heard language

Before you use them, know your tools. To use language unconsciously is unconsciously to beat plowshares into weapons. Why do you think it always seems to happen in spite of us? 

What is written language,

and what is an a-sensory scribble solvent?

Written language is a musical score, as described elsewhere, and you need to hear it with your ears. Your ears know things your mind needs to know in order actually to hear the mongrel discourse. Writing that resists the tendency to read without listening is called poetry and philosophy, which can and should infiltrate many kinds of writing, and all wise people understand these forms are like water for a world dying of thirst. 

If you're a horse that gets lead to this kind of water and are not inclined to drink, you are very far gone. The fact that you are hearing this, though, means you're waking up. Meanwhile, just because you love poetry and philosophy, doesn't mean you don't need what leads back to them. Zen mind is beginner's mind, because, among other things, if you do not support the instrument of sharing knowledge, you begin losing what knowledge you have, even if there's an apparent, short term gain. And even if there were no loss of knowledge in hoarding knowledge, the source of all misery is miserliness. 

Written language as a set of marks without sound does not work to transmit all the knowledge carried, not only in remarks, or re-marks, made out of words, but in the ancient marks and sounds themselves. This world of incomplete knowledge began to develop many systems of incomplete, literally senseless knowledge, knowledge that makes no sense, being out of touch with the senses -- as the original words tell us in their wisdom, when we linger to listen to their sounds --

as written language spread, the incomplete world codified in silent scribble replaced the "real world". Theories blame the existence of this "simulacrum" on capitalism, but ancient Hinduism and other traditions are wise to the grand illusion. Capitalism in fact loosens as many screws as it tightens. All written language is also heard and is still made of all the ancient heard words.  As such it remains a palimpsest swimming with pentimenti floating up from many different times and places. However the authorities upholding the grand illusion restore its resiliency at every assault, the pentimenti will keep bleeding up to contradict the senseless systems of thought arising in and made to maintain the a-sensorium, and even the systems are not wholly senseless. 

Arcane knowledge travels in hermetic circles, knowledge concerning how to activate the palimpsest and integrate the pentimenti. Hermetic circles, though, harbor false as well as real prophets.  The latter protect, the former hoard this knowledge and use it to aggrandize themselves and their circle.  

In the a-sensorium sensory experience, being denied language, grows and more locked in. My sense of color and yours, or of the taste of a peach is assumed subjective and untranslatable, and so it is. In this as a sensory being I am indeed locked in, totally isolated. In some branches of the sensorium much and sometimes all sensory experience is debased and considered illicit. This nicely mixes with a hope to escape thoughts of mortality by cultivating interest in what is fixed and immutable, and people are free to, and have many other reasons to, value the immutable and the enduring, if not taken to insane extremes; insane means unclean. Too clean is unclean.

Science (along with free enterprise, as appealing to the senses is good for selling things) turned things around a bit, reclaiming the evidence of the senses, and began to codify a set of shared experiences of sensory beings, however still living in the simulacrum, or the a-sensorium of our modern civilization, which suffered the deepest entrenchment yet in the Middle Ages. The Renaissance with a great heave-ho! ripped through and threw off the a-sensorium to revive and recover the life of language and everything in what seems like one last dying gasp before the sensorium died, and a few centuries later the word was proclaimed dead. 

True, science began to build out of, and on top of, the a-sensory, over-written surface, a world again open to the senses. But however well structured above ground, a house built on poor foundations cannot long stand. A tree cannot root itself on a plastic bed. Many words and ideas in which science traffics, too, partake of the cover up, actually reinforcing, as if by adding a layer of make up and perfume, a world in which, compared to the original, fully sensory world, a yellow aging shellac like veneer covers everything -- except abstract art, which refuses to refer to the so called real world, though figures are returning as science tries to reclaim more and more sensory experience. 

But compared to ancient ones, the figures in officially recognized art today lack depth. If they possess it, the artist, if not an "outsider", an untrained member of an indigenous tribe whose sensorium is intact, is accused of kitchiness and faux-naivite.  Figures must appear as the empty shells they are. They are written over. 

