Closer to the charms of an image than to the rigor of a meaning. This symbolic wisdom is a prisoner of the madness of dreams. Freed from wisdom and the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about in it's own madness. Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered exept in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure nolonger speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream...forming beyond all the lessons of the sacrifice the fantastic tableau of savagery, of tormented bodies, and of suffering. Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning. The symbolic figures become nightmare silhouettes. - michel foucault
i like the sound of fist hitting face and also philip glass can be soothing.
reading derrida, foucault, claude levi-strauss, eagleton, barthes, heidegger and of course the new cormac mcarthy. cant wait to get into pynchon's new book...