Maria Damon

“… that which is sacrificed (the lamb, the deer, the ram, the boy, the girl, the body) and that to which it is sacrificed (the prima causa, but of course if it needs sacrifice to function then isn’t the sacrifice itself the prima causa?) call out to each other with images of flora and fauna…”

Now for a moderate digression into the heart of the text/textile nexus; this also provides me an opportunity to showcase a collaboration with performance poet and feminist Kabbalah scholar Adeena Karasick.

After I reviewed and wrote about Karasick’s work, we collaborated on a conference presentation in 2006. But it was in 2010, after the publication of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture, a book in which we both had essays, that our text/textile work together began.

 “How did this come about?

Stay tuned,”

is how I concluded my previous post.

Here’s the simple narrative. I was puzzling over some of Shane MacGowan’s lyrics, struck by the viscerality of his fear of ghosts and corpses as well as the frequency with which they appeared in even the songs with the jauntiest melodies.

Some weeks ago on Facebook I posted this:

“Breakthrough on the metaphor/materialism front. Stay tuned. The signifier yearns for its other, the long-buried signified. The Song of Songs…”

Signifier and signified, “soul” and what “soul” worships, that which is sacrificed (the lamb, the deer, the ram, the boy, the girl, the body) and that to which it is sacrificed (the prima causa, but of course if it needs sacrifice to function then isn’t the sacrifice itself the prima causa? about which more in a later post) call out to each other with images of flora and fauna; in the Song of Songs, language using non-language to cry out for reunion with whatever it is about processes of meaning-making that is not language, that exceeds and also lies below it.