That's a pretty incoherent post below. I wrote it somewhere near the middle of last night but couldn't get it to post for some reason, so i saved it and thought i'd edit it this morning; but i didn't. So it is stuck on here for whoever can get anything out of it...good luck.

Probably a lot of you have been aware of this piece for some time. I've only just found it, having watched the news this evening with the coverage of his fight with Amis. Seems to me that Amis, on the news did conflate religion (islam) with ethnicity (middle eastern), which could reasonably be called racist - or perhaps just lazy. There's enough silly fuckers out there making the same connection. Well it's all good fun knockabout stuff, but i think that i'm on Eagleton's side in this one. I've liked Amis's books, that is the ones i've read, but i see no reason why his pronouncements on geopolitics or domestic policy should be taken seriously.

I have always been sceptical of Dawkin's atheism, or rather, the terms in which he frames it. I watched his CH4 t.v. series not so long ago, and thought that he was making some pretty huge category errors, but Eagleton has put it far better than I could - and I'm an atheist. Actually, whilst i know Eagleton's background is far from secular, I don't know where he stands on the god thing now, so for all i know he could be utterly without faith, like me.

Still this struck me as a pretty bloody good version of a radical christianity. Also, despite being something that has fascinated me for a long time this is an interpretation of iconoclasm that hadn't occurred to me:

For iconoclasts, the only real religious image must be an exact likeness of the prototype -of the same substance- which they considered impossible, seeing wood and paint as empty of spirit and life. Thus for iconoclasts the only true (and permitted) "icon" of Jesus was the Eucharist, which was believed to be his actual body and blood.

Any true image of Jesus must be able to represent both his divine nature (which is impossible because it cannot be seen nor encompassed) as well his human nature. But by making an icon of Jesus, one is separating his human and divine natures, since only the human can be depicted (separating the natures was considered nestorianism), or else confusing the human and divine natures, considering them one (union of the human and divine natures was considered monophysitism).

and then Eagleton:

"You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood."

i was always looking at it as being driven by something more abstract/hieratic about our own distance from the purported divine (but there is this, I mean the Antidicomarianite variation) but that might have just been me being thick. In other words, really, that Christ was a man above all. i.e. someone who could shit and sweat and suffer and weep. Hence the lack of necessity to picture him in paint or gilding, he or she was standing right next to you.

"The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough."

The viewpoint of Dawkins and those proponents of progress is summarised by Benjamin: thesis XII

"Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren."

Staying with the blood and mire as a political program, the tortured, destroyed human body as the image of history, (which after all, does not change - the limbs remain attatched or not in the same way, the organs are in the same positions, or not) the infinitely falling short or broken as a basis for a politics ,seems to me to be the antithesis of the ruling class ideology of the present

Thesis XIII:

"Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress ...Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. ..However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself."

The destroyed body will always bring us back: pain fills time, not as homogenous but with particular intensities. In fact, pain changes time, annihlates it and draws it out into a spasm or scream which is happening, as it has always happened, now.

Acephali who lacking property or patron, could apparently "not acknowledge a superior lord" -quite rightly, who should? who believed that the incarnation was wholly human, one assumes.

Then this, from thesis VI

"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead (the destroyed body)will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious."

This is highly recommended ( i mean i know that there's paperback translations out there that might be better and more user friendly, but this one's here online and free).

It involves a whole load of stuff that appeals to me, anyway; animal transformations (including in the fourth part some really wierd animal incest), skulduggery etc. There actually seems to be quite a strong (if warped) vein of humour running through the whole thing, but some of it just grips; like the story of Blodeuweed, the flower/owl girl in it's fourth branch, which was of course the basis for Alan Garner's brilliant book. The image of the betrayed lover, Lleu, as an eagle who, rather than doing majestic predatory things, sits on a tree and rots, has the ring of truth.

"Gwydion, for his part, came under the tree, and looked for what the sow was grazing on. He could see the sow was grazing on rotting flesh and maggots. He looked up into the top of the tree. When he looked up, he could see an eagle in the top of the tree. When the eagle shook himself, worms and rotting flesh fell from him, and those the sow was devouring. It occurred to him that the eagle was Lleu..."

But the part that I really wanted to write about is the incidents surrounding the return of Bran the Blessed's severed head to London from Ireland. I'm pretty sure that tradition has it that he continued to talk, even to prophesy, whilst lacking a body. Those bearing his head spend seven years in some other place, feasting; then

"...And at the end of the seventh year, they made for Gwales in Penfro. And there at their disposal was a beautiful kingly place [high] above the ocean - and a great hall it was. They went into the hall. They saw two open doors - the third door was closed, and that [was the one] facing Cornwall.

