draft
work in progress
recovering the origins of modern science in a mystic's dream...
continued from confluenza6.blogspot.com
Those deemed legally blind can see colors and shapes. This is not vision, vision comprehends and senses a world. Nor is reading the world without sensing it sight. The modern idea -- sign arbitrarily related to signified -- is that we fluctuate back and forth, mostly unconscious of, and not really sensing, the world, but the internal computer matching the color vibrations and reading the shapes for information. We have to stop to take the time to feel and sense things, and in the instants we de-mechanize and actually return to sentience, the read world shatters into fragments, we go legally blind. So the modern (including, even more so, so-called (erroneously) post-modern) idea is that we are essentially, irrevocably blind, fluctuating between sensory fragments that trigger salivation and other affect and blind, computerized reading. The oceanic experience of the whole is a delusion. Only the shards of color and form, such as some of the legally blind can see, in abstract painting restore the senses and allow us to be sentient and awake -- by removing the legibility of the whole. We might be Oedipus, too guilty to enjoy the senses without putting out our eyes, but you don’t really need a psychological explanation, and in a way that’s a front, a way to imagine it’s up to us, that we did it, are not just humiliated victims of the physiological and ontological facts. The Greek gods maybe live no more because sooner or later the truth would out. It’s a beautiful dream to think psychology matters. As Ashley Bickerton puts it, “I’m just a lump of biomass parked between naughts and ones.” Of course he forgets to mention that, heir of Giotto daring hair of the dog that bit us, he knows it, like unto the gods.
Shameless, or just willing to confess and repent my constant shame -- just to cover the psychological side in case I missed something there -- I have not only understood, but felt and sensed something different in front of this fresco, a releasing and flowing of all the parts of me toward one center. Defying the assumed impossibility of something so anomalous, this fresco seems to say -- yes we arrived at the same conclusion, vision does not exist, it is impossible’ and then from there we said, okay then, let us produce vision, which has never before existed. We decided to construct a thing that, uniquely, could allow people to see, but only when gazing directly at it. You can also, though, see through it -- the very fact that you can finally see, not just fluctuate being sensing and thinking, tints the view rosy, that tint reducing the glare so you can see even more -- and you can interpolate beyond the frame. Oh and just for a back up, in case the physiologists and philosophers were overlooking something, we brought in the psychologists working out the guilt and absolution aspect. It wasn’t working though, until we brought in an artist who might be a mason or a member of some secret cult, able to convert time back into space. Too many things came together here. It all seems like one big conspiracy to make this happen, create vision, conjure up a divine human out of a lump of biomass parked between noughts and ones”. Not haphazardly or randomly, the way it’s always happened before, where it might well have been just another Greek dream. No, we’d cover all the bases this time, such that a fair jury would deem vision actual, the divine human construct fully constructed, beyond a reasonable doubt. Lucy in the sky with diamonds, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes. All you need is love.
Maybe you always had to tamper with the default to buy into what the militaryscholarlyscienceartbusinessworldindustrial complex (not to be confused with art, critical thought, and science worming their through it and up, occasionally, for a glimpse of the rose, against all the odds) exists to deny, however they give lip service to Nietzsche, even as they negotiate with, and traffic in, everything that tears apart the world he sought to reassemble. They think they can be pluralistic and social, they think they can take the words at face value, don't have to rethink and give rebirth to every one, that they've finally found a Buddha they don't have to kill. This time nobody has to be alone and to fight friends in high places. If Nietzsche were alive today, he'd still go out of his mind, because nobody can climb this slope without the proper tropes. My God, my God, how terrible it was to see my one friend, Nietzsche, fall from the height, into the abyss. I wept and wept and felt so all alone, but had to let him go. Now I am healing. Here, at the top of the mountain, the tropes repaired, though now retracted and ready to use to climb down and retrieve others, I see the obvious. I see through space and time. I see into the eleven dimensions that will never be verified by the recalcitrant machines. I see, you bastards, I see; I am not a machine. I am, we are, the people, whole, one, with superman eyes and minds; it just sometimes needs to come in slowly, oh so slowly, and the signs thin out, and it's hard to keep the faith, and then it's better to trust the skeptical academics, it's better to live blind and in doubt than go with the blowhards carried away by this kind of rhetoric; because it isn't a lot of brou ha ha and hot air; it's technical, it's precise, what sight is --
not a noun, but an event in which the image and the viewer conspire in commitment to the surrender to the surface, where the read world constantly pours itself back into the optically sensed surface, which replenishes the read world, to pour back into the optically sensed surface like water evaporating, then condensing in an endless cycle. The story of the Stigmatization quite strictly describes and encapsulates the three-part process -- visual appearance, reading, assimilation. Sight worthy of the name is alive, pouring from step to step, each step resonating with the memory or adumbration of the other. Sight is the pouring, the moving on the bridge between its parts, the bridge becoming visible like the circle traced by a sparkler in the air.
