Ms. Poiesis

Photographer: Anton Petukhov

Is the American Empire on the Brink of Collapse?

By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash. Posted March 24, 2007.

U.S. military expert Chalmers Johnson argues the catastrophe in Iraq and the staggering cost of running a military that stretches across 130 countries on 737 bases may finally cost America its empire.

“I believe that we’re close to a tipping point right now. What happened to the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 could easily be happening to us for essentially the same reasons. Imperial overreach, inability to reform, rigid economic ideology. … The world’s balance of power didn’t change one iota on September 11, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that’s what we did”. — Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Has our “leadership” traded democracy for empire? Have their over-bloated egos convinced them that they are the world’s newly crowned colonial kings? Author Chalmers Johnson is certainly not given to wearing rose-colored glasses. As he concludes in his newest book, Nemesis: “… my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences.”

Johnson’s well-argued, persuasive argument draws on the economic, military, and political lessons of the past, which may be just what’s needed to wake up Americans in time to change course. In this interview, he explained his hopes and fears for contemporary America.

Read more here.

The Emperor tarot

The Emperor symbolizes the desire to rule over one’s surroundings, and its appearance in a reading often suggests that the subject needs to accept that some things may not be controllable, and others may not benefit from being controlled.

The Emperor is Key Four of the Major Arcana. Fours are stable numbers; four walls, four seasons, four corners. It takes a massive amount of energy, comparatively, to move them. The strength of The Emperor is the stability he brings. The weakness is the risk of stagnation.

The Emperor is connected to Key 13, Death, through its cross sum (the sum of the digits). Emperors maintain their power through death and through their relationship with the other 13 of the tarot; The Queens (who legitimate their rule and bear their heirs). He is also strongly associated with Life; his scepter is an ankh, the symbol of life. But he is in the mountains, separated from the pulse of life. The sign of the Emperor is associated with the sun sign of Aries. Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and is the leader. The Emperor, like Aries, is fiery, powerful, authoritative and very egotistical.

King Minos is another aspect of this archetypal image. He was, mostly, a good king, (considered so wise he is, according to some, one of the judges of the dead), who increased and protected Crete for many years. But he took his kingdom by means of a trick. He and his brothers disputed who should rule, and he prayed to Poseidon to send a sign from the sea that he was the chosen of the gods, which he promised to immediately sacrifice to the god. Poseidon sent a magnificent bull, and Minos was proclaimed king. But he balked at fulfilling his promise to slay the animal, and substituted a bull from his own herds. In so doing, as Joseph Campbell put it he “converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investiture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person. The return of the bull should have symbolized his absolutely selfless submission to the functions of his role.” (Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces 15 (2nd ed. 1968)). And the consequences were catastrophic; Poseidon afflicted the Cretan queen, Pasiphae, with an unquenchable desire for the bull. Their coupling produced the Minotaur, who was fed on human flesh.

Slaying the Minotaur

The Emperor’s power and apparent stability bring great comfort, self worth, power. But the danger, as Minos discovered, is that we may gain a sense of personal entitlement beyond our actual rights. That way leads corruption, material or spiritual. It also, to quote an old television show, makes the people “cr[y] out for a hero.”

Generally, when the Emperor appears in a spread, he is something to be overcome. Some rigidity of thinking, some inflexibility of approach, some external force keeping us from our destiny. A comforting myth the Querant has outgrown. Sometimes, he represents the exterior forces we must accommodate. Sometimes, he is the superego. The two rams on each sides of his throne represent Aries presenting him as a powerful dictator for his time and showing his potent thirst for conquering in war. (Source: Wikipedia)

Panda nap

“What do you guys want?”

Dog pack attack

“We’re tired”

“Let’s check out the action over here …”

Coco

“I’m too tired today – can’t possibly work”

I recently became aware of this website by Elena Filatova, a Ukrainian woman who takes bike trips through the countryside poisoned by the Chernobyl explosion in 1984. Her travelogue is fascinating; check it out here.

Reactor 4 with sarcophagus

Given the proliferation of Starbucks in Vancouver and around the globe, I found this “hot document” about the company’s loss of soul interesting. Check it out here.

By Martha Kearney

“The Chapman Brothers first hit the British art scene with Disasters of War in 1993, their sculptural re-working of the 19th century Spanish artist Francicso de Goya’s epic series of etchings Desastres de la Guerra. Ever since, Goya has remained a steady influence on their work. In Bad Art for Bad People, the first big show to examine their work, there is a large Goyaesque tree called Sex hung with the skeletons of soldiers from the earlier Disasters of War in an advanced state of decay. The other major sculpture in the room – an inflatable lilo featuring a couple having sex is made of bronze, and is entitled intriguingly, Death.

Chapman brothers, detail from Explaining Christians to Dinosaurs 2003

The Tate Liverpool exhibition traces the artistic journey of the Chapman Brothers. It’s centrepiece is perhaps the notoriously controversial Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model, one of a collection of child mannequins where sexual organs are put in place of more familiar facial features, which hit the headlines in 1997 after its unveiling at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition. Later works include the exotic sculptures of The Chapman Family Collection with their parody of McDonalds and globalisation. For those seeking their inner child, Hell Sixty-Five Million Years BC is the best room to explore. This is where the dinosaurs who got left behind live. Mostly made from cardboard, one even from an old Mitsubishi VHS box, there are a few made from bronze for the detectives amongst us to hunt down.”