Artists quite naturally dwell on surfaces long enough sometimes literally to hear the colors, or in my case, I see the sounds of language. We are ciphers to what's actually happening, otherwise unnoticed in all the unheard, unspoken, nonsense writing continually poisoning any vegetation beneath. But by now, with the ground so thoroughly impregnated by pest poisons, even a weed as voracious as I seem to be can hardly breakthrough. 

Graffiti in typeface on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook in Brooklyn reads: I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I will try to find him, but I can only hope that restoring language now will provide air for your grandchildren. 

Philosophy acts as a solvent of all this a-sensory scribble -- that's why they poisoned the pest Socrates -- that obscures the living palimpsest that is right before our eyes. With philosophy, love of knowledge, I am carefully, oh so carefully applying the solvent. 

Don't worry, I'm being very careful. I learned from James Beck, who tried to stop the restoration of the Sistine Chapel before they removed some significant shadows and even some of the original glossy topcoat that Michelangelo himself applied. 

I also studied with Giotto. He showed me how to mix and apply a particular kind of philosophical solvent, one that won't scrape off a shadow of the sensory world as it dissolves all the scribbles binding the Gargantua of being in a world wide web of strangling abstract ideations and protests against them and protests against the protests, all which can do anything but align with, release, and revive the replete sensory world.

Who in the world will be patient enough to work with me to get this job done properly? Who will help me sustain this enterprise? Who will give it air to breathe in the vast space in which it longs to live? Just last year, incredibly clumsy, rushing restorers nearly destroyed a chapel of frescos by Giotto, the very chapel where I found this particular, gentle yet effective formula for removing the a-sensory scribble without chipping away at sensorium below. This solvent knows how and when to go, slow, stop (the recurring theme in my friend Shura's painting)so many can drive in opposite and perpendicular directions without crashing. 

You don't know a thing about how to do this? Good! You have no bad habits. You're hired! Just put on these gloves and this white coat. Study this pile of books I am loading you down with. 

If not us, who, if not now....

...yes that's right, just in reading this carefully, thank you, you're overwriting the overwriting and it's washing away. Careful, careful, don't overdo it, you'll remove the shadow of that oh so round voice, our one voice, the voice of all languages channeling and speaking all the world's knowledge as one -- at the Spring Break art fair, a banner read, love is telepathic -- spoken heard vibrating cogitated enacted realized catholic hymn to universal siblinghood, the living voice of Giotto imagining Saint Francis of Assisi beyond his imagining of himself, 

restoring not just the animals plants rocks planets and stars, but ideas and numbers, the very mathematical mechanical scheme itself, defected from the a-sensorium to serve as the bones of one interconnected sensory life, 

Giotto's voice rising above the phlegmatic coughs and expletives, the central text of the manuscript with the angry and sarcastic marginalia allowed by the authorities to blow off steam, and everything can stay just as it is,

but then there's Giotto's voice like a beautiful vase turned by all human history coming off the wheel, a voice hardly heard above the crowd, but it turned things around for a while, and then they shattered it, and its echo could be lost forever...

the source of the mongrel discourse in a fresco by giotto, the holy grail, work in progress

http://giottosyetmoredivinecomedy.blogspot.com

tanjaPART-1pdf by l foo on Scribd

more sprawling attempts to describe the origin of perspective in  fresco by giotto

http://myyearbookcopy.blogspot.com

imitation of life in all disciplines evolves by natural selection, and one day a double helix entwining the word and the world. And all the viral, toxic forms that invade it can only prune this genre of genres to its greater health, can never prevail against it. It is life's reflection, that which proves that life is alive. It is what Giotto paints, what the eye both can and cannot see. He possesses me and all artists. All artists as such are Giotto. But I speak in his careful, reasonable, problem-solving, quietly passionate voice. I think the way he thinks. I know this because I assembled the composition of his last painting autonomously, the one that concludes his researches by finding and offering a sip of the holy grail. Being peasant twins separated at birth, our tastes align perfectly, and I can write, just as he can draw, a perfect circle. We consider painting a form of writing and writing a form of painting; the distinction is a false one -- Plato and Aristotle walk hand in hand. It's only non-artspeak in forms or words that lies, implicit claiming the objects it defines are fixed and stable -- but abstraction overdoes it -- not that we don't overdo not overdoing it, but what could be preferred to the middle way? The illusion that you can feel or think in any satisfying way without objects manifesting history and memory, that mad frenzies shouldn't be limited to a few feast days instead of everybody having to drive harder harder faster and faster. Oof. C'mon, bring Pooh and let's sit on the stoop blowing bubbles. We're forever blowing object bubbles and letting them pop.