The reader becoming see-er becoming seer moves into the visual, from the temporal, order by eliminating all that is not necessary to vision as this fully alive three-part phenomenon. In reducing the scene to the minimally visible, at the metaphysical, reflected on the physical level, there is a dramatic change in the relation between words and things, signs and what they signify. Words and things behave as if alive. They move toward each other as if to spiral round each other like (or as) strands of a D.N.A. molecule. This journey that flies in the face of, and breaks down (if only in this demilitarized zone) every division — bridging the gap not only between geology and biology, but between biology and ontology. All praise to you, Brother Being, and to you Sister Speech. Figuratively pressing against each other and penetrating each other, words and things effectively become one individual, while, again, maintaining a minimum difference between them. This difference gives them space to enact, just as they signify, the ongoing process of the perfect union in living for one purpose. All this, again, defines what it is to love. Here Francis and Christ, the story and the image, the image and its reading inhabit this shallow relief in which there is space only to love, as love alone defines, creates, and palpably suffuses the space of the merely and purely visible.
With the observed and the observer on the same side working to the same end, the means of surrender to the visual order is no longer elusive. The space in the fresco, as it embodies its story, is the tool of surrender to what sight is, just as the flute is the tool of flouting. We see how it works in working with it, and how it plays in playing it. Now, instead of falling into an abyss each time we step from word to thing, we prance from sign to signified become sign to signified as on stepping stones placed almost touching, and if you dwell in this place, the distances are so collapsed, you begin to link the words with the things, as it was in the first utterance bound to the bodily response, maybe wired from the beginning in the being. Time is collapsed in your mind, the way you can remember a whole morning's continuous activities in a few seconds. You suddenly connect with your own infancy; you can begin to have memories of the origin of the species, but the fresco calls you back to the present, to the music of its own being weaving across the immediate phenomenological field.
As now with our eyes open we step off the shore for some serious sight seeing, we sense a surface, where in sensing, there is instantaneous reflection fed by all the knowledge that crystallizes in vision. Sight all at once remembers and recreates interiorly what it is to touch and become the other, and then sight expands to create space, then to close in on, and touch, and become the other, to open and close, over and over. Sight breathes, as sight sounds in the wind to find and mate with the sad, sweet, accordion music as Giulietta Massina twirls holding a wine bottle in the empty piazza by the Franciscan church in the moonlight.
It is a tool of vision for all peoples, even disbelievers, but if their world is not by some other means already turned upside down, it might well reverse their condition, causing present believers to lose faith and disbelievers to find it, where true faith is never a stable condition. Still, if one loves to flout fate, one will stick with it and not give up because of one or two bad days, weeks, years, decades, or centuries, or millennia, when one blows and blows, and nothing comes out of the flute of faith but fart like sounds. Still, it is promised that all the secrets of creation will be revealed to those who let the word call them a friend, not a slave; and now that there’s a flute to flout with, generally in the long run we can flout and flout fate first poorly, but better and better.
Francis in the story is at first confused as the seraph is a symbol of joy and transcendence and this conflicts with the affect carried by the man of sorrow held in the wings. The story is happening all at once instead of unfolding in time. When Francis comes to understand that the vision means he will imitate Christ not by martyrdom, but rather become like Christ in the fervor of his spirit in love of Christ, the vision gradually dissolves to return Francis to the temporal order, where all sorrow and wounding happen. After that, the interior vision returns in memory to vie with the pain, faith to vie with doubt, the spatial order to vie with the temporal order, as he cycles around from agony to ecstasy for the rest of his life. He becomes the living embodiment of what it is to see, for this cycling constantly to return sight to the all present surface, as pain dies into pleasure, again, is sight. Sight again is sight surfacing until the surface is saturated with sight, and again, the visible evaporates, and then again sight surfaces.
If one loves and lives in loving, things funnel down in one’s life to what boils down to love, eventually to arrive at what is limited to love, which is sight limited to sight, the epiphany, the appearance, and then the hourglass flips over, and we are separated from it to begin funneling down to what brings us into oneness with it again. Each time we endure some ordeal to bring us closer and closer to what love is, we are refined, we are more loving, we are more of what love is. Over and over, we funnel down, we arrive at the point, and it flips, and then we funnel down, and then it flips again. Who knows who flips it, but it keeps happening until all the hours are counted. However the epiphany manifests in us and is revealed through us is not the point, nor can we control it.
Never has a lover made himself so transparent to love as revealed in an appearance so transparent to the nature of appearance. Never has an image so reduced to the merely and wholly visible, as the constant, never ending visualizing of the visible. This fresco sees sight, as the space in it sees the story in it, which sees the bodies in it, where all the things that can be named read wholly by, and only by being seen. Sight is the medium by which I receive it, by which I produce it, by which my receiving produces it and vice versa. Sight is the medium in which all words speak to words in it and words find bodies, and bodies find bodies that have anything to do with it. It is all by way of sight, or otherwise we and they are not admitted into it, are blind to it. It is our choice, and it offers illuminated sight, sight known and experienced as purely sight, not just to us, but to anything and everything that can sense, while reflecting on, and giving space to, the sensed, all the way down to becoming the sensed and back again, to say or feel “I see!” I wonder if it hearing it beat so hard, wave upon wave on the beach of the mind, ever more excited, could quicken the waves of sound and give sight to the blind.
