My Theory of the Brontosaurus

my mother says you're a selfish lover

Derrida argued that Heidegger should not have framed the problem as a question, since a question presumes a subject, and an unacknowledged subject is a spirit, which is the most inauthentic relation to death imaginable. So let's return to Parmenides. We can't say nothing is not; that is unsayable. Does philosophy have to say it? Hegel: being itself is nothing.

Shakespeare: Forcing humanity into an object position cracks it, it bifurcates into real and fictive, outside and inside. But that mapping to out/in requires gender? Cf. Eve on the sonnets; if outside = visible and inside = not, then we are still within the domain of the image, contra Feinman. Fiction = self ignorance, being turned from oneself?

No one looks at a painting for information anymore. Maybe not even a photo: it is the info? Repetition = rote learning?

Michelangelo puts the male body smack in the middle of the narrative and dares you to decorporealize it. Are is undisciplined. What did Northerners think of the robust naked Christ flying off of the wall above them?

The Pope is in an impossible position. As Catholicism ceases to be a way of lifehe becomes symbolic. The church is symbolic, unity not of doctrine but body of believers, ie Kaspar? Ex cathedra was an admission of weakness. He is the possibility of clemency. There is no "hierarchy" outside the curia, thus Law retreated there when Boston wanted to lynch him (that's a pun). Parliaments are indifferent to the church, there are no conflicts between king and bishop. Political power, the state, is created as the unity of law under the church. The process by which it supersedes the church is much debated. Marsilius identified the necessarily foreign church as a block to effective sovereignty. The nation is first inter-nation, then, if not universal (catholic) it must be national? Latin is supplanted by vernaculars as European kings become the kings of whatever nation they control. How does an international ruling class become the embodiment of a national state?

Under the golden rule or harm principle, the other is my loss of self, identity becomes anonymity. Think of the Catholic thought of anonymous charity to preclude pride, or the revolutionary effect of Jesus (know not father or mother). If we know the law only negatively, ie by and as murder, there is no ground for law, no necessity; the other is thus non-murder. Recognition of the other is my murder? The diremption is the missing middle (Rose says this, but I havent read it)? We pass each other only in murder. Is this just Levinas? But Levinas thought we could build on this, we could not murder and still know. I can't hold on to both the other and knowing. If the other must be other then philosophy is doomed. There will be no meeting of the minds.  Note what I'm saying: that we don't touch the sides as it were, we don't understand ourselves, the law.  We can will it, but we can't know it.

Hinduism: the practices of worship among the inheritors of Sanskrit.

Note that there was no India before the raj and independence, and no Hinduism either. The Hindu kingdoms defined themselves as at war with each other, ie in Keay's reading of the mandala theory.

The Hindu scriptures are neither narrative nor legalistic/commandments: they are hymns and ritual practice. The purity of the brahman class is a function of ritual, not of behavior/law.

The representations of god is, like his works, the manifestation of god. The worship of god, or his representations, the pilgrimmage and the sacrifice, and the ritual, are not distinguishable from the divine itself. The incarnation of god and the unmanifest linga (may or maybe not the phallus). Cf. also Akbar's defenses of painters as creators, and his syncretic religion, and that of Sikhism.

I've been reading and thinking about India, and it's tempting to define them (?) as the opposite of us (?), ie we are orthodoxy, they are orthopraxy (also said of Islam though), we fear sex they enjoy sex; we are iconclastic, they are iconophilic; we are linear, they are cyclical; we oppose philosophy and religion, for them philosophy is religion; we have two kingdoms and equality, they have caste and karma; for us death is the law, for them death is pollution. But this doesnt get at it for me; it doesnt address the syncretism that makes any claim to a Hindu nationalism untenable (where does Hinduism begin and end?). I began to get it in Gavin Floods description of "mediation," and then in Wendy Doniger's remarks, prefacing her translations from the Rig Veda, that everything means everything else. I  think the key is the thought of transformation; the interpenetration of sacred and profane, the unabashed sexuality (generation), the worship of icons and the reincarnation of gods and men all assumes a livingness of the world, an unfinished world. In our terms it is anthropocentric, but not teleological. I am very attracted by the Buddhist heresy: to stand aside from these transformations, to be untouched by them, not by purification nor renunciation but by understanding the ego as the source of suffering, the desire for immortality as the hindrance from release. (I know this is inadequate.) I am also interested in the shift from what Keay describes as caste as estates to caste as hierarchy and purity (instigating the Jains and Buddhists), down to Gandhi's resistance as moral work (karma?). Why do Hindu gods have extra arms? Why do western gods not? Not reduction, origin, absolutes: but multiplicity. Why should it be strange that a civilization the size and age of Europe (if you give Europe ancient Greece) should be as rich and complicated as Europe (the west, as we say)?