>>36
The perceived justification for mentioning my name appears to be the idea floating around in this thread that Cracky herself, of all people, was actually "present", in some form, during that video-chat between RavRav, Mero, Kimi, Dolly, myself and some other people a couple of days ago.
If she was, I certainly wasn't aware of it. And indeed, to my - admittedly completely unschooled - feeling, the idea seems particularly wildly unlikely.
I've always thought - as most of you do, I believe - of RavRav pretty much as the "Anti-Cracky" - that is, as the most casual, opportunistic, and basically merciless of the various "Sisters of Mercy".
Samuel Beckett's words to the effect that "buildng a temple does not guarantee that the object of its worship will manifest itself therein" are certainly germane here. But my instinct, like the instinct of the rest of you, is to say that RavRav's presence in any gathering - not to mention my own - is surely a factor apt to make a "manifestation" LESS rather than MORE likely.
And yet there must now be fed into the equation the strange and anomalous fact of RavRav's obviously close - apparently even sexual - relationship with Kimi. The fact, that is, of an intimate human and emotional relationship's existing between the person who is probably (again, with the exception of me) most exterior to the reality of Cracky and the person in the Crackyverse who is most "interior" to this reality. As I've said several times, Kimi represents - to use a term favoured by the execrable mentor of Zizek, Jacques Lacan - a unique "suture" between the two areas of the Crackyverse: its relatively vast "mediate" or merely "virtual" area on the one hand and its almost vanishingly tiny "immediate" or actually EXPERIENTIALLY REAL area. If you people have created a religion here, then Kimi is the only equivalent within the Cracky religion of an order of personality that is almost inconceivable to Christianity as it has known itself throughout most of its history. Even for a medieval, let alone for a modern, Christian, there must have been something surreal in the thought that, for a short period between 33 and around 80 AD, it was possible to talk with men who had walked and talked directly with God-made-Man, who could describe to you His movements and His mannerisms from sources that did NOT consist just of canonized "Christpasta". At the time of the death of these men circa 100 AD "all that", to quote the Epistle to the Philippians, "was lost, like tears in rain."
The infinitely thought-worthy circumstance is that everyday friendly intercourse - not to mention mouth-to-vagina contact - between this inarguably most sacred member of the Crackyverse dramatis personae and probably its most "profane" member - the guady, classless cam-whore Stephanie Turner - is now a very likely prospect.
The phenomenon is "relevant to my interests" as a scholar, if not as a Crackyfag (though it WOULD be if I were in any sense the latter). At issue here are all those fundamental questions of religion that have gone under the various names "sacramentality", "epiphany", "typology". They are summed up in the question "How does the Sacred and Divine manifest itself amidst the essential profanity of our experienced world?" I have always been most fascinated by those varieties of religious discourse that insist most childishly and selfishly that the Divine must "come to meet us" and manifest itself in those things we know most intimately and desire most instinctally. This is the strange pathos of Dante's "Divine Comedy", where Hell and Heaven are peopled with individuals that Dante drank and gamed with, and of Blake's devotional poems, which are as crazily parochial and chauvinistic as the ludicrous Americanization of the Holy Land by the Mormons: "And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England's clouded hills?"
I do not believe in the least that "those feet" walked the Crackyhouse Tinychat the other night. But there is a "mystery" here - as indeed there is in all things, if one has the courage and perseverance to seek it - and I, for one, am deeply grateful that my (indeed entirely and irredeemably profane) love for RavRav has allowed me to partake in it.