Post 2: Seductions

12 March 2020// Pages 30-40

Schattenfroh tells our narrator, still chained to the desk, that images are voluptous and can seduce you. The Frightbearing Soceity thinks this is dangerous, we should all strip it down to Hegelian pure-word-thought. But you see, I’ve already been seduced. Framing, enframing, which in some German and in Heidegger is Gestell, is important, if you want a pure and eternal soul, which seems to be the goal here, eternity. But I am never pure, and have Death in the groupchat.

The narrator sees the image like this, and our differences are illustrated by the device of printer Franz Behem, which I have stolen from the Penn Provenance Project.

For him the image is a phoenix that burns, disappears its image-ness and leaves in the sky a fiery sign of the eternal soul. The narrator likes this. But you see, phoenixes come back, they don’t stay burnt. And this is where the Schattenfroh locates voluptuousness in the image, that stubborn always-coming-back-embodied-ness. The end of that striptease is death, which happens when you love the visual world world too much. Sic His Qui Diligunt. To those who love-- like the pelican loves, overmuchly, feeding its young in Christological allegory by drawing nourishing blood from its own breast with its beak. Some of us prefer the pelican to the phoenix. Some of us like the act of drawing blood that looking does, always referential, always pulling on the self as it also pulls on the world.

The problem is that Scattenfroh would call me obstinate, the kind of person who loves moribund arabesques too much to ever get at truth in texts. Our narrator is better than I am at the exercises of framing, en-framing, and un-framing meaning in words that peel themselves off from the seduction of the visual. He does the crunches, the lifting, the jumping jacks, the exercises at the desk that are meant to strip down the image’s allure. I, however, don’t want the “standing reserve” of pure meaning that might mean eternity of the soul. I want the image to layer me up and peel me down like a Mandarin orange with its unclear complexities, play me out. Let me die impure then. Sorry, Schattenfroh.

-- A.V. Marraccini

p.s.-- This Death And The Maiden, by Hans Sebald Beham in 1547, is one of the Kleinmeister prints from the German 16th century that are favourites of mine, and if you trust Scattenfroh, dangerous loves. They are so small they contain details smaller than are visible with the naked eye-- you have to bend over them, like a kiss or a surgery, and use a loup to see them.

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