How to be a human being

the enemy of the people

(the views expressed here are not necessarily those of the publisher.)

a very slow painstaking process that cannot be rushed,

how to be an artist is a related tract, and being an artist is humanizing indeed, but it is also animalizing, mineralizing, energizing, and nullifying, which altogether comprise humanizing but only if kept in careful balance.   In truth, even artists cannot find the balance and be fully human unless the culture they reflect is fully human, so everybody needs to take this course and start at level one like everybody else, as the tower of fully human humanity demands different foundations from that of proto- or post-humanity.  

Scholars, I've noticed, do not have perfect focus, they can be quite visually impaired even with all their refined magnifying instruments. One should definitely steal these instruments and use them, but remember that scholars looking through the first microscopes saw verification of the fully formed homunculus implanted in the womb at conception. The microscope could  not prevent them from seeing what they already believed until some renegade took over the instrument and beat them over the head enough times with what was right before their eyes.   

Today, the key proto-humanized critic advises proto-humanized artists to toss out the whole apparatus of scholarly inquiry -- they only see what they want to see anyway -- ignoring the fact that if used with a truly open mind, this constantly self-correcting scholarly apparatus  augments our understanding of history and therefore the present and future dramatically, and it is very unwise to let it rust along with obsolete electronic equipment in a heap of toxic waste if you don't want dangerous viruses spreading.   For instance, when aforesaid critic dismisses scholarly reference to the origins of perspective in the Renaissance, he has not read enough to understand that they mean something much different from the mere mechanical technique described by Vitruvius used theatrically, the modern version spectacularly initiating "the age of the world picture".  It's like he's obviating the capacity of art to take on -- and solve! -- the largest philosophical problems of the day, those problems underlying all the surface problems, political and otherwise.

you do need to stop and reflect, and that's really all that scholars do, and it is quite special even if it can get very off track and out of touch with the world. and the world can get infected with strange deviations from its original purpose.   

But you do need an internally cooperating scholarly apparatus to err and correct and err and correct to understand the very important implications and concatenations, because an understanding of the underlying conditions veering a microscopic degree from the truth of the matter over time will open up a chasm, and the ship of state will  one day be utterly lost in the night, and one can only hope it kept good historical records so it can retrace its course to where it first made that microscopic, minimal mistake. 

Which is what I decided to do, possible because of the careful historical records.  Noticing the ship was lost in the night,  carefully studying the logs and the back ups, I retraced our course back to where we first veered that minimal degree. For a while it seemed were still heading back to the garden, but now have given up on that and are just trying to survive the night on sheer faith in the will to survive of the species, as if nature had any issue with extinctions; 

but take heart, hang in! I've studied where it began in order to correct the deviation,  and after conferring with the crew and explaining everything carefully so they're ready to comply,  getting the captain to call COME ABOUT! and if he won't call it, the crew and I will be ready to cry MUTINY!

it amazes me that people spend decades learning and working on how to be a transcendentally objective machine, but won't even take the months or years it takes to learn from the first and greatest humanist -- Giotto -- how to be a human being at his level, where I hope to verify, having decoded his language, anything lower is really post-humanist, a euphemism -- don't blame the messenger, just absorb the logic, it's the logic not me that wants to knock you off your horse in a blinding flash of light -- for sub-human.

you see, when people work so hard to think things through and understand, as if they really wished to, one must hope they really do wish to, because if they keep at it, one day there will ensue a tsunami of understanding, too gigantic and multi-dimensional for science to fathom, but for art it's pretty much a piece of cake, but not just any cake, a long making, baking and perfected cake that, as historians have intricately documented, emerged alongside, or actually inside the cake of emergent science, equally long gestating and perfected, but took seven centuries to bake, and then the timer went off in my head  as I had sniffed out the cake and found the kitchen.

let's try that again:

when people work so hard to think things through and understand, as if they really wished to, one must hope they really do wish to, because if they keep at it, one day there will ensue a tsunami of understanding, too gigantic and multi-dimensional for science to fathom, but for art it's pretty much a piece of cake, but not just any cake, a long making, baking and perfected cake that, as historians have intricately documented, emerged alongside, or actually inside the cake of emergent science, equally long gestating and perfected, but took seven centuries to bake, and then the timer went off in my head as I had sniffed out the cake and found the kitchen.

and once more:

when people work so hard to think things through and understand, as if they really wished to, one must hope they really do wish to, because if they keep at it, one day there will ensue a tsunami of understanding, too gigantic and multi-dimensional for science to fathom, but for art it's pretty much a piece of cake, but not just any cake, a long making, baking and perfected cake that, as historians have intricately documented, emerged alongside, or actually inside the cake of emergent science, equally long gestating and perfected, but took seven centuries to bake, and then the timer went off in my head  as I had sniffed out the cake and found the kitchen.

(Now you please do it yourself  -- I mean read each paragraph thrice. The journey is not only a thing to savor -- if you don't love going there, if you get there, you're never going to stay there, so you may as well not begin-- and savoring it is, in this case, the only way to get there.  It's an exercise in civilized biting of bite sized sounds for us hounds of society slurping up bowls and with our tongues out imploring more more more!  It's very difficult to master radical humanistically modulated reading, as it must not only  go down slow, but there's some flavor there that you can't quite identify, and you're dying to get to the bottom of it, the effect is that of common salt applied to something crunchy, such that you simply can't stop until you get to the bottom of the bag, but the bag seems bottomless and finally you just get exhausted and decide to stay away from this bag of potato chips forever.  For me to ask you to use restraint with these potato chips compares to asking an alcoholic to have glass of wine and leave it at that.  Compared to post-humanist slurping of bowls and bowls of sound bites, or even proto-humanist dishes that slow you down somewhat, it will feel like I'm trying almost to starve you, as if you were a novice in the convent of Teresa of Avila! But as with the novice, I promise, once you get the hang of it, this radical moderation is ecstasy!)

To continue (tomorrow, no more potato chips allowed today, sorry, whoa! okay okay one more maybe, but you do have to do your part for this training to work. 

I immediately began distributing the aforementioned cake, and the hounds of society tasting it cried -- wow, this is amazing! I've never tasted anything like this! -- but then reached for their spittoons and spit it out; they could not swallow, let alone digest it. and if anyone asked them what had happened the night of my reading -- they ranged from twenty minutes to five hours -- they would say, the performance was great! but in no way be able to describe or summarize it, and they'd already forgotten all about it. 

I believe -- though there is no physical, brightly colored, readily marketable object involved to keep pulsing out the always brand new news turning this enterprise into a respectable one --  something is happening similar to what happens with my late mate's quite simple and minimal paintings generally of two biomorphic blobs on a warped stretcher, which a critic noted are so present and anomalous that he often cannot remember them, because he cannot find anything to compare them to, there is no hook.  They're just out there.  But in fact, they're also hooked up to everything, and they hook everything up to everything else, and I've explained this very carefully, but people can't swallow or digest even the hors d'oeuvres, which you can find on his Instagram page; I'm very proud of a post describing the conspiracy of Johns and Ron, allowing the latter to give rebirth to the world, to link everything back up, as living religion (religament) in both a visually and verbally communicable way, not just be amazing to look at. 

You see, I had bedded up with Giotto, the seven-century dead white chef responsible for the aforementioned cake, and then I found his bones in my bed. That's how synchronistically Jung at heart the I am and how hooky it gets when you play hooky from everything pre-digested, and demand to taste, swallow, and digest ambrosia. Isn't it time, you big baby birds, to digest your own food?  I understand you've delayed because grown ups with wings  demand ambrosia.  I understand you've been waiting for the ambrosia, which you are not going to accept as such without careful inspection of the seeds, farm, and the kitchen throughout the process, as a responsible noble who has inherited this estate.  Welcome to the kitchen!

