Thursday, November 16, 2006

Coiled

In the vision behind my vision I see a helmet of hair of tightly coiled serpents. They are alive but they are the colour of alabaster. Why are they tightly coiled around her statuesque head? Do they grow from her scalp or do they merely cling to her head? What do they eat? Realism is not the point of myth, I remind myself.

As I move somnolently through the world of banking and investment, I hear hissing. It is like my muse is calling. In this number-drenched world of income, or how we survive communally.

Do an aesthetic of art and an aesthetic of finance arise from the same roots?

What does the Gorgon want? Why is she imaging here?

Writhing, coiling in these numbered halls
papered with endless account statements...

5 comments:

  1. "Aesthetic of finance" -- I'm sure of it, on layers I haven't yet learned to read. Ebbs and flows, rhythms, figure/ground relationships. But it can be used as such a weapon (then again, so can art). And it can be used as a healing mechanism (ditto).

    Medusa can live as alabaster, but Midas cannot live as gold....

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  2. I love the mordant, smoldering feeling from your last bit and love this bit, too. It's vivid and there's something Jungian about it - I share the mindset or the image or the archetype. Tell me, do you know Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me To the End of Love?" When I clicked on your Xanga name this morning, that song erupted in my mind, and I loved it. You are that beauitiful femme bohemme - or however you can say that appropriately in French. We have not forgotten you :-)

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  3. e_journeys, exploring the world of finance in this way is difficult for an anti-Capitalist like myself, but it is interesting and may prove fruitful. I hadn't thought of aligning the Greek myths of Medusa and Midas, and that's giving my pause for thought too. I'm not sure if I can or seek to turn the world of moneyed numbers into a poem of energies... rather, plummeting the roots of both as semiotic systems of a language that structures us, our patterns, our communities, as an aestheric that shapes...

    Whether any of that makes sense, I don't know! Thanks for the great comment.

    Boureemusique, you come bringing an eloquence and ineffable sense of the love-note with you... for what else is a comment? Even when it's a discussion, or a hate-note, comments are still expressions of love-notes to each other. I do know Cohen's 'Dance' and adore his poetry, songs, singing, life... meaning what a wonderful compliment. I continue to read you, and must remember to drop in more often to say so... :-)

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  4. the power in the collision of myth and memory, of need and desire, of necessity and dream, of fantasy and nightmare. You capture those intensive tensions...

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  5. Narrator, I like that, 'intensive tensions'... thank you.

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