but it's trick to come to terms with all the things going on in that passage.

"accumulating palimpsest" is SUCH A BEAUTIFUL expression for what happens when someone with the BL vision goes to church. A "palimpsest" is when a scribe, back in the day, ran out of papyrus, so he scraped off the writing from an older manuscript, and wrote his own lines on top of the "recycled" paper. I have always had the STRONG, UNPLEASANT feeling in church that I was being treated as a palimpsest. That the "church leaders" wanted to do nothing with me but SCRAPE OFF my personal feelings, vision, soul, self, whatever you want to call it, and write their own little Christian Story on my heart. It felt profoundly creepy. And that was what they ALL wanted to do to me. "accumulating palimpsest"

But what he's acknowledging here is that EVERYONE goes through the same process. To use an ugly word, the common spiritual vision of the Ideal Man has to be a "compromise." My Bl vision gets bleached out, but then somebody else's vision of Christ as political leader for the People's Republic of Judaea also gets bleached out, in the common vision. The vision MUST be something everybody can get on board with, or else it's not beauty. This is what Davis calls "correctness, or canonicity." A "canon" is a rule that is generally accepted. Although, as Davis says, that's a necessary but not sufficient condition! I know a lot of Presbyterians whose churches are "correct" but are a long ways from beautiful, from a BL's point of view.

The glass if half-empty, in that in church I'M NEVER GONNA GET MY WAY; the church will never worship boys and let me worship boys like I want to. As half-full, nobody gets their own way, and the general vision is INCOMPLETE without the contributions of boy-lovers.

"Implicitly, then, the Kantian mechanism requires that sensuous (erotic) interest and delight must be converted into non-sensuous (rational and moral) approbation and admiration; and it imagines that this conversion occurs as it were naturally in the social (or sociable) coordination of judgements."

A) This is old stuff; it's the same song PLATO has been singing for years.
B) the social coordination of judgements is what we do were at CBLF & BC; it's why I continue to post here, even after 10 years of hell. THESE DISCUSSIONS that we take part in here -- beginning with which of the Sprouse twins are cuter! -- "naturally" lead us to an interest in bigger and better things than simply our delight in, e.g., cute boy feet.

---Didaskalos