31 Days: Man or astroman
Aug. 12th, 2005 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia(http://www.livejournal.com/users/petronia/tag/31days)
Rather, "body or astral body?" Let us all close our eyes and pretend this is a fanfic.
***
i) Memory is an inculcated, latent disposition of cerebral matter, liable to be excited into a specific holding pattern of neural impulses. Upon his arrival in a newly emptied body the kanshousha must seal away the parts of the brain that have already been used, or risk contamination. Yet the soul itself carries memory from body to body like a stain, or a disease. Is memory the mark of the insubstantial left on the substantial, or of the substantial on the insubstantial?
ii) Strictly speaking it is not the memory of injustices suffered that fuels souls engaged in the Dark War, but nen – otherwise, human Will. The disruption caused by Will of the order toward which the system in/ex/tends is mysterious; only demiurgical intervention is sufficient to neutralize it. Perhaps it is after all necessary. Yet accepting this does not provide us with a definition of the first cause.
iii) A paradox: how do we speak of "Kagetora's soul" without our chain of reference doubling back to a historical body that is now dust? Where is the ontological divide between the one who says "mine", and the one thus owned? As well ignore that it was Naoe Nobutsuna's blood that ran from the gash on Tachibana Yoshiaki's wrist.
iv) A positive definition of karma is that it is the individuating quality of a soul, as it remains - sine qua non - even after impurities such as memory have been removed. However each action performed in the Six Worlds adds to the soul's karma. Is not the very essence of the soul susceptible to change, then? And what of the impurities? Where is the beloved in this?
v) The tragedy is that the body does not introduce the soul to temporality. We are all no more than the foam that forms on the surface of a rushing river.
vi) Without memory it is easy to lose oneself in baseless anxiety. Takaya learns eventually that the dichotomy between "himself" and "Kagetora" is false, and what he had identified as "Kagetora" is doubly false, constructed as it was from external intent deformed and misread; an image of an image. The irony lies in the fact that it is "Takaya" who is actuated by his striving toward this non-existent self. Action completes the synthesis of soul and body. What would "Kagetora" be without "Takaya"?
vii) An axiom: "Ougi Takaya" is not the name of a body but of an incarnation (that is, of an action). The child in the womb was nameless.
viii) In truth the union of soul and body establishes a state of belonging of one substance to the other in such a fashion that neither assumes nor subsumes the other, but is susceptible: the soul of being touched by the body, and the body by the soul. What touch communicates is not object but force. We speak of pulsion, impression, expression, compulsion. The etymological root of emotion is motion. Bodies brush and ride up against each other, come into fleeting contact, merge, part. No greater reality exists than the one in which Tachibana Yoshiaki caresses Ougi Takaya's skin with his hands and tastes his secretions with his tongue. The body is the soul's fatal weakness; it is its salvation.
***
Notes:
This was one of the first pieces I wrote for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
31_days, which... yeah. Some weeks ago I mentioned spotting an essay collection at the Contemporary Art Museum bookstore that reminded me of Mirage of Blaze. It was 58 Indices sur le corps (et Extension de l'âme) by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. I eventually went back and bought it, with the vague idea that I could rip it off for fanfiction because seriously, who would know? XD;;; It transpired that Nancy's post-Derridean exegeses of the Cartesian body/mind(soul) dichotomy were such a useful framework for thinking about Mirage of Blaze that I ended up using his "indicative" structure as a springboard for my own thing.
...I could come up with many more of these, actually. Yes, I know I'm on a whole lotta crack.
***
Rather, "body or astral body?" Let us all close our eyes and pretend this is a fanfic.
***
i) Memory is an inculcated, latent disposition of cerebral matter, liable to be excited into a specific holding pattern of neural impulses. Upon his arrival in a newly emptied body the kanshousha must seal away the parts of the brain that have already been used, or risk contamination. Yet the soul itself carries memory from body to body like a stain, or a disease. Is memory the mark of the insubstantial left on the substantial, or of the substantial on the insubstantial?
ii) Strictly speaking it is not the memory of injustices suffered that fuels souls engaged in the Dark War, but nen – otherwise, human Will. The disruption caused by Will of the order toward which the system in/ex/tends is mysterious; only demiurgical intervention is sufficient to neutralize it. Perhaps it is after all necessary. Yet accepting this does not provide us with a definition of the first cause.
iii) A paradox: how do we speak of "Kagetora's soul" without our chain of reference doubling back to a historical body that is now dust? Where is the ontological divide between the one who says "mine", and the one thus owned? As well ignore that it was Naoe Nobutsuna's blood that ran from the gash on Tachibana Yoshiaki's wrist.
iv) A positive definition of karma is that it is the individuating quality of a soul, as it remains - sine qua non - even after impurities such as memory have been removed. However each action performed in the Six Worlds adds to the soul's karma. Is not the very essence of the soul susceptible to change, then? And what of the impurities? Where is the beloved in this?
v) The tragedy is that the body does not introduce the soul to temporality. We are all no more than the foam that forms on the surface of a rushing river.
vi) Without memory it is easy to lose oneself in baseless anxiety. Takaya learns eventually that the dichotomy between "himself" and "Kagetora" is false, and what he had identified as "Kagetora" is doubly false, constructed as it was from external intent deformed and misread; an image of an image. The irony lies in the fact that it is "Takaya" who is actuated by his striving toward this non-existent self. Action completes the synthesis of soul and body. What would "Kagetora" be without "Takaya"?
vii) An axiom: "Ougi Takaya" is not the name of a body but of an incarnation (that is, of an action). The child in the womb was nameless.
viii) In truth the union of soul and body establishes a state of belonging of one substance to the other in such a fashion that neither assumes nor subsumes the other, but is susceptible: the soul of being touched by the body, and the body by the soul. What touch communicates is not object but force. We speak of pulsion, impression, expression, compulsion. The etymological root of emotion is motion. Bodies brush and ride up against each other, come into fleeting contact, merge, part. No greater reality exists than the one in which Tachibana Yoshiaki caresses Ougi Takaya's skin with his hands and tastes his secretions with his tongue. The body is the soul's fatal weakness; it is its salvation.
***
Notes:
This was one of the first pieces I wrote for
31_days, which... yeah. Some weeks ago I mentioned spotting an essay collection at the Contemporary Art Museum bookstore that reminded me of Mirage of Blaze. It was 58 Indices sur le corps (et Extension de l'âme) by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. I eventually went back and bought it, with the vague idea that I could rip it off for fanfiction because seriously, who would know? XD;;; It transpired that Nancy's post-Derridean exegeses of the Cartesian body/mind(soul) dichotomy were such a useful framework for thinking about Mirage of Blaze that I ended up using his "indicative" structure as a springboard for my own thing. ...I could come up with many more of these, actually. Yes, I know I'm on a whole lotta crack.
***
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 12:03 pm (UTC)That said, you are also so damned brill it hurts. <3 VII is just beautiful.
(p.s. - I think you added an extra 'e' to 'temporality' in V?)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 03:45 pm (UTC)(And thanks, fixed. XD)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-12 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-13 05:59 am (UTC)