Date:         Tue, 13 May 1997 11:17:50 EDT
From: thatsa spicy meatball <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Subject:      FILLER: Burke's Mystery

just for a little zing in the thinking...

(p. 115) "...we might begin with the proposition that mystery arises
at that point where different kinds of beings are in communication.
In mystery there must be strangeness; but the estranged must also be
thought of as in some way capable of communion.  There is mystery in
an animal's eyes at those moments when a man feels that he and the
animal understand each other in some inexpressible fashion."

"While the mystery of sex relations, which leads to the rhetoric of
courtship, is grounded in the communication of beings biologically
estranged, it is greatly accentuated by the purely social
differentiation which, under the division of human labor, can come to
distinguish the 'typically masculine' from the "typically feminine."

"Similarly, the conditions for 'mystery' are set by any pronounced
social distinctions..."

"And all such 'mystery' calls for a corresponding rhetoric, in form
quite analogous to sexual expression: for the relations between
classes are like the ways of courtship, rape, seduction, jilting,
prostitution, promiscuity, with variants of sadistic torture or
masochistic invitation to mistreatment.  Similarly, there are strong
homosexual analogies in 'courtly' relations between persons of the
same sex but of contrasting social status...."

From A Rhetoric of Motives
Kenneth Burke
University of California Press 1969