Chapman brothers, installation Bad Art for Bad People

“Wrestling with earlier artists and with history, trying to get beyond cliche and to say something if not original then at least fresh, they keep our perversities alive – which is pretty much the best an artist, or even a pair of artists, can attempt to do”. (Anthony Searle)

· Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Bad Art For Bad People is at Tate Liverpool until March 4.

Read more here and here.
See a slide show of work from the Tate Gallery exhibition here.

Surrealism’s women thought they were celebrating sexual emancipation. But were they just fulfilling men’s erotic fantasies?

By Germaine Greer

Monday March 5, 2007
The Guardian

Delvaux, The Birth of the Day 20th c

Among the “surreal things” to be celebrated at the V&A’s exhibition this month is the human body. The body when separated from its identity – or soul, if you prefer – becomes just another thing. In her book The Surreal Body, written to accompany the exhibition, Ghislaine Wood struggles mightily to present the body that “the surrealists endlessly manipulated and fetishised” as unisex or ambisex, but it is actually feminine. Not female. Feminine. Even in the deliberately dis-gendered figure of Claude Cahun, the operation of narcissism is purely feminine. Herbert Bayer mugging at his naked and mutilated self in the mirror is feminine. Hans Bellmer’s dolls are all, horribly, feminine.

Fini, The Ends of the Earth 20th c

In our polarised culture, in which real men may not be treated as mere body, and women must consider themselves primarily body, the portrayed body becomes the feminised body, regardless of its sex.

May Ray, Veiled Erotic (portrait of Meret Oppenheim) 20th c

At the same time that the women of surrealism were endlessly arraying and portraying themselves, as often in carefully posed photographs as in any other medium, the men of surrealism were disappearing into short back and sides, and suits and ties. Femininity was all image; masculinity had no image at all. Real men don’t look in mirrors. …

Oppenheim, Object 20th c

Read the rest of the article here.

For more on Surrealism, click here.

The Story of Pygmalion and the Statue

Pygmalion loathing their lascivious life,
Abhorr’d all womankind, but most a wife:
So single chose to live, and shunn’d to wed,
Well pleas’d to want a consort of his bed.
Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill,
In sculpture exercis’d his happy skill;

Delvaux, Pygmalion 20th c

And carv’d in iv’ry such a maid, so fair,
As Nature could not with his art compare,
Were she to work; but in her own defence
Must take her pattern here, and copy hence.
Pleas’d with his idol, he commends, admires,
Adores; and last, the thing ador’d, desires.
A very virgin in her face was seen,
And had she mov’d, a living maid had been:

Gerome, Pygmalion and Galatea 19th c

One wou’d have thought she cou’d have stirr’d, but strove
With modesty, and was asham’d to move.
Art hid with art, so well perform’d the cheat,
It caught the carver with his own deceit:
He knows ’tis madness, yet he must adore,
And still the more he knows it, loves the more:

Gerome, another version of Pygmalion and Galatea

The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft,
Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft.
Fir’d with this thought, at once he strain’d the breast,
And on the lips a burning kiss impress’d.
‘Tis true, the harden’d breast resists the gripe,
And the cold lips return a kiss unripe:

Falconet, Pygmalion and Galatea 17th c

But when, retiring back, he look’d again,
To think it iv’ry, was a thought too mean:
So wou’d believe she kiss’d, and courting more,
Again embrac’d her naked body o’er; …

Bronzino, Pygmalion 16th c

Read the rest of Ovid’s poem here.

Waterhouse, Echo and Narcisssus 19th c

Excerpt from Ted Hughes’ “Narcissus”

… Weary with hunting and the hot sun
Narcissus found this pool.
Gratefully he stretched out full length,
To cup his hands in the clear cold
And to drink. But as he drank
A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror.
He could not believe the beauty
Of those eyes that gazed into his own.
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love. So he lay, mistaking
That picture of himself on the meniscus
For the stranger who could make him happy.

Caravaggio, Narcissus 17th c

He lay, like a fallen garden statue,
Gaze fixed on his image in the water,
Comparing it to Bacchus or Apollo,
Falling deeper and deeper in love
With what so many had loved so hopelessly.
Not recognising himself
He wanted only himself.
He had chosen from all the faces he had ever seen
Only his own. He was himself
The torturer who now began his torture. …

Narcissus after the metamorphosis

Read the complete poem here.

On contemporary narcissism.

Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus.

A giant tortoise and an orphaned baby hippo who forged an unusual friendship after the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia are the stars of a new Web site so fans can follow their progress.

Mzee, a 130-year-old Aldabran tortoise, became a surrogate parent and inseparable friend to hippo Owen who was washed out to sea off the coast of Kenya, rescued by villagers and taken to a wildlife park where the tortoise lived.

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami that hit in December 2004 left 230,000 people killed or missing, including 170,000 in Indonesia.

“They have created sounds unique to hippo or to tortoise and use gentle nods and pushes to communicate with one another,” said a spokeswoman from Scholastic which has just released “Owen & Mzee: The Language of Friendship.”

The second installment in the animals’ story follows their remarkable friendship at Haller Park Animal Sanctuary nearMombasa, Kenya.

To access the website of Owen and Mzee, click here.