Don’t Worry, Cringe Is Hot

“All Greek gods are violent, in their fashion. Dionysos’ specialty is to connect interior violence - violence of phrenes, distorted perception, individual emotional storm - with performed, exterior violence: violence done and seen, out in the world. His persona is the fostering link between madness and murder. Tragedy, like Athens’ physical theater, belongs in Dionysos’ precinct. It grew up while historians and scientists formulated and worked on the principle that one infers interior movement - and the movement they too were interested in was mostly violent - from external movement, movement you could see. Tragedy is this principle’s dramatic truth. Its performed violence is only nominally onstage. It happens unseen. Spectators infer it and watch others doing so. [quotation of Agamemnon’s death] This is the theater exulting in possibilities of relating inside to outside, unseen to seen, private interior experience to the external watching and guessing of others: a concrete parallel to tragedy’s personal dimension. All over tragedy, men and women suffer within, in their emotions. Other figures, and spectators, infer this unseen pain from words. One cannot see into another person’s feelings. No external mark can tell us what people are inside. We infer what is in them from how they look and what they say. The physique of Dionysos’ theater, its contrasts of unseen and apparent space, embodies the personal dialectics of Dionysos’ tragedy.”

somewhat horny: i have to get Fucked!

test weaving of penelope's tapestry on the chiusi skyphos:

progress?

in true penelope fashion, I may need to unweave and start over, but at least now I've got the loom weights and heddles in place.

I have 999 problems and warp tension is 997 of them (the other two are my selvedges).

row by row she grows

“[The Iliad] is remarkable for the way that its preoccupation with mortality and the human conditions extends even to the enemy. The killing of Hektor by the central figure of the Iliad, Achilles, is a great victory for the Greeks, and yet the camera immediately shifts, as we witness the gut-wrenching reactions of Hektor’s mother, father, and wife to his death. Similarly, the Iliad ends not with the funeral of Achilles, who is doomed to die very soon, but instead with the funeral of Hektor. Achilles’ own short life and imminent death resonate throughout the laments that are sung for his deadliest enemy. In the words of Simone Weil, who was struck by the equity of compassion with which the suffering of the Greeks and Trojans is narrated: “The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the destruction of the city. This calamity could not tear more at the heart had the poet been born in Troy. But the tone is not different when the Achaeans are dying, far from home.””