Just like two full grown sister elephants similarly separated at birth, when we found ourselves in the same zoo on opposite sides of a reinforced concrete wall, we could not wait until morning to be joined. We kicked down the wall, and now run side by side, inseparable. We are a space, a place, the body of the unutterable unknowable yet everywhere in art kerystallizing keryste, children of Ovid -- spirits known in many metamorphoses, and where we come from, where we go, and who we are nobody knows. We are shamelessly un-ironically faithful but not blindly. We are mystics, not literalists. We pledge allegiance to the invisible by which the visible obeys our commands, which we limit to what already is, because we love what is. It is the best of all possible worlds, or that is surely the best attitude to take toward its taming, and we are very practical people. Wherever we are, scorned or celebrated, we give constant rebirth to a golden age, a practical age. All lost artists, all artists who have betrayed the cause for a winning career, can renew their vows and relight their flames at our altar. Ha ha ha -- we know very well that all this melodrama is laughable...quick Giotto, withdraw these tropes, we've arrived at the next plateau!










all this not the thing itself, but a correction where there's been too much of a swing in this or that direction...illumination lies where the pendulum rests in the middle, not that I hit that..but this tool kit I offer has unprecedented capacity towarddddd slowing down, a global coolant that could rile you up at first as it counters the inertia that's presently speeding and heating things up in the other direction...don't wear flammable clothes, as sparks could fly off the wheels trying screech to a halt before we fly over the edge






here find scraps of a bona fide map and a properly lit way to paradise on earth. The map is not the land itself, oh pioneer. Good luck. There are snares, stumbling blocks, highly vulnerable tropes -- specifically -- Christian metaphors, signs, symbols, and art (not to be confused with Christian religion, except to point to or away from it as you perceive at any given moment -- as these symbols for EVERYBODY are carefully forged to be a VISIBLE PHYSICAL bridge as much as a bridge is a plank set across a stream. If you stand on the bridge you ARE neither here nor there. You are nobody nowhere, like Emily Dickenson. It can be lonely, but you are free, just another word for nothing left to do but try to love it, a full time job, because you surely do not want to lose it. That water however boring you sorely miss when your well runs dry. You can'targue with visible form conforming to the definition of a thing, but you can spend your whole life crying out that you are missing something that you are already standing on, all options still open, you choose, you do not analyze the data, you simply choose. Stick around, you'll see what I mean. Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down...needing constant attention, dirt under your fingernails, not just, or even, the literal kind, maybe you have to make a deal in a backroom to save a life that is not your own...there are limits; certain ideals can't be compromised, but all prejudices and baggage not belonging to the ideal but long associated with it...these must go...we have a long climb, bring only necessities...of course that includes your teddy bear and the rose hips and the rose oil so I can anoint your head and massage your feet...

Premises:






kerystianity represents the supra-mundane if not supernatural rose that blooms on the thorny stem of reason and remains rooted in material evidence.






The rose is a paradox both physical and ethereal, both fleeting and surreal...






Science is hellbent on resolving contradictions and paradox, but life is a contradiction and a paradox. The words cannot match the things perfectly, for then they would not be words. In forming a bridge, they serve as a wedge. All experience is made of this...best language being love...which draws us to the object, but preserves it though it can penetrate it and engender morphs. All these metaphors perfectly apply, and yet they don't... the more you know, the more mysterious and unknowable...we turn to science, but science too will never know just what we're dealing with...there is a time for surrender, for reverence of IT, whatever name you call it, where reverence does not mean strike me dumbstruck -- that's a sham awesome like everything else -- it means attention to it, a science of IT, a science of non-science... which means a love of it more than a fear of it...you best tame lions by love not fear...though step by step, slowly and wisely you let go of fear, and know the difference between a bear and lion...if someone claims to be a lion tamer, a guide, a cipher, a sibyl, you watch, you judge for yourself...






