tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32723577.post2221442376149525993..comments2023-10-03T17:37:08.845+02:00Comments on documents: Malefic's Mirrors IIvalterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00239129101855356246noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32723577.post-88069348758143130972007-09-06T04:12:00.000+02:002007-09-06T04:12:00.000+02:00As a medievalist, my take on this moment is automa...As a medievalist, my take on this moment is automatically refracted through the specular origination of love in the _Roman de la Rose_: <BR/><BR/>"This is the perilous mirror where proud Narcissus looked at his face and his bright eyes, and afterwards lay stretched out in death. Whoever looks at himself in this mirror can have no help or remedy against seeing something which promptly causes him to fall in love . . . here sense and moderation are of no use, and there is only the total will to love [Ci est d'amer volenté pure]." <BR/><BR/>Here, <I>falling</I> in love, into another abyss, happens in a moment of simultaneously seeing one's reflection, like Narcissus, as another being, and seeing <I>something else</I>, i.e. the Rose, as later described, <I>reflected in the reflection</I>, in the ambivalent space of one's own/the other's eyes. So that I would say that reflection here serves as a kind of mystical joining of self and world, being and image, the who and the what, in a manner that Agamben makes sense of: "Seeing something simply in its being-thus -- irreparable, but not for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason contingent -- is love."<BR/><BR/>Which makes the absence of a <I>something else</I> all the more significant in Xasthur's mirror. There is nothing to see <I>in</I> the eyes of his "mirror master." Instead he sees through them and in that through-seeing the <I>mirror</I>, at once the inert object and specularity itself, not Satan or some other being, stares back at him. But is this not another kind of falling in love, not the kind of falling in love that also falls in love with love, but a love that falls in love with falling, that is pure falling, love subtracted of all objects of love, a love whose only sign is its transformation, as a mere attendant to it, of a thing (mirror) into a being (something staring back into onself)? Cf. Dominic's "detached from any possible referent in the world of the living."Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32723577.post-48687399712023070572007-09-02T23:09:00.000+02:002007-09-02T23:09:00.000+02:00I wrote on this earlier:A world of the dead that d...I wrote on this <A HREF="http://codepoetics.com/poetix/?m=200702" REL="nofollow">earlier</A>:<BR/><BR/>A world of the dead that despises and rejects that of the living: such is the allegiance of the misanthropist without reserve. Xasthur’s Telepathic with the Deceased engages the same conceit: “Haters of life are telepathic with the deceased. / Fragments of failure, some said it was art, for it only bears a meaning when all life is torn apart”. Tele-antipathy, the “spooky action at a distance” of “the dying and…the dead”: it is unsurprising that a recurring theme in Xasthur’s lyrics and song titles is that of projection. Total misanthropy forces a split in the human self, a self-projection into the realm of the inhuman - or is it a projection from that realm into the human world?<BR/><BR/>Mirrors for Xasthur have a double significance, both as portals to the land of the dead and as multipliers of appearances holding the living captive: they establish a geometry of reflections which is both the prison of reality and the transcendental “screen” beyond which lies a universe of discord and unthinkable chaos. Is the horror which looks back at you from the mirror a projection from the malevolent beyond, or the simple truth of your all-too-human existence? The answer must be “both”: the image captured by the mirror is both veridical reflection and projection from/into the land of the dead, detached from any possible referent in the world of the living.Dominichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17939466948420020186noreply@blogger.com