Critical thought pinpoints a problem- then boomerangs over to embrace what opposes it to cancel out the problem, but this cancellation is never directly accomplished.  Rather, the problem uses this resistance like gym equipment to build up its muscles, even if it goes underground for a while to surprise the resistance gloating over its victory. Still, with all the regressions speeding on any progress made, the wheel of history inches forward, however something's lost with every gain, still, I'll take the gains.  

But then again, we don't seem to progress fast enough to overcome the problems evolving to outwit our ability to solve them, and what's lost is substantial; moreover often the problem has not been scrutinized sufficiently when the decision is made to resist it with a counter-attack, that, to speak its language, itself is insufficiently scrutinized.  Often what is needed is contextualization and visualization revealing that head and tail are not enemies needing to chase each other around in circles, but different parts of the same puppy dog.  

Therefore, if a chance opens up here for a catastrophic leap out of this minimally progressive reaction-ary system, I call on critics to brave, following whatever gestation period is needed, a dramatic rebirth, a conversion from progressive reaction-aries to creatives -- as Martin Luther King says, everyone must be an artist -- similar to when the painter Philip Guston, in fear and trembling, one foot forward, one foot back, then with a leap, shocked himself and all his friends and the whole history of art and culture, at great personal professional risk, by allowing his abstract paintings to follow their outrageously rebellious impulse to evolve into grotesque, sublime, ridiculous, monumental representational self-portraits.  

Abstraction is in fact a reaction-ary progressive practice, attempting to restore primal experience and resist the banality of reproducible, generic words and images, whose gains it helps to consolidate in the short term, but it pushes the wheel along in the great circle, heading back to the garden.  Though I used Guston's personal crisis and courage as a model for the integrity required to evolve, and try to impress on everybody the fact that we are all obliged to imitatio Guston, his radical change of style itself does not break or transcend the progressive reaction-ary cycle or stand outside of it.  It's just the captain's sudden cry to come about, to tack to the resigned conservative side, let's make the best of the degraded world we have, fact the music and dance, after the tack to radically iconoclastic left -- let's shatter all the idols and begin again -- that keeps the craft heading forward on the straight and narrow.  The art is just mirroring and being mirrored by the new critical tack playing pingpong with a spotlighted ping pong ball, as the slow slow train moves on.   And you feel it in the darkness and jailhouse humor in Guston's work that high modernistic-ally says, no exit, except by shattering the idol of the world, been there, done that, so now trying this.  

A visionary approach does not negate this reaction-ary teleologically progressive -- thesis antithesis thesis antithesis...effort and start another pingpong game; it simply attaches a jet engine to the craft so it cuts through the waves and heads straight to the target -- synthesis -- not a new thesis to begin a new pingpong game, but a revelation of the timeless single path that falls in and out of view.  It is in no way reaction-ary, it is autonomously creative, wholly positive generated from an original positive desire to be and go forth toward not requitement but fulfillment of all desire.  A lack that's been resigned to is reconcieved a hope for the lacked, as when a sperm penetrates a hole, from safely negational -- though it can get you in trouble and takes no small effort to do it well, to criticize is a lot easier than finding a solution, so critics as such who put themselves on the level of, or even often above, creative artists, including computer programmers, chefs, gardeners, and philosophically explosive writing performance artists (ahem ahem), but not "artists" who are just playing around, should stop it -- to bravely, riskily posit-itional -- the ayes have it -- and puts the creative artist worthy of the name in command -- and so do the eyes.  The artist, always a junk collector, finds a place and use even for the dregs, the outdated teleological process itself, grown decadent and narrowing into an ever more involuted vortex -- wait Jerry Saltz, don't toss it out, I can use it!.  I have lifted off from Flatlands and entered a three-dimensional world in which all that is happening can be affirmed and rearranged to a surprisingly, indeed shockingly positive effect.  

And I propose that you have all the faculties to turn on the light right this minute too; the only thing stopping anybody, however unconsciously, is the market.  There's no market for it in a society that worships, not the other guy, but mammon.  In this society and all who are invested in it, unmarketable illumination is an enemy of the people.  Nevertheless, I persist, like Guston carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders, but he can call himself Don Quixote, and he and everybody can call me deluded, but the fact is, I am a real knight, like worthy Sir Elton John, who came to see that his destiny lay beyond the yellow brick road -- and the proof is in the way the meaning melts into a melody as green as fertile farmland, but in America nothing is allowed to lie beyond the yellow brick road.  There's no real knowledge behind a diploma, no real love behind a locket, no real courage behind a medal, just having these idolatrous fetishes confers enough confidence sufficiently to simulate the effect, so the wizard can escape and Dorothy can awaken from that fun for a while, but getting very old nightmare, but by then the farm is sold, and the nightmare reigns from shore to shining shore.  I'd move to Europe, but there's no place like home. And who cares if I'm not publicly knighted. I'm a knight, that's good enough for me. Plus everybody who crosses the threshold into my apartment knows it's not America.  

To return to the birth of science wrapped up in art, since then they grew apart though always very friendly.  But art and its history became a separate language, an entirely separate body of knowledge, and then both science and art lost touch with their shared roots, as well as too much interest in their roots.  They saw themselves as free, as two friendly tumbleweeds, but is that really their nature?  Are they not more noble beings, such as great flowering, fruit bearing trees, which, having emerged from sister seeds, are among those arboreal sisters that feed each other's roots and grow so to depend on one another, if one dies so does the other? Isn't this tumbleweed idea just a midsummer night's dream or flight to Oz from which it's high time to awaken?  Try to remember, George Washington, as your snow shoes made of thicker and thicker ice crystals dyed red from your bleeding feet scrape against each other and you stumble forward, your gaze riveted on that distant cabin with the fire glowing from the hearth, and repeat after me-- there's no place like home, there's no place like home...  .  

I am an artist, but I feel my roots so entwined with those of science, I often forget myself and can't tell which of us is which -- I being the first to be crushed by the tsunami of understanding, the first one to stir and feel the present, though to call a human being ever woke is, with all due respect, a joke -- at best we hover between, intermittently present, as on the first pages of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the rememberer of the state awake enough to identify it from a distance, but not so woke that he forgets how it feels, which would be to fall sound asleep again, a typical victim of some grand illusion watching the news that's dead on arrival, like a twinkling star that burned out eons ago.  

Oh this dreamily present one thought she was a clever girl, giving up her social world to gain three masters degrees pawing at the ground to claw away and dump elsewhere all the irrelevant material that covered what she'd caught a scent of in her doggy artist way, a bone she finally found there in the form of a hunch about how to bridge the breach without violation of the autonomy of each, and it will take some maneuvering by the editor to loud protests from those who arrived on time and have been patiently awaiting their turn to speak to move me up in the line in time to avert disaster.   

It's a bit -- or more than a bit -- hard to get used to, with the chasm long deemed too wide and deep for even an Evel Knievel like me to attempt one jump, let alone the oscillating exchange supplying this electric current, but my finding of the lynch pin reveals that art, or at least one work of art fully realized in a breakthrough interpretation using and advancing state of the art methods revealing this long missing link to be science's original twin sister, conceived in the same transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, from feudalism to capitalism, sacred to dawning secular culture to evolve into fully formed science contained in its own space in the baroque era and flowering today -- very vulnerable cut off from its roots before essential re-grafting in the nick of time -- this original work of art as an autonomous entity is, in fact, just geometric or visual science -- after science piles up and classifies all the pieces of the puzzle according to the categories most useful and likely to produce matches, then finds some continuity across a few different categories, these assemblages suggesting further pockets of unprecedented coherence, the artist with the camel's back breaking straw suddenly sees it and begins moving the pieces all around in every direction to assemble the image.  