whether you're a so-called atheist or a believer or an agnostic or anything, kerystianity is a thing everybody is told a thousand million times a day nobody wants or needs.






it is what slips between the cracks of everything, all that gold recovered -- terrifying! dangerous! impossible! or completely innocuous and a waste of time? take a chance on it? rock the boat a little? mmmm no better let sleeping dogs lie. okay, good-bye. you know where to find me.






kerystianity is a dramatic awakening sympathetic to the underlying principles in all the world's great ethical systems and is not affiliated with any of them. My private practice and beliefs, if any, are irrelevant.






you say you want a revolution, well you better free your mind instead...because the very words you use and the way you use them are THE ONE AND ONLY THING that is perpetuating the very thing you want to overthrow...






RATIONAL thought demands abject subjection to it or none at all...short of abject subjection, all claims and appearance of rationality become a ruse to uphold hidden agenda.






YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR RATIONAL THOUGHT -- maintaining the cane (stem) of the rose, pruning the dead wood, raking the weeds, watching for mold and hostile insects.






I promise you rose gardening with plenty of thorns, without which you never see or know the rose...






YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH YOU TRAFFIC.






YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR KEEPING IT CLEAN, SO ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES -- MY FAVORITE JOB -- CLEANING THE LANGUAGE LATRINES... warning, this high lacanic Lacanic colonic can be agony, but then oh the ecstasy!






COMMON SENSE AND INTUITIONS CAN GUIDE ONE IN RATIONAL THOUGHT, BUT IF RATIONAL THOUGHT DOES NOT SUSTAIN THEIR JUDGEMENTS, AWAY THEY GO...






BUT IF RATIONAL THOUGHT LEADS TO UNETHICAL CONCLUSIONS, TO HELL WITH RATIONAL THOUGHT. USE IT ONLY FOR WHAT IT'S GOOD FOR.






BUT IF RATIONAL THOUGHT LEADS TO ETHICAL CONCLUSIONS, THEN THE WORLD IS A BETTER PLACE THAN WE THOUGHT, AND THERE IS MORE HOPE THAN WE THOUGHT.






Rationally speaking, as affirmed by empirically verified relativity, we inhabit a subjective, or non-objective world, known in relations of one thing to another. THE objective world is a construction.






all the different worlds are in communion to produce what we call being...being is happening by certain common principles such as the structure of all language. Elliptical language and parables also speak across worlds by not demanding to fix objective forms, but only establish universal principles..






my thinking feeling being the source of all these reflections and your reading them being impossible to extricate from this representation, but our difference being limited to that..-- ALL THIS IS FULL OF HOLES, how about playing along? with a thing that professes to be nothing more than a thing that rides on your playing along is all I am saying, it's as holey as WHOLE FOOD BREAD, except it is not a capitalistic enterprise...YET...for it would be against principles here to play holeyer than thou, and if I could sell a few of these books, I might just squander the profits on something totally useless, oh and feel free to place a bust of me in your hallowed halls, bust or bust! -- we have no call, rationally, further to objectify ourselves. I am pretty sure I am writing what you told me to write. I do not feel I am other than a backboard by which you can work on your strokes. Of course I could be carrying hidden agenda, but my method is transparent to itself. To complicate the argument into a gigantic tome fostering the illusion I can rationalize away all disinterest only reveals to the next tome writer how very flawed that idea -- but THIS time he will get it right. How crazy is that? Yet not to try at all seems equally suspicious. Let's try the middle way -- philosophy light might be just right. burp. nice.






It is not rational to assume that one line of thought can align words with the sensory world woven of many crossing threads. Unitary lines of logic are bound to fail.










