'everything is sacred!' (when horsemouth was a horse)

‘ it is reason which ensnares and destroys the grim and ingenious magic.’

like ulysses chained to the mast and hearing the sirens we leave the world of myth and enter the world of reason, but medea of colchis is the victim of this process. the birth of tragedy is the birth of reason from myth ‘the indistinct totality of life’.

monday was the anniversary of the death of cameron bain (horsemouth raised a glass at some point in the evening).

horsemouth is reading caudio magris’ microcosms - the floor of the cathedral is tiled to resemble the patterns left by waves in sand (sorry horsemouth is getting nostalgic for the seaside). the possibilities of going for a cooling dip in the sea or in a river. he will carry on researching the writers as they are mentioned - if only to reassure himself that they are real.

'everything is sacred!' 'everything is sacred!'

pasolini films medea in the lagoon (or does he merely write it in his house there). the centaur chiron ‘the wisest and justest of all the centaurs’, and guardian to the child jason, salutes the day. his position in the lush greenery beside the lagoon hides his horse legs. claudio magris mentions pasolini filming in the lagoon in microcosms. later we see that there are two chirons - one with horse legs, one without. then both have merely human legs. this, he assures jason, is because we are now in the world of rationality rather than in the world of myth. (or at least this is what horsemouth gets from the spanish subtitles, the dialogue is in italian of which horsemouth understands even less)

horsemouth watched pasolini’s medea - a solid diet of beauty. ovid wrote about jason and medea (but this tragedy is now lost) and so they appear in christoph ransmayr’s the last world (another book horsemouth read recenty). jason is now the captain of a rusty old freighter (in pasolini the argo is a raft). medea is now a costume at carnival juggling a child’s skull.

when horsemouth was a horse he did not have a horse’s body and a man’s torso - he was entirely a horse (or a mule) - like appuleius’ the golden ass (or the bad children in pinocchio) he was entirely a horse or mule (or donkey). a horses skull closed about his head and stoically he plodded on.

medea by pasolini is about the dangers attending of the birth of tragedy out of myth - to tell this story jason’s semi-divine origins (great-grandson of hermes) have to be suppressed. it is not just that it will not do for jason also to be descended from the gods (medea is descended from helios the charioteer of the sun) - it is that greece must become the land of the rise of reason.

yesterday horsemouth wandered across the fields to the supermarket in the fields. later the sky clouded over and horsemouth either snoozed or watched movies - medea, and then a series of films featuring supernatural detectives, spectre (US supernatural detectives come to syon house, a stone circle in the grounds, in the basement the worship of asmodeus), then two films from the night stalker series - the newspaper reporter is in las vegas, he is confronted by a series of murders of young women where all the evidence points to a vampire. (a few years later, similarly, seattle).

there was plenty of gratuitous 70ies sexism in all 3 of these horsemouth was delighted to see. our ruling deities are satyrs not centaurs.

when in the years when horsemouth was a horse/ mule/ donkey he laboured hard - today is the anniversary of one such project. it’s a glorious morning ‘everything is sacred! everything is sacred!’ horsemouth will  roll towards the solstice.