Italian
Gardens II
Boboli Gardens,
Piti Palace, Florence (in Winter, before and after sunset…)
Night
vision. Monochrome: a painting in dark green harried by black shadows… sliding
into the hung monochromes of night, a motley cowl of greys, pale white, powder
ash, pewter lead, indistinct, interchangeable, often changing as we watch -
backing into a still and silent black. The black we see behind things, behind
branches and trees, dwelling in the shadows of things. Not unlike another
image, a painting; night visions, a collection of scenes, a number of
paintings: the ‘black and white’ type, monochrome effects found in the
paintings of the ‘green cloister’, the Uccello frescos in Santa Maria Novella,
Florence (almost entirely restricted to two tones). Also exuding a magical,
mysterious effect, the effect we associate with black and white photography’s
distance from colour, the monochrome means of expression as both record and
transformation; here found in the green-black, pale white contrasts of the
Italian garden at night. Night vision accentuating the naturally occurring
monochrome of green and white, statue and leaf, so slipping ’naturally’ into
the black and white of our night vision. Yet in the eye of the beholder, in the
memory of the eye, this colour (its absence) is something we still feel to be a
darker shade of green…
Again, the image
before the eyes, and the echo of art history, the shadow of art history, our
own art history, our looking at images and its ghostly haunting of our sight,
as if the pantheistic, or ‘primitive’ sense of ‘the spirit of the place’ was
being made manifest… a kind of proto-image, the skiamorph beneath the endlessly
wiped-over palimpsest, the scopic Ur-text - as if the Platonic essence was in
black and white. As in the case of etchings and sketches, so much marginalia,
preparatory and disposable, that now are worth fortunes, collectors’ rarities.
Often evoking a precision of form and design that the final image, realized in
colour, cannot deliver, evoking the art of the imagination, as an art of the
ideal (again expressed in a monochrome aesthetic economy – a monochrome ecstasy).
An ‘ideal’ which the real or resulting, ‘final’ painting, teleological end
product, oft-times is hard-pressed to surpass… Like the Chinese ink-wash
painting and its ‘non-relation’ to reality. The imagination finding a kind of
‘purity’ in monochrome, a ’means of expression‘ to suit pure expression, which
is lost in the fecund possibilities of colour: exhausted possibilities,
suggested in the sketch, its lines and washes… its absences and contrasts of
black and white. Like the endless summoning of the imagination that is the
evening walk in an Italian Garden, where we are face to face again with the
incomplete images of a restricted palette, obscured vision and wraith-like
statues: statues that seem hover above us on a backdrop of dark green fraught
with black shadows. An image that is also the product of an enchantment that is
a product of absence and incompleteness, and so productive of imaginings, which
the original in plain sunlight, in full colour, might not be so generous in
providing (or in over-providing...).
Replete.
Ascetic
monochrome: monochrome aesthetics; replete with meaning…
At night replete…
Can you hear them? At
night replete with murmurs, but have the fountains not been turned off? Forest
murmurs. It is the trees that sing for us, branch and leaf sing and stutter,
mew and moan; the white noise of whispering escapes the shroud-wrapped
darkness, night sounds haunting the shadows… More likely in silence. Can you see them? At night with mummers,
silent masque, shroud-wrapped, masquerade, pale white forms haunting the
shadows… Processions of silent pilgrims, as if the park was populated by
proliferating statues, presently come to life and wandering; now lost, so many
lonely ghosts, each, together, in its hell of loneliness, wondering as to purpose
and place, lost to possibility. Visible in the dark green fringes, in shadows
of trees, of cypresses, lost in green shadow, the black green of the cedars,
the dark green of the cypresses; shadows at night, dim, barely perceived forms
flitting in and out of the tree line, between shadow-shape and grey-shape,
between shadow and lawn or fleeing along the verges of tree-lined avenues; in
and out of vision, barely-evoked pale forms, shrouds in motion on the edge of
perception; in and out of the imagination, metamorphosing out of the darkness,
thought forms, veiled inhabitants, contents occluded, on the verge of
comprehension, travelling the edges of human understanding…
Only
the wrappings are visible… the personages, the contents, obscure.
Grey
white cowls amid the dark shadows beneath the green-black foliage.
From
the corner of one’s eye: the imagined motion of a statue; the stroke of an
owl’s wing in silent flight.
