Monthly Archives: March 2011

Quote of the Day: “The one genuine revolution of our time”

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A Libyan rebel at the frontline near Sultan, south of Benghazi, Libya, Friday, March 18, 2011

With ongoing developments in the Middle East — and the Midwest — in mind, here’s Frye in “On Human Values”:

“Ever since since about two hundred years ago, for a variety of reasons, and for better or worse, man has embarked upon a program of revolution. In the centre of that revolutionary program I see democracy. That seems to me to be the one genuine revolution of our time. . . . Therefore, one cannot identify democracy with a form of government like republic or monarchy. It is a process, and a process which, I should say, following the terms of the French Revolution, is a pursuit of liberty, equality and fraternity. If you pursue liberty and forget about equality you get laissez-faire, which ends in a most abominable tyranny. If you pursue equality and forget about liberty, you get a totalitarian state, which also ends up in an abominable tyranny. And consequently, the central revolutionary process of our time pursues simultaneously liberty and equality.” (CW 24, 15)

(Photo: Anja Niedringhaus/AP)

Apartheid

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s8xkjG8bx4

BBC report on the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in February 1990

South Africans voted in a national referendum to end apartheid on this date in 1992.

Frye in one of the late notebooks links apartheid to the pernicious synthesis of religion and political doctrine:

The worst governments are those with double ideologies, where a political doctrine is backed by a religious one, as in Iran. Israel is better, but I’d hate to have to live even there. But South Africa’s apartheid is buttressed by a remarkably dismal Dutch Reformed creed, and fifty years ago the word “Christian” in the name of a political party meant “Roman Catholic Fascist.” (CW 6, 91)

St. Patrick’s Day

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaHMG_SvUkw

The Pogues, “Streams of Whiskey”

On the soberer side of St. Patrick’s Day (that is, any time before about 4 pm), Frye in The Great Code cites St. Patrick’s illustration of the Trinity to make a point about metaphor and doctrine:

The sense in Christianity as a faith beyond reason, which must continue to affirm even after reason gives up, is closely connected with the linguistic fact that many of the central doctrines of Christianity can be grammatically expressed only in the form metaphor.  Thus, Christ is God and man; in the Trinity three persons are one; in the Real Presence the body and blood are bread and wine. When these doctrines are rationalized as conceptions of a spiritual substance and the like, the metaphor is translated in metonymic language and “explained.” But there is a strong smell of intellectual mortality about such explanations, and sooner or later they fade away and the original metaphor reappears, as intransigent as ever. At that point we are back to the world where St. Patrick illustrates the doctrine of the Trinity with a shamrock, a use of concrete paradox that enlightens the mind by paralyzing the discursive reason, like the koan of Zen Buddhism. The doctrines may be “more” than metaphors; the point is that they can be stated only in a metaphorical this-is-that form. (CW 19, 73)

Slainte.

Bernardo Bertolucci

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_4A6d_Q-U

The actual last tango from Last Tango in Paris (Video not embedded; click on the above image and hit the YouTube link)

Today is Bernardo Bertolucci‘s birthday (born 1940).

Frye on violence and sexuality in Secular Scripture:

In romance violence and sexuality are used as rocket propulsions, so to speak, in an ascending movement. Violence becomes melodrama, the separating of heroes from violence, angels of light from giants of the dark.  Sexuality becomes a driving force with a great deal of sublimation in it. In the traditional romance, where the heroine is so often a virgin reaching her first sexual contact on the last page, the erotic feeling is sublimated for the action of the story. (CW 18, 120)