Evil Eye

luka

Well-known member
1. the architecture of the eye
it's vaulted ceilings and tessellations

beauty

woven at beyond sight-limit / woven light
the rainbow architecture of the eye.

2.

in the circumference of his eye. in the great glories of his eye. on the sea there upon that surface rounded.

3.

And this is why we must never stare, we never look AT, as poets we won’t look at. The interrogatory stare pins down what it stares at, fixes it, creates an artificial tableau, we abstract ourselves out of the picture, imagine ourselves disembodied eye hovering above like a drone in the sky- so we have to find that other way of looking, involved and participatory,

And then we can see the trees breathing and the clouds start moving again across the sky and the grasses sway and birds take flight and the children’s games begin again. The continuum of events, the narrative thread, and us as a moving part within that great whirl of motion, as air also is always in motion, bifurcated by the blade of our bodies, washing around us and spiralling in vortexes.
 

luka

Well-known member
Essential grapejuice essay on the eye vs ear struggle in Finnegans wake which is also Joyce vs Lewis and time vs space and is picked up on and extended by McLuhan. I'll find it in a sec.

have you read this yet? should i excerpt?
 

luka

Well-known member
"
It all boils down to a tale of Ear and Eye, a tale of Time and Space, of Saturn and Jupiter, of Shem and Shaun. The tale is one of warring brothers, yet even this relationship and these roles are not fixed. The rival brothers -- Cain and Abel -- can also be depicted as lovers -- Eve and Adam, Binah and Chokhmah. They can also represent the Oedipal struggle between Father and Son -- Chronos and Zeus.

As Joyce realized in the Wake, though, much more is at play than just the myth of Oedipus, than just the Freudian reduction, however powerful this is. The struggle of Ear against Eye, Eye against Ear and their occasional harmony, subsumes and transcends all myths and all relations.

McLuhan puts this bluntly in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962):


...there can be no greater contradiction or clash in human cultures than that between those representing the eye and the ear...

And this is echoed in Understanding Media (1964):


The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us.

But, prior to McLuhan, it is most candidly proclaimed in the Wake:


TELEVISION KILLS TELEPHONY IN BROTHERS BROIL
"
 

luka

Well-known member
"
With the onset of print, with the onset of Gutenberg from about 1440 and onward, the tyranny of the Eye fully dethroned the tyranny of the Ear, but between the two was a long and fascinating transition. The scribal or manuscript cultures from the development of the phonetic alphabet to the beginning of print during the Renaissance represented, for McLuhan, a unique blending of Ear and Eye. Once more, and during the High Middle Age of Europe in particular, a "communion of the senses" became possible and was reflected in society.

Such a balance was not to last. Gutenberg's great invention was again to set the kaleidoscope of the human sensorium to spin. Europe soon became flooded with printed books. Everything changed.

The development of perspective in painting, the rise of the individual, the emergence and standardization of national languages, nationalism and national wars in general, the Bible-based Protestant Reformation, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the age of mass production and the mass man, all of these and more were direct outgrowths of print. A mutation has occurred. The ratio of the senses has been skewed. The Eye became master."
 

luka

Well-known member
"The age of print is the age of linearity, of standardization, of uniformity, of mechanical processes, of centralization, of single-point perspective, of rigid categorization, of analysis, of interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. In the newly imposed national languages of Europe grammar became rigid, spelling became fixed. The visual spell had been cast."
 

version

Well-known member
I was actually thinking about Lynch saying the body part discovered in Blue Velvet had to be an ear,

"It had to be an ear because it's an opening. An ear is wide and, as it narrows, you can go down into it. And it goes somewhere vast. . . "
 

version

Well-known member
 

version

Well-known member
"It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little."
 

version

Well-known member
Is the eye evil because it's the window to the soul? You can tell whether someone's on drugs from looking into their eyes and the Japanese have something called "sanpaku" which refers to how much white of the eye is visible,

According to Chinese/Japanese medical face reading, when the white part of the eye, known as the sclera, is visible beneath the iris, it represents physical imbalance in the body and is claimed to be present in alcoholics, drug addicts and people who over-consume sugar or grain. Conversely, when the upper sclera is visible it is said to be an indication of mental imbalance in people such as psychotics, murderers, and anyone rageful. In either condition, it is believed that these people attract accidents and violence.

In August 1963, George Ohsawa, an advocate for macrobiotics, predicted that President John F. Kennedy would experience great danger because of his sanpaku condition.

In 1965 Ohsawa, assisted by William Dufty, wrote You Are All Sanpaku, which offers the following perspective on the condition:

"For thousands of years, people of the Far East have been looking into each other's eyes for signs of this dreaded condition. Any sign of sanpaku meant that a man's entire system — physical, physiological and spiritual — was out of balance. He had committed sins against the order of the universe and he was therefore sick, unhappy, insane, what the West has come to call "accident prone". The condition of sanpaku is a warning, a sign from nature, that one's life is threatened by an early and tragic end."
 
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