[FRIAM] the racist woo peddler

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The flowery sentiments expressed in that review miss something ... something that del Toro nails here:

  https://youtu.be/DGIH2nVRcIQ?t=2585

It's right to talk about all this in the context of (inapt) abstraction. But it's equally right to adopt the tendency to violently abstract if that's what the others around you are doing. I.e. it's a kind of 2nd order violence to avoid abstraction when everyone around you is abstract[ed|ing]. It's *tone deaf* to advocate sensual and psychological extension when everyone around you is abstracted, like some 60 year old complaining about kids playing video games and chatting with their "friends" on Discord. E.g. it's tone deaf to focus on Lovecraft's racism, to *abstract* him out of his time and place and apply 2020 standards to his prejudices, even if those prejudices were already archaic and due to his own abstraction from his world and contemporaries.

On the other hand, it would be tone deaf of me to ignore how utterly offensive and deserving of ridicule those prejudices were and are. The flowery happy talk of that review simply doesn't get at how dissonant the ebb and flow of abstraction <-> concretization can be.

On 8/19/20 5:50 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> From David Abram's book "Spell of the Sensous":
> 
>     /It is not by sending his awareness out beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact with the purveyors of life and health, nor by journeying into his personal psyche; rather, it is by propelling his awareness laterally outward into the depths of the landscape at once both sensuous and psychological . . ./
> 
> put in context by this review:
> 
> https://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/articles/book-reviews/876-no-going-back-coming-full-circle-qthe-spell-of-the-sensuousq-by-david-abram

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