secret life of statues

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    THE

    SECRET

    LIFE OF

    STATUES

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    The chain of Venus

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    The artist begins indeed tolook like a special sort ofsophist; and not the leastof his crimes is that hedirects our attention toparticulars which hepresents as intuitivelyknowable, whereasconcerning theirknowability philosophy hasgrave and weighty doubts.Art undoes the work ofphilosophy by deliberatelyfusing knowledge byacquaintance andknowledge by description.

    Iris MurdochThe Fire and the Sun

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    The simultaneously endless and closed, full and

    tautological world of resemblance now finds itself

    dissociated and, as it were, split down the middle;

    on the one side, we shall find the signs that have

    become tools of analysis, marks of identity and

    difference, principles whereby things can be

    reduced to order, keys for a taxonomy; and on the

    other, the empirical and murmuring resemblanceof things, that unreacting similitude that lies

    beneath thought and furnishes the infinite raw

    material for divisions and distributions. On the

    one hand, the general theory of signs, divisions

    and classifications; on the other, the problem ofimmediate resemblances, of the spontaneous

    movement of the imagination, of natures

    repetitions ...

    M. Foucault, The Order of Things

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    Archaic Torso of ApolloRainer Maria Rilke

    We cannot know his legendary headwith eyes like ripening fruit.And yet his torso is still suffusedwith brilliance from inside, like alamp, in which his gaze, now turnedto low, gleams in all its power.Otherwise the curved breast couldnot dazzle you so, nor could a smilerun through the placid hips andthighs to that dark centre whereprocreation flared.Otherwise this stone would seemdefaced beneath the translucentcascade of the shoulders and wouldnot glisten like a wild beasts fur:would not, from all the borders ofitself, burst like a star: for here thereis no place that does not see you.You must change your life.

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    Whenever one rejects the experienceof love by rationalising it away, one isobeying a collective law that has beeninternalised. We have all absorbed thislaw that negates the free realisation ofdesire in the face of lifes continualinvitations. Thus while life conspiresto arouse us, it can and does oftenhappen that we deny our desire inobedience to an external veto that bynow is fatally alive within us withoutour even being conscious of it.Aldo Carotenuto, Eros and Pathos

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    We go into a gallery, and we have been soschooled in a particular form of aesthetic

    criticism that we suppress acknowledgement ofthe basic elements of cognitionand appetite,or admit them only with difficulty.

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    Looking, psychologically, brings about theactivation of the object; it is as ifsomething were emanating from onesspiritual eye that evokes or activates theobject of ones vision. The English verb tolook at does not convey this meaning,but the German betrachten, which is anequivalent, means also to makepregnantAnd if it is pregnant, thensomething is due to come out of it; it isalive, it produces, it multiplies. That is thecase with any fantasy image; oneconcentrates upon it, and then finds thatone has great difficulty in keeping thething quiet, it gets restless, it shifts,something is added, or it multiplies itself:one fills it with living power and itbecomes pregnant.

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    Pythagoras planned it.Why did the people stare?His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move Inmarble or in bronze, lacked character.But boys and girls, pale from the imagined loveOf solitary beds, knew what they were,That passion could bring character enough,And pressed at midnight in some public placeLive lips upon a plummet-measured face.

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    I think that the wise men of old,who made temples and statues inthe wish that the gods should bepresent to them, looking to thenature of the All, had in mind thatthe nature of soul is everywhereeasy to attract, but that ifsomeone were to constructsomething sympathetic to it andable to receive a part of it, itwould of all things receive soulmost easily. That which issympathetic to it is what imitatesit in some way, like a mirror ableto catch the reflection of a form.

    PlotinusEnneadIV.3

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    There are reflections ofthe incorporeals incorporeals, and ofcorporeals inincorporeals from thesensible to theintelligible cosmos, andfrom the intelligible tothe sensible. Thereforemy King, adore thestatues, because they,too, possess Ideas fromthe intelligible cosmos.Corpus Hermeticum17

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    Every cognition through similitude binds

    the knower to that which is known: tothe sensible or object of sense-perceptionthe perceptive cognition, to cognizableobjects discursive reason, to intelligibleobjects intelligible cognition, andtherefore also to that which is prior tointellect the flower of the intellect is

    correspondent.Proclus, Commentary on the Chaldean OraclesIV

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    Proclus Four Levels4. Participation/identity3. Reflection2. Representation1. Sense-object

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    the soul is constituted from[both] intellectual reasons anddivine symbols, of which theformer proceed from theintellectual species, but the latterfrom the divine unities:and weare images of theintellectual essences,but statues of theunknown symbols.Proclus, Commentary on the

    Chaldean Oracles V

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    When nature had seen the beauty whichnever satiates of him who had in himself allthe energy of the powers and the form ofGod, she smiled with love, because she hadseen the image of the most beautiful formof Man in the water and his shadow uponthe earth. He, seeing in himself a similarform to his own in the water, fell in lovewith her and wished to dwell there. Nosooner wished than done, and he inhabiteda form without speech. Nature, havingtaken her beloved, enfolded himcompletely, and they united, for they lovedeach other.

    Corpus Hermeticum, 1

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