The astonishing revelation of the merely and wholly visible engages all my attention, blotting out all that is mere optical stimulation or mere projection. Sight, again, is reflection in the thick of engaged sensation, as sight opens to touch opens to entering what must become the beloved. Sight is the door that opens into love without coercion, the place where signs are pried apart from things to create an articulate world, but the bridge still in place repairing the breach. As the scales keep falling from my eyes, and my eyes take in this surface limited to the truly visible, the world is not torn beyond repair, but still sewn across space by the terms of the visible leading every other conception of the discernible/knowable. Everything melts into and trails like comet dust behind the limited to the merely and wholly visible, as it melts into the touchable, the touchable into the able to become one with another, as the visible condenses and evaporates in the space that renders it visible, where only in the highest art is the merely and wholly visible, as the gate always opening to the merely and wholly lovable, enterable.
There can be no surface without depth to collapse onto the surface, no pleasure without pain, no visual order without time to surrender to it. Even rapt in seventh heaven, there are battles among the warring spirits. Not the blindness of mere optical stimulation, not sticks held open to eyes no longer allowed to blink, but the preservation of the temporal and all other orders in the unending cycle by which in freely chosen surrender to it, the visible melts and evaporates and melts and evaporates into the visible is vision. Vision reduced to vision appearing visible to itself happens when sight sees by loving, just as love loves by seeing, as the story paints the painting that fully realizes the story, where sight with blinders on sight provides a window on paradise, the gate where just by gazing there, we enter.
By paying such close attention, the artist loses himself in the story and disappears. Mixing up all the stories, I have followed the flouter of fate with his flute down the rabbit hole, passed to the other side of the looking glass. The world turns inside out, or rather right side in, and I’ve rather not fallen down, but climbed out of the hole. I’ve finally returned from that sometimes charming, but exhaustingly zany nightmare, where hares go by the clock, queens nurse pigs, this world become so familiar from the newspapers and art journals —- an inferno of chimera where integration of bodies into forms is no longer possible, or allowed, lest one behold with one’s eyes the being, the divinity of the visible, the touch me not, to find oneself, after all this effort to distinguish oneself, so many investments in the struggle, one of THEM, the believers. How strange to work so hard to avoid receiving the world’s sweetest gift.
Until this marvelous, flashing thunderstorm refreshing the streams of the visible abates, and the visible again evaporates, as I eagerly await the next thunderstorm, I’m back on this side of the melting mirror, returned from the land of the dream to the world of the living. As the visible pours down all around me, flooding into the windows, drowning me in it, never have I so appreciated dozing in an arm chair with cat on lap. Having squeezed up against the edges of a dollhouse like world, I’m now growing smaller in relation to the world, which is now expanding to arrive at, but then swell beyond its boundaries as I left them, before I began this journey. I’m shrinking in relation to it, growing childlike, and in a newly protected field that also reminds me of childhood.
Taking in this surface expanded into, as it is reduced to the merely visible, never in my living memory has the world looked so new, strange, and though suffused with benign presence, still rather ominously alive. For it’s quite scary to gaze on, forget about eating a peach, not remembering having ever before seen one -- except that time very briefly when grown dizzy at a blockbuster retrospective blurring its way down the ramp of the Guggenheim. I slipped into one of those small, side galleries to get my feet on level ground. One of the painted fruits in a still life by Cezanne from the permanent collection caught my attention and transported me briefly to this space. I'd never before heard the sound of the sight of a peach.
In the very first suggestions of dawn, this gently awakening, so long forgotten world, far from being blind, love alone can see and shape visible space. All that doesn't love freely, molding the world around it to the nature of love, is invisible. Holding close to Cezanne’s peach, the one thing I brought over from the other side, I begin to orient myself in this world of all things newly as visible as the peaches of Cezanne. I dare to grab a peach from this side, bite into it, and ah! -- I could be the gracefully slipping, sliding, and stumbling Kramer on “Seinfeld,” it is as newly delicious as it is newly visible!
Psychiatrists characterize the state of the three year old as in love with the world, which for a big person who’s been around the mill a few times is a truly mad state considering the state of the world. Still it’s a strangely capacitated state, such that each time the three year old trapped in the grown up body stumbles, slips and slides, tripping all over herself onto the stage of appearance, she then settles down and appears quite balanced, at least until the next appearance after the last exit. Yes, that must be where Kramer and I landed having fallen through a hole in time, but he is a fictional character, and I am real, like the velveteen rabbit after its transformation.
A world famous violinist played before a group of famous critics and musicians first a vintage Stradivarius, then a common violin. The audience couldn't tell the difference. The violinist alone knew the difference. He said the Stradivarius pretty much played itself, it was effortless, while the violinist exhausted himself pouring energy into common instrument to achieve the same effect.
So I've given you a Stradivarius that isn't going to do you much good if you're not already a virtuoso, or getting there, but if you are, it will make your life much easier. As for my case, you be the judge. As for that of everybody as a whole, believe in us, and let us try it. Maybe Cinderella's dirty foot will surprise the wicked watchers who only want to lord it over everybody.
more discarded introductions
the genealogy of perspective
or how the modern mind may know itself, as all enlightened minds must
or
the final non-solution
continued
the exuberant pluralistic world seems a fractured one, a pastiche of discontinuous perspectives even within that of a confluent clan, between each post of the home feed, there's a quantum leap and then another quantum leap from clan to clan. The discontinuity is digital, on off on off on, not just in form, but now in content. The content has grown or shrunk to fit the digital medium. This is not a futile protest against what cannot be undone without losing too much that's been gained, this is to reveal the underlying, interwoven continuity, the flow that continues underground, but here the stream breaks up to the surface, briefly everywhere. A work of art might express the continuity, but art works since the rise of museums appear discontinuous with one another and the space they inhabit.