Night
symbols. The space-ordering statues, punctuation of reality – night reality -
transformed into disorder, translated by time and place into formless space and
eternal duration, the suspension of narrative time - a syntactic chaos of the
spatial, a blurring of the priorities of the temporal. Leaving us… (or is it
‘we’ who have left…). Open (to…). Suggestion. The forbidden suggestion of (un)
knowability of the unknowable, the priority of description to reason, the
poetic image to the sentence, yet also present at the birth of a concept,
nebulous thought, yet unclarified (pre-Descartes, pre-Husserlian
bracketing-out, before clarity and before de-contextualisation) something still
lurking on the edge of thought, the edge of self… So also the edge of the
reasonable self, the verges of the irrational self, another self, the other
self… as a new context, in a new context; the finding of ourselves in a new
context: the losing of ourselves in a new context; the finding of our selves in
the new context; a new landscape, a new identity… So what kind of self is here,
now, present in this witnessing of phantoms marching on the drear edge of
vision, the fraught and frayed edges of representation itself?
*
Straight
versus winding geographies; the usual, default (so somewhat lazy) opposition between
West and East regarding dominant elements in garden design. And as usual the
binary is grossly over-simplified, not to say cliché-ridden (often choosing
unlike things to compare or unrepresentative moments to compare. (Like
comparing Renaissance perspective to Chinese ink wash as representative of the
two vast cultural blocks and consecutive epochs of history…; when, in reality,
all cultures show the same functional need for art as representative,
recognizable – so vaguely realistic and in colour; function: to show immortals
and tell tales as featured in the décor of home to shrine to temple -throughout
history). The central design of the Boboli, at first appears as straight and
angular, but on setting out, we quickly discover alternative routes made from
circling and bending paths; if the map looks rigidly divided into cubic
segments, then the experience of traversing the space in question reveals the
bisecting and shadowing of serpent-like paths amid the undergrowth and trees.
‘Male’ and ‘female’ routes? ‘Masculine and feminine’ trajectories (to accept
for the moment the received hierarchies and associations of cultural history);
otherwise, majority and minority passages through space… or ‘first-’ and
‘second thoughts’, the topic and its trailing comment; with the latter half of
the sequence ‘commenting’ on the former terms, harrying their illusion of clear
sight, the mathematical illusionism of the ‘straight-line’ – the very issue of
their priority? Axioms and their other… Half-hidden sinuosity accompanies the
grid that offers the direct route, a re-mapping and conceptualization of the
park (not unlike the contrast of mathematical space and real space, the
rounded-off decimal that makes quantitative measure possible and the
embarrassing possibility of a continuous infinite subdivision of any given
quality of reality). The useful-isation of reality: the cutting away of an
embarrassment of riches… (And always the originary binary; topic/comment;
subject/predicate; subject/object… with their infinite variations, echoes and
shadows – each designed to fill the aporia left by the others… but an aporia
which we suspect is originary, present at the beginning, implied, in the – in
any -original division.)
For if the evasion
of the straight line is also the evasion of measure and building; then the
straight line of the evasion is conversely the evasion of our conscious origins
as rooted in a dichotomy which is probably based upon our time consciousness
and its necessary division into presence and semi-presence, the present and its
others, the past and the future. Not non-presence; this comes later as the
parallel present, eternity (how Nature abhors a vacuum) or is foreshadowed in
the sense of the Sublime.
What
is important is that in straight geography one can see the end, the
destination, it has ‘a view’, has cross roads and the omni-present punctuation
of statues and glimpses of open spaces from a distance… the promise of open
spaces, from a distance… Whereas on a curved path, the path of an arc, or
partial circumference, ends are obscured, occluded; the near, the detail, is
not lost, foreclosed in the lure of the distant, the seducing vista, at which
(like the future) we never seem to arrive; a short range view is followed by
the sudden revelation of a full view (like Eastern gardens, moving quickly from
closed intimacy to open scene). Trading stateliness for surprise. Open and
closed senses of space also are implied by passages which are straight and
curved. Although both are, in reality, imposed, from above; designed features
imprinted on Nature’s palimpsest; that is, according to plan, the straight and
angular (right angles are not natural) seem or feel like a map of order and
control, of dominated space and tendential reason: whilst the curvy arc-type
paths suggest adaption to environment, inheritance of original paths or
contours (the memory of geography as history), the paths of deer or children,
or the repeated passage of small nocturnal animals, so including, at first
experience, a lack of fore-knowledge, a spontaneity gradual or a sudden
discovery of corners and partial views followed by revelations. Fruits of a
winding phenomenology. (Actually there are similar experiences in straight
geography, as when we get a partial view of a square or other open space,
cross-roads or pool or fountain, which then becomes an open and full
revelation…). ‘Straight versus winding’ as thought-models: ideal types;
clarity, distinctiveness, planned rigidity: and emotional models; open versus
secretive, revealed versus concealed, the instant and the gradual, prophecy and
an oracular vision of the future (a vision of where you will be), as opposed to
surprise, the unknown ; and subjunctive versus indicative, as we would like to
believe human culture is; unlimited, masterful: and as it is; limited,
near-sighted, perspective-bound… bound by its visual grammar - hyphenated.
