To: George Coyne who wrote (63752 ) 12/17/1999 12:30:00 PM From: lorrie coey Respond to
Hmm...Make that, "maleness is Nature's AfterBirth."knowledge-power , and particularly the father's Law, his prohibition against a son's "theft" of that power for himself. Fire is logos because it is a substance that hides within objects, within the warm human body, and which upon flashing out, transforms the world, illuminates it, destroys it. *see link below, if ya want. carlisle-www.army.mil Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance... It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. (Bachelard 7)Empedocles ended his own life by throwing himself into a volcano expressing his "desire to change, to speed up the passage of time, to bring all of life to its conclusion" to be consumed by Nature. In the alchemical texts where these images enter the reveries of science, such possession of the body is obviously sexual. Masculinity is defined in terms of its secret, inner power, but correspondingly becomes obsessed with the containment of this consuming, digestive fire. Sexual desire is, as ever, oral as well as genital, conflated with the infant's desire to eat the maternal body. The mind itself becomes a stomach, consuming the world as it ingests more and more knowledge, ever classifying, naming, subsuming Nature to logos and ego... To consume the world is to contain it, to possess it rather than to come into an equal relation with it. freenet.msp.mn.us
