Tongue of Flame

"Know thyself" and "Physician, Heal thyself" seem pretty unremarkable sayings. The first was engraved above the double-talking Oracle at Delphi. The second might have been spoken, by his jailer, to Socrates, as he drank the hemlock and died an agonizing death. When we are young we seek truth, even the truths about ourselves. By the time we are confirmed, graduated, and well installed in a professional role, we know how to avert our eyes, to see without seeing. Truth then pursues us and we may evade it successfully for our entire life.

Truth is what at a certain stage we can no longer suppress, but blurt out to the consternation of those whose duty it is to then to bring us back into line, so that what is normal - and intolerable - but serves the interests of the status quo may be preserved. The shadowy moment when the outline comes together, the unanswerable line is spoken to oneself in an undertone, and inspiration speaks clearly, so one need only take dictation from the divine voice that will get you killed. The list of those who have taken dictation is the list of the great moral teachers to the the wealthiest and most powerful people who needed it most.  The list of inspired moral teachers to those in power is a long roll of those "sanctioned," by which I do not just mean canonized. Say their names:

Socrates - executed

Cicero - executed

Seneca - forced to commit suicide

Jesus - tortured and executed

Boethius - tortured and executed.

Thomas a Becket - assassinated

Mandelstam - tortured and executed

Martin Luther King - assassinated

When the city is ill, the physician must die that it might be healed. Or, the king must be blinded that he might see. That is it what it means, apparently, to see the truth about ourselves, or to be be born into immortal life. No wonder takers are few. And besides, moral truth, like laughter, is as contagious as it is incongruous. Best that it be suppressed before a new normal spreads. So, the healing, world changing, words hover and flicker in the air, unwritten, unspoken, like a tongue of flame.

Comments

[Jeff Trexler]

If you haven't already read Rene Girard, I highly recommend it: http://tinyurl.com/3rnypg

[Phil Cubeta]

O, yes, have read quite a bit of him, and quite recently. Amagen on homo sacer comes into it also. He who protects the law by being above the law, and also he who is outside the law, a pariah. Both are homo sacer, a man who is sacred and cursed, set apart. Lear and his Fool is you will. Or Oidipus. Or Jesus. We sanctify the sacrificial victim who has restored our sanity and collegiality by suffering us to butcher him. Swift and all deep satirists are homo sacer. In fact, the best quotations on the pharmokon/pharmokos/pharmakeus complex of terms are from the satirists, including Aristophenes. The profane and the sacred meet in a manger, or the floor of the church, their limbs, thrashing in the Festival of Fools, which was of course The Feast of the Circumcision. From all this also descends Erasmus's Praise of Folly, Rabelais, and the conversational tradition honored by your antecedent, Marshall Mcluhan, as well as by Bahktin, as Carnival where the medium of masquerade is the message, the pleasure, the massage, as we jostle in the Bachnallian streets in a play without footlights. Out of this, as the Mardi Gras becomes Lents, as Bakhtin well knew comes revolution/order, endlessly cycling. And so we raise the drinking cup brim full of blood from an innocent man, the man we killed, and that is how we worship God and celebrate our togetherness.

[JJ Commoner]

Would you consider Bernie Madoff homo sacer ? Was he not just showing us all how foolish and greedy we really are ?

I find it fascinating that his sons ended up snitching on him, evidently after him telling them he knew he should go to jail, or some thing like that.

[Phil Cubeta]

Homo sacer would be to strip him bare and send him wandering naked around Manhattan, at the mercy of all concerned.