Slept right through the alarm and couldn't remember a thing about what needs to be done today. And being that it's Wednesday, there is plenty to forget. My knees hurt a little too. It's the swimming bringing on sleep and soreness. Insomnia cured; then I miss it: since when am I a person who sleeps in, forgetting? Someone told me those treated for hypertension miss their hypertension. It's also the middle of the term--where things begin to unravel. I'd like to have one term that didn't look that way. Just as I wanted one term in which the daily record remained intact. Of course it's still doable. I'm not saying it's not doable.
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from Geoffrey Hartman's "'Was it for this...?' Wordsworth and the Birth of the Gods":
"It was fear," Vico remarks, "which created gods in the world, not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves." That fear, interpreted as self-astonishment, is then connected with figurative language, or with the idiom of our ancestors the giants. Blake also linked fear to figuration, though of a distorted kind. His visionary poems show a continual theogony whose 'big bang' is the self-astonishment of an imagination that shrinks from its own power and then abdicates it to the priests. By this recession it also produces the void described in the first lines of Genesis, and a God who has to create something from that nothing. Our present religiously reduced imagination continues to exnihilate creation, that is, to understand created nature as the product of a creator who has raised it from nothing (ex nihilo). The result is a flawed image of power that has inscribed itself in domestic, political, and religious institutions--it has become a second nature, and frozen the hierarchy of human and divine. (15-6)and this is how he arrives here:
...poets have never lost sight of the exceptional character of their occupation in the greater world. I cannot say the same about recent commentators, who insist that the political content of literature has been neglected or must be our first if not exclusive concern. No pronouncement of this kind will change the fact that our own occupation as literary scholars working within a university context is as exceptional as poetry itself. The privilege that causes our concern will not be cancelled by mimic wars against the "aesthetic" element in art or art theory. Such attacks deny what is strong and peculiar about both art and art education, and so may be self-scuttling and politically the worst thing to do. (emphasis mine 19)***
Well, what of it: something from nothing?
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