(I personally believe that science and any being's life begins at conception, and you may as well call a fetus a baby like people do naturally -- they don't say -- ohhh the fetus is kicking! -- but whose responsibility it is at various stages before the umbilical cord is cut might be subject to debate; in any case the state of science, art, my conscience, or anything doesn't have to order me to protect, nourish, and suffer the bloody birth of etc. this contribution I'm making to both science and art that every part of me from id to ego to superego, torn between those two lovers, science and art and convinced of their dangerous viral status apart from being wound up in this complex molecule, wanted to make all my life.)

As the puzzle pieces break free of their piles or drag them over to the other side to assemble the image, scientists and science lovers cry -- huh wuh, what's going on, this is total chaos! -- stop messing up my categories! and the other artists mingling with scientists at the root, join in  There is no image! The image is dead! but then one and then another glimpses it, and cry -- It's there! I see it! and, when everybody had given up hope and least expected it, a reborn modernized classical age, a visual age ruled by an ultra-efficient visual order inundating the world with instantaneous understanding that runs words ragged flying through metaphors trying to focus it and keep it in sight -- please spare me Renaissance philosophy!.. but it's connected to very astute, scholastic theology, father of modern philosophy!  -- has dawned full of hope and promise.  

Some people will hang on to the past and never acknowledge it, because you can't prove the existence of music, only of notes, or that of an image versus dots, and so much effort has been made to deny the existence of the former, song turning into talk, portraiture into dot transfer.  But is it really safer and wiser to consider music non-existent until its existence can be verified in a court of law?  But wait, if now you think you can file me on your side in the music or just notes debate, you've got me wrong.  My button holes are two small for your sticky fingers.  My music dotes on the notes, my notes are music unto themselves.  My fetal condition both a baby and not a baby, however it frays the wires of your digital brain and it starts singing Daisy in slower and slower motion -- hello human!! -- it's simply not either/or.

And think of the wonder of it, you are here, on a day, today, that is not like other days, when something fell into your inbox that is not like other things there, requesting that you to study it carefully -- the best way is to keep breathing and relax and enjoy, even thrill to its thrillingness as I drillingly boringly drip and bore into the core -- and when it occurs to you what's hitting you, dare I suggest you dare to support it before everybody, to no credit of their own, jumps on the bandwagon for all the wrong reasons, already casting a shadow over its radiant face.

*****

Giotto paints what the eye cannot see.  (Boccaccio)

The ignorant cannot understand him. (Petrarch)

(so if ignorant about Giotto, Dante, 

the birth of autonomous art, the modern world,

and related literature and issues,

check out the internet, get educated,

and come back in four years.  Well okay,

those who wish to sit in and try to pick up something, fine,

but don't grumble, what the hell is she talking about?

Relax, just let the meaningless words wash over you,

and a miracle could happen, 

as when the crowds from foreign lands

all understood the apostle as if he were speaking in their language.

Those concerned with white privilege

may scroll down to the paragraph

that I believe will satisfy you on this matter.

welcome nobles

(ladies and gentlemen worthy of the name)

before we begin,

now that you're up to date on the literature

and your shoulders here unburdened of chips

in some ways more painful than whips --

as if your oppressors had already won --

f-k that sh-t! --

please allow me to tell you 

what has never before been told,

the true story of art in a nutshell,

or

How to Be a Human Being

It's harrowingly humbling and divinely inspiring,

it's everywhere and utterly elusive,

it's an insult to every other hobby horse

until that hobby horse 

enters its most hobby horsey harem,

and with this manual I discovered,

even I can do it, so whomsoever it's eluded,

so can you!  and being human

means aspiring to humanity, never a done deal.

what a boon to find a manual 

to keep everybody on track.

without further adieu

How to Be a Human Being

you see, art said -- 

I do not privilege science 

I do not privilege humanities. 

I do not privilege manual labor. 

I do not privilege intellectual labor.

I do not privilege giving.

I do not privilege taking.

I do not privilege good.

I do not privilege evil. 

I do not privilege hope.

I do not privilege despair.

then art said,

I privilege myself!

and began moving to occupy 

the Animal Farm manager's office,

so sad,

as the stars had just then arranged themselves 

to re-reveal as such the perfect work of art,

not decoration or propaganda,

and not not that, not anything

but art the thing apart,

born in a night to perish in a night,

with everything else failing better and better

closer to the summit or worse and worse

closer to the base, all failures great and necessary!

the worst forming the essential, wide, stable base --

so artists, just proudly let your art, 

however badly failed it's good,

take its natural place, the whining babies

constantly flagging in autonomous inspiration

languishing in a lower rank than hoped for

should study the manual,

How to Be an Artist 

and not give up,

even when all hope for promotion is lost,

forget their wounded pride,

and just celebrate the chance to play and serve.

taking pride in their necessary role, 

even those sent to the front lines 

to be certainly felled in the first round.

(It's also the critic's responsibility

to position and keep re-positioning everybody 

properly and maintain mobility 

until the perfect place for each is found,

and not overdo such encouragement as would

suggest all equally deserve

fifteen minutes of world wide fame,

that was a joke.  

Interpretation of art is an art, 

as with a musical interpretation.

The conflation of the critic's role with that of the interpreter,

while sometimes producing beautiful  interpretations,

is dangerous, because when close enough, 

that seems to close the book

before hitting the jackpot.

A thousand words is not a fair price

to pay for a picture.  

A picture is worth a tome 

or a solid gold poem worth a picture.

Thou shalt not steal.)

in order to revive and sustain 

this wonderful happening,

the equally perfect realization

of each and all of the opening exclamations,

denying all categorical privilege as far as

to stop on a dime before that denial becomes categorical, 

as later transpired (the righteous iconoclastic imperative

becoming the most stifling category of all),

the apex -- nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita --

of all that it omnisciently remembers

and clairvoyantly foresees, the mountain

whose upward slopes converge on it.

It's said that nothing white men

made or found isn't sullied by their evil deeds,

I won't argue that general point here, for or against,

but only say that if so, 

it will leave some trace in the sullied thing,

and also an exception is needed to prove the rule.

Without here examining other possibilities,

I will show decisively that this work is un-marred,

having apparently paid the fair price demanded,

purified, it purifies and releases a laughing gas

of repentance, inexplicable, incalculable mercy,

forgiveness, and healing grace, 

clearing the ground for purely positive production 

for the good of all, 

all for whom justice suffices,

all who grasp that delight in surplus revenge 

is a soul devouring serpent,

and on the other side, all should recognize

the need for such an outside aid, and not expect

a spontaneously measured approach

after immeasurable abuse. 

Consider that slavery existed everywhere

of whites by whites and blacks by blacks as well,

of words by things and things by words,

but this great artist, a lowly shepherd discovered drawing a sheep,

and almost as ugly as the elephant man, wound through the world

untouched by the world to make a real world

where slavery even of things by words

or words by things -- the source of all the other kinds --

disappears forever,

but so far everybody in the real world

has found some excuse not to get near there,

however every path naturally crosses it,

everybody always goes out of his or her way 

to get around it and manages too, uncannily,

before having the least inkling

that it could and does exist,

as if their life's journey's

had been pre-planned 

centered around this concerted evasion,

just as mine pre-planned to evade

and expose the evasion.

Perhaps we are but puppets of the gods,

or drives, as science now teaches.

At least it looks to me like the gods,

like Jane Austen, Alfred Hitchcock, or me as a housekeeper,

just create all the messes to enjoy how good it feels

to clean them up. 

