Author: blablablaandgabbler
[BLA and GB GABBLER are two halves of the pen name behind the CIRCO DEL HERRERO series. Vol. 2, THE PRE-PROGRAMMING out now!]
On automata and statues:
‘Our imaginary identification with so alien a creature as a moving statue or an automaton can be profoundly satisfying, partly because that identification may spare us diverse anxieties about our place in the world, in our own bodies, about the proper location of the human. The freedom entailed by that identification lies not just in the idea of a turn against the blockage or oblivious figured by the stone, but in the fact that the living statues, for all its motion, yet tends to remain a statue, untroubled and unselfconscious (or at least we hope it does). Yet if the living statues does not disappoint us by becoming all too human (as Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle disappoints her “creator”), the fiction of animation is also likely to remind us of how alien and how disruptive of what we think of as the human are our vital energies, how catastrophic, petrifying, or mechanistic a form the entry into life can assume. Indeed, it suggest the ways in which the fantasy of the animated statue may constitute an implicit critique of our optimistic pictures of human desire, and of our wish that desire and the human could peacefully occupy the same space. The living statue may remind us that there is never any fixed space between.’
‘…Placing the question about the consciousness of stones thus in relation to the automaton fantasy, it starts to seem as if the desire to invite the inanimate into the space of the human conceals or mirrors a desire to push the human into a space of the inanimate. The face of objects granted a more than ordinary life becomes the face of Medusa.’
From The Dream of the Moving Statue by Kenneth Gross
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Quotes from “The Asexuality of Dionysus” in _Masks of Dionysus_:
“When the god is alone with the females the sexuality is not overt but latent, if we grant that the swirling dances of young and lovely superhuman women have sexual overtones. When the satyrs too are in the scene they show by their arousal and their behavior that they are not indifferent to their companions. By the second quarter of the fifth century t hey are usually no longer shown with erections and are generally less enthusiastically indecent in their actions. Perhaps it is worth remarking on what we all take for granted–there are only male satyrs. Even a detumescent satyr next to a woman or nymph embodies male sexuality.
The god, meanwhile, is never shown in art as involved in the satyrs’ sexual shenanigans. He may dance, he may drink, but he is never paired with or shown taking any interest in any of the female companions of his rout. He is not shown with an erection, but then the gods almost never are, except for a single goat-headed Pan chasing a shepherd boy and the semi-iconic pillars of Hermes we call herms, which are shown with phalli at the right height in the archaic and early classical periods.* What has not been remarked, as far as I know, is that before the change to a preference for a beardless Dionysus, the god’s member is rarely shown, even at rest, though examples can be found…[even] when he wears a shorter chiton his lions remain hidden.
But even though Dionysus, like all Greek gods, could be violent and dangerous, one suspects that the more characteristic images for the Greeks were the terrified Dionysus who takes refuge in the bosom of Thetis and the cowardly, if comic, figure who ‘gilds’ his elegant Ionic gown when confronted with the Hound of Hell in Aristophanes’ Frogs.
…
Two images may provide us with an appropriate conclusion: one is that of the embodiment of the epicene style of modern pop culture, the male leader of the pop group, who for all the violence of music, gestures, and words is neither traditionally masculine nor yet effeminate. To the established order he may be a threat but not to the adoring young, especially the young women. There is a fascination but also a certain horror about such a figure, who cannot be placed and straddles or crosses boundaries. The other image is that Dionysus in the Bacchae, who draws Pentheus over a boundary as the king is lead to make himself in to a bakkhe. In that play is the there not some of this chilling fascination about Dionysus, too, whose gender puzzles Pentheus and who moves quietly between the raucous world of the male and the female?”
*’…The aesthetic preference for the small penis must also have been a factor. The large penis and thus the phallus were comic and grotesque, inappropriate for beautiful and powerful gods….’