work in progress
recovering the origins of modern science in a mystic's dream...
continued from confluenza6.blogspot.com
Those deemed legally blind can see colors and shapes. This is not vision, vision comprehends and senses a world. Nor is reading the world without sensing it sight. The modern idea -- sign arbitrarily related to signified -- is that we fluctuate back and forth, mostly unconscious of, and not really sensing, the world, but the internal computer matching the color vibrations and reading the shapes for information. We have to stop to take the time to feel and sense things, and in the instants we de-mechanize and actually return to sentience, the read world shatters into fragments, we go legally blind. So the modern (including, even more so, so-called (erroneously) post-modern) idea is that we are essentially, irrevocably blind, fluctuating between sensory fragments that trigger salivation and other affect and blind, computerized reading. The oceanic experience of the whole is a delusion. Only the shards of color and form, such as some of the legally blind can see, in abstract painting restore the senses and allow us to be sentient and awake -- by removing the legibility of the whole. We might be Oedipus, too guilty to enjoy the senses without putting out our eyes, but you don’t really need a psychological explanation, and in a way that’s a front, a way to imagine it’s up to us, that we did it, are not just humiliated victims of the physiological and ontological facts. The Greek gods maybe live no more because sooner or later the truth would out. It’s a beautiful dream to think psychology matters. As Ashley Bickerton puts it, “I’m just a lump of biomass parked between naughts and ones.” Of course he forgets to mention that, heir of Giotto daring hair of the dog that bit us, he knows it, like unto the gods.
Shameless, or just willing to confess and repent my constant shame -- just to cover the psychological side in case I missed something there -- I have not only understood, but felt and sensed something different in front of this fresco, a releasing and flowing of all the parts of me toward one center. Defying the assumed impossibility of something so anomalous, this fresco seems to say -- yes we arrived at the same conclusion, vision does not exist, it is impossible’ and then from there we said, okay then, let us produce vision, which has never before existed. We decided to construct a thing that, uniquely, could allow people to see, but only when gazing directly at it. You can also, though, see through it -- the very fact that you can finally see, not just fluctuate being sensing and thinking, tints the view rosy, that tint reducing the glare so you can see even more -- and you can interpolate beyond the frame. Oh and just for a back up, in case the physiologists and philosophers were overlooking something, we brought in the psychologists working out the guilt and absolution aspect. It wasn’t working though, until we brought in an artist who might be a mason or a member of some secret cult, able to convert time back into space. Too many things came together here. It all seems like one big conspiracy to make this happen, create vision, conjure up a divine human out of a lump of biomass parked between noughts and ones”. Not haphazardly or randomly, the way it’s always happened before, where it might well have been just another Greek dream. No, we’d cover all the bases this time, such that a fair jury would deem vision actual, the divine human construct fully constructed, beyond a reasonable doubt. Lucy in the sky with diamonds, the girl with kaleidoscope eyes. All you need is love.
Maybe you always had to tamper with the default to buy into what the militaryscholarlyscienceartbusinessworldindustrial complex (not to be confused with art, critical thought, and science worming their through it and up, occasionally, for a glimpse of the rose, against all the odds) exists to deny, however they give lip service to Nietzsche, even as they negotiate with, and traffic in, everything that tears apart the world he sought to reassemble. They think they can be pluralistic and social, they think they can take the words at face value, don't have to rethink and give rebirth to every one, that they've finally found a Buddha they don't have to kill. This time nobody has to be alone and to fight friends in high places. If Nietzsche were alive today, he'd still go out of his mind, because nobody can climb this slope without the proper tropes. My God, my God, how terrible it was to see my one friend, Nietzsche, fall from the height, into the abyss. I wept and wept and felt so all alone, but had to let him go. Now I am healing. Here, at the top of the mountain, the tropes repaired, though now retracted and ready to use to climb down and retrieve others, I see the obvious. I see through space and time. I see into the eleven dimensions that will never be verified by the recalcitrant machines. I see, you bastards, I see; I am not a machine. I am, we are, the people, whole, one, with superman eyes and minds; it just sometimes needs to come in slowly, oh so slowly, and the signs thin out, and it's hard to keep the faith, and then it's better to trust the skeptical academics, it's better to live blind and in doubt than go with the blowhards carried away by this kind of rhetoric; because it isn't a lot of brou ha ha and hot air; it's technical, it's precise, what sight is --
not a noun, but an event in which the image and the viewer conspire in commitment to the surrender to the surface, where the read world constantly pours itself back into the optically sensed surface, which replenishes the read world, to pour back into the optically sensed surface like water evaporating, then condensing in an endless cycle. The story of the Stigmatization quite strictly describes and encapsulates the three-part process -- visual appearance, reading, assimilation. Sight worthy of the name is alive, pouring from step to step, each step resonating with the memory or adumbration of the other. Sight is the pouring, the moving on the bridge between its parts, the bridge becoming visible like the circle traced by a sparkler in the air.
