Recceswinth's 7th c. votive crown + Visigoth trendsetting

This votive crown, from the Treasure of Guarrazar, belonged to Recceswinth, the early medieval Visigoth King, who ruled from 649-672. Not designed for wear, but rather to hang as votive offerings, these crowns were typical of the Early Middle Ages, although pagan examples also exist. The phrase on the pendilia reads RECCESVINTUVS REX OFFERET, or 'King Recceswinth offered this.' Votive offerings, or deposits, were made for spiritual purposes, either as a thanks, a vow, or to invoke supernatural powers, thus could be anticipatory or ex postfacto; curse tablets, or defixios, were Graeco-Roman sheets made of tin or lead that wished misfortune upon someone, but gratitude was more typical, often including the more recognisable offerings of lit candles, statues, flowers, and jewellery. 

Which pretty much brings us up to speed. Logo jewellery and brandish charms are the modern tribute symbol par excellence, the simplest and most effective way to delineate your in-group out-group divide and identify with all that the symbol represents. Our example from over 1,300 years ago offered to God and required enormous amounts of wealth, whilst our modern day deposits, though requiring similar $$ contributions, seem to offer to no-one. Their prêt-à-porter symbols seem to be tributes to money itself, which negatively offer by way of presenting to others their exclusion from the club. This phenomenon is most interesting is its excess, which that holy subgenre of hip hop, gansta rap, displays with more ambiguity than Damien Hirst's diamond skull. 

Whilst the popularity of Chanel, Tiffany, D&G, LV logos, wearable as charms, are relatively simple status symbols, For the Love of God, Hirst's memento mori is less so. Gangsta rap and hip hop branding, including the obvious irony of the Beastie Boys sporting a non-luxury brand VW logo, play with the same ambiguities, smile the same knowing smile. The irony is so inbuilt that it is hard to be either repulsed or admiring for long; a confused whirring between the two is the probably the most appropriate response to such an obvious play with symbolic meaning. Fittingly, the slang term playa usually refers to men who use minimal effort to get what they want from women, or to those who play the life game and come out on top; power, money, status. Recceswinth was, I'm sure, playing for similar rewards, only whose particulars have changed over the centuries. Don't hate the playa, hate the game? Perhaps. Exploiting the symbol to the point of crassness is at least more eye-opening than the banal toting of coy arm and throat candy. 

modern individualism.. "do not let your 'you' gain the upper hand"

a stillness that characterizes prayer... Saul Bellow

INTERVIEWER

Your context is essentially that of the modern city, isn't it? Is there a reason for this beyond the fact that you come out of an urban experience?

BELLOW

Well, I don't know how I could possibly separate my knowledge of life, such as it is, from the city. I could no more tell you how deeply it's gotten into my bones than the lady who paints radium dials in the clock factory can tell you.

INTERVIEWER

You've mentioned the distractive character of modern life. Would this be most intense in the city?

BELLOW

The volume of judgments one is called upon to make depends upon the receptivity of the observer, and if one is very receptive, one has a terrifying number of opinions to render—“What do you think about this, about that, about Vietnam, about city planning, about expressways, or garbage disposal, or democracy, or Plato, or pop art, or welfare states, or literacy in a 'mass society'?” I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquillity under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction. 


The modern masterpiece of confusion is Joyce's Ulysses. There the mind is unable to resist experience. Experience in all its diversity, its pleasure and horror, passes through Bloom's head like an ocean through a sponge. The sponge can't resist; it has to accept whatever the waters bring. It also notes every microorganism that passes through it. This is what I mean. How much of this must the spirit suffer, in what detail is it obliged to receive this ocean with its human plankton? Sometimes it looks as if the power of the mind has been nullified by the volume of experiences. But of course this is assuming the degree of passivity that Joyce assumes in Ulysses. Stronger, more purposeful minds can demand order, impose order, select, disregard, but there is still the threat of disintegration under the particulars. A Faustian artist is unwilling to surrender to the mass of particulars. 

INTERVIEWER

You have on occasion divided recent American fiction into what you call the “cleans” and the “dirties.” The former, I gather, tend to be conservative and easily optimistic, the latter the eternal naysayers, rebels, iconoclasts. Do you feel this is still pretty much the picture of American fiction today?

BELLOW

I feel that both choices are rudimentary and pitiful, and though I know the uselessness of advocating any given path to other novelists, I am still inclined to say, Leave both these extremes. They are useless, childish. No wonder the really powerful men in our society, whether politicians or scientists, hold writers and poets in contempt. They do it because they get no evidence from modern literature that anybody is thinking about any significant question. What does the radicalism of radical writers nowadays amount to? Most of it is hand-me-down bohemianism, sentimental populism, D. H. Lawrence-and-water, or imitation Sartre. For American writers radicalism is a question of honor. They must be radicals for the sake of their dignity. They see it as their function, and a noble function, to say Nay, and to bite not only the hand that feeds them (and feeds them with comic abundance, I might add) but almost any other hand held out to them. Their radicalism, however, is contentless. A genuine radicalism, which truly challenges authority, we need desperately. But a radicalism of posture is easy and banal. Radical criticism requires knowledge, not posture, not slogans, not rant. People who maintain their dignity as artists, in a small way, by being mischievous on television, simply delight the networks and the public. True radicalism requires homework—thought. Of the cleans, on the other hand, there isn't much to say. They seem faded.


the rest, in the Paris Review, hither...

out of their ingratitude, they bite the sky...

A collection of Taliban Poetry has just been published, with a preface by Faisal Devji, an assistant professor of history at the New School in New York, whose work focuses on Islam, globalisation, ethics, and violence.

Which one of these two should I do?
I should either take up stones or a sickle.
I am afraid to become a fire and be burned.

Due to this crazy world of yours
Craziness is biting at my neck.
In the past, that was the role of
The wild beast, but now humans
Bite humans. They are not content
With their dignity. Out of their
Ingratitude, they bite the sky.

The book's website, hither.

An excerpt from its description:

Their verse is fervent, and very modern in its criticism of human rights abuses by all parties to the war in Afghanistan; whether in describing an air strike on a wedding party or lamenting, “We did all of this to ourselves,” it is concerned not with politics, but with identity, and a full, textured, deeply conflicted humanity.

It is such impassioned descriptions – sorrowfully defeated, triumphant and enraged, bitterly powerless or bitingly satirical – and not the austere arguments of myriad analysts, that will finally come to define the war and endure as a record of the conflict.

the world at once present and absent; Debord, Nietzsche, Bernstein

Very early in my life I took the question

of the relation of art to truth seriously:

even now I stand in holy dread in the face

of this discordance.

Nietzsche, Nachlass

"The discordance between art and truth arouses dread because art and aesthetics (the theoretical discourse that comprehends art in its autonomous, post-Christian guise) appear somehow more truthful than empirical truth (knowledge understood as the subsumption of particulars under concepts or kinds under laws, and truth as correspondence between statements - laws, theories, etc - and facts), more rational than methodological reason, more just than liberal just (beauty, or what beauty signifies, designating the first virtue of social institutions), more valuable than principled morality or utility.