slowburn_bowie.mp3

“In family-melodrama horror there is always one family member…trying to escape the confines of their limited existence, or an outsider coming into the narrative poised to steal them away. Their only social interaction…is with their siblings, but something happens that awakens them to the possibilities of the outside world. They may even make sincere attempts to escape, but as we have learned from a century of such films, the family always comes first, a reconciliation takes place, and the would-be escapee is forced to recognize their inherent nature and the fact that they belong with their family – especially when they are concealing a secret that would render them socially unacceptable to the outside world. They retreat to the familiarity of the only people who accept them for who they are. Again: traumatic bonding.”

“As I’ve said, there is a significant problem with the very concept of mysticism, which is that none of the medieval mystics thought of themselves as mystics. As Michel de Certeau shows, the word mysticism was only introduced in the seventeenth century, in French as la mystique. He argues, convincingly to my mind, that the creation of the category “mysticism” marks a basic shift in Western attitudes towards the sacred, which move away from the sense of mystery at the core of common church and devotional practice, and towards a special type of experience which is received in a “gratified passivity where the self is lost in God.” The invention of mysticism goes hand in hand with the narrowing of the sacred to what we now blithely call “religious experience.”

This is too good not to share excerpts. It gets to the heart of both Graham Platner's appeal and the backlash to "girlboss HR feminism"