In the classical paragone,

the competition between poetry and painting

revived at the dawn of the Renaissance,

or actually the blue hour, 

privileging neither the night nor the day,

the past nor the future,

by its meta-non-categorical imperative,

when art ascended to the summit here invoked, 

the reticent tortoise of painting, such a hard nut to crack

most think one must wait for death, or the split second before,

however it's all right there right before the eyes,

had fallen behind the relatively self-explanatory hare of poetry

with whom it kept pace briefly at the outset,

but the hare on a tare had relatively burned out,

and the peripatetic dome all alone had crawled up 

to crown the summit with a tortoise shell army helmet,

not, in fact, describing the moment of death or its aftermath,

which the artist alone was privileged to visit, 

as did the poet trying, he had to admit, in vain

to recreate the image, as in reverence for it

and for his painter friend, he jabbed at the fickle public

(often construed as a jab at painting itself,

but the poet's and painter's was the friendliest competition,

always cheering each other's elegant moves,

only concerned that the game itself win)

I say the poet in defense of, construed as an attempt

to undermine his friend, jabbed at the public

for scanning like machines unable to recognize

a traffic light in a mildly ambiguous context,

only responding to the latest eye catching arrangements, 

forms, and colors swiftly going out of style.  

Alas even if they had been able to see not just scan it,

all the spectators had gone home

by the time the little walking dome crawled up to the summit,

revealing painting's long held blueprint for heaven on earth,

blowing away the clouds to reveal the North Star

so the ship of state and the state of art -- wheeee! --

could stop spinning in the wind,

but art like everybody essentially,

by that time, as now,

when the stars reconvene to re-reveal it,

was busy worshipping itself

and its own position and supporters

and its own hour, unlike the perfectly realized art

of the golden ages wrought by them 

and the likes of that pair

now babbling and playing chess 

by a babbling brook in the Elysian Fields,

and it was like the son of god

came (some say came back) 

and couldn't even get people

to pay enough attention to crucify him.

Some also say,

in response to the dearth of historical records --

Bulgarov  propounded a related theory

in The Master and Marguerita --

that that's what happened the first time,

and the small band of disciples 

who had recognized him, 

in pity for him 

and in excessively decent, but rather foolish hope 

for the humanity of humanity,

decided to describe the minimally 

more human response

that had been hoped for, 

so that the messiah's purpose

could be fulfilled. 

If that were the case,

would it really be so bad

if art, the little artlessly artful white lie

with a higher purpose, 

managed to save the world

and the humanity of humanity?

I think most believers and moderate skeptics

would be okay with it,

but some grand inquisitors, from orthodox to atheist, 

though they burn perfectly pious saints for heresy,

actually hold to the Manichean heresy 

that Creation, with its wiley methods,

its pretexts, ruses, and camouflages, is an evil web 

(and I'm not sure how they think 

they can unravel it scientifically

when they also worship the empirical evidence

it conjures up with its nefarious, convoluted methods), 

would dig in their heels, so I'm afraid

this won't right away end the struggle

between humanity and the machine,

but how many for how long can oppose

this alliance of art faith and logic

for a legalistic fine point

demanding certainty at every turn 

when the ground on which we stand 

is irrevocably uncertain,

and we humans are sailers at sea?

so that's it, 

how to be a human,

please study it carefully,

there are many fine points,

and within the fine points

you'll find finer and finer points,

it's heady up here close to the summit,

where the more you turn and look

the more you see forever.

as the following Talmudic commentary

attests, winding round and round and round 

with the writer explaining and clarifying the thing

in more and more detail, but maybe it's really 

just getting more opaque, as any certainty

regarding the ultimate nature 

of humanity's divine humanity

certainly eludes even the highest angel in heaven

sitting at the right hand of the uncertain god,

a voice within calling from a place 

where nothing else can ever stand,

but why do I bother?  if the starry night

never shattered you, unraveled all your explanations,

and forced you down on your knees,

the machine must have body snatched you at birth,

the very now uncontrollable machine 

whose accelerating speed in quest of certainty

the verified uncertainty principle, 

lost in the mountains of data,

does not in the least deter,

as it tears, conductor-less, faster and faster

over the countryside to its doom -- Zola zapped it!

oh lost modern world. 

Veronika! Veronika! your all too human traits

will be your undoing!  Despair, impatience,

and hysterical hyperbole, 

however fitting to the hyperbolic situation, 

will not accomplish the ends you seek.

Modern man is irrevocably in love with ME.

You're right, I'm sorry. Thank you machine. 

I'd be lost without you. 

Clicking on the wink to humans 

will not prove you're a human, reader,

just that you have potential and are still ahead of the machine.

Both aspiring humans and machines 

may now proceed to the next level. 

an everything but your self help program

that might in the end help you because everybody saw Jerry Maguire, or now will be sure to, and would never align with THEM

despite the fact that growing up and achieving any degree of success involves such compromise as does align everybody with THEM even if it doesn't totally turn one into one of them

until everybody, even THEY, inspired or chastened by Jerry Maguire, just can't take any more, perhaps wisely quietly conspiring behind the scenes until everybody is ready to break it to everybody that the gig is up!

well, maybe not everybody, but enough of us!

scholarly foreplay so arousing it will soon melt into serious scholarly passion

or

the cat you smell might smell like one, but it is not a rat! :

philosophy can be so stripped of its pretense of perfect objectivity and placidity it might actually ascend to perfect objectivity and placidity, but to build such an airship will take as many breaks from everything else as it takes to read a tome of poems and retain enough to quote at least a few of the most memorable lines from every era of the poet's career, then suddenly see, in a blinding flash of light, the poem in all the poems -- but watch me build it, and watch it fly, and you be the judge of whether or not you made a mistake to place so much cash on this dark horse, based solely on the perfect neighferiousness of neighs emanating from the old mare's stall, while your friends would have had you locked up and plied with anti-psychotic drugs had you not wisely kept your indiscretion secret.  

You see, it never worked for me when professional people implored -- compromise, nobody's perfect, give up your ideals, because just when, finally beginning to recover from the last beating, I was ready to let go, there appeared to me directly or in hallucinatory vividness*, shining in all its radiant glory, some actually as incarnate as divine, perfect fulfillment of desire in its department, some extremely dangerously if not actually lethally enviable Giotto, Caravaggio, Marilyn Monroe, Dr. M. Katherine Shear (my big sister, who last year held the title of the vigilantly computer supervised, based on objective criteria, world's foremost healer of intractable grief), Katherine or Audrey Hepburn, Leo Steinberg**, my late mate,  Il Redentore, the Uffizi, Ishiguro, Aretha, Jesus, Grand Canyon, etc. -- please forgive me if you're not in the list, for the most part I pretty much picked them out of a hat -- marked with a fake or real, perfectly balancing dark mole, or beauty mark, as all my pathologically insufficient defenses sizzle away in the acid bath, and I dissolve entirely into abject submission, as befits the role of the youngest of nineteen first cousins of a tight clan, in the pecking order a pecker with nobody to peck but herself, which proves a tremendous asset: it doesn't take much to overcome such an underdeveloped ego, and without one, the limitless sky's the limit, plus almost anything, even a jar of obsolete keys, can spark and inflame one's joy as much as tidiness does.  With this advantage and so many models hardly to be squandered with moral impunity, I resume my pursuit of perfection in my department.

Not that the sky doesn't have space for billions of stars as bright if not brighter for having polished their act in secret all their lives so as to emerge with a big bang when the ceiling blows off the theatre, but then there's a lot more dark empty space with plenty of room for the vapid who're neither here nor there, just biding their time, so for inspiration the aspiring soul must dote on what manages to project, in it's own niche, more than just some cosmic dust such as two sustainable, but why? ugly amorphous Martian moons***, if only as the glorious flash in the night of a shooting star on a night of them or of a lone one somewhere in the desert, where nobody but a lonely God nobody but that valiant, perfect performer believes in any more even noticed.  

The rare and anomalous, and the rare and anomalous nights teaming with the rare and anomalous, what science and democracy overlook when the majority of samples rule, I'm really only interested in this otherworldly untouchably Brahmin class of class acts that is ruled by completely different rules, if any, from what rules the majority -- until it does, as the quality of the phenomenon is arbitrarily related to the quantity of examples.  

