era, did not just worship their gods in the temple but made sacrifices to them, including human sacrifice. From our present perspective the practice looks barbaric. And I certainly wouldn't advocate bringing it back. But they had an understanding of what they were doing and why they were doing it.

Funny ha-ha

Twenty or so years ago I remember a debate flaring up about whether women are funny. Jerry Lewis was quoted as saying there were no funny women comedians. Christopher Hitchens went into a whole evo-psych thing about how humor was just a male tool for finding a mate or something. New Atheists, man.

Complicating this argument is the fact that most women who think they're funny aren't. The same holds true for men who think they're funny. The sexes may differ in the various ways they're unfunny, but it's hardly an earthshaking difference. Even funny people aren't all the time. As in baseball, anyone hitting one third of the time is doing pretty well.

Mu see 'm

A couple of recent articles seem to resonate with each other for me. There's this one:

This collective purpose was of a peculiar, negative sort. It required us to deny positive, substantive goods that make life worthwhile, in particular those of human connection. Young children remained isolated or masked through two years of crucial social development; dying grandparents were denied the company of loved ones. The effect was a kind of enforced nihilism. We had to be actively detached, by police power if necessary, from sources of meaning that might call into question the bureaucratic fixation on a few narrow metrics. In our acquiescence in this, we can discern the influence of Thomas Hobbes in forming our spiritual horizon.

And then this one:

Instead, over the last 20 years the museums and galleries, universities, media, agencies, and foundations moved to shore themselves up as the rightful experts on art by asserting that an artwork is not a site of numerous meanings but that which contains a single blunt message. One receives such a message publicly, not in private. It is delivered with the expectation of being acquired whole, and of being understood quite as the artist intended. This is utilitarian art: Its value lies not in itself but in its moral or political content. The majority of artists supported and promoted by the private foundations and government agencies, universities, and galleries today produce work of this kind.

Our age, especially in the last couple of years, does seem to have been possessed by a Hobbesian gloom. A sense that the people must be guided by their betters, lest their minds be full of folly and their lives be nasty, brutish, and short. Hence the forced curtailing of social and commercial activities, the obsession with controlling information and labeling some of it "misinformation, etc.

Under these circumstances it's tempting to attempt to build a priestly class that can speak to an for the rest, especially if you could be in that class. Honestly it's no surprise at al art has fallen.

Dimensional

 

Marisol Escobar was a Venezuelan artist who also worked in France and the US. She was justly celebrated in the 1960s, faded from public view after that, and then was justly revived. She passed away about six years ago.

You might say that her sculptures were influenced by Picasso. Probably more accurate to say that she saw the liberty that was possible with modern art, and took full advantage of it. Her work has a healthy sense of play.

A report

 

This was kind of a surprise, and a pleasant one. Mainly because Eno has been involved in some way or another with all of U2's albums since 1985, and Bono has been very exhibitionistic about Ukraine. Which is probably a matter of chasing relevance as time goes on. 

Of course everyone very publicly and loudly agreeing on something without brooking any opposition isn't limited to one issue. It's gotten to be a norm in the past few years.

Rise and fall

Someone I know and ran into today had heard about the heat. I'd heard about it too, from a bank teller yesterday, who'd told me they were talking about it hitting 90. So the friend I met today was looking to get all their errands done before it got too hot. (Laundry was out. She didn't want to get caught in a laundromat if it would be subtropical outside.)

I don't know if it actually hit the nineties. It did get pretty hot, enough to make you get a little hazy, when I was coming home from grocery shopping. And now that we're well into night it feels a little more reasonable, which is a relief.

My parties have all the big names and I greet them with the widest smile

The subject of celebrity didn't used to interest me much, at least not within itself. It just seemed to be something that was there, not really worth questioning or celebrating.

If I think about it more, it's because things have changed all around. Given a wider array of platforms, famous people are sharing their opinions much more often on average than they used to. And to a creepy extent, they all seem to have the same opinions. You get the occasional outlier, like Evangeline Lilly supporting the Canadian truckers (a gutsy choice, and I wonder if the baffling amount of hate she and her character got when she starred on Lost helped prep her.) But by and large you hear the same things, often the same exact words.

Caitlin Johnstone has noticed this phenomenon as well, and some of the examples she cites are fairly appalling. She has a theory to explain it as well. There is, I'm sure, something to the idea that they've all basically been rewarded by the system, and so are happy to call for more of it. Some of it is simple conformity as well. Once your social circle has been narrowed down to a certain elite set it takes a certain strength of character to refrain from copying them.

It's shortsighted, though. What passes for leftism in the present basically amounts to "what if the Cultural Revolution but corporate-friendly." And when the peasantry is becoming more beset, you may live to regret declaring yourself a Bourbon.