Human culture as (the garden as culture as…) nature tamed, as … pretend nature,
pretend universality, putative eternity, as enacting human culture’s ego self-image
and myriad imitations…. Limitations in denial. Intimations of limits.
Two paths: ‘high’
and ‘low’, one suitable for formal attire, one for casual dress; unhindered
passage and the unsteady swerve owed to the hampering branch : a choice of
design; our choice to take. The one traversable by moonlight, by starlight
even, the other seeming impenetrable, inciting fear - requiring a torch, a
burning brand, actual or metaphysical…
And everywhere
(away from the open) there are openings…
Openings… Openings as inherently mysterious – as any framing
calls attention to that which is framed, denoting a cut-out space, connoting a
higher value, a sense of particular place. Concomitantly we have the
provocation of desire that results from curiousity; the prompt to interrogation,
to delve and discover - and to satisfy the yearning for an arcane knowledge
(for such is so promised…) or so we think (or rather, feel, as this really is a
matter of the senses and not of reason). Precisely mysterious, if mystery can
be precise, not founded in a veiled object, on diremption and dichotomy,
ambiguity and aporia (and if accompanied by no threat, no fear, also deliciously mysterious). The world
viewed through the gauze of incompleteness; the cause, the promise of
completion. With the outcome of the curiousity, the fruit of the desire to
know, further dividing openings into true passages, passages open to light and
image, to the passing and perception of objects and people: or into dead ends,
passage occluded, transit denied, entryways whose ends are not visible, or
imperceptible, suggestions of passage, but in appearance closed; yet, due to
this, more mysterious (because still denying knowledge, withholding final
knowledge, whilst holding out the promise of final knowledge, the promise of
conceptual satiety). This is the realm of caves and ‘grottos’, niches and
aedicules, hiding places… that are also a framing – places of concealment that
reveal, or that seem to… half-vision and suggestion; the borders of presence,
which, like our imaging of the past and future, are fraught with invention – in
one case with too much repetition (the future); in the other with too much
invention (the past). And then, of course (and again like the past and future),
there are those that are one and yet look like the other; a bad case of
combined or deceiving openings; of openings… closed).
Fore-closed… open only in the
imagination. An opening only there in its lure of content, like any frame, any
form… we fear what will emerge or what we will find if it is we that enter…
relish imagining something emerging or ourselves entering (perhaps one step
removed, in the third person, self as other, as we watch our own back
disappearing over there…)
Our world of outer openings, our
sense of them, our feel for them, what they make us feel, is as a psychological
map of the self, an analogue for our inner space, our inner experience (and who
knows which comes first, our susceptibility as due to a prior conditioning,
prior memories, a prior disposition, or is it the prompting that is prior, is
the efficient cause of the finding of new spaces of the self, of a new role, a
contextually contingent self (something our egos immediately revolt against;
something our desire to be sensitive, to commune with the Other, yearns for…
)). Every garden, then, affectively is, effectively, a map for our self; of our
mind, a mind-map, a guide, to our self, and its storage… its vaults… its
passages, potential narratives stretching back into our pasts, as well as
‘forwards’ into our unborn futures, the work of our imaginations, indeed, of
both… together… intertwined, past and future. Time map; ecstatic (using the
word in its older sense) reaching outwards, ourselves, out of ourselves, in all
directions… stretching-out in all directions…
Interlude.