Render unto democracy what belongs to democracy.  That's not my department, but nevertheless, it's been shown that when the world encourages the phenomenon and then overcomes its envy and acknowledges that the perfection right before its eyes or ears does exist as such in a given department -- not to be confused with mere excellence -- beware false prophets, read the fine print -- or with any discernible perfection of the perpetrator in all things  -- that when it acknowledges such perfection's incommensurable nature as, in a form we can grasp, it reflects the ungraspable, incommensurable, terrible perfection of the world itself, appearing a lopsided mess only through the common, lopsided mess of our special human, animal, organic life, existential post-existential, pleasure and peace privileging interests, that when the graspable perfection pointing to the ungraspable is grasped, the body politic breaks free of the bondage that an army of small, ungrateful, limited, unimaginative, bureaucratic minds seeking and, you may have noticed, never finding the original particle that will prove that everything is made of stuff as limited and mundane as they are impose -- indeed, the more they grasp. the more evidence they find of the gigantic limitless ungraspable nature of grasping and everything -- and the body politic at this awakening to anomalous local perfection pointing to a global one, is miraculously healed of  intractable grief, resentment, un-forgiveness, and division, and such a night of shooting stars as greeted my mother, the most perfect state legislator ever known in the state of Missouri, at the apparent ascent of her apparently surprisingly -- children often focus on the dark moles of parents with supra-nuclear familial callings -- spotless soul is upon us, with possibly more novel modes of perfection presenting themselves than ever before, such as my philosophy (Yes, mine IS the Marilyn Monroe of philosophies; due to my mother's habit, both my sister and I were born heroine addicted and must, however long it takes, reach perfection in our departments or bust.) 

Yes, at this public acknowledgement of the category of anomalous perfection, on earth as it is in heaven, with these North stars to guide us, cold civil wars festering wherever the majority rules grind to a halt, and the repentant majority, pledging allegiance to and determined never again to betray the healing power of the anomaly, is re-united, science and democracy, newly resilient.  And the funny thing is, though I hope and trust you're appropriately smiling -- foretaste of passion imminent -- I'm not kidding!  The immortal Renaissance never dies, it only sleeps to awaken refreshed and chomping at the bit, first one of us this century, then two the next, then four the next, then sixteen, then...everybody! Provided the ducklings who've been quacking we're only ducklings in this department for centuries don't kill the swan in this department and destroy not only all the direct evidence of its existence but wipe out anyone who would ever tell of it.  Cmon, don't be skittish, to be devout Durer's portrait of Christ is a self-portrait; imitation of the Christ between the lines that, answering questions with more questions, the living Jesus in the story never touched, is the only form of prayer, short of a very short conventional one appearing in the Talmud, that he ordered, just as he continually pointed to what lies between the lines, not the parts, but the whole, not the dots, but the image, not the notes, but the music, while sanely admonishing, unless it offends the latter's composition in progress -- to honor the former.

Paradoxically, though, this anomaly is internally democratic. All the parts are equally important and I cannot establish any hierarchy among them.  Until every vote is counted, you will have no idea who the winner of the election is.  You yourself will count the votes and add them up to determine the will of the majority of voters.  That metaphor failed and fell apart even faster than usual.  

* I tell you, the great conspirator has orchestrated it that these towering vampires pursue me! Presently my late mate's best friend LB will not let two months pass without texting me followed by two or three phone calls explaining her byzantine labyrinth of self-imposed familial responsibilities, whilst -- as never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all her day -- purveying career advice to my "genius" self, "more poetic than the poets", career advice being a language my sixteen elder cousins and two elder siblings hard wired my brain to fail to be able to learn.

**with whom I had a secret triste tropique but then we dropped each other for what each of us deemed unrepentant Satanic verses -- well actually he deemed mine a Satanic tome 

***the great sibyl and cipher, my late mate, fully ascended, under the influence of paint fumes, to a curvaceous, yielding, and receptive soul conveniently trapped in a more commercially viable projective, angular male body and not above cashing in on it, from his youth dreamt -- boys Will be boys -- of sending yet more gigantic versions of his wind filled sail shaped paintings into outer space to sail in the night sky to the joy and wonder of earthlings. But then the internet produced images of the two amorphous Martian moons, whose waning and waxing forms, their source long unknown, had continually appeared in the artist's luridly glowing, convex/concave mirrors submissive as photographic paper to whatever they might happen to pick up on their long distance radar, while the artist spaced out reverently in a receptive reverie. On beholding on the internet the naked Martian moons themselves denuded of the perfectly balanced and perfectly enticing colors the artist applied and perfectly balanced with perfect freedom from reality after tweaking the forms based on purely formal criteria, having no idea what unearthly place the weird amorphous blobs that appeared in her reveries and dreams came from, the painter, now informed of the source, was suddenly dispossessed of the desire to make and set sail in the sky gigantic, wind filled sail shaped paintings of two Martian moon blobs often weeping and running their thick, crazy playful makeup and decided Mars was trying to tell us to stay home. So my advice is, whenever the rare opportunity knocks, to grab at whatever cost one of those weirdly trans-phenomenal, mongrel sculpture/painting/photograph/crystal balls while they last, as future Mars dwellers will so swoon over them that a novel, yet more virulent mutation of Stendhal syndrome will appear in the compendium of psychological disorders, and no doubt Elon Musk is already angling to get some up to the nearest satellite to await further instructions.  

To conclude the becoming seriously unbearably enervating foreplay, to repeat in full, in case you forgot this vital forewarning -- philosophy can be so stripped of its pretense of perfect objectivity and placidity it might actually ascend to perfect objectivity and placidity; but to build such an airship will take as many breaks from everything else as it takes to read a tome of poems and retain enough to quote at least a few of the most memorable lines from every era of the poet's career, then suddenly see, in a blinding flash of light, the poem in all the poems -- but watch me build it, and watch it fly, and you be the judge of whether or not you made a mistake to place so much cash on this dark horse, based solely on the perfect neighferiousness of neighs emanating from the old mare's stall, while your friends would have had you locked up and plied with anti-psychotic drugs had you not wisely kept your indiscretion secret. And the thing, still funny, but not for long, is, I'm not kidding.

******************

SCHOLARLY PASSION

complete technical version linked just below  -- available, given the pressing spiritual crisis, until the present version oriented more to the laymen is completed.

underlying premises to be elaborated in upcoming work --

solving the world's problems depends on constructing somewhat complex machines of thought that are in fact at least much less complex than long philosophical tomes meant to prove unprovable theses, 

and the former actually can solve the world's problems.

just as viewing atoms molecules and cells enables us to cure disease -- revealing the underlying forces and ideas that rule Creation in a transparent mimesis -- an imitation of Creation perfectly transparent to its own process -- has the same effect re. social problems that arise in ignorance of the common constituents of all experience.  

the act of creation alone understands creation

again the following is the technical "proof" that on reflection and studied application can be translated into the above mentioned results 

ARE YOU READY?  FOR THE MOST BORING PENETRATING BOOK EVER WRITTEN!!! (SCHOLARS, WHO LOVE BORING BOOKS BECAUSE THEY LIKE TO PENETRATE THINGS, BIND WITH THEM, AND CREATE MORE THINGS, WILL TAKE SOME INTEREST UNTIL IT STARTS ERODING THE GROUND UNDER THEIR FEET) 

CLICK ON

>>>>>>>> giottopage1.blogspot.com <<<<<<<<<<<

IF YOU -- 

EVERYBODY EQUALLY FEELS THIS IS NOT THEIR DEPARTMENT  -- NOT JUST DUE TO THE FACT THAT IT IS AN ARRIVEMENT THAT NOBODY IS READY FOR, BUT WHAT EDUCATED PERSON BESIDES ME WOULDN'T RATHER PAY TO HAVE AMAZON ASSEMBLE THE WASHING MACHINE?  -- 

I SAY IF YOU CAN ROUSE YOURSELF AND STAY AWAKE IN THIS POPPY FIELD, YOU STAND A CHANCE TO SING GOOD-BYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD, WORLD, OTHERWISE DREAM ON,  KNOWING -- JUST LOOK AROUND -- YOU'VE NOT YET MELTED THE WICKED WITCH, AND OZ IS FUN FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS,  BUT DOROTHY STUCK THERE IN A GROWN UP BODY FOR MONTHS ALMOST DIED OF EXHAUSTION AND HAD TO GET HERSELF TO REHAB OR DIE.  IF YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH IT ALL AND THINK YOUR PERSONAL DESTINY CATAPULTED YOU BEYOND, DID YOU FORGET THAT YOU ARE THE WHOLE WORLD, OR YOU ARE JUST A MUNCHKIN. 