'Look over there,' said Manawydan ' the door which we must never open.'

And that night they were there, lacking nothing - and were completely free of care. Of all the grief that they had witnessed or experienced themselves - there was no longer any memory or any of the sorrow in the world. Eighty years they passed there, having never enjoyed a period of time as carefree or light-hearted as that It was no more irksome to them - they didn't realise from their companions how long it had been since they came there. And it was no more irksome for them having the head there, than it had been when Bendigeidfran (Bran the Blessed) had been alive with them. And because of that it was known as the 'Assembly of The Wondrous Head'. "

An eighty year piss up, accompanied by a talking head.

I'm assuming that they set it up over a bucket, so they could pour drink and food down its (truncated) throat, as no doubt he did in life. It would've been emptied - thrown out of one of the other doors - periodically. The bucket would have added a sepulchural tone to his pronouncements, as if he had a zinc chest (alright i know that's anachronistic, but these things always were, and still are. They telescope time). Imagine the voice of someone in an iron lung going "why did the pervert cross the road...?"

So he talked, they talked, jokes were told. No doubt people were sick, and other people lapsed into unconsciousness periodically, then woke up. The fruit machine in the corner kept broadcasting its spastic distress patterns. A good time was had by all. Then:

This is what Heilyn son of Gwyn did one day:

'Shame on my beard,' said he 'if I don't open the door and find out whether it is true what is said about it. [So] he opened the door, and looked out to Cornwall and over Aber Henvelen. And when he looked, suddenly everything they had ever lost - loved ones and companions, and all the bad things that had ever happened to them...became as clear as if it had been rushing in towards them. And from that moment, they were not able to rest unless they were making for London with the head."(It was finally buried under the tower of London)

There'd been eighty years, eighty years, on this. Everyone that they had known was probably dead, or children had grown, and forgotten; homes,jobs, had been re-allocated, or just ceased to be, by the time that they emerged. They sat in the smoke and fug, Bran's echoing sonorities punctuating proceedings, with jokes, commentaries on what (they thought) was current TV and politics...until that time that some stupid fucker lets in the dawn. The sound of the first bin lorries, the school run and the hopeless drizzly light of some too-early morning, people going off to work. The room itself revealed, with its spilt ashtrays and sticky patches on the carpet. the wrinkles and surfaces one's own clothes seamed with spilt food, drool, ash, vomit. Someone starts sweeping up...and "everything they had ever lost....became as clear as if it had been rushing in towards them..."

So they started out in that dawn to walk towards a burial, sick, with decaying head (and heads).

But the head at that point wouldn't stop. There were jokes and anecdotes, even advice about long-dead wives, tax collectors or livestock. Their heads were aching and their bowels were in revolt, and he had no poison stored, having no body - fresh as a fucking daisy, he said. There was 200 miles to London, give or take. When they finally got there -Great western trains providing an unimpressive service, interchange at Reading unavoidably delayed, tube from Paddington fucked, severe delays on the circle line due to "passenger incident" - they take him to the white hill (now the white tower) and hastily dig the hole. The first shovelful of dirt is aimed at his mouth. It goes in, and is spat. They continue, and gradually the screams of "3-2-1, you remember that funny finger thing? Shit programme, I can still do it, the finger thing...if i had fingers and that...It didn't really make sense, I mean what were the fucking rules..." had subsided beneath the good earth, and London. 

Going back to the Owl service, that link there is apparently the pattern that inspired the book. I have written here about the decorative( in connection with the yellow wallpaper), The pattern, being both flower and owl, seems to condense the sense of threat as visual seduction that i wrote about there.

Very few desires are really forbidden. What is certainly unspoken is that every desire contains the seeds of its own death. As Freud pointed out, desire wants to be consumated, that is, to end. In pursuing desires, perhaps we are pursuing their ending, not so much the spasm of release or fulfillment, but beyond that, the point at which they stop.

However, desires cannot be fulfilled. They are forever replenished from an endless tide. Each individual want bears the same relationship to that tide as waves to the sea; apparently individual, but actually disturbances on the surface of the whole springing from the contingencies of wind and current.

This tide, with its surface ruffled and broken into infinite reflections scattering light like miriad tiny suns only flows one way; towards its own ending. The pull towards death is the tide. It never gets there. Each wave that breaks dissolves with a sigh, but the peace of dissolution is broken by the next wave that quickly follows, dying in its turn.

Our desires,that no-place within us where we end, are formed by lack and lack manifests through them. This void is both within us and at the centre of every desire that we give body to.

Perhaps the pursuit of the heart's desire (that shrieking cannibal) is embarked and re-embarked upon not to extinguish that lack that our object embodies but to ingest it - ending the desire and its object in consummation, attempting to end desire.