THE MONGREL DISCOURSE IS, AS A WHOLE, SEEMINGLY ANARCHICALLY ORDERED, LOOSELY LINEAR THREADS ENTER IN FROM DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS AND WEAVE TOGETHER, YOU DON'T HOLD THE THREADS TOO FIRMLY, SOMETIMES YOU BACK UP AND THERE ARE GLIMPSES OR INTUITIONS OF THE WHOLE -- BECAUSE IT IS AN IMAGE OF THE WORLD GRADUALLY COMING INTO FOCUS, NOT A THEORY ABOUT THE WORLD. The image, however, is pretty well ordered, at least enough to be legible. It is not a chaotic splat. It privileges and protects the dream of being and all its parts, respects the permeable boundaries of sentient bodies and atomic and molecularly structured entities appearing in clocked time and space, such as stones and clouds, from which they evolve without definite rupture. It is sympathetic to Howard Bloom's notion of creative universe that moves as much, if not more, toward order, as it does toward chaos, reconstituting itself after every collapse. It moves with and reflects what moves toward life. Though seemingly anarchic in the non-linearity of its overall order, the mongrel discourse does not take a stand on politics.










though irrevocable pulp publishing has so far given her a terrible heartache, the sheer veil has tried it a few times. Here are three blinding, late Turnerian reviews in the Brooklyn Rail...






http://www.brooklynrail.org/contributor/veronika-sheer

recommended time for reading this post -- five minutes a day X 7 days, read on turning on your laptop and midway through the day and then on turning it off, and then just keep turning over the text in this way for a few months, unless you can take enough for the temperature to rise and the material to decompose more rapidly...


recommended day 1

I'm working on a long book in which all these thoughts are woven into the kind of material life that produced and keeps reenacting them, but I'm not sure how long it will take and whether it will work at all -- maybe it's the nature of the beast only to appear in this most raw and abstract form, and it's up to the reader to flesh out the dry bones.   

this is like gardening... or rather making compost, turning over the rotting material, over and over, inviting the worms, then set it aside for two years...

This goes against the latest idea about abstraction -- that it should bear no hidden meaning that can eventually be parsed out.  It is a simple flat play of textures and rhythms signifying nothing; "the concept is a con."  Which overlooks the fact that the concept that "the concept is a con" might be the most conniving con of all.   I merely suggest -- an infantile hypothesis worth keeping alive until the other is verified beyond a reasonable doubt --- that language and experience are lovers that quarrel, that's all, until they file for a divorce that will leave them bereft of a true love forever -- due to lack of a good marriage counselor -- because nothing in heaven or earth can satisfy the one except the other.   The initial elation of the victim escaping from the other slipped into the role of oppressor will eventually fade, and they will fly to a mutual embrace in repentance and a restored balance of power, again just a hypothesis to keep dandling until verified an imposter beyond any doubt;

you don't realize how instant result oriented writing and reading are until you start doing the real work of making language compost

but presently the vehicle of return is damaged; the parsing part of the collective brain is lain fallow, that region of the collective brain has already atrophied; and the thought required to follow this text seems to be prohibitive -- compared to the usual just desserts, find forty days fast in a cold dry desert... custom written to bore you to death -- for fierce dogs with eyes as big as saucers guard the gates of knowledge -- not to be earned in idle curiosity or for self-aggrandizement, but only for public service...

for on the underlying metaphysical construct all social forms are built, and as for driving the piles of a newborn, greener world into bedrock, if not now, when? If not us, who? Yes, you and I, the replacements. As we don't want it, we inherit the world.  It slips through the fingers of those who grasp at it and clutch it.

recommended day 2 (after brief review of day 1)

trinitarian hegelian principle on which I base everything because it's how life and language work — there’s always a this and a that, wherever there’s a world that is alive, and they compete, and/or they cooperate, and they generate novel forms; they demand conservation or they grow extinct if they cannot evolve, they may evolve to preserve themselves but at a certain point the evolved form can utterly reject the earlier form, which is no longer recognizable in the evolved form.  And art is not life; they are this

all these naturalistic metaphors reflect a minimal difference between art and life, where less is more. 

and that, but they mingle and mate at the always somewhat illicit boundaries -- as each other is to each one's own progenitor from the wrong side of the tracks...and there will be hell to pay in this love affair, we can only hope each time the hell will be a little less literally realized...

recommended day 3 (after brief review of day 2)

and all this is bigger than I am, and so I enter into this process where the process pulls me in, not by deciding where I prefer to stand in advance — though I try to negotiate or woo the form that will grab me.  In the end, I believe in the process more than I believe in my apriori prejudices and am willing to my surrender myself to it as best I can.   So if I am possessed by some mongrel caught between this and that in the process of evolution, so be it.  So said the architect of the Parthenon when then the building committee cried — what is this monster — a stone building or a wooden hut?  Arrest Socrates — this is all his fault!   It’s one thing when hacks play around with these ideas, but now you’ve refined to exquisite calibration to its context, that too a travesty against immutable classical principles indifferent to context!  How dare the sheer veil compare her mongrel discourse to the Parthenon!  Arrest this practice!