It describes how the modern paradigm of knowledge* originated in a mystical vision that was scalped to denude it of its sacred, continuous, embodied nature, and how Giotto returns the face to the body by manifesting them together -- and you can decide the level at which you want to participate in this reintegration and what you are willing to sacrifice for it.  As it's said in programs for treating alcoholics, only those who cannot look at themselves honestly are incapable of redemption. 

* the full assimilation and distribution of mathematical space turning entities into disembodied coordinates, that is, the matrix...

some stir in their sleep and briefly open their eyes and make contact with others, but there is no red pill, the matrix itself must awaken 

all the insight herein, by the way -- by the way, it's all by the way, as more clearly explained at the end where it begins -- accrues from years of traditional education that her father disallowed my mother -- only the boys got to go to college -- but alas,  the crusty surface exclusively offered by the time I got there -- though until I plumbed too deep they funded a bit of investigation beneath, hoping it would help preserve the stale crust, not slice it off and form a nice crunchy new one, as actually transpired to their utmost chagrin, glad to get me out of there asap lest I mess with their salacious syllabi  -- [but alas,  the crusty surface exclusively offered by the time I got there]concerned the fervid attempt to undermine it all in the most educated way available in order, apparently, with the ruse of cultural diversity, to avoid sharing the massive wealth compiled by the millennia long privileged, as the savvy girls, swiftly gleaning the absence of self-serving alternatives, joined the boys in their gleeful systematic deconstruction -- like the velociraptors escaped from the dinosaur zoo to ravage geometrically the geometric cornfields in Jurassic Park -- of all the precious tools and toys, now that the time had come to share them.  

I mention this because when I was swept up in the only game in town, which was systematically taking apart all the games and undermining and disassembling all the carefully forged tools, I was pursuing a doctorate in art (and actually also science) history focused on the origins of Renaissance perspective -- not just a method, as in antiquity, but as Panofsky notes, a symbolic form chewing up the world of names to convert it into numbers, an ambiguous phenomenon at the outset, as this dematerialization purveyed mystical meanings just as it served and embodied materialism and capitalism, where in the transitional Renaissance wholeness flowered as categories crossed defying the codifying controllers, 

and after seven summers roaming around Rome I had already been dangerously infected with renegade reintegration, misfitting me to contemporary life, where fragmentation is and was an intellectual and moral imperative.  "What is torn torn must remain." was the mantra of the day; one should need a license to carry a needle and thread, used only for self-defense or innocuous superficial embroidery, and no-one with a record like mine allowed them. Even clothes must strictly define and limit their operations to function (self-defense) and playful ornamentation, as well as identification of social stratum, etc. the judges confined to the applicable categories, including je ne said quoi, an ornamental feature.  Aesthetic standards, such as proportion, balance, and, God forbid, integration, better if lurking around, be seen but not heard, preferably nobody will notice them except to be bored and cry NEXT!

In my researches, still back then towing the line, I focused on the anonymous manuscript painters deeming them and their charming, idiosyncratic styles more beautiful and interesting and worthy of attention than the great white males with their great white male concerns.  But as I took apart the phenomenon of this transition to a quantified world, spontaneously examining it disinterestedly and using whatever language came to me (I was secretly a mutant that way at birth, a born Nancy Drew stalking around with my magnifying glass looking for fingerprints.) I noticed that the anonymous manuscript painters along with the celebrated ones, along with culture at large, were all systematically searching for what seemed the exact opposite thing, something that would restore the wholeness of the already very fractured, medieval bureaucratic, increasingly literate world that arose long before in the fracturing phenomenon of consciousness itself, something that would not just instate the mathematical matrix, the backbone of science, which they loved as much as poetry, but ensure its perpetual embodiment as a tool of perpetual, poetic individuation in one, fully integrated form, the blueprint for heaven on earth, the open sesame to return to, or originally create, based on a model in the imagination, the garden of Eden --

if only seeing were believing.  But when by a recent medical breakthrough, doctors conferred sight on the congenitally blind, they could not wrap their minds around what their eyes took in, and those who did not contract fevers and die of it tragically reverted to their original state.  A related effect ensues with any radically new visual evidence that contradicts the schemes into which one has settled to filter the blinding light of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so that one can play and master a game in the fun, but often dead serious amusement park of life. One's whole life is so focused on this enterprise, that it's to be struck by lightening and awaken somebody else, such as that musical genius that appeared out of the blue that way (and also, in a way, yours truly, when, finally understanding me, in singing back my song you connect all these notes into the music I'm always channeling, as when everybody senses first a soupçon of gigantic mama and baby soup spoons up there, then everybody's providence on earth as it is in heaven) to absorb such visual evidence as will eventually emerge here, shattering your scheme whatever it is.  When it crashed down on my head like a frying pan and crushed me flat as Buggs, not as resilient as the bunny, I pretty much stayed in bed for two years, but then I did finally pop up again maybe not in the greatest shape -- a Buggs is a Buggs is a Buggs, that's it folks -- but in substantially better shape than before the flattening, as close observers of the avatar I pulled out of the hat, ready to take on and bounce back after ever worse flattenings. However your disinterested inner computer will placidly take in the evidence and approve the logic affirming that this planet bigger than Jupiter has actually always been circling around the earth -- I love it when metaphors get so close to the thing itself, I can almost feel the thing cracking like an egg on my head, as when people foster that effect by standing behind other people, children usually, knocking on their heads and then ever so softly running their fingers down their heads and shoulders to give them the chills  -- when  the ubiquitously dominant ego and id, or idiotic ego -- this could in no way  threaten its natural dominance as prevails in even in the world's greatest sages -- DO NOT CALL ME GOOD. (Jesus) -- you will ignore your inner computer and find the whole thing perhaps a little strange, but essentially meaningless, and a thing you would not wish to keep around, as you don't like arguments with your inner computer, which you, like all of us, have tamed with many biscuits mainly to affirm what you like or at least can live with and what works in terms short enough for you to stay in your game.   Alas, I daresay your inner computer has never sniffed such a delicious biscuit, like desiccated raw duck meat to  dog!  I will -- I have! as it's already sniffed it -- set your inner computer against you, and you will have to fight it out, and may the computer win this round sooner than later, because for humans, like unto the gods or claiming to be, staking not just our survival, but any sustainable well being and happiness on our capacity and willingness to seize every opportunity to wrestle down our idiotic ego when opportunity knocks, so as to fight our way to it and knock with all our might on the still locked door to believing what is right before our eyes -- we cannot open it ourselves, as we never know what we're doing; science has verified that our brain makes our decisions before we're aware of them, so we must fall on our knees and bang at the door and cry, give me the open sesame, and really knock hard and persist and really mean it -- even if it might be so beautiful we can only gape there paralyzed, swoon, or even just lie down and die  -- now that would be sustainable happiness! -- but in those cases, short of a fatal blow, that phase soon passes, and heightened capacity ensues. And if something appears that doesn't fit our schemes, we need new ones, even if one in the mix might be, or be itchily close to being, however intellectually purified and radically reformed, one we spat on when we were thirteen years old for the rest of our life -- crying I'm a free spirit! but more likely by now it's our parents who did that for us.  The great news is that, should you make it to the right door and knock hard enough, there is one scheme that, while able to filter the blinding light, like or as a work of art that runs on automatic running through the world cleaning all the sticky stuff and idiotic ego goo stuck to all the schemes, continually unravels itself -- like a garden flying round and round the seasons in speeded up motion -- and the one I found seems to be it.   Sounds smells tastes looks feels delectable! cries your inner computer wagging its tail!  D0wn down! you shriek -- get back in your cage!  Oh I will show it to you, I will explain how it works, it will be AS IF -- one of those egg cracking metaphors again -- a living soul you'd watched die right before your eyes and then watched being buried appeared and took your hand and stuck it into his festering wound, and you could feel the pulsing warmth and the blood remained on your finger, and it's really hilarious that you would so overblow it because nothing like that will be in any direct evidence  Oh if only, if only seeing were believing.  But now children too probably would not flinch if I cracked real eggs over their heads, but just keep playing their video games or scrolling through social media, everybody's inner computers locked in their cages, whimpering, their idiotic egos using, purveying, and rallying a little Judas living in their inner computer frantically to update long outdated insights clicking away, as the ship of state spins in the wind.

