Soma/ Body

body

I know it seems basic, but when you are coming out of an existentialist high (like as if it the answer to all the problems of realities' limitations and you are so free..ahhh free like being trapped by open space and the claustrophobia of limitless imagination..arrgghhh) anyway like i said, basic. free, relief. loving painting bodies, movement, what is, outside of self...wonderful reality, to just observe. the movement of the brush loaded in pale sepia, to the heavy confident and straggly lines of charcoal like a web or heavy iron constructing the form. i am loving drawing.

so I am painting again. loving it. all thought is somewhere embedded in it. but not over it.

I will have the drawings up on walls before Christmas.

an excerpt: (not necessarily related)

The greek word for body, "soma"means corpse in homer. Soma is what is left lying on the field when the battle is over and the psyche has left the dead person. Only when Psyche is gone does Soma appear to be something different from it, and vice versa. But even if homeric man did not have an overall concept for the body in our sense that does not mean that the body was downgraded in relation to, for example, the mind. On the contrary.....a standard example is all the words for snow in an inuit languages, which also lack a single word for the concept 'snow'. If one is to think of greek cultureand pre socratic anthropology, one has to think in physical terms, and try to forget our body-mind divisionto avoid projecting it onto the homeric way of thinking. the body is the self for Homeric man. The term the greeks use for whole body is 'autos', self.

....In Homeric anthropology, it is impossible to distinguish and catergorically separate between the emotional, sensory and intellectual and rational the way we do. so there is no word that means 'reason' in homer'......

one of my favourite books that is taking forever to read, "A history of the Heart' by Ole M Hoystad.

NEXT TIME i want to write about the new book I found in a second hand bookstore last week. It's called 'Portrait of the lover" by Bettini (it's translated so it loses a lot. I guess I will just have to learn Italian (smile smile) domani domani!!!

imagine following a train of thought that traces the origin of displacing the lover, from real form to representation.( from Butades Daughter who stole the image of her lover by tracing his shadow on the wall (beginnings of clay sculpture) and made a statue out of clay) to Nietzsche and his concepts of shadow in Zarathustra....and so on and so on......sigh....oh so beautiful. this book is amazing, but yet to be read.