The reader becoming see-er becoming seer moves into the visual, from the temporal, order by eliminating all that is not necessary to vision as this fully alive three-part phenomenon. In reducing the scene to the minimally visible, at the metaphysical, reflected on the physical level, there is a dramatic change in the relation between words and things, signs and what they signify. Words and things behave as if alive. They move toward each other as if to spiral round each other like (or as) strands of a D.N.A. molecule. This journey that flies in the face of, and breaks down (if only in this demilitarized zone) every division — bridging the gap not only between geology and biology, but between biology and ontology. All praise to you, Brother Being, and to you Sister Speech. Figuratively pressing against each other and penetrating each other, words and things effectively become one individual, while, again, maintaining a minimum difference between them. This difference gives them space to enact, just as they signify, the ongoing process of the perfect union in living for one purpose. All this, again, defines what it is to love. Here Francis and Christ, the story and the image, the image and its reading inhabit this shallow relief in which there is space only to love, as love alone defines, creates, and palpably suffuses the space of the merely and purely visible.
With the observed and the observer on the same side working to the same end, the means of surrender to the visual order is no longer elusive. The space in the fresco, as it embodies its story, is the tool of surrender to what sight is, just as the flute is the tool of flouting. We see how it works in working with it, and how it plays in playing it. Now, instead of falling into an abyss each time we step from word to thing, we prance from sign to signified become sign to signified as on stepping stones placed almost touching, and if you dwell in this place, the distances are so collapsed, you begin to link the words with the things, as it was in the first utterance bound to the bodily response, maybe wired from the beginning in the being. Time is collapsed in your mind, the way you can remember a whole morning's continuous activities in a few seconds. You suddenly connect with your own infancy; you can begin to have memories of the origin of the species, but the fresco calls you back to the present, to the music of its own being weaving across the immediate phenomenological field.
As now with our eyes open we step off the shore for some serious sight seeing, we sense a surface, where in sensing, there is instantaneous reflection fed by all the knowledge that crystallizes in vision. Sight all at once remembers and recreates interiorly what it is to touch and become the other, and then sight expands to create space, then to close in on, and touch, and become the other, to open and close, over and over. Sight breathes, as sight sounds in the wind to find and mate with the sad, sweet, accordion music as Giulietta Massina twirls holding a wine bottle in the empty piazza by the Franciscan church in the moonlight.
It is a tool of vision for all peoples, even disbelievers, but if their world is not by some other means already turned upside down, it might well reverse their condition, causing present believers to lose faith and disbelievers to find it, where true faith is never a stable condition. Still, if one loves to flout fate, one will stick with it and not give up because of one or two bad days, weeks, years, decades, or centuries, or millennia, when one blows and blows, and nothing comes out of the flute of faith but fart like sounds. Still, it is promised that all the secrets of creation will be revealed to those who let the word call them a friend, not a slave; and now that there’s a flute to flout with, generally in the long run we can flout and flout fate first poorly, but better and better.
If one loves and lives in loving, things funnel down in one’s life to what boils down to love, eventually to arrive at what is limited to love, which is sight limited to sight, the epiphany, the appearance, and then the hourglass flips over, and we are separated from it to begin funneling down to what brings us into oneness with it again. Each time we endure some ordeal to bring us closer and closer to what love is, we are refined, we are more loving, we are more of what love is. Over and over, we funnel down, we arrive at the point, and it flips, and then we funnel down, and then it flips again. Who knows who flips it, but it keeps happening until all the hours are counted. However the epiphany manifests in us and is revealed through us is not the point, nor can we control it.
Never has a lover made himself so transparent to love as revealed in an appearance so transparent to the nature of appearance. Never has an image so reduced to the merely and wholly visible, as the constant, never ending visualizing of the visible. This fresco sees sight, as the space in it sees the story in it, which sees the bodies in it, where all the things that can be named read wholly by, and only by being seen. Sight is the medium by which I receive it, by which I produce it, by which my receiving produces it and vice versa. Sight is the medium in which all words speak to words in it and words find bodies, and bodies find bodies that have anything to do with it. It is all by way of sight, or otherwise we and they are not admitted into it, are blind to it. It is our choice, and it offers illuminated sight, sight known and experienced as purely sight, not just to us, but to anything and everything that can sense, while reflecting on, and giving space to, the sensed, all the way down to becoming the sensed and back again, to say or feel “I see!” I wonder if it hearing it beat so hard, wave upon wave on the beach of the mind, ever more excited, could quicken the waves of sound and give sight to the blind.
The astonishing revelation of the merely and wholly visible engages all my attention, blotting out all that is mere optical stimulation or mere projection. Sight, again, is reflection in the thick of engaged sensation, as sight opens to touch opens to entering what must become the beloved. Sight is the door that opens into love without coercion, the place where signs are pried apart from things to create an articulate world, but the bridge still in place repairing the breach. As the scales keep falling from my eyes, and my eyes take in this surface limited to the truly visible, the world is not torn beyond repair, but still sewn across space by the terms of the visible leading every other conception of the discernible/knowable. Everything melts into and trails like comet dust behind the limited to the merely and wholly visible, as it melts into the touchable, the touchable into the able to become one with another, as the visible condenses and evaporates in the space that renders it visible, where only in the highest art is the merely and wholly visible, as the gate always opening to the merely and wholly lovable, enterable.