getting tired.... pace yourself...Rome was not built in a day...we were just talking, now's the time for walking.   a thousand mile journey consists in steps, one at a time...  and driving piles in bedrock is not one day's work.   Consider before retreating from this bog the necessity of arriving at the lake. Mongrel discourse doesn't come along all that often. Opportunity knocks.

dear R -- you expressed interest in communing on the subject of knowledge.  I hope you don’t mind my sharing my thoughts with the whole quixotic quintet.  I suggest it is important enough to spare time for such useless reflection.   I suggest it could serve the whole quintet at some time it least expects it.

If at any time you do not wish to receive these missives, just send an email marked discontinue.  

I was hoping not to have to go back here, but my voices demand it I play the ultimate nerd who believes in the discussion more than the result, like those earnest Jewish beatniks who hang out the Hungarian pastry shop still arguing about passages in Marx.  I feel scared and full of dread this dreadful time, not elated, this might be a good sign... 

I am working on containment in other spheres, but still I feel I need an avenue of expression for what passes through me that will not be contained, what is infinite boundless yet focused in all its parts —

recommended day 4 (after brief review of day 3) 

but knowledge remains cloudy, refuses to crystallize in myriad flakes that blanket the land in soft cold truth.  We are intrinsically wired to put out our eyes in the face of knowledge.  There is too much darkness in nature not to mention yet darker human nature.  So if I earnestly channel knowledge it is only in believing there is some level of truth — if only psychological — soul-logical -- in the kerystian narrative, the gospel tooth (versus truth, not saying it is or isn't the truth as that's not my department).  I would be lying and misleading you to traffic in any other perspective.   I stay clean this way, in my bathwater find some just some nice clean garden dirt.

recommended day 5 (after brief review of day 4)

 I guess it’s due to my pernicious doubt — i’m from show me state -- that my “faith” mainly boils down to this psychoanalysis attended by noticeable poetic and mood effects that verify the theory in application; it is no credit to me…  yet given the travesties accruing to faith without evidence or argument, I’m not relatively ashamed… without this kind of infinitely eking, empirically evident epiphany — by the way invisible like any evidence to those who do not wish to look… or even listen to the qualities of the voice that allow trust in what appears on the other side of its window — the faithful get fanatical in defensiveness.  The less they believe, the more ardently they express it.  Whereas I lack all conviction even as I’m clearly doomed to keep dragging the stone up the mountain.  or more like trying to row through the sulfuric swamp of tangled cattails.  

recommended day 6 (after brief review of day 5)

the sheer veronika a mere mirror of the Mir for instance the first performance of which I saw with the words stretched like vibrating strings across the screen…it is poetry that’s all, and yet this fence they get people to pay to whitewash between art and life does not make them good neighbors.  

Remove the whitewash and find, again the gospel tooth — in my humble opinion, based on reason and empirical evidence and a truly minimal grain of faith.  That’s what it’s not allowed to say aloud.  Every age has its prohibition -- there find truth.  Would that it were booze that was prohibited; I’d rather be a bootlegger.

In short, I believe I stand where art kerystallizes in religion because the weather affects its chemical constitution in this way, and it is unscientific (against knowledge) to deny this terrifying, yet objectively visible audible and in all ways sensible nonsense result.  Blake is my soulmate; it just keeps coming up snake eyes.  I’m not preaching the doctrine, I’m just refusing to load the dice.  first principle of any ethical approach to knowledge.

