Leviathan
New in the studio.
This was a commission, for which I’m available. Reach out if you need a sea monster of your own. I am also available for dragons and basilisks. Unicorns are on offer for a premium.
I have long thought of the Leviathan as a whale. That’s not correct, as I found in the course of researching this image. The Leviathan eats whales. The lore hails from ancient Judaism, following other Canaanite sources. The sea beast has counterparts on land as Behemoth and in the air as Ziz. Midrash says that God originally made a male and a female Leviathan, but lest they reproduce and crowd the oceans, He slew the female and is reserving her flesh for the victory banquet that he has planned for the party celebrating the arrival of the Messiah. Which means that her enormous length is chilled in some supernal refrigerator. I like to think that angels are preparing gefilte fish as we speak.
In Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 book of that name, he argues that the nature of man is so combative and selfish that the only hope for a harmonious society is a social contract in which we trade liberty for safety, guaranteed by an absolute sovereign. Britannica:
The sovereign determines who owns what, who will hold which public offices, how the economy will be regulated, what acts will be crimes, and what punishments criminals should receive. The sovereign is the supreme commander of the army, supreme interpreter of law, and supreme interpreter of scripture, with authority over any national church. It is unjust—a case of reneging on what one has agreed—for any subject to take issue with these arrangements, for, in the act of creating the state or by receiving its protection, one agrees to leave judgments about the means of collective well-being and security to the sovereign. The sovereign’s laws and decrees and appointments to public office may be unpopular; they may even be wrong. But, unless the sovereign fails so utterly that subjects feel that their condition would be no worse in the free-for-all outside the state, it is better for the subjects to endure the sovereign’s rule.
Leviathan as the serpentine symbol of the sovereign state became a trope of libertarian economic thought when Robert Higgs invoked it in Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987). This is where Higgs observed what he called the ratchet effect, in which government uses crises to increase power, which it rescinds only partially after each crisis passes. This is possibly the truest and most durable observation about politics since Bakunin wrote, “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
Due to this commission and an upcoming residency, further discussion of the current Asynchronous Studio Book Club book will be delayed, but not by much.
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
The current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš.
Dissident Muse Journal is publishing a serial comic, The Socialist Book of the Dead: A Graphic History of Collective Failure.
💙Lots to digest here.
Not the least of it = Celestial bowls of apocalyptic gefilte-leviathaness...
I recently tried out gefilte fish (the store-bought kind, which is no doubt inferior to home-made). I found it bland but comforting. Tartar sauce works well on it, but so does barbecue sauce.