Tag: Vico
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20. Bodies in the Altar
My friend Jason asked me to elaborate further “about graves as the first location markers, the relation with parts of Genesis focusing on burials, the relation to pilgrimage and veneration of saints, and especially if this informs (or is informed by) your medieval travel narrative interests.” A big ask, a big topic, but a journey […]
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13. Sea and Forest
Such traditions as belong to the time before the city was founded, or rather was presently to be founded, and are rather adorned with poetic legends than based upon trustworthy historical proofs, I purpose neither to affirm nor to refute. Livy, The History of Rome Foundation establishes place and historical time.* Before foundation there is […]
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12. Reading Tea Leaves
Picking up some threads. Recall that Vico imagined the beginning of society as a consequence of the giants, degenerate humans in the aftermath of the Flood, first encountering thunder and lighting. This encounter terrified them and motivated the institution of marriage and burial. The god of thunder, of the sky, was the first god. Alongside […]
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7. Vico, Language, Barbarism
I mentioned yesterday that, for Vico, the degradation of civilization was tied to a sort of forgetting which began in the corruption of language. I promised to elaborate, so here we are. Recall that the foundation of civil society is exteriorized memory, preserved in things such as grave markers, statues, the structure of cities, and, […]
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6. Burial and Memory
“The human mind rethinks its prior modes of synthesis and carries them over into its subsequent modifications” – Vico Vico writes that places and on places, society, are founded upon the dead. In his account, it is the act of burial that marks a place as a place and from this marking comes the claim […]
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5. Place and No-Place
I’m really not happy with this one, struggled to get started, had too much to say, and my thoughts were too jumbled to express all I had to say. Were it not for the dictates of the challenge I’ve set for myself, I would have let it percolate for a few days and tried again. […]
Dan Yingst 