“A poem has nothing to recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is that from which it wrenches away as a poem. If we speak of ‘poetic emotion’- we must think of its cognate emoi, whose etymology indicates the absence or deprivation of strength.”
- Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience: Two Poems by Paul Celan
“Children play a significant role in mediating between the worlds of the dead and living, and each instance of haunting is a re-acquaintance with a childlike refusal to understand how people can suddenly stop existing.
Haunted houses are characteristically confronted and explored by young women, as if they have a particular responsibility for resolving the problems of habitation gone wrong and bring a courageous capacity for entering into a relationship with a troubled past.”
“In recent years films about haunting and its locales have proliferated.
‘Ghosts’ and the dark places where they dwell have served as powerful metaphors for persistent themes of loss, memory, retribution and confrontation with unacknowledged and unresolved histories.
The relative modernity of the ghost story and its currency in popular cinema could be attributable to a need to acknowledge what has been consistently repressed in the construction of everyday bourgeois culture and its environments.
One of the features of the haunted house film is the uncanny animation of the house and its interiors; the flexing of margins and the refusal of objects to stay stored in place or within the limits of their customary significance…
The house conceals a truth that has to be symptomatically worked out. The mundane domestic details have to be brought into focus by their spectral inflection, made strange in order to reveal what is troubling them.”
- Barry Curtis, Dark Places: the Haunted House in Film
“We live in a society where the indirect, the difficult, the implicit are not valued…
Subtlety and depth require tact, time, and sheer hard work, not likely to find favor in a culture that demands instant gratification, prefers the loud and the blatant over the quiet and tentative, and is impatient of the idea that nothing good is achieved without a battle. That’s not propitious for poetry, and it’s that we should hope to be able to change.”
- Iain McGilchrist, author of “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/240250
notes from kristeva’s Black Sun on christianity and the idea of christ - based on holbein’s grim depiction of christ’s corpse.
i like the idea of a christianity that places more emphasis on christ’s death than on his being “born again.”
“the death of Christ offers imaginary support to the nonrepresentable catastrophic anguish distinctive of melancholy persons. It is well known that the so-called ‘depressive’ stage is essential to the child’s access to the realm of symbols and linguistic signs. Such a depression - parting sadness as the necessary condition for the representation of any absent thing - reverts to and accompanies our symbolic activities unless exaltation, its opposite, reappropriates them.
A suspense of meaning, a darkness without hope, a recession of perspective including that of life, then reawwaken within the memory the recolleciton of traumatic partings and thrust us into a state of withdrawl. ‘Father, why have you deserted me?’
Moreover, serious depression or paroxismal clinical melancholia represents a true hell for modern individuals, convinced as they are that they must and can realize all their desires of objects and values. The Christly dereliction presents that hell with an imaginary elaboration; it provides the subject with an echo of its unbearable moments when meaning was lost, when the meaning of life was lost.
Here as elsewhere, death - that of the old body making room for the new, death to oneself for the sake of glory, death of the old man for the sake of the spiritual body - lies at the center of the experience.”