recommended day 7 (after brief review of day 6)

the dna is given, and its given being demands a proper reading.  it doesn’t want to be genetically modified (fiction), nor does it want to be reduced to a pile of dead facts

something novel is happening at the immaculate conception called life choice love sentience a program for no longer being programmed.   so poetic no human poet will dare to apply a poetic name to deoxyribonucleic acid.  it’s this non-fictional fiction that doesn’t want to keep being undermined. These minimal particles of credible faith want to add up to something. I have ants in my pants. The ants are getting antsy.  They’re sick of being in my pants.  They want to go outside and make an anthill.  The ants will not survive without an anthill.   Each kerystian is an ant dragging far more than its weight to the anthill, the ant whose torture by a bacterium the atheists love to use as evidence for the impossibleness of God.   But it was the strange impassiveness of the early Christians in the face of all manner of torture that caused the religion to take root and spread.  Not an idea of God, but only a relation between I and thou, only love joining love's ultimate source to the lover of it can arm wrestle with tortuous nature and win.  Love of thou precedes belief in thou, and nothing seen from outside of this choice appears as it does from within it.  The two places speak gibberish to one another, and if it seems otherwise, trust me -- there are far more faux amis than there are trustworthy cognates.  So some form of practice is more important than, and must precede, belief. One notices one has been practicing in order to believe.  The practice of love just happens with a big bang out of nowhere and nothing, however gradually it is noticed.  Of course one loves before one believes in the beloved as such or recognizes her effects as those of a loved one.  And a lover sings -- lie to me, I promise I'll believe, just please don't leave me.  That all these principles are dangerous in the hands of the naive cannot be doubted; that's why the sophisticated and cosmopolitan must hurry up and embrace them and clear the palace of usurpers.   

xoxoxox

v

art's role in philosophy 2019

Please remember to go slow and review the Mobius marvel.  Though they crawl there from the other side of the world, any guests not reading in that aforementioned manner tailored to the text will, before being served, be tossed out on their ears,  and I really don't wish to waste anybody's time.  It all boils down to -- don't crawl or sprint, stroll. If it's all by now come back to you, and you're quite sure you're well suited in the Bespoke reading suit bespoke -- my my it really does suit you! -- splendid!  Here comes the waiter with another hors d-oeuvre.

As a friend (trying to track down name) of Dorothea Rockburne once said -- the heart is a cognitive organ.  Artists are inclined to understand this, but most philosophers are loath to admit it. The soft or hard heart of the philosopher will cause his thought to bend like a natural beam of light bends however straight it's shot.


The eye too is a cognitive organ, tacking back and forth between hard-heartedness and soft-heartedness, to head like an eagle right for the prey.  The eye knows the sea of seeing and how to navigate the currents and capture the wind to its own advantage.  Dante begins his voyage as a sailor flying ahead of the fleet and finds his prey after spiraling down on it, to spiral back home but now, with the beast in his belly -- like Buddha ascending to Enlightenment after a good meal -- he keeps spiraling all the way up to a truth too visual for words, putting his own in their place -- that the whole journey be taken with a grain of salt,  as what he calls a "non-false error".  The Mongrel Discourse is, like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, a similar guide, but since everybody's grown so dense, literalist, and visually illiterate, the annotations are far more extensive than the main text, as in Irwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form.

Many of the eye's tricks science has mastered with the artificial intelligence of a machine, but a real scientist like Einstein is an artist, for whom imagination is essential and "dreaming is more important than thinking".  He sees that time is not other than space. Space is the overlooked component in linear, versus visual thinking.  We are all temporally literate, as we live by clocks.  To be spatially literate is to be visually literate.

In recognizing space, Einstein is a visionary, or acutely visually literate, and very lonely in a world that does not acknowledge the language of vision and psychologically pathologizes any extraordinary faculties, while seizing their useful contributions to create atomic bombs and such.  Strange that we can find that kind of usefulness for Einstein's discoveries, but meanwhile deny all the beneficial uses at human scale in everyday life -- indeed I hope to show these findings are spectacles given to the relatively blind; they're not counter-intuitive, they're counter-linear logical.  Linear logic is counter-intuitive, where Einstein is an intuitive, a medium*.  We extract the word relativity and apply it in the one case it does not apply, for Einstein or anybody, morality.  Indeed the relativity of everything else implies there is an absolute, not of this world, but of the anti-world at the seat of consciousness, on which it pivots.

