In Christianity, feet are tender, and are washed. Christ bathed the feet of his disciples. There's a lot of love toward feet going on.
In Rome, the power of feet is displayed.
The tender side of feet are hallmarked within Christianity.
Feet have an otherworldly side, a warm and sweet side.
All praise feet!
In Rome, the power of feet is displayed.
The tender side of feet are hallmarked within Christianity.
Feet have an otherworldly side, a warm and sweet side.
All praise feet!
27 comments:
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/o/u/ourgodrn.htm
"All praise feet!" Great line.
Helen
This brought tears to my eyes. I loved it! Thank you.
You're welcome, brother.
"And did these feet in ancient times...". William Blake is delightful in his depiction of feet. One reviewer mentioned this--always look at the feet in Blake!, he or she suggested--in relation to the Blake visual art show at the (NYC) Metropolitan Museum of Art some years ago. I looked and agreed.
I guess everybody has seen the recent Altamont historical revelation?--that there was a plot by some HA's to kill Mick Jagger just because he said he would never get involved with those folks again. This was in some newspapers yesterday I think.
Wow, I should go with my first reaction. I felt like commenting on Blake's poem, but decided not too. I'm glad to know someone else made the same connection.
My feet hurt all the time. I wish there was a cure for that.
WW
They say podiatric and dental pain are the worst.
But those people haven't have a kidney stone.
I'm going to look into Blake's feet.
Look here http://youtube.com/watch?v=73eB-aAo8Eg
I went to see There Will Be Blood today. This wasn't painful at all. Just one long dull socialist screed.
Boring as heck.
At least you're off your WW.
But it's hardly WWII, or even I.
It's just a lot of spouting about oil.
I am tired of sociopaths in films. I think they're overdone.
I asked a famous Blake scholar if Blake had said anything important about feet.
The scholar said no.
Feet o' Jesus by Langston Hughes
At the feet o' Jesus,
Sorrow like a sea.
Lordy, let yo' mercy
Come driftin' down on me.
At the feet o' Jesus
At yo' feet I stand.
O, ma little Jesus,
Please reach out yo' hand.
"I'm going to look into Blake's feet."
That's the most sublime phrase I've heard in a long while.
I just picture you sitting there, gazing at these luminescent, angelic feet.
That are also gross and dry and dead.
Someday, baby, you ain't gonna worry for Me anymore.
Well, feet are perhaps an aspect of Blake that hasn't been sufficiently explored. Stephen may have led us into a virgin area of Blake studies where experience is to be met in all innocence!
Jesus posits the essential innocence of feet, and by washing them, in a sense he is baptizing them, and perhaps it is in this sense that he meant the term, "souls," as "soles."
To cleanse our soles. Perhaps that is what church was meant to be, after all.
Well, once again I am late to the party.
I prefer the version by Vangelis used in the movie Chariots of Fire to the one Helen gave us a link to. But perhaps that just dates me.
And doesn't Oxford use the Jerusalem hymn as some sort of school song?
I would think the Lutheran Surrealist would enjoy the poem since it recalls Revelations and raptures.
WW
and since we're trading youtube links, here's mine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zfOu6QWX0w
WW
I saw some really beautiful feet at the Pitti palace in Florence. Actually, there was one statue which I will nominate as having the most beautiful representation of baby feet in the world. They were so perfect and pudgy I wanted to pinch them. The baby's hair was so soft and wispy looking that it was hard to remember that she was marble.
Superb!
I think that was the day I almost fainted from cultural overload. Apparently its a documented condition and they have clinics set up all over Florence which treat some 20-50 people a day suffering from cultural overload (and heat exhaustion).
The following is from a famous Blake scholar that I asked about feet in Blake:
Blake mentions feet in his poem"And did those feet in ancient times," which is part of the introduction to Blake's poem "Milton". The poem is on page 95 of Erdman's edition (rev. 1988)(misnumbered 94 in the first line index). It became quite famous in England because it got taken up as an anthem by the labour movement. The feet are Jesus's. There are some big feet in Blake's paintings, but he does not say anything about them. However, Gulley Jimson, a fanatical Blakean painter in Joyce Cary's great novel "The Horse's Mouth," paints a picture entirely of huge feet on the wall of a London flat he is "renting" from some toffs. It is a very funny scene. As I recall, there are some tiger's feet in it, which caused Alec Guinness, playing Jimson in the movie, to recite some of "The Tyger" while contemplating his work.
You really didn't like There Will Be Blood? I thought the cinematography, acting, soundtrack and message were superb. Did the heavy handed anti-Christian sentiment bother you? What movie did you most like from the current crop of films?
--Tom
I had to look up toff. It's a member of the British upper class, esp. one who is elegantly dressed. It stems from the word tuft, it is thought. The upper class wore tassles or tufts to indicate if they were from Oxford or Cambridge.
Tom, this is the only film I've seen since The Bourne Identity, I think it was called. I rarely go to see movies.
I didn't like the Bourne Identity either.
I don't think anybody is actually able to think in a movie.
I don't know why anybody goes to them.
There is one film maker I like to keep up with: Aki Kaurismaki, a Finn.
I don't care about any other films.
Occasionally I watch International Film Channel. I saw Even Cowgirls Get The Blues Last Night, which is described by Leonard Maltin as a BOMB. I wasn't able to pay attention very well.
I was reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose for class today.
Do you like movies? I went to see this one, and just couldn't believe how simple it was. I felt the acting was one-track monomaniacal giggliness (DDL was basically the same guy he played in Gangs of New York -- high energy nihilstic ruthlessness).