and I found I could trace the steps quite specifically -- I will show you later -- up to the point that the greatest of the great white males, Giotto, found the thing they were all looking for, the portal, like in a science fiction fairy tale, I will show you -- oh if only seeing were believing!  And when I found what he found, I found out the velociraptors and began to gravitate to those rounding up a posse to rein them in.  The white males exploiting the ruse of cultural diversity and stoking the long oppressed to a rein of terror so they can, as soon as possible, reinstate the monarchy as they, just in case, destroy all their toys and tools to avoid sharing them at the cost of cultural diversity are not going to deprive me of what they came up with with women and blacks and the whole world serving them and rubbing their feet -- though with all due respect, Michelangelo remained single and slept in his boots.  I'm taking the ball and running with it and passing it up to whomsoever is positioned to score regardless of race, color, gender, or creed.  The one is lord.  

(Meanwhile, in the art world today, the focusing mirror of the whole world, it's still a few paragraph eons ago, all one big Dionysian orgy, the men-ids and maenads tearing everything apart in their terrible teeth to create more sublime splatters of images and matter to be deservedly or undeservedly -- who has time to discern the difference? plus it takes millions of noble stem cells to produce an immortal oeuvre like like like like like -- flattered by the flattered by the flattered..., as meanwhile, in the political arena, still dangerously high on all this mutual admiration, flashing their red capes to the enemy with no bullfighting experience, the nuclear reactionary rhetoric accelerates in the accelerator, as all line up behind Thelma and Louise to fly off the cliff and end it all --  while posing as their closest pals, the worshipped leaders of this suicide cult clearly allied with the rapist and system that cornered them.  So as Barnaby says, I prefer not to,

whatever, gushing over the oppressed and tossing in some old world sentiment and veneration of the canon as artists are not going to put out their eyes or stab themselves in the heart before they're ready to, the great white fathers and complicit mothers running this spiritual and quite possibly -- man does not live by bread alone -- material suicide cult instruct.

why is every position taken but the central one? don't get cute, history doesn't rhyme, ugh, under a thin veneer, it repeats itself! Being though does rhyme and somehow manage to run through it all.)

Trusting that the truth however delayed and resisted will eventually prevail, I can only tell it as it is, that IF, big if, you don't just read it, ugh, but think about it -- what? you've got to be kidding, I'm too busy to read it, let alone think about it -- this finding turns the inside out world right side in.  It awakens us from a midsummer nights dream in which alien species wed, from a zany trip over the rainbow where the yellow brick road never ends, and the dogs of society never stop howling.  The dream was fun, but has grown old.  This finding finds the way back to the plough and the hunt for the horny black toad.  This finding grounds language in matter, so that language can lift matter up within its capacities.  This finding lies at the source of all inspiration, all songs that are not made of snippets of other songs, but songs that flow on one, totally surprising uninterrupted strain straight from the virgin source.

#themongreldiscourse

#giotto

#philosophyandmysticism

#performancephilosophy

#veronikasheer

#krveronikas

#callistosgarden.blogspot.com

#myyearbookcopy.blogspot.com

#originsofperspective

#gospelofphilip

#scholasticphilosophy

#artasscience

#themiddleway

#unclassifiable

#enlightenment

#therabbithole

#artandlife

#artunbound

#tortoisewinstherace

#womanswork

#holeybabble

#hegelianhooplah

#visualphilosophy

#philosophyoftheimage

#philosophyandpoetics

#propheticarthistory

#paradisoonearth

#languagemysticism

#nominalism

#joycetotheworld

#herecomeseverybody

#workinglanguage

#freudianphilosophy

#neo-romanticism

#post-post-romanticism

#orthodoxy

#thematrix

#anti-anti-intellectualism

#contemplativeaction

#oxymoronicity

#therenaissancenow

#thetaoofnottao

#logicandlogos

#thevisualorder

#apocotastasis

#restoration

#redemption

#stigmatizationofsaintfrancis

#originsofperspective

OH I FORGOT TO TELL YOU, BEGIN HERE AND JUST KEEP CIRCLING ROUND AND ROUND.  TO COMPLETE THE NEAR PERFECT ALIGNMENT OF FORM WITH CONTENT, THE TEXT SHOULD BE PRINTED, THE CONSECUTIVE PAGES TAPED OR GLUED TO FORM ONE CONTINUOUS SCROLL AND TWISTED ONCE AND JOINED IN A LOOP.   THAT WAY, THE IMPRESSIVE FACT THAT, WHEN READING, WHATEVER'S BACKING UP THE FRONT WILL SOON BE BACKED UP BY THE FRONT THAT'S NOW THE BACK UP WILL BE IMPRESSED UPON YOU, AS WITH BASEBALL, WHERE THE FACT THAT EACH PLAYER TAKES A TURN AS THE FRONT MAN, WITH THE OTHERS THE BACKUP, IS LIKEWISE IMPRESSED UPON YOU AND THE PLAYER IN THE SPOTLIGHT AND ALL THOSE FOCUSED ON HIM OR HER.  HOWEVER IT MAY APPEAR OTHERWISE, WHEN THE WHOLENESS OF THE WORLD IS IMPRESSED UPON US AT EVERY TURN, WHEN WE WAKE WHEN WE GO BY THE WAY WHEN WE LIE DOWN AND SLEEP, EVERY INDIVIDUAL BEING AND THING SHINES WITH EQUAL RADIANCE AND INDIVIDUALITY AS IT SERVES THE OTHERS WITH EQUAL SUBMISSION.  THE IMPRESSION WHEN IMPRESSED FOSTERS A SUBTLE DIFFERENCE DISTRIBUTED EQUALLY IN EVERYTHING THAT CAN NEVER BE LOCATED ANYWHERE, BUT IT LEAVES A TRACE IN EVERYTHING ONE FEELS THINKS AND DOES AND TOTALLY CHANGES THE QUALITY OF ONE'S LANGUAGE, AS IS EVIDENT IN THE GREAT ART MOVEMENT\ CALLED IMPRESSIONISM, WHICH REVEALED THE WORLD A HEAVENLY PLACE DANCING WITH LIGHT KISSING EVERYTHING EQUALLY, EVERY ATOM A PRINCESS OF GUERMANTES, WHO UNLIKE LESSER NOBLES AND ROYALS, CONSIDERS PEASANTS HER SIBLINGS AND GREETS THEM ACCORDINGLY.  THIS SUPERNATURALLY NATURALLY RADIANT TRANSLUCENT SUBLIMELY SUPERFICIAL -- ALL THAT IS HIDDEN SHALL BE REVEALED -- DEMOCRATIC WORLD MINGLES AND MARRIES THE FINDINGS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE IN THE TEACHINGS AND PROMISES OF RELIGION, ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN. 

