john gleim_ open notebook

“Nobody has ever read my work-in-progress the way that the factory workers read and commented on the weekly installments of THE STORY OF MY TEETH.”

“The Greatest Distaste a Person has to

this Place is the Stench of the Fish;

the whole Air seems tained with it. 

It may, in Short be Said its a Dirty, 

Irregular, Stincking Place.”

"We cannot, of course, speak of Rozanov’s philosophy as a coherent and consistent doctrine, but for all the lack of system and heterogeneity of his philosophical utterances it is still possible to identify the fundamental points of his world outlook at his most characteristic period. In his philosophy, which is based on God and sex, the world is perceived as a sort of mystery, as a Cosmos—a single God-created whole with a soul and in eternal motion. Rozanov connects the animation of the world by God with sex, which is cosmic: combinations of the sexes can be traced throughout the universe. Contact with “other worlds,” in his opinion, occurs precisely through sex. Truth exists, but it is hidden from us and irrational; only a gradual approach to it is possible by means of intuitive comprehension. He draws inspiration for his religious-philosophical intuitions from a passionate desire to uncover this world mystery. Constantly striving to make his thinking ontological to the world, he did not derive ontologism from his epistemological deliberations; on the contrary, his theory of knowledge rests on being. In Rozanov, therefore, the highest principles of the spirit are not disconnected from natural creation, from the flesh of the world. He repeatedly emphasized that he wanted “not to give praise to the flesh” but “to introduce the soul into the flesh.” He affirmed sex precisely as the unification of flesh and spirit: “The separation of spirit and flesh is an illness. . . . All living things want to live; in other words, they hold spirit and flesh together.” Sex for Rozanov is the embodiment of the natural principle, which is connected inseparably with religion: “To love nature means to love God”; “Images of God—that is nature.”