eesirachs

[eesirachs]

your thoughts on Lucifer, the Morning Star?

in the hebrew bible he sits on the divine council, loved by god. i don’t think he ever loses that love

#ask

[eesirachs]

Is Hashem the God of the Old Testament? (Sorry if this is an obvious q)

yes: the god of the hebrew bible (this is what theologians call the 'old testament' now) has many names. the tetragrammaton (yhwh) is perhaps most well known, but because this name is not spoken, others are used. this god is called, in the text, el(ohim), adonai, el roi, hashem, on and on. hashem (השם) is what i encourage students to use. it translates to the (ה) name (שם)

#ask

[eesirachs]

does god listen to Palestinians, you think :(

when baldwin said 'the children are always ours,' he was speaking, i think, for god, who is huddling, eating, praying, resisting now with palestinians

#ask

[eesirachs]

thinking about horror!! god in horror is horror, horror in god, fear of god (of losing sight of him). my beloved: work out your salvation through fear and trembling. good horror: not only scary. only scary is boring. misses the point. misses the longing. its way of begging for your attention is the bone chill. but what it wants to say is something else, always. often just as intense. often more intense. are you a part of it? is it a part of you? can you run? you have to try. you break and you have to keep trying. when you die make sure it counts. as this website often echoes, the horror was for the love

hashem, a good ancient near eastern god, wants you scared. is scared himself, even. but you're right, it's not the fear you look away from, not a cheap jump scare. it's the horror you fifth-look at, the horror you peak through fingers at. he's all abject, all wire-motherhood, all vomit. and it's because he's sweet, too, and so close

#anon just asked if it’s ok to find god in horror: yes #he’s there more than anywhere else

[eesirachs]

Thoughts on Antigone, if you have any? It’s a story that has stuck with me for years.

the tragedy precedes antigone herself. i mean that her narrative is one we've seen before: it's from the hebrew bible. in 2 sam 21, rizpah, a concubine of king saul, sprawls herself in the elements to protect the rotting corpses of her sons and grandsons following their impalement by king david. unallowed to perform kispum (funerary rites), she can at least let them decay naturally. rizpah is a matrix, not a sister (as antigone is), but nonetheless makes visible how the feminine body bends under the burden of mourning, of vigil. makes visible, even, that femininity is that vigil, or one like it

#no one talks about rizpah but to be fair greek lit is trendy #ask

[eesirachs]

Freud shows that he is very well aware how fragile are the veils of the unconscious where this register is concerned, when he opens the last chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams with the dream which, of all those that are analysed in the book, is in a category of its own—a dream suspended around the most anguishing mystery, that which links a father to the corpse of his son close by, of his dead son. As he is falling asleep, the father sees rise up before him the image of the son, who says to him, Father, can’t you see I’m burning? In fact, the son really is burning, in the next room. What is the point, then, of sustaining the theory according to which the dream is the image of a desire with an example in which, in a sort of flamboyant reflection, it is precisely a reality which, incompletely transferred, seems here to be shaking the dreamer from his sleep? Why, if not to suggest a mystery that is simply the world of the beyond, and some secret or other shared by the father and the son who says to him, Father, can’t you see I’m burning? What is he burning with, if not with that which we see emerging at other points designated by the Freudian topology, namely, the weight of the sins of the father, borne by the ghost in the myth of Hamlet, which Freud couples with the myth of Oedipus? The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law—but the inheritance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin. Where does Hamlet’s ghost emerge from, if not from the place from which he denounces his brother for surprising him and cutting him off in the full flower of his sins? And far from providing Hamlet with the prohibitions of the Law that would allow his desire to survive, this too ideal father is constantly being doubted. Everything is within reach, emerging, in this example that Freud places here in order to indicate in some way that he does not exploit it, that he appreciates it, that he weighs it, savours it.

Lacan book xi

#i need this here #weighs it savours it #freud as hamlets father

[eesirachs]

the biblical word מָיִם can mean water, pulp, semen, or urine. when god finds you dehydrating in the desert, this is what he'll give you, in a large pit in the earth (gen 21:19). the only way to find out which referent he's offered is to take a taste (try not to spit)

thinking about the fluids of the hebrew bible. about how these are not meant for drinking. pus, semen, blood. if there is water here, it has metal melted into it. if there is milk, it belongs to another’s mother. tinny on the tongue, these aren’t meant for you. and yet there is a swallowing. god’s amniotic fluids down prophetic throats. aaron drinking gold. samuel and his horn of oil. sometimes, the biblical text nourishes its bodies in ways that fit ill—that makes them ill, even. it is nourishing all the same. god won’t let you die of thirst but he doesn’t have to be sweet, either

#thinking

[eesirachs]

Romans 1:26-32 is talking about homosexuality, isn’t it? How do I reconcile my faith as a gay Christian with such hatred? It’s scary

the bible, written with(in) a one-sex framework, does not speak of homosexuality at all—it cannot. it does speak, however, of unruly bodies and penetrations gone wrong and negotiations made to sex that are appropriate or not. i've spoken before on the hebrew bible's rubric for israelite sex, and i will say something similar here of the second testament. this text is at once accessible and not, legible and not. it is for us, and yet, not. when paul entextualizes and enfleshes the bodies of the roman church in and around grace, he is doing just that—handling and touching those bodies, in their space, tensed and topic. we colonize this ancient text if we hurtle our bodies into that space without critical thought. the bible is a text that will hurt us. it can do that, and it was always meant to. but if we meet paul where he is, follow him down damascus, see what penetration meant for the ancient world and its one-sex model, make its care matter for our bodies, not its hate—that is how we engage in critical spectatorship here. that is how we let it love our bodies, these sites of difference

#ask

[eesirachs]

thinking about the fluids of the hebrew bible. about how these are not meant for drinking. pus, semen, blood. if there is water here, it has metal melted into it. if there is milk, it belongs to another’s mother. tinny on the tongue, these aren’t meant for you. and yet there is a swallowing. god’s amniotic fluids down prophetic throats. aaron drinking gold. samuel and his horn of oil. sometimes, the biblical text nourishes its bodies in ways that fit ill—that makes them ill, even. it is nourishing all the same. god won’t let you die of thirst but he doesn’t have to be sweet, either

#thinking

[eesirachs]

Silver Gelatin Prints, Jeff Cowen, HOUSE Berlin - SÉANCE Exhibition, April 2024

#art

[eesirachs]

thinking about horror!! god in horror is horror, horror in god, fear of god (of losing sight of him). my beloved: work out your salvation through fear and trembling. good horror: not only scary. only scary is boring. misses the point. misses the longing. its way of begging for your attention is the bone chill. but what it wants to say is something else, always. often just as intense. often more intense. are you a part of it? is it a part of you? can you run? you have to try. you break and you have to keep trying. when you die make sure it counts. as this website often echoes, the horror was for the love

hashem, a good ancient near eastern god, wants you scared. is scared himself, even. but you're right, it's not the fear you look away from, not a cheap jump scare. it's the horror you fifth-look at, the horror you peak through fingers at. he's all abject, all wire-motherhood, all vomit. and it's because he's sweet, too, and so close

#ask

[eesirachs]

does god get scared? as and with us? im a pretty anxious/fearful person and its hard to soothe myself even when i talk to him

when god really conjugates the bible, it is, in genre, closer to horror than anything else. samuel being risen from the dead. prophets rotting alive. bodies chanting in a cultic, hollow ring around something gold, something calf-like. god sitting in a garden the night before he kills himself in utter silence. yes—this god is scared

#ask #gods the final girl #which not only means that he gets the terror; but that if you stick w him you’ll both make it out alive

[eesirachs]

Watching the new Moses doc on Netflix. One of the theologians said something so simple but beautiful. When they were talking about God’s identity I am who I am and I will be what I will be. She said “God is a verb”. And for some reason I never thought of it that way but it hit me so heavily.

these verbs—אֶֽהְיֶה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶה.— are qal imperfect, and could denote either present or future tense. and the root, הָיָה, does mean 'to be,' but also, 'to fall out,' 'to pass,' 'to tumble into.' this god does verb himself, but ambiguously, tenselessly. he's throwing triconsonants at moses, letting them fall onto the prophet, fall into his tetragrammaton, fall into language, and then out of it all. here, god is repeating words. babbling with apprehension that edges itself. begging no one in particular to make sense of him, terrified that they might. reminding us that it doesn't matter what we call him, only that we do

#ask

[eesirachs]

What ancient langauges do you know?

hebrew, aramaic, sumerian, akkadian, hittite, ugaritic

#ask #faq #akkadian i was taught w caplice which is ob and na

[eesirachs]

thinking about the images of language. about how our earliest sign-systems had an aesthetic register, but not a straightforward one. before logograms, there were pictographs, meaning that the first cuneiform characters looked like things. the determinative for land (𒆳) looks like a drawing of hills (like, 𓎈 ). the logogram for water (𒀀) looks like two vertical waves (like, ⌇⌇). many think that these signs are crude things, things that do less evincing than their original image might. but referents sometimes evince better when they're crude. look at the signs for penis (𒌫) and for vagina (𒊩), for example. they connote no image, and yet are all-image. these signs penetrate, are penetrated, only in their capacity to evade proper referent. cuneiform culture keeps semiotics non-discursive in this way. its signs aren't images, not anymore, and thank god. they're something less and more than that

#thinking

[eesirachs]

samantha, 27 yo vegan, former mdiv student, current doc student.

studying tissue & text & the ane

what i’m thinking about

my faith

music

goodreads

letterboxd

#anon: my goodreads favorites shelf are the most formative books for me

[eesirachs]

#fashion