Bob,

IF, as you write

> ... only the fool is unafraid; doesn't feel  the
> impulsion to hysteria always hot on the neck...

AND IF

> Francis' canticle
> addresses this binary bogey, but, unlike the hysterics ...
> resolves it on an affirmative plane, an expression of faith ...


THEN St Francis is a fool.

Also, the cantico is NOT entirely an affirmation.  What about the "Woe to
him who dies in a state of mortal sin".   "Sin" and menace for the saint are
associated with sex with a woman.  You're overlooking the saint's blatant
hysteria in an attempt to cast the cantico as pure affirmation.


Tim



----- Original Message -----
From: "bob scheetz" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 10:53 PM
Subject: Re: cantico del sole


> Tim,
>      "sister death" is a euphemisizing form (like eumenides);
> the anti-thesis of morbid sexuality.  Post-lapsarian existentiality was
the
> same for medieval as it is for post-freudian man (i.e., even outside the
> thrall of a religion of a castrating father god); his abiding cardinal
> dilemma is love & death.   Everyman leads a life of quiet desparation on
> each of those heads.  And only the fool is unafraid; doesn't feel  the
> impulsion to hysteria always hot on the neck.
>
> As was obligatory for all medieval christian teaching,  Francis' canticle
> addresses this binary bogey, but, unlike the hysterics (st paul or
hamlet),
> resolves it on an affirmative plane, an expression of faith in the
ultimate
> meaning of...moon, stars, earth, water, critters...life/death, an ode to
> joy.
>
> bob
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 7:50 AM
> Subject: Re: cantico del sole
>
>
> > Bob,
> > As for the St Francis allusion: the latent fear expressed in the cantico
> > with respect to concupiscent appetite (evident in the emphasis on female
> > purity and in the metaphorical equation of death with a woman's embrace)
> > stands, I think, as an analogue to the neurotic puritanical psychology
of
> > the poem's speaker rather than as an expression of archetypal grandness.
> If
> > the recognition of human mortality were driving the saint into a sea of
> > women I'd agree with your reading. But what we find in the cantico is
> > asceticism, not the quenched brand of Meleager.
> > Tim
>
>