"Let the midnight special
shine her light on me."

For more on the
eight-point star of Venus,
see Bright Star.

Related material:
April 21-22, 2003.

IMDb Trivia for Music Box (1989)

• After the movie was released, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas's own father Istvan Eszterhas was accused of war crimes in Hungary by printing anti-Semitic editorials and even organizing a book burning.
  
  
• Both Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau wanted to play the father....

Once a son,
now a father:

"He spent his earliest years in post WWII--refugee camps. He came to America and grew up in Cleveland--stealing cars, rolling drunks, battling priests, nearly going to jail. He became the screenwriter of the worldwide hits Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, and Flashdance. He also wrote the legendary disasters Showgirls and Jade. The rebellion never ended, even as his films went on to gross more than a billion dollars at the box office and he became the most famous--or infamous--screenwriter in Hollywood. Joe Eszterhas is a complex and paradoxical figure: part outlaw and outsider combined with equal parts romantic and moralist. More than one person has called him 'the devil.' He has been referred to as 'the most reviled man in America.' But Time asked, 'If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?'"

-- Random House promotional material

And eventually to become
a holy ghost...

"Yea, though I walk
through the valley of death
I will fear no evil,
for I am the meanest
son of a bitch
in the valley."

-- Karl Cullinane

in The Silver Crown,
by Joel Rosenberg

"And we may see
the meadow in December,
icy white and crystalline."

Und was fur ein Bild des Christentums 
ist dabei herausgekommen?

Und was fur ein Bild des Christentums 
ist dabei herausgekommen?

Voila:

From The Vanity of Dogmatizing,
by Joseph Glanvill
(London, printed by E.C. for
Henry Eversden at the Grey-Hound
in St.Pauls-Church-Yard,  1661)

Pages 195-201:

That one man should be able to bind the thoughts of another, and determine them to their particular objects; will be reckon'd in the first rank of Impossibles: Yet by the power of advanc'd Imagination it may very probably be effected; and story abounds with Instances. I'le trouble the Reader but with one; and the hands from which I had it, make me secure of the truth on't. There was very lately a Lad in the University of Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts, and yet wanting the encouragement of preferment; was by his poverty forc'd to leave his studies there, and to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelyhood. Now, his necessities growing dayly on him, and wanting the help of friends to relieve him; he was at last forced to joyn himself to a company of Vagabond Gypsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their Trade for a maintenance. Among these extravagant people, and by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love, and esteem; as that they discover'd to him their Mystery: in the practice of which, by the pregnancy of his wit and parts he soon grew so good a proficient, as to be able to out-do his Instructors. After he had been a pretty while exercis'd in the Trade; there chanc'd to ride by a couple of Scholars who had formerly bin of his acquaintance. The Scholars had quickly spyed out their old friend, among the Gypsies; and their amazement to see him among such society, had well-nigh discover'd him: but by a sign he prevented their owning him before that Crew: and taking one of them aside privately, desired him with his friend to go to an Inn, not far distant thence, promising there to come to them. They accordingly went thither, and he follows: after their first salutations, his friends enquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was, and to joyn himself with such a cheating beggarly company. The Scholar-Gypsy having given them an account of the necessity, which drove him to that kind of life; told them, that the people he went with were not such Impostours as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of Imagination, and that himself had learnt much of their Art, and improved in further than themselves could. And to evince the truth of what he told them, he said, he'd remove into another room, leaving them to discourse together; and upon his return tell them the sum of what they had talked of: which accordingly he perform'd, giving them a full acount of what had pass'd between them in his absence. The Scholars being amaz'd at so unexpected a discovery, ernestly desir'd him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them satisfaction, by telling them, that what he did was by the power of Imagination, his Phancy binding theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the discourse, they held together, while he was from them: That there were warrantable wayes of heightening the Imagination to that pitch, as to bind anothers; and that when he had compass'd the whole secret, some parts of which he said he was yet ignorant of, he intended to give the world an account of what he had learned.

