#ambiguity

why must (66116) I live with (this fucking meat)

The first quote reminded me of some on the Grotesque I have saved. There's more but I don't have the time to find them all right now. Peep the Grotesque papers post as that's where they're from.:

“Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity, of compromise (Ibid:200) – Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World)

“Frances S. Connelly’s new study responds to a critical lacuna in art-historical scholarship, namely, the absence of a comprehensive “study of the grotesque in the modern era, despite its pervasive and insistent presence from 1500 onward” (18). In order to address this gap, the author moves away from the traditional definition of the grotesque that negatively describes this category in relation to its perversion of normative types. Connelly instead elucidates a grotesque that is shaped by what it does; it is an art that “ruptures boundaries, compromising them to the point where they admit the contradiction and ambiguity of a contrasting reality” (10).

Morning light lay upon the gallows. A man stands on a trapdoor; he has a bag over his head and a noose around his neck. The sheriff stands near a lever, speaking to the crowd. “Arthur J. Halloway, a man accused of numerous crimes across America, will take his last breath today. He will be hanged until he is no more.”

A man pushes his way into the crowd surrounding the gallows. He looks at the man about to be hung and looks to the man next to him. “What are his crimes?” he asks.

“Arthur Halloway? You don’t know his crimes? He is the worst outlaw of our times. He killed at least 20 people and robbed thousands of dollars. What crime hasn’t he committed?” the man said.

“What’s the chap’s story?” he asked.

“Well, he is 26 years old, I know that. He was a leader of an outlaw group out west,” he said.

“So you don’t actually know his story?” asked the man.

“Dammit, H.W., just watch the display,” said the man.

H.W., not satisfied with this answer, walks further into the crowd. He stands beside a young girl and asks her the same question. “My dear lady, do you know this man's crimes?”

“Yes, I do indeed; he is a whore of a man. He was an adulterer, the immoral pig,” she said.

“Adultery got him hanged?” H.W. asked.

“Yes, I believe he slept with the sheriff’s wife. You know how the sheriff is with his power.”

“Thank you, my lady.”

H.W. pushed closer to the front of the crowd, and a man stopped him and said, “You hear what he did?”

“No, I didn’t,” H.W. responded.

“He was a satanist, a cult leader or something of that nature. He sacrificed babies, the monster.”

“How awful, my God.”

H.W. watched as the trapdoor fell and the man was hung. The body’s twitching stopped, and after about a quarter of an hour, he walked up to the sheriff. “I can’t get a straight answer about why this man was hanged, Jim. Please do tell!”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just orders—something about oil or gold.”

“Thank you, Jim.”