A rhetoric of reflection, of incorporation and projection. Hyperbole: the projection of our subjective bias, ‘writ large’, on
the parchment of the ‘outer world’; or the exaggeration of the effect of the
outer on the inner – the flood of perception washing (away) the self. Meiosis: the finding of the self in
certain details of the enfolding landscape; or the projection, the
miniaturization, of the outer into the inner, onto the waiting screen of the
self (as with Chinese Gardens, where the world, a ‘mountain and river’ is
represented in a scene, or smaller yet, in a Bonzi arrangement; a mountain in a
pot). Litotes: (definition employing
the negative, strangely often confused with meiosis):
the denial of any connection, last defense of the ego of its central position
in the world, assertion of the (current) ‘identity’ in all its sovereignty and
duration – its self-centered, self-assured claim to eternity, to the domination
of the Eternal Present (instead of a function of its frame…). Synecdoche: part to whole… self and
surround; identity with environment;
the genius loci is in our head; it is
we who provide the spirit, we who feel
‘the spirit of the place’; personification of context… our contexualised
persona… in passing, passing… ‘passing’ as one’s self - ‘in passing’, a persona non grata to the ‘self’…
Our rhetoric of
meaning making, the tropes of the self, the meanings of the self.
From part to whole. From openings as
gates, doors, windows, in the walls of structures, or in walls as such, barriers
with enigmatic entry points, places of access, in rock walls, in stone; the
‘natural’ walls of a nymphaeum, enclosing an intimate space, an outdoor ‘room’
with a fountain or ‘rock-fed’ pool, a ‘spring’ falling from the rocks…
architectural rhetoric of quoting nature, an illusionism recreating a part of
Nature in the whole … Or the opening may be signaled by a tell-tale gap in the
vegetation that cloaks an ancient wall; the absence of natural growth as
framing an absence in stone, as one opening frames another… with the whole. And
from openings as part, we move to the park itself as an opening. To the park as
a whole. The whole read as an image or symbol, as analogue or physical allegory
of the female lower body image. As found famously in art and poetry, perhaps
most notably in Coleridge’s poem, ‘Kubla Khan’ and his pleasure garden; which
is precisely what we have here: a pleasure garden (as well as an act of
colossal showing off, on a scale of which only the Medici seem capable; the
mysteries of the garden lie in contrast to the interior decor of the ‘Medici
rooms’ - in whatever palace they happen to be found…). Ostentatious wealth and
power… With the body of the park also an ostentatious possession; the
ostentatious possession of a body – to be shared with the grateful visitor. For
the park itself may be read, be experienced, as space of opening: the opening
of a space as part of its experience; a reading of the park taken as a whole.
So in-itself (in fact for-us) a female or ‘feminine’ opening. Geo-graphically
suggested by the gentle hill from which it is made, a mound of gradual contour,
with the central line of a walkway, dividing the undergrowth, leading down to a
pool and… a fountain. Reverse view: from the place of the pool with its
bubbling fountain set in its arc of hedge and shrub, up the hill with its
parted groves of trees. A Venus-berg indeed!
As attested to by this mound of
symbolism; the place for which its own enclosure is its second meaning; both
enclosure and mound, both the frame and the content, both absence and presence.
From the ‘positive’ of space, of presence in space, to the place of enclosure,
a ‘negative’ or absent space, a room, a place… to be filled… (that is its
function, that is its prompt…). Filled. By ourselves, by our meanings (genius loci). The enclosure as place: as
charged space, charged meaning, collected, or controlled, by its framing (like
a traditional landscape painting, at once proof of possession, and prop to
identity). By the sequence of nested forms: openings and opening; a part/whole
repetition, a mise-en-abime, the elements and the meta-set, where the
enclosure, the framing, provides the absence which can contain presence, can
contain such things… which can sustain such things… as ourselves. A place of part
hole: or the whole as hole… space into which we fall… and time through which we
fall… Framed space, like a picture we can enter, like parks and gardens, put
aside for special use, for mixed and contrary use; for passing time, for play,
and for bypassing time, for the serious play which preserves the self and its
connections, its bonds of recognition, preserves them in time, and against
time, against social entropy, preserves them just in time to perpetuate
ourselves. Place of a play in which we must all take part; the play of
identity. Park as space of ritual; charmed space we have entered; park as space
for the performance of types of self. A self different from the selves we are
outside of the park. A part we play, as a part of a whole. As part in a whole.
As part of this particular kind of whole.
Orifice
as park, park as orifice; orifice as space of ritual; containing with in itself
the time of ritual, a time or temporality evoking the outside of time, better
to suture temporality, our time; stage for the re-enaction of the mythic,
recall of the ancestors, cult of the dead, all those things that are outside of
everyday time... outside of time (or so we feel…) to ‘fix’ ourselves, give us
our ‘fix’ of the trans-historical, of the cure that comes with the touch of the
eternal (or so we feel) so we feel a part of the present, part of the whole.
