Sunday, May 15, 2016

Tom Sterner multimediates



1 comment:

  1. Jean Paul was the pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, a German Romantic writer known for his humorous novels and stories. In 790 he had a vision of his death that changed his life and his art, which were suffused with a personal philosophy without illusions, lived in a state of humorous resignation. Three years later he began using his "Jean Paul" alias and became a prolific and popular writer. In 1796-97 he published "Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstücke, oder Ehestand, Tod, und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten Siebenkäs" ("Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man's Lawyer"), in which he introduced the "Doppelgänger" (double + walker or goer), or, in his words, "people who see themselves.". In the novel, Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs faked is own death in order to escape from an unhappy marriage, at the instigation of his alter ego, Leibgeber. He used the concept in some of his later works as well. However, the term was slow to migrate into English usage. An "apparition of a person living" was a definition in Francis Grose's "Provincial Glossary" of 1787, but it defined the term "fetch."
    Percy Bysshe Shelley's drama "Prometheus Unbound" (1820) contained the following lines, though not the word doppelgangee:
    Ere Babylon was dust,
    The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
    Met his own image walking in the garden.
    That apparition, soul of men, he saw.
    For know there are two worlds of life and death:
    One that which thou beholdest; but the other
    Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
    The shadows of all forms that think and live
    Till death unite them and they part no more...."
    Eventually, the success of Catherine Crowe's "The Night-Side of Nature" (1848), about paranormal phenomena, introduced the term to a wider audience. The concept, however, is both old and wide-spread.In Egypt, a ka was a tangible "spirit double" that had the same memories and feelings as its twin. In an Egyptian take on the Trojan War story. "The Greek Princess," Helen's ka misled Paris and ended the war. In Norse mythology, a vardøger was a ghostly double who went ahead of a living person and performed their actions in advance. The doppelgänger motif is a staple of Gothic fiction, probably its central expression of character. In psychiatry and neurology, heautoscopy is the reduplicative hallucination of seeing one's own body at a distance" and is a symptom of schizophrenia and epilepsy.

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