OH DEAR, I WENT OUT ON A TANGENT JUST THEN, I WAS TRYING JUST TO INTRODUCE THE FOLLOWING TANGENTIAL INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH IN THIS IMPRESSIONISTIC WORLD IN WHICH THERE IS NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY AND EVERYTHING IS BY THE WAY.  BY THE WAY, RENDER UNTO THE SOCIAL ORDER WHAT BELONGS TO THE SOCIAL ORDER, AND MAINTAIN, REFORM, OR OVERTHROW IT AS YOU SEE FIT, JUST MAKE SURE WHEREVER IT IS OR LANDS, IT KEEPS ITS HANDS OUT OF MY HEAD, WHERE SHIMMERING IN LOVE'S ETHER, ANARCHY REIGNS WITHOUT DISCORD.  CONCERNING THE SOCIAL ORDER, THE NORTH STAR GUIDES THE SHIP,, IT IS NOT THE DESTINATION.  AND THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW, SO DON'T TRY TO KNOW ANYTHING ELSE AND GET CONFUSED AND LOST IN THE NIGHT AGAIN.  RIGHT NOW, AS THE NORTH STAR SMILES AGAIN ON THE SHIP IN THE NIGHT, VIGILANTE PHD'S ARE FORMING IN BANDS AND WILL SOON BE OMNIPRESENT IN THE LAND MAKING SURE TO RESTORE ORDER WHENEVER ANYBODY IN WHATEVER ECHELON SEES FIT TO DISTURB THE PEACE.  SO KEEP IN MIND, IF YOU DON'T WANT THEM IN YOUR FACE, THAT WHATEVER ISN'T BY THE WAY IS WAY OUT OF THE WAY.  SO JUST TURN THE OTHER CHEEK WHEN THEY HURL OVER THEIR RHETORICAL BOMBS, STUDY THE POSITION OF THE NORTH STAR, AND CORRECT YOUR COURSE ACCORDINGLY.  SOMEBODY MUST CUT THE GORDIAN KNOT AND STOP THE VICIOUS CIRCLING. THOUGH IT'S LORD OF THE FLIES, AND ONCE YOU TASTE BLOOD, THERE'S NOTHING LIKE THE SURGE OF ADRENALIN, NOBODY ON THE ISLAND IS ACTUALLY A CHILD.

By the way, to repair the foundations, professional hold diggers (phd's) must suffer a deadening noise and get covered with the dust,  but that's one of our main jobs here, so cover your ears with whatever you've got.  This is an emergency as you know.  The public depends on us vigilante phd's as the licensed ones are not rising to the occasion.  Don't worry I ransacked their files and have all the necessary information and maps.  Okay here we go.  It's takes mental muscle and attention to the technical details to fix the leaks, but once we get this done, we can start building in the sunlight.  And though, or actually because it's such hard work, unlike almost everybody else, gas main repairers and all manner vigilante phd's go to bed with a clean conscience, however the noise of the drill is still ringing in our heads.  For shame Veronika, to compare this namby pamby work to that of operating an actual jack hammer!   Okay okay sorry, I know they occupy the penthouse and the pinnacle. I'm only on, and inviting my reader into, my first floor flat in the tower of this song, the song of the vigilante professional hole diggers.  Okay cover your years, I filled it up with ethel -- costs a fortune these days, so let's not waste it -- and I'm turning on the ethereal jack hammer. Here we go.

in the so called secular world, what words, which all generalize, the identity of a chair as a "chair" is the identity of every other chair as a "chair", cannot say about individual things is relegated to poetry and art, which can only point to it with a unique mix of metaphors or in art shatter the idol of "chair" and replace it with unnamable forms and evocations, or so detail it one is riveted by the details and forgets the whole known only as "chair", like in yoga when you relax by paying attention to each part of your body to escape your moribund identity as a generic "person", notwithstanding the fact that the name at the outset would not have been applied if there hadn't been something there that compares to, without being, things like it, 

but, short of ascending to enlightenment, which comes and goes, and where it comes from and where it goes nobody knows -- as the authentic gurus explain -- concern with that original thing belongs to art and poetry, separated from science, meaning knowledge or truth, where what we call science is built only of generalized categories, with the poetry and individuality of each individual thing set aside for art's inchoate, subjective musings on it.  

Over time, explaining the need for the yogic exercise, at least to reclaim the parts, the everyday world we perceive, all things denuded of their distinct individuality, is limited to the objects authorized by science, objects known only in the way they are like other objects and statistically verifiable.  This means the everyday world we perceive is radically misaligned with, or depleted of reality, is missing full half of the picture --  maybe explaining why only one of each pair of socks survives the year, the platonic one only visiting briefly from the celestial sphere -- just kidding...maybe, do you have a better explanation?  The authorities demand blind faith in this shadowy world as the world, in which science is the state religion, allowing other personal religions in which a few other authorized objects are admitted on the basis of tradition and the sense that science is missing something, where science's objects are deemed imbued with the essence of these other objects, but that too is a general phenomenon, not really helping each individual thing fully to express its own individuality. 

Lost in this labyrinth somehow uniquely aware that I was lost, I noticed a thread, and as I followed it -- I will eventually detail this transition to verify it -- poetry and art rejoined the categorical world, I escaped the labyrinth to a great expanse of unimpeded space, science became science, no longer a shadowy religion upheld by authorities, and the world became whole.  

This differs from "enlightenment" in that it does not come and go, but stays and is perfectly describable. Nor does it control my emotions or attachments, if I want to study and learn such control, I can choose to do so as before. Just the underlying assumption that all is fragmented, usually with a glaze of some kind of general spirituality, which you notice has filtered down from academic to everyday discourse among the college and internet educated pervades everyday discourse, is gone.  Everything is whole. No mumbo jumbo, no excess or depleted emotion or self-expression, only I register and can document some serious synchronicity that makes the miracle of the socks seem almost relatively credible, as  I simply observe and record in plain English freely deploying metaphors and all the different ways of speaking that seem appropriate to describe what is right before my eyes in dogged defiance of the authorities, who demand to know what genre this is, as if that's more important than the clearly beautiful truth it says and shows, simply due to the fact that I happen to be unusually fluent in my native tongue, and insist on applying logic and direct observation to the whole world, whose individuality known in art is mingled in the general qualities recognized by science as every individual thing speaks in its own individual way while communing with those like it, the nature of natural things being the perfect, nurturing society, as if a god created the world, and it was good.

The world is whole, however neglected its wholeness, and the English language, a very old language, is wholly adequate to describing the whole world, which is no surprise, since that was the job the tool was formed for.  Yet my insistence in inhabiting the whole world and speaking always to whole things, indeed my incapacity now that I've escaped the labyrinth to do otherwise, has made me a pariah, and I am, on close inspection by professionals, officially diagnosed insane, not just a silly person who pretends she could believe that Plato stole half her socks, but a sociopathological threat to science's control and protection with several signs, in all the synchronicity, of being bewitched whether or not they believe in witches -- as everybody prays nobody will listen, and this shadowy Ponzy scheme, the religion of science with or without the some objects thrown in from other religions, in which everybody's invested all their cash doesn't run itself out before they die and leave the mess to their beloved heirs. Well, I'm afraid the house of cards is about to come tumbling down. If you wanted to stay a velveteen rabbit, if you didn't want to become whole and real, you shouldn't gone for whole food. You are what you eat.

the rose-ary that arose on a pile of hurricane blown dust
covering the bones of Callisto, my she wolf guide
on the first stretch of this odyssey,
 Callisto's Garden, May, 2019

studio of the moi mole, 2016

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the graveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go! 

 

address inquiries with mongrel in title to krvs at me.com