Identity.
(Stone orifice with dromos, the approach to the place of the
worship of the dead: the approach to the hidden history of the self).
Is our identity really so contingent
- contextual? The part in the whole. Mimetically taking on the colouration of
the whole (the place in which we find ourselves, find a version of our selves).
For otherwise do we not fall into the trap of a (Neo-)romantic ‘authenticity’?
An obsession with a ‘true’ self and our quest for this chimera: as opposed to
the context-bound passage of consecutive selves, a succession of identities,
each as ‘true’ as the others… a succession of passing ghosts, of passing
statues… The parts in the whole. Caught between the lure of openings and being
part of an opening. Between perceiving and inhabiting. Between nature as desire
for the object and Nature as our ecology and home. Where else to situate the
spirit of the place? Locative spirit, earth-bound ghost, a foot in both camps;
like nature, as once (to us) suggesting specific beings and universal Being; at
once here and now, the matter of living things and the frame; geology too, with
its near mythic temporal periods, it too is nature: and Nature too (upper case)
is the name we give the universal that lifts ‘above’ the particular, the
particular culture, time bound and annoyingly, pitifully, real. ‘Nature’ as
synonym for eternity, trans-historical and a-temporal (home to axioms as much
as gods). Nature as… nature worship; for nature worship too is to be found
here, the nature hidden behind the historical culture of the park, tamed
nature, hidden Nature... The Nature of the Romantics and today’s Neo-romantics,
the age–old ‘Nature-first’ philosophy continued (as old a philosophy as the
first philosophers, East or West) the Fall we love to fall for... The eternal
truths revealed only in the depths of the grotto, deep in the fissure, buried
in the cave - and only to those first driven temporarily insane… the possessed.
Genius loci incarnate. Space incarnate.
Mother Nature.
Yet the possession can be temporary
(like our visit to the park): can be... provisional. At once necessary and
in-sufficient (like our laws of Nature, man-made - like the totems that
preceded them). Permitting poetry to be part of perception. ‘Nature’ as space,
also leads us here, to the eternal, and to the feminine. Whence the version or
definition in this context, the vision in this frame, this opening… the
eternal, mythic, and feminine. We remember ‘the eternal feminine’ (Goethe),
‘drawing us upwards…’ the ‘civilising influence’, the ‘courtly love’ tradition
in lyric poetry, the Lady lifts the Lord….
The
space of the park, its mysteries, its call to the imagination, its traverses
and windings, its openings and its being as the sense of an ‘opening’: a ritual
space and time become home to all of this, to all of these… to all of us… who
would tread there…
Tread the paths within the opening…
As
in ritual (as in the garden space, with the escape from everyday time and work
time) the ‘arrow of time’ is apparently stilled or reversed, the past is called
to the foreground, ‘recreated’ or quoted, re-enacted (from myth narratives
performed in ritual to the past recalled of the solitary settling of accounts
in tranquility). Re-enacted in order precisely for the present to be renewed,
and the arrow to continue in flight… Much as traditional, marked period ritual
provides the space-time for the repair and renewal of cultural identity,
community and continuity, and ‘RNR’ does for our physical self, our physiology
- for our physical and mental stamina, material home to our cultural or social
selves in their myriad continuities (and discontinuities)…
Tread the boards, the boards of a
stage,
On
opening night…
A stage…
Outside of everyday culture. But in
reality only its intensification… a high point, framed, ‘high culture’, art
culture, as is the case with all rituality (the pre-history of art history) an
improbable denial. For the deferral, the placing ‘outside’, is a
sleight-of-hand, but one in which we half-believe… knowing that belief bring
efficacy in solace and community, regardless of fact (for what use is a fact…
alone). For in rituality we think we are elsewhere; but in actuality inhabit a
stage, a space, a time and a self (a temporality). All of which lies upon a
gradient of emotional intensification, a range of ritual repetitions (and what
repetition does not carry some ritual force) from our everyday ritualized
meetings and moments, our life of quotidian recognition, to our larger, and
more intense, more binding, identity exchange rituals… (more private, more …
cult like… culminating in our cult of… one). So if it is that we imagine that
we commune with the past, in one sense we are right, for, in actuality, it is
the past that we evoke: but only our own past, ‘the rest … is history’; our
history, consisting of our learnt, but not experienced, history, filling in the
gaps - our psychological preparation, as in the placebo… (Something) Not there
but needed. A deeply buried foundation, the bedrock of our daytime edifice, the
granite upon which we have built (ourselves…) history, our personal
pre-history; a metalepsis, the
(distant) cause of our (present) effect. The slippage between history and myth
(in parallel with the slippage between the here and now and its
generalisations, between nature and Nature, ‘beings’ or ‘Being’, between the
Eternal Present and eternity…). Our debt to the past, recent and distant. And
then we are back in the realm of ancestor worship, of the cults of the dead…
but what else is our drive to visit the places of the dead, our desire to
haunt… the haunted places of the past… to be again one with the ghosts, our
ghosts (for whose else would they be… you didn’t think that they were… did
you…?). The dead, undead. Ritual meeting. In the places of the dead. Ritual
visitation.
