thesis.

Some of you have expressed interest in reading my thesis when it is complete. Well, now it is complete.




click here to read my thesis.



It is relatively short at 41 pages long.
The topic is an interpretation of a Francis Bacon painting.

theory from: early Christian Byzantium, St. John of Damascus, Martin Luther, Joseph Leo Koerner, GWF Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, my own experience
fictional literature from: Oscar Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges
film stills from: The Battleship Potemkin (1929), Triumph of the Will (1935)
art from: Francis Bacon, Diego Velazquez, Albrecht Durer


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The Next Chapter of Lena: Confession

aren't you getting tired of seeing no updates? yet you return, day after day.


depression feels like desperation, and I refuse to submit a dishonest post.


Lena: Return.






Lena walks back to a place she has been before. A scaled-down Babel pierced the sky. A sound came out of the rip - bells. A woman in an ugly hat walked out. The church.


Entering the confessional, Lena walks back again to a place she has been before. 


"When was the date of your last confession?" the virgin asks her.


"Age fourteen. A requirement before Confirmation."


"And how many years do you have now?"


"Twenty-Four. So ten. Ten years since my last confession."


The virgin says nothing. Lena decides this silence is the least offensive prompt of all possible prompts which are directed as instigating one's admission of vulnerabilities.


"My first sin is that, when I was younger and forced to participate in this sacrament, I made up sins," Lena says. "I never felt as if I had done anything wrong."


"And now, you feel you have done wrong?"


"No, not really."


The virgin says nothing, and then says, "Why don't we continue anyway?"


"Why not I suppose. My second sin is not believing in God."


The virgin automatically responds, "Mother Theresa was plagued with doubt until the day she died. She wrote of it every night in her journals."


"I guess I don't see what that has to do with me, because I don't give a fuck if God exists or not. I write about interesting things in my journal."


The virgin clears his virginal throat. He reswallows the virginal mucus he has just worked so hard to dislodge, virginally. "Perhaps confession is not the right step for you at this moment."


"Jesus man. I'm getting there. I'm just fucking around right now."


"So you do have something to confess which burdens your soul?"


"No, but one of my characters does. Do you mind if I read a part of her confession to you?"


"I'm not sure I understand." Virgin clears his dumb virgin throat again. 


Lena clears her own de-virginized throat. "Her name is Aletea. She is conflicted right now because she is having an affair with her cousin. They played the 'show me' game when they were young, and now, their paths have mysteriously intersected again many years later. Their attraction is magnetic and natural and mutual. Yet of course it is wrong."


"Is this you? Are you talking about you?"


"No, Father. This is Aletea. She is one of my characters. From my journals."


"Ah - I think - "


"Anyway Father, may I please read you her confession? She is quite a devoted Catholic and I need to know what penance you would give her. For contextual accuracy."


"Er, alright then."


Lena opens her purse and removes a small red notebook from one of its compartments. She turns to page 17 and begins reading. Slowly.


"When he finally touched me it was how I remembered touch felt. It was bare sex, elementary sex. Everything else has since him, a footnote. Like I tapped into the center of a system. Its maxims. Its gears. At one point I said, as he was cautiously reacquainting himself with me, I said, in a last attempt to salvage my ethical self, to squander his carnal appetite, I said, 'Don't do this to yourself.' He said, 'But I'm doing it to you.' And god. I just fucking let him."


"Is that it?" the virgin asks after a few moments of dead air.


"Yes. What are the damages?"


The virgin merely swallows. "15 each Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary."


"Is that really it?"


"And a tremendous effort to change."


Lena frowns. "But if she changes the plot will be ruined. I have many more pages after 17."


"Well, then I guess she's not really sorry."


Lena ponders this a moment. 


"I guess you're right."

master of theology

encountering the apophatic in Hegel, very persuaded by his hesitance to enumerate particulars of the Divine. the Spirit travels in a circuit, evidently. often objects are completing their own definitions, i.e. "thought thinking about itself."

all very interesting, my previous experience with Hegel detailed the aesthetic - or just Art - and Hegel understands it as the third most effective device to communicate the Absolute, only behind Religion and Philosophy, respectively.

this is very reassuring to me, for these are exactly the three areas to which i am most drawn. i anticipate socially-correct colleagues to point out that the supersessionist construction is not only inconsistent but dated, as Hegel seems to have privileged the Greek yet demoted the Jew. no matter.

christianity is not special in its metaphysics, it is arbitrary and game-like.

whenever i become frustrated with the thing i remember that it is being presented to me mostly in formulas, or in some colorful brochure committed to dispensing justice. i remember that as a refined narcissist, the world exists for me to enjoy.

the element of christianity i most enjoy is its portrayal in film and literature. to appreciate those modes one must accure a bit of experience though, but not religious experience, just the witness of an executed vision, a masterpiece unto itself without the amendments of a thousand tiny voices yelling pieces of splintered scripture as if the whole was always too much for them.

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of whom should i be afraid

>>>

my light and my salvation,
my darkness and tribulation,
all free fall in adulation
of whom should i be afraid?

emptied of pennies or
absent my body in full-
working motion
whom shall i fear?

I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.

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Working Thesis.

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for those of you who were asking about my thesis: this is the bare-bones precis.

"My final project pivots on the words “original” and “translation:” I am interested in translations of portraits that break stylistically and theologically from their archetype. The two archetypes and their translations I will be analyzing in this project are:

1.      Albrecht Durer’s 1500 Munich Self-Portrait, for which I have selected my object analysis 1. (translation of Christ Pantocrator)

2.      Francis Bacon’s 1953 portrait of Pope Innocent X, for which I have selected my object analysis 2. (translation of Diego Velazquez’s 1650 portrait of Innocent X)

I am interested in telling the story of these translations of religious art. I do not wish to merely compare the original to the translation, but I want to show how the original informs its translation and how the translation completes the original. My theoretical platform, therefore, approaches the correspondence as one that could operate within a number of historical trajectories. Specifically, I am interested in the overlap of two histories: a stylistic/artistic one and a theological one. I hope that in telling the story of these pieces of art, the reader also hears a religious story. I wish to communicate that visual literacy informs, supplements, and, at its greatest heights, is theological literacy.

I will mainly be using Benjamin to organize my paper. The two essays I have in mind are “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Task of the Translator.” I also anticipate drawing upon other aesthetic texts that envision art (or everything) historically – so Germanic aesthetics mostly. Lessing, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, etc. are possibilities.

Also, I am in the habit of titling my papers after I have finished them, so unfortunately I do not have a title yet." 

Velazquez/Bacon

Christ Pantocrator/Durer