I was reading this 'article' 'review' of James Davidson about a book by Michael Wood in the London Review of Books.LRB Vol. 26 No. 23 dated 2 December 2004 James Davidson
I read these promising words and think of how Isodore Isou was declared Emperor of Poetry by Maurice Lemaitre. How strange and odd to declare a poet Emperor in the midst of one of the greatest leftist periods of History. SO there is a hierarchy and a democracy at the same time. that is mistah bloomis sort of suggesting, but his maps be wrong. the maps are deeper and more complex.
I was right about this a few years back when I suggested that the unconscious is a quantum, I mean in the sense that it contains both contradictory self and the straightforward self, or let us call it, bending to Deleuze and Guattari, the transcendental and immanent unconscious. Or the molar molecular dada mama.Maps of the brain and power.
How silly. I am a leftist. I am a believer in history, not god or gods, its all forces, and flows intensities, several thousand years of institutions and names, genders, and displacements of self and other.
It is all very uncertain. One speaks of history and power, death and life, war and mouths, bodies falling down the curtain. What the false poets don't understand is that the real poets are in for keeps,that it is not about 'creative writing' and awards. But about intensities, dangers, what Artaud called the Body-without-organs, about real people really going Nuts. about tidal wave washing away thousands in half an hour..
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But what is an oracle? What isn’t?
The word ‘oracle’ (Latin not Greek) is perhaps unhelpful and is not really examined by Wood with any curiosity. In fact I cannot think of a straightforward equivalent for ‘oracle’ in Greek. The Greek word normally translated as ‘seer’ is not prophetess which implies ‘spokesman’ (phesi, ‘he says’; pro-, ‘in place of’), but mantis, perhaps from a root ma- indicating ‘reveal’, and related by Greeks to mania, ‘raving’. Mantis gives us all those -mancies, those odd subdivisions in the science of knowing the unknowable: geo-, necro-, oneiro-, ornitho-, biblio- mancy, to which one might now add nancymancy or ‘gaydar’. One cannot be sure what it was about the appearance or the behaviour of a certain spooky headhunting insect that led the Greeks to call it, too, mantis; perhaps its habit of adopting a motionless position as if transfixed.
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I don't know who the guy is who wrote this article, but.
It is significant, I think, that Apollo himself, a god, could be called ‘seer’ as if it were a particular talent he had, and that unlike omniscient Allah, Yahweh or God, even Zeus can be surprised by fateful futures. Cassandra is also ‘mantis’, but Apollo’s female voices, like the Pythian priestess at Delphi, were sometimes called ‘pro-mantises’, as if to emphasise the fact that they were not seers but stand-ins for the true divine seer who stood behind them and operated them, with his hand, so to speak, up their skirts. Hence manteion, ‘seer-site’: ‘divination location’ is one of the words often translated as ‘oracle’
