John Steppling

“It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of “eternity,” a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic.” This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality.” Sigmund Freud (Introduction to Civilization and its Discontents. Referring to letter from Rolland) “ Arabic readers would have been familiar with through the two adaptations of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex that appeared in 1949 by playwrights Tawfiq al-Hakim and Ali Ahmad Bakathir, as well as the first scholarly Arabic translation in 1939 by Egyptian belle lettrist Taha Husayn. Egyptian dramatist al-Hakim’s version is … [Read more...]

"In the beginning may have been the Uroboros: male and female, father and mother, mother and child, ego-id and outside world in one. But the Uroboros has busted a long time ago; the distinctions and divisions are our reality—real with all its symbols. In the light of its own possibilities, it may well be called a cave, and our life in it dream or death." Herbert Marcuse (Love Mystified; A Critique of Norman O. Brown, Commentary Magazine) "Actaeon; alien horns added to his forehead; the dogs that sated themselves in the blood of their own master; all for the sin of seeing. Cur aliquid vidi? Why did I have to see something?" Norman O. Brown (Apocalypse; Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, … [Read more...]

"The lion griefs loped from the shade And on our knees their muzzles laid, And Death put down his book." W. H. Auden (A Summer Night, 1934) "The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives." Wallace Stevens (The Necessary Angel) "It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded papier-mache... The sun was coming from the outside. ... It was like A new … [Read more...]

"He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth." Isaac 53:7 "The greatest part of our being is unknown to us. . . . We have a phantom of the “ego” in our heads, which determines us many times over." Friedrich Nietzsche (Nachlass) "On Saturday, August 10, 2019, at approximately 6:30 a.m., inmate Jeffrey Edward Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell in the Special Housing Unit from an apparent suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York, New York. Life-saving measures were initiated immediately by responding staff. Staff … [Read more...]

“Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?" Herman Melville (Moby Dick) “It is possible that here we are facing a fourth ‘narcissistic wound’ namely that even the intelligence of which we are so proud, though analysts, is not our property but must be replaced or regenerated through the rhythmic outpouring of the ego into the universe, which alone is all knowing and therefore intelligent. But more of this another time.” Sandor Ferenczi (Diaries) "The … [Read more...]

"a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning." William Carlos Williams (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus) "The growing relevance of technology in artworks must not become a motive for subordinating them to that type of reason that produced technology and finds its continuation in it." Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory) "the opposite of play is not serious occupation but — reality.” Sigmund Freud (The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming, 1908) I wanted to look at the growing irrationality of the West today by or through the lens of American cinema. And to a degree through the critical analysis of several different films. The first film in question is The Shining … [Read more...]

"The wing of the Angel of Death brushes against me, and the systole of my soul inundates the depths of my spirit with the blood of divinity ... our elaborate human lineage is no more than a doomed procession of phantoms trooping from nothingness to nothingness .... If we are all to die altogether-what is the point of everything! Wherefore? It is the Wherefore, the Wherefore of the sphinx, that corrodes the marrow of our soul and that is the begetter of the anguish which stirs our love of hope .... And so we sing dirges to death, the never-ending respite, simply from fear of it, and call it a liberation. " Miguel de Unamuno (The Tragic Sense of Life) "It is quite impossible for a … [Read more...]

"When two do the same thing, they do not do the same thing.” Ernst Bloch (Heritage of Our Time) "President Nixon: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the – let it hang out, so to speak? Dean: Well, it's, it isn't really that – Haldeman: It's a limited hang out. Dean: It's a limited hang out. Ehrlichman: It's a modified limited hang out." Whitehouse Tapes (March 22, 1973) "As to the question whether it is the illness that generates the crime or whether the crime, by its very nature, was always accompanied by something like an illness, [Raskolnikov] still felt unable to resolve the issue". Fyodor Dostoyevski (Crime and Punishment) After a week in … [Read more...]