There can be no surface without depth to collapse onto the surface, no pleasure without pain, no visual order without time to surrender to it. Even rapt in seventh heaven, there are battles among the warring spirits. Not the blindness of mere optical stimulation, not sticks held open to eyes no longer allowed to blink, but the preservation of the temporal and all other orders in the unending cycle by which in freely chosen surrender to it, the visible melts and evaporates and melts and evaporates into the visible is vision. Vision reduced to vision appearing visible to itself happens when sight sees by loving, just as love loves by seeing, as the story paints the painting that fully realizes the story, where sight with blinders on sight provides a window on paradise, the gate where just by gazing there, we enter.
By paying such close attention, the artist loses himself in the story and disappears. Mixing up all the stories, I have followed the flouter of fate with his flute down the rabbit hole, passed to the other side of the looking glass. The world turns inside out, or rather right side in, and I’ve rather not fallen down, but climbed out of the hole. I’ve finally returned from that sometimes charming, but exhaustingly zany nightmare, where hares go by the clock, queens nurse pigs, this world become so familiar from the newspapers and art journals —- an inferno of chimera where integration of bodies into forms is no longer possible, or allowed, lest one behold with one’s eyes the being, the divinity of the visible, the touch me not, to find oneself, after all this effort to distinguish oneself, so many investments in the struggle, one of THEM, the believers. How strange to work so hard to avoid receiving the world’s sweetest gift.
Taking in this surface expanded into, as it is reduced to the merely visible, never in my living memory has the world looked so new, strange, and though suffused with benign presence, still rather ominously alive. For it’s quite scary to gaze on, forget about eating a peach, not remembering having ever before seen one -- except that time very briefly when grown dizzy at a blockbuster retrospective blurring its way down the ramp of the Guggenheim. I slipped into one of those small, side galleries to get my feet on level ground. One of the painted fruits in a still life by Cezanne from the permanent collection caught my attention and transported me briefly to this space. I'd never before heard the sound of the sight of a peach.
Psychiatrists characterize the state of the three year old as in love with the world, which for a big person who’s been around the mill a few times is a truly mad state considering the state of the world. Still it’s a strangely capacitated state, such that each time the three year old trapped in the grown up body stumbles, slips and slides, tripping all over herself onto the stage of appearance, she then settles down and appears quite balanced, at least until the next appearance after the last exit. Yes, that must be where Kramer and I landed having fallen through a hole in time, but he is a fictional character, and I am real, like the velveteen rabbit after its transformation.
A world famous violinist played before a group of famous critics and musicians first a vintage Stradivarius, then a common violin. The audience couldn't tell the difference. The violinist alone knew the difference. He said the Stradivarius pretty much played itself, it was effortless, while the violinist exhausted himself pouring energy into common instrument to achieve the same effect.
So I've given you a Stradivarius that isn't going to do you much good if you're not already a virtuoso, or getting there, but if you are, it will make your life much easier. As for my case, you be the judge. As for that of everybody as a whole, believe in us, and let us try it. Maybe Cinderella's dirty foot will surprise the wicked watchers who only want to lord it over everybody.
more discarded introductions
A good reader and/or publisher will read and/or publish things he doesn’t agree with if they are interesting and well argued. But few will read or publish things that seriously could threaten their own convictions and mess up their minds. That kind of text — or test — will be read simply as bad writing, maybe that’s why bad means good in street talk. These opposition texts are indeed too good, they are too interesting and too well argued. Emotions enter in. Emotions cloud thought. I believe this is not acceptable. What does a person need to do to free herself of all emotions that could cloud thought, so that no thought could threaten her? She needs to divest herself of all certainty. She needs to leave herself behind and become anybody, to live at sea, truly quite seasick on land after finding such sea legs and storm watchfulness. This is not to be cool and aloof, quite the opposite. This is to be a trembling leaf ready at all times to be torn from the branch and tossed to the wind. This is probably not to be a successful publisher, but with God and those who don’t have a hissy fit when they hear that word, which nobody has ever defined well enough to justify any reaction at all -- to thing itself apart from how it’s used and abused, all things are possible.
Not that I don’t understand the psyches of those who think too good is just too flat bad. As I came upon the insights unfolding here, my words got stuck in my throat for years as the part of me that couldn’t accept the insights ferociously fought to keep them down. Then came an outpouring of words that conveniently assume off putting qualities, so nobody pays too much attention, and people hardly notice I do this kind of writing on the side, or that this margin of my life keeps growing and encroaching on the center, and I have to cut it back like the voracious wild rambling rose that took over my garden, though it only blooms once in Spring, and for the rest of the warm season it’s just a fiercely, unnaturally thorny bramble. Still, it’s worth it for that glorious bloom in late May often right on my (and Walt Whitman’s— May goes in with a revolution, out with a revelation!) birthday — so however I bleed in having to cut it back, it’s here to stay, with its parsimoniously flowering over-abundance of bramble, always encircling my life and wipe out all paths and any clearing.