Night
vision. (The park as pentagram.) Opening… conjuration.
Openings… back into ourselves.
Conjuration… of our selves.
Opening… of the room of the self as
‘feminine.’
Conjuration… of our debt to a higher
and deeper part of our selves.
Back to the places we never knew we
had…
(To rethink the places we know we
have…)
*
Given the persistent negative use of
the female lower body image in visual culture (paralleling its linguistic use
as a negative comparative), a yet more positive re-conceptualising seems
necessary. Not least when we find many images of the ‘vagina dentata’ type, not
least in science fiction, a genre we also look to for the re-imagining of many
current issues from the point of view of the future, the philosophical use of a
popular genre, the most popular mode of narrative presentation in popular
culture (Blade Runner, Alien, Solaris…). Yet what we all too often see is fear of the feminine
expressed in the ‘lower body’ type image as threat (note the apposite images in
block buster science fiction: Return of
the Jedi, Aliens, Predator, et al). Given the popularity
of such horror images, the re-conceptualisation of the female lower body image
as positive through the affinity to ritual (and most certainly the pleasure
garden) would be a useful corrective. And if some rituals are destructive
(sacrifice of the Other, the pogrom, scapegoating) nevertheless the majority
are constructive and essential to our survival as cultural entities. Culture,
after all, is but a matter of repetition; with time-suturing and affect
exchange as the basic unit of repetition, ritual, key to the effectiveness of
identity renewal… ‘individual’ and social, in common (the manufacture of
comm-unity). Moreover in matters of gendered space in general, space is usually
read as female, time as male, narrative; forwards motion are traditionally read
as active, space, inert, as female… But in the case of ritual as put aside
space and time, as a different kind of time, one not necessarily narrative
(though often containing sacred narratives, myths, etc.). If ritual may contain
or enable the presence of special narratives, of myth-like tales and analogies,
as outside of time or found within the other time evoked by ritual, then space
need not be ‘female’, nor time gendered as ‘male’… Enabled by limitations,
space/time limitations (framed events), ritual actions and events and festivals
rely on other (definable as ‘opposite’) kinds of time and space and so their
gender tagging. So if the notion of space/time as neutral is empirically sound;
yet our received notions of time/space (their Indirect Lexical Associations,
the key to linguistic and cultural cohesion or meaning making) are gendered and
this tagging, a matter of received history, cannot be easily avoided; but may
be used, or turned (appropriated), not least in new context. Identity of
course, includes gender (both fundamental and disputable) so it is also
important to work through, or work with this received pattern, binary or set of
associations as historically received. A beginning point from which we may go
elsewhere. For framed space/time (the space-time of ritual), as of genius loci (the room of the self), may
indeed, be strategically read as ‘female’ or ‘feminine’, that is, keeping their
traditional gender tagging (rooms, containers) as protecting, enabling,
birthing as positive. Further, not least with respect to the function of ritual
regarding identity, as anti-entropy, preserving and renewing, whilst asserting
(an in this context not forgetting that Janus-faced rituality also sustains the
pogrom, ethnic cleansing and the sacrifice of the Other… also for identity
exchange, or community self-recognition). So ritual space/time may easily be
read as ‘female’ as compared to ‘male’ historical space/time (again, the
quotations marks are important as they indicate received notions or
associations and not ‘essential’ or empirical connections…). If nurturing and
caring, however, are still largely (actually) female associated work or
pursuits, then the expansion of these into the functions of ritual also may
claim rituality as strategically ‘feminine’. And if the time/space evoked in
ritual is other to history, then eternity has already been tagged ‘feminine’.
The sacred, support of value in the world, has been wrested from the clutches
of a jealous male god. Into whose hands, how then bestowed, and to what end, is
another question…
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2017