The Cultivation of Conspiracy (1998)
Context: The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman, thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring.
In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu.
The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter IV. The Middle Ages
1990s, A Period of Consequences (September 1999)
Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 64
2008, Mass with the Clergy (18 July 2008)
"Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word : The Madness of Lear" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/nmr_lear.html, in Critics and Criticism : Ancient and Modern (1952), edited by R.S. Crane
Context: At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting. Intelligibility, too, has its levels of obligation, on the lowest of individual statements, and even on this level the obligation is never easy to fulfill and perhaps even to genius could be a nightmare if what the genius sought to represent was “madness.” Only to a limited degree, however, can individual statements be intelligible — and in many instances and for a variety of reasons the individual statements are meant to be obscure, as in “mad” speeches. Since full intelligibility depends upon the relations of individual statement to individual statement, the concept of intelligibility, fully expanded, includes order and completeness; for a fully intelligible exposition or poem having relations has parts, and all the parts ought to be there and add up to a whole. The second major obligation, that of being “interesting,” includes unexpectedness and suspense, for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be — or why should it be written or read? — and the unexpected should not be immediately and totally announced (in other words, expository and imaginative writing should have suspense), for, if the whole is immediately known, why should the writer or reader proceed farther?
But the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape — he gives it proper size. For a piece of writing to have its proper size is an excellent thing, or otherwise it would be lacking in intelligibility or interest or both.
Scholle
Quote from a letter to his brother (4 Dec. 1911); as cited in 'Lankheit, Almanac 14'; as quoted in 'Leaders', in Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910-1914, Milton A. Cohen, Lexington Books, Sep 14, 2004, p. 67
1911 - 1914
