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Coney Island Cut-Out Consciousness
A couple related quotes I wanted to pull from Sansonese’s excellent Body of Myth. Incidentally, Sansonese emailed me after reading my recent piece mentioning his book and we’ve been having a fruitful email conversation since. Once I’m finished with this book, I’m hoping to compile an interview with him about it. Stay tuned for that.
In any event, this first quote comes from page 33 and the context of it has to do with a discussion of early Greek philosophy and how archaic cultures understood consciousness. Some of his language here may be difficult to follow if you’ve not read the rest of the book, but oh well:
An apt image is that of a Coney Island cutout, in which the customer sticks his or her head into the cardboard body of a strongman or bathing beauty. Just so, tha anaxagorean nous peers into the world though the senses, a concept of perception that is thoroughly archac. An archaic human being, the evidence suggests, pictured himself as a spirit inhabiting and animating a body. But the nous is itself susceptible to proprioceptive scrutiny by the psyche or soul. Thus cognition too is externalized in archaic psychology.
And there is a follow-up quote using this same image on page 234:
Imagine a lantern covered by a shroud perforated by an infinite number of tiny slits. The light burning at the center of the lantern is brahman, each ray of light emerging from a slit is atman. Therefore, the Upanishads say, “atman is brahman.” It is an analogy similar to the Coney Island-cutout analogy that describes archaic attitudes on the relation of body to soul. Brahman-purusa “peers” into the manifest universe (the creation) though an infinite set of eyes, it hears through an infinite set of ears, it thinks with an infinite number of minds, of which your eyes and ears and mind are but instances.
Inspired by this passage, I have been compiling some photos from Google images which I think push these concepts into ever more revealing directions. The first thing I noticed was that every instance of beach cutouts I could find all stereotypically stuck to the male-female dyadic pairing. A couple other examples in addition to the one above:
It almost seems as though the male-female pairing is expressive of some other archetypal content. An Adam & Eve pairing perhaps? Also see these headless mannequins I found online, the purpose of which I think is just about exactly the same as the beach cutouts above: you’re supposed to imagine your head transposed onto their bodies, and thus want to buy the clothing they model.
Also think about this: what was Adam & Eve’s sin? They ate from the “Tree of Knowledge” and thus gained self-awareness. In other words, they “grew heads.” Growing heads forced them out of paradise. But perhaps there lies a way back to Paradise after all.
Check these graphics out:
First off is the classic way that Jack Chick depicts God - as a faceless entity. Second is the cover of Carlos Castaneda’s “A Separate Reality” (see also Castaneda’s discussion of “erasing personal history“) Third is from the Surrealist splinter group lead by Georges Bataille, Acephale. Wikipedia has the barest introduction to the subject matter:
Georges Bataille, the group was a secret society interested in instigating a new religion. Due to their secret nature, little is known about the group.
Though not central to group activities, Bataille was fascinated with human sacrifice, and planned to ritually sacrifice his lover. Though an indemnity was offered to an executioner, one was never found.
Human sacrifice might also remind you of my recent discussions here, particularly the one on faking your own death. Also rather odd, seeing as I’ve never really read much of anything about the Acephale group is that another of the contents closely parallels something else I have been talking about lately in terms of identity, government and documentation: “Perhaps its most insolent entry was the ‘License to Live’, a faux governmental form requesting vital statistics from the bearer in order to enforce its legal fiat; the penalty for failing to keep the document ‘in order’ was death.”
One final symbol I wanted to add to the mix that has been floating around in my “head” is this one of Salome and John the Baptist.
Very peculiar set of connections, no?
- Podcast 17: And I’ll Form The Head!
- Flying Humanoids
- Raising Consciousness
- The Siren Song of Beach Volleyball
- Gods & Collective Experiences
- Prev: Love Is A Battlefield
- Next: Dragonfly Robot Video
December 18th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Once I was walking down the street in Bratislave, Slovakia, with some friends, and we smoked a joint, which was something I hadn’t sone in years.
As I walked, I was vidividly transported through space and time to other occasions on which I had been walking down the street with friends - in cleveland, in upstate NY, in Texas… I found myself returning to different points in space and time for a moment or too and reliving certain seemingly trivial memories of walking down the street as though I was right there
i had the sensation that my consciousness was something that had been lowered into a cyclinder which was revolving around me - the metaphor of “a lantern covered by a shroud perforated by an infinite number of tiny slits” is very apt - the slits were different pinnts in space and time and/or memories
I ‘m not really “here” this is just the slit I happen to be loooking through right now
Or maybe
I’m here, or in otther words, yes I am looking through this slit
They grew heads, hmmmm….
December 18th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
BTW you might also dig “The Solar Anus“
December 18th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Fun With Your New HEAD by Tom Disch
December 18th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
That Disch piece is AMAZING! Fits perfectly into my next podcast posting tomorrow.
December 18th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
“And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations.” (Luke 16:9)
What’s this mean?
December 18th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Huh? How does that Bible quote relate?
Another thing that just struck me regarding these cut-out beach images. Each of them features a man and woman touching. The beach itself is a similar union of water and earth touching. Most of them typically feature the sky in it as well - the juncture of the Three Worlds. I wonder if you might interpret the empty spaces for the heads of people to be stuck in esoterically as the nostrils: two holes through which life passes.
December 18th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
I remember learning a few years ago that Bataille was an anarcho-syndicalist who also (paradoxically?) influenced fascism and Nazism with his emphasis on action over thought. I might not be remembering that exactly right, and as I type this, I haven’t gone searching the net about it.
December 18th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
Emphasizing action over thought doesn’t sound so nasty to me:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/12/07/making-it-happen/
In fact, on the white board over my desk, I have written in all caps right now “TO KNOW THROUGH ACTION”
December 19th, 2006 at 5:15 am
You might find Douglas Harding’s ‘Headless’ experiments intriguing:
December 19th, 2006 at 5:22 am
Yeah I keep meaning to look at that - thanks!
December 19th, 2006 at 9:35 am
No, it’s not, I agree. I guess the point was (and I heard this all second-hand) that action instead of thought was fascist because of the whole not thinking critically about your leader’s orders thing.
I dunno if Bataille’s ties to fascism’s roots are real; that’s what I heard, and I certainly would want to emphasizes not thinking critically about that.
December 19th, 2006 at 9:49 am
I think On Having No Head might have been my first introduction to buddhism, I got the coolest paperback of it from the thrift store. The cover was white and blank, and had a head-shaped cutout in it so the title page could show through.
December 19th, 2006 at 9:52 am
There’s this, too.
December 19th, 2006 at 11:56 am
4 Worlds, if you count that fiery disk on the horizon.
December 19th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Well I think we have a lot of problems with the word fascism nowadays and trying to equate things with it. Simply put, fascism is fascism - nothing else.
More to your point though: If you were to truly be “headless” I’m guessing you wouldn’t even recognize a leader at all though…
PS. The exercises on that Headless.org website linked above are AWESOME
December 20th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Very true. They say the first person to mention the Nazis in an argument loses, ha ha. Anyway, I was just saying what my professor had said — and he was talking about fascist fascists and Nazi Nazis of the original varieties.