In general, philosophers and scientists today do not understand the importance of visual literacy in comprehension of the world.  Artists today bow to philosophers and scientists and accept the general, strange assumption in a materialist paradigm that "science" is the only the science, science meaning knowledge, whereas "science" by its own professions, only thinks things, it knows nothing.  Still, almost universally artists and philosophers today grant the word of science the status of the last word on knowing.   (When I say "word", I mean the flatly descriptive word, not the poetic Word, which itself is a visually constructed form, as the ontological status of words, as elsewhere clarified, like everything, depends on their arrangement.)  Artists in many ways are reduced to entertainers.   Art is a diversion, an emotional outlet.  The heart that drives art is generally not considered to be a cognitive organ.  Scientists think, artists feel, mainly, though reflection complicates it a little, but only a little.

This is highly misguided, literally blinding.  We are blinded by constructs piled up on constructs that grow more and more estranged from our actual, sensory experience of the world.  Art is the first to register the shattering of our image of the world into disjointed fragments.  The word weavers are clever.  They tell the clever thoughtful artists that perspective's ideal of the whole was just a word-made construct.

But some word weavers are more visually literate.  They point out that not only is the raw retinal image imprinted in perspective, but perspective is visual language allowing comprehension of space and even spacetime.  Artists discovered perspective for the same reason scientists discovered science, to throw off the word and reclaim this immediate and also comprehensive sensory experience.


But art doesn't have time to think about all that.  It has already "elevated" itself to reflect the long outdated supposedly cutting edge idea that perspective is a verbal construction. (The Panofsky referred to above perpetrates this error, while constantly undermining it.  I should write annotations to the annotations, that this highly illuminating scholar's Alice in Wonderland be read as a non-false error that, taken with a grain of salt, fills the belly with the prey that sent Dante and Buddha spiraling up to Paradise.)

Then art, having dispensed with the whole comprehended in perspective, both registering and reinforcing the fragmentation of the world, abandons the social world altogether.

Art is free to have nothing to do with life, life can go to hell as far as art is concerned.  Mondrian can't stand the color green.  He shuts the curtains on it.  Not that art isn't free to do this, and some art should do this.  Life is a comedy, a joke, and also a tragedy, and it's sublime to escape.


Leaving some of its by now disjointed limbs back there art as whole, though, gets bored out there in outer space and returns to earth.  But for the most (not all parts) part, when it returns, it can't just join the fray, but in some way must ironically sneer at life, or join the political protest, in both cases a servant to the language that gives it a reason to jeer or protest.  You have to join the fleet to lead it, but art has pledged obedience to the word.  Art is now the child of the lofty philosopher,  the kind who, implicitly or explicitly, would not traffic in association with the lowly fleet.  The fleet has no captain. This is not art's idea.  This is the word's idea, that it's visual experience not it, that is born to serve in close attention, but never touch the other (elaborated below).


Of course, again, there is some, even much art that is faithful to art and will not be moved.  But all commentators are pretty keen to draw art into service to some a-priori concept or construct.  I'm doing that too, as it's impossible to speak prosaically without asserting general concepts.  The trick is not to dote on concepts, try in reading to see they're just tropes to toss to the next plateau, then when you climb up, you should retract them.   The reader must take responsibility for this effort.

Moreover, if they keep some distance and touch it not, while carefully watching and attending to its needs, words can serve as faithful servants of the visual world.  That is, prosaic words are not destined to be brahmin, but rather untouchables.  After dutifully serving in this incarnation, they are rightly resurrected brahmin or poets.

(It is a great liberation, and all of history converges on the teaching against literalism.)

So read critical commentary on art with several grains of salt.  There's something that displeases Krishna in this shmoozing of prose and poetry.  Only poetry can describe a poetic work of art.  Or maybe some art is a novel or memoir that can be described by a novel or a memoir (see my work here on a fresco by Giotto).  At a distance from the poem or the novel, not touching it, prosaic words can begin to fathom and point to the world known and understood visually.



To return to the main point, when art curriculae aren't supported in schools, performance in all other subjects declines.

I was investigating the origins of perspective in the history of art department, but, according to the accepted credo, that perspective was just a word made construct having nothing to do with art except as a tool like a ruler, I should really have been in the history of science or archeology department.  And given that the universities hold to a scientific paradigm, there was a lot of scientific, archeological literature on the subject, and in the dominance of the word, the art historians used the scