Our obsessiveness about exercise and health seems supremely anti-gnostic.
But the opposite is the case. Consider the imagery: “Buns of steel” and “Abs of iron” and “Cable-like biceps.”
The bodybuilder aims to exercise himself to robothood. His goal to exercise until he’s elevated to a state beyond human. He wants to escape his inevitably soft and pliable, penetrable and vulnerable, fleshliness.
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…