Now that this strange power of the Imagination is no Impossibility; the wonderful signatures in the Foetus caus'd by the Imagination of the Mother, is no contemptible Item. The sympathies of laughing & gaping together, are resolv'd into this Principle: and I see not why the phancy of one man may not determine the cogitation of another rightly qualified, as easily as his bodily motion. This influence seems to be no more unreasonable, then [sic] that of one string of a Lute upon another; when a stroak on it causeth a proportionable motion in the sympathizing confort, which is distant from it and not sensibly touched. Now if this notion be strictly verifiable; 'twill yeeld us a good account of how Angels inject thoughts into our minds, and know our cogitations: and here we may see the source of some kinds of fascination. If we are prejudic'd against the speculation, because we cannot conceive the manner of so strange an operation; we shall indeed receive no help from the common Philosophy: But yet the Hypothesis of a Mundane soul, lately reviv'd by that incomparable Platonist and Cartesian, Dr. H. More, will handsomely relieve us. Or if any would rather have a Mechanical account; I think it may probably be made out some such way as follow. Imagination is inward Sense. To Sense is required a motion of certain Filaments of the Brain; and consequently in Imagination there's the like: they only differing in this, that the motion of the one proceeds immediately from external objects; but that of the other hath its immediate rise within us. Now then, when any part of the Brain is stringly agitated; that, which is next and most capable to receive the motive Impress, must in like manner be moved. Now we cannot conceive any thing more capable of motion, then the fluid matter, that's interspers'd among all bodies, and contiguous to them. So then, the agitated parts of the Brain begetting a motion in the proxime Aether; it is propagated through the liquid medium, as we see the motion is which is caus'd by a stone thrown into the water. Now, when the thus moved matter meets with anything like that, from which it received its primary impress; it will proportionably move it, as it is in Musical strings tuned Unisons. And thus the motion being convey'd, from the Brain of one man to the Phancy of another; it is there receiv'd from the instrument of conveyance, the subtil matter; and the same kind of strings being moved, and much of whay after the same manner as in the first Imaginant; the Soul is awaken'd to the same apprehensions, as were they that caus'd them. I pretend not to any exactness or infallibility in this account, fore-seeing many scruples that must be removed to make it perfect: 'Tis only a hint of the possibility of mechanically solving the Phaenomenon; though very likely it may require many other circumstances completely to make it out. But 'tis not my business here to follow it: I leave it therefore to receive accomplishment from maturer Inventions.

Jeremy Pearce in this morning's New York Times:

"Dr. Fritz Klein, a psychiatrist and sex researcher who studied bisexuals and their relationships and later helped start a foundation for promoting bisexual culture, died on May 24 at his home in San Diego. He was 73.  The cause was a heart attack, said his companion, Tom Reise."

Sunrise in Death Valley



(Click to see the larger original,
a photo by Michael Trezzi)

The Baroque sensibility of ruin emphasizes a meaninglessness that too many possibilities deliver.  Aimlessness and malaise make life into exhausting toil in the absence of  coherence.  In overdetermined realities, meaning appears arbitrary and erratic, as the world's connection to God seems lost or withheld.  At the extreme, everyday life is as full of noise and commotion as it is devoid of intrinsic meaning.  Connections among people wither with the onset of overabundance and despair.  Recognition of this condition induces acedia, a weariness of life.  Here the malaise of modernity and ruins ties to Benjamin's interest in Trauerspiel, German tragic drama, and the tragedies of Shakespeare.  All respond to a plague of lost spiritual connections and a meaningless earthly existence where incessant toil and trouble -- "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" -- contribute to a chronic, wearing sense of pain. Benjamin's interest in this form of melancholia, from suffering a sort of spiritual exile, is evident in his 1916 essay "On Language as Such and On the Language of Man."  In this text, he explains that the Ursprache, our "original" language, is "blissful" precisely because it lacks the arbitrariness that results from overdetermination.  Ur-speech is Adamic language, the linguistic power that God gives to Adam to confer identity on the material world.  It contains no arbitrary component, but reveals the unity between God's divine plan and the world as it exists.  Before ruins and fragments, there is no overdetermination to induce the melancholy of acedia.  Instead the originary language implies a unity of transcendent and immanent realms.  "With the creative omnipotence of language it begins, and at the end of language, as it were, assimilates the created, names it.  Language is therefore both the creative and the finished creation; it is word and nature."6 This blissful state between the world and its creator as expressed in Adamic language has its end, of course, in the Fall.  The "ignorance" introduced into the world that ultimately drives our melancholic state of acedia has its inception with the Fall away from the edenic union that joins God's plan to the immediacy of the material world.  What ensues, says Benjamin, is an overabundance of conventional languages, a prattle of meanings now localized hence arbitrary.  A former connection to a defining origin has been lost; and an overdetermined, plethoric state of melancholia forms.  Over-determination stems from over-naming.  "Things have no proper names except in God.  . . . In the language of men, however, they are overnamed."  Overnaming becomes "the linguistic being of melancholy."7 6 Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and On the Languages of Man," Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume I:  1913-1926, Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 68. 7 Ibid., p. 73.

For a Christian perspective on Adamic language, see Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion.

See also the previous entry:

Float like a butterfly,
sting like a