For all my efforts to deny it, hide it, and cut it back, the journey I took and the things I discovered that I am describing here, with the first magnificent efflorescence, however soon to wither, rot, blow away, and leave only thorns, changed me completely, changed me so deeply I felt estranged from and had to change my name. Expletives that before poured out of me with the normal abandon suddenly got stuck in my throat. I had kissed death and awakened presence, and that brought me to my knees and turned the hairs of my head quite white, however not exactly literally at the time. I know it now, the aliveness of presence and live in fear and trembling before it when it doesn’t lift me up and toss me in the air as I squeal with delight. To others these changes remain subtle. When I see notes I wrote before the change, they sound like there might not have been a change after all. In truth, on second thought, there really was no change, I only gradually came to see and accept what I always believed and who I always was, as I had gradually chipped away at the encrustations, unscrewed the tightly woven armor, and let it fall. I had always believed and experienced life as an ongoing revelation — that only seems to get worse than stuck when the wheel is in regression.
All these contradictions and the elusive way I speak of it I know provoke distrust, I distrust myself too often, but someone must enter into being and take on its mutable mercurial qualities to be a cipher to it and a messenger. However I shadow it and imitate it in a theatrical way to show you as best as I can what it is I saw in penetrating the inner sanctum— I can’t avoid it sometimes, I must master and mix up as many modalities as possible to convey this insight — but I prefer this method to offering my own interpretation, in which too much of the original is always lost — don’t blame the messenger for the message, but of course you will. You probably don’t believe any more in the difference, which science denies until science needs to manifest faith in it to continue to exist.
Anyway to move to the needed, if not that much desired, theoretical interpretation, the modern discipline of critical theory consists, mainly, in disparaging ideals and attempting to redefine the world on a material, scientific basis. This effort has roots in, among other things, monotheistic iconoclasm, demanding the shattering all idols and empty ideals, demanding worship and reverence only of being — what is that it is, to itself” —“I am that I am”. Strange that people object to representing it calling itself an “I’" when being is what is doing everything including personifying us. Being being so immediate, so existent, compared to the ideals represented by the names we attach to things, that it can only manifest as a mirror and likeness of the perceiver and receiver of it, an I to a thou, not an I to a thing, which could only be lesser than the consciousness that would recognize and name it. It’s beyond a being in the way that we are beings, but we can’t conceptualize beyond our own mode of consciousness, we only know that to call it a thing or a mere idea, to idealize it either way, would be to denigrate it. To fail to refer to it at all would be blasphemously to ignore it and deny our innate consciousness of it. All this is quite logical, the product of the rational unconscious, of which — to my surprise when I looked it up, as I thought I had come up with the idea myself — much has been written. The rational unconscious is quite a bit more rational than we are when we are conscious, because we are never all that conscious and usually when we consciously try to be rational, we just use our reason to rationalize our desires. But if we doze a bit and free associate, sometimes real rationality gets the upper hand. This at first seems a dreadful thing to happen to a free spirit or an artist, until she recognize that constraints liberate. That logic is no enemy of illogic, they’re a match made in heaven. This all good and great artists know. Nor in art is the good the enemy of the great, though both are bad meaning good in street talk.
Where Eastern practices consist in numbing or silencing the mind and disparaging language, leading to transcendental detachment, monotheism engages the mind in this effectively distracted, dreamy way and embraces language without allowing thought to idealize the world and float above it. The unrepressed mind is a child telling stories or a dreamer symbolizing reality to convey psychological truth. Once ideals are expunged, the immediacy of being is restored to glow numinous, even magical. You can twist and stretch the body to straighten it out and release the effects of assimilating this before you ever understand it; apparently you can achieve enlightenment without ever understanding anything. I would rather understand it and be gnarled and stooped (not that I choose this effect or don’t try to counteract it) and remain unenlightened. “Those who think they see are blind.” I would rather use enlightened language than be enlightened myself, as I would rather repair the roots even if the plant won’t bloom until I’m gone. I would rather have a mind and know its capacity, even if I fail to realize it, than to be mindless, and I’m consummately annoyed with mind lovers who use their minds to disparage minds and romanticize blood, guts, and lower body functions set free of them. My mind enlivens my body, and the mind of my lover touching mine intensifies the sensation of his touch. I am theorizing it now, and it allows this, but only if the reflection remains shallow, dancing on the waters I’m also swimming in. By this I avoid the idealizing of not idealizing; by this I avoid turning science into a religion, but instead I am turning religion into science — quite a bit more rigorously than Mary Baker Eddy, who invented “Christian Science”, did, but she got better, if not exactly dependable results. Maybe someone in the future will succeed in a synthesis.
What if all that’s been theorized to set the scientific mind apart and tear away these roots only re-establishes them — well, not only, because going around full circle, we manage to refresh the screen and de-corrupt the data, have the best of both worlds. Yet all those thoughtful enough to seek an intellectual basis for their world view will read the most difficult, obscure texts that disparage idealism, so long as, again, this disparagement remains itself an ideal, placing the reader above whatever reading is drawing them down into. But if a text — this one to be precise — is able to reconstruct the world on un-compromised material terms, they won’t be able to stand it and won’t have patience for the systematic mechanics that so beautifully build this impeccable machine. They are prejudiced against the symbols and tradition that uniquely facilitate this reconstruction and feel justified in this prejudice, but they are not. Did they think they could avoid squalor, corruption, and compromise in the abandonment of ideals? Do they think theorizing it and cherry picking it to justify the way one so poorly practices it is not a worse, more corrupt compromise? Well, there’s no-one available, and if there were, he might infect you, so you’ll have to suffer much wailing and gnashing of teeth to read the instruction manual and put this contraption together yourself — whether you do it just to see how it works — like a guy I met who built an airplane in his small upper West Side apartment, and left it at that -- or actually to fly it. Here the theory of art or religion or history or philosophy or science or anything is not other than the practice of art and religion and history and philosophy and science and everything. This walks its talk and talks its walk if it’s going to talk at all, and I guess it is.
an excerpt:
…All this pressing up to the surface pressing up to the retinal image in my eyeball saturates the sense of sight, and it seeps into the tactile and even other sensory domains. I can almost taste and smell the image. But it's only so drinkable because it's so thinkable. It's encapsulating years of thinking and research like a several mile long accordion collapsing on itself, as if this were the end of the quest of someone deaf and dumb to hear and make this, her first intelligible sound, in great relief and release as the accordion closes in on itself. Those years of thinking and research are not about me. I was tracking two primary quests, one leading the sacred world forward to the perfected tool of prayer, the tool that prayer was seeking in order to become its not yet known real self, the way flouting, before it became itself, was seeking a flute, the other the quest of the secular world for the parent of perspective, for the immaculate conception — by a quantum leap — of Cartesian space (should really be called Albertian space) -- when they first conspired to take away our names and give us social security numbers; maybe if we can find our way back, there will again be a choice, and we can go the other way at the fork in the road. Both quests lead to the same place, the missing link, the finding of which closes the circle and makes us whole, as if to answer that urgent prayer of Leonard Cohen. I am a cipher to something everybody, past and present, has long been seeking. You can remove me altogether, and it's still there, but as I'm the one who cracked the code of the score, and who's presently playing it with the strong sense of being guided by the original composer. I must play it both accurately and passionately. Crescendo. Piano. All that is written into the score.
End of excerpt
I must reiterate, though nobody else’s whole life was directed toward this revelation allowing it to unfold logically and be assimilated viscerally, as music, over decades, it’s still an objective finding with considerable significance — something like not only discovering -- if it were so -- that the human race arrived in a spaceship from outer space, but uncovering the long lost library in the space ship, along with a key for translating the language. But many of the signs and symbols used are so familiar, people will pigeonhole me and the finding and manage not to perceive anything particularly, centrally novel in it, and just call it a bit eccentric. Well, Giotto had to wait seven centuries to find someone to notice the rustling in all the camouflage, someone to pass the baton to, and I will probably have to wait seven centuries for the next receiver.
the genealogy of perspective
the modern paradigm of knowledge
or how the modern mind may know itself, as all enlightened minds must
or
the final non-solution
continued
the exuberant pluralistic world seems a fractured one, a pastiche of discontinuous perspectives even within that of a confluent clan, between each post of the home feed, there's a quantum leap and then another quantum leap from clan to clan. The discontinuity is digital, on off on off on, not just in form, but now in content. The content has grown or shrunk to fit the digital medium. This is not a futile protest against what cannot be undone without losing too much that's been gained, this is to reveal the underlying, interwoven continuity, the flow that continues underground, but here the stream breaks up to the surface, briefly everywhere. A work of art might express the continuity, but art works since the rise of museums appear discontinuous with one another and the space they inhabit.
When the underground stream breaks up to the surface, every thing melts into everything, that is the passion. It is more pleasurable to experience serious passion than it is to have all the exhausting fun in the world. The latter the main course, the former just desserts. Just desserts, just discontinuity, has sold itself as well as cigarettes did, but just desserts is, in fact, a form of self-punishment.
for the thoughtful determined to think to the edge of thought in honor of thought's capacity to refresh the screen and restore the original data. It would be better not to think at all than to perpetrate conclusions arrived at midway upheld by so many others stopping at about the same place. Yet this is what scholars do, and they disseminate their conclusions that actually affect life deeply and decisively. Who will change this? If not us, who?
To adjust to pH of a medium requires fine calibration, too acid or too base, too ironic, too earnest, might support life, but does not support life, or vice versa. But neither are negotiable. I will not face my death having betrayed either one. The mongrel discourse endeavors this fine adjustment.
Seven centuries ago, Giotto found and shared access to an important portal, but I am the first, it seems, to find and to decipher the cryptic open sesame carved into the surface of it. Sadly, though I reap many benefits from journeys there, there’s so much more good that could come from passing through the portal if many would join me. Perhaps something will change some time in the future, and more will be able to find it. In any case, I must do my job and speak to my one, hoped for reader scheduled to arrive in around the year 2830 to take, update, and pass the baton. Please save it and pass it on to him or her. Or better, prove me wrong!
warning: no fussy sissies need apply for pushing this stone up the mountain and establishing it up there, teetering on the peak. At least it's easier to play one of the caryatids supporting the shrine at the peak than to keep dragging the stone up there and never arrive. But the noble philosophers would rather hold onto their empty ideals, as their slaves (today called "workers") bear the actual weight of the actual stone, than graciously accept the weight of the given gift, even with the stupendous view and the honor accruing to the stone bearer. What the ancients made and gave is rightly seized and appropriated by moderns in the modern age now 2020 years old. Young for an age, but old enough now to come of age.
press press press forward,
the sands are swiftly sifting through the hourglass,
there's little time to know and kiss the beast.
if you did not at first succeed, try try again