I don't know anybody like this.
I also don't know any pastors who are faking it.
Nor do I know anybody who would knowingly hurt their children's feelings.
The real world is a lot richer than the weird world of the movies.
One of the great things about movies, Kirby, is that they expose you to people who aren't in your circle of influence.
AND they're fiction. That's pretty cool too.
Day-Lewis gave an excellent performance and deserved the Oscar he won. And he talks awesome.
It'd be silly to say that movies are only allowed to portray good, moral people - that'd put an end to Aristotle's protagonist/ antagonist schtick.
The very, very ending of There Will Be Blood is over the top and a bit ludicrous - PT Anderson lost the restraint he mostly had shown throughout the rest of the film - But I dare say that the film as a whole is tense, visually stunning, well-done, 'meaningful,' and good.
For someone who seems to spend as much time Reading as you do, Kirby, I dare say it's a bit wonky of you to talk about the 'real world' being the only mental space worth existing in.
And Kirby, if you want to see some pastors who are faking it, just go ahead and watch some televangelists.
Kirby,
Re/ Blake, I was mainly interested in posting about the art criticism I had read (and affirmed with my own eyes) that said Blake was excellent in his pictorial depiction of feet. Citing "And did these feet" (from the Preface to JERUSALEM) was an association & afterthought.
However, as I've come to remember, another moment in Blake that shouldn't be left out is the important episode in MILTON wherein the spirit of John Milton, as a Descending Star, enters Blakes's left foot. Plate 29 of this Illuminated Poem shows Blake bending backwards (above the waist his body is almost horizontal) as the Star, alongside his knee, homes in towards his foot.
This, and the variation that constitutes Plate 33, is the visual counterpart of lines from Plate 19:
"But Milton entering my Foot, I saw in the nether/Regions of Imagination, also all men on Earth/And all in Heaven saw in the nether regions of the Imagination,/In Ulro beneath Beulah, the vast breach of Milton's descent./But I knew not that it was Milton, for man cannot know/What passes in his members till periods of Space and Time//Reveal the secrets of Eternity..."
The passage continues, but I imagine that's a big enough dose for now. I have a beautiful paperback edition of MILTON published jointly in 1978 by Shambala of Boulder and Randam House of New York.
Plate 29 of this Illuminated Poem
I agree with Brett's comments on There Will Be Blood. Kirby, you project a Victorian aesthetic in the need for art to be morally instructive. Why would that be of any interest? You can spend your time reading the true Canons if you want moral instruction.
I do love films; I have been on foreign run as of late, discovering the all too action packed world of Fassbinder and Bergman. I have discovered a few gems along the way: Suzuki's Fighting Elegy, Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano, Schlondorf's Circle of Deceit, Melville's Le Samourai to name a few.
--Tom
I don't want moral instruction from a film. I don't want a thesis-driven film, esp. one with a very simplistic thesis.
The film had a very simplistic thesis and a blood-thirsty title with an implicit promise:
There WILL be Blood!
Ok, and so it wasn't as if they reneged on the promise. There was a little bit of blood in the bowling alley scene at the end.
I thought the film was hell-bent in all the wrong ways.
I did like this character very much in Gangs of New York. But the close-up here without any further dimension. Well, I didn't learn anything new from the film at all.
I don't learn anything from films, for the most part. They seem hell-bent on stroking a certain demographic, to make the cash machine ring.
Books are a lot better at teaching me something. As is life itself.
Life is mysterious.
This film was quite predictable, and there were no surprises and it wasn't even very well-made (the progression of the lead into total solipsistic greed is ultimately preimised on the notion that he was ALWAYS that way -- but we see throughout that he actual struggles with his demons to some degree).
But not enough, and it didn't interest me at all. The film was as interesting as a slam-dunk.
I understand that for the left who have not been getting very far these days with their jive enjoyed seeing a slam-dunk of their vision: capitalism and religion suck, and should be replaced by ...
SOME KIND OF CHANGE (never precisely spelled out)...
And when Sinclair wrote it, no doubt there was the hope that Stalin and co. were going to provide that change.
But then you come to me and ask, "Can we make a utopia?"
Answer: "No, we can't."
But we're doing pretty well here in America, and I don't think we should knock it. I think we should be proud of what we have built. A pretty good food distribution system, for instance.
I mean, no one has starved to death in this country (except Karen Carpenter) for what -- a hundred years?
Compare the Ukraine in the 1930s, and ask yourself, is that the kind of change we want?
I would like to go see a movie called, "There Will BE No Blood." However, I might be the only person in the audience.
Fine. And I'll take a pack of Jujubes. Thanks!
Well, evidently no one here wants to get into the perplexities of later Blake--but I'm sure all can appreciate that now the Illuminated Books, everything from Songs of Innocence and Experience to Milton and Jerusalem, are available in affordable color editions. In the early 70's one had to be a toff or a thief to own one of these books (some posh outfit called The Trianon Press seemed to monopolizing the printing of these works)...and then suddenly the floodgates opened in the later '70s, I seem to remember.
Oh, and of course "And did these feet" is from the Prologue to Milton, just as Kirby's expert said. I said something different.
Blake's complexity is bewildering.
Thanks for bringing him up, Stephen.
I have to rely on the experts with Blake. I've tried to read a lot of it, and have read some short books on Blake: Soupault's and Ginsberg's come to mind, but none of the experts take either of those volumes seriously.
old "children's" (sort of) joke or play on wds
The Agony of Duh-Feet
get it? get it!
"defeat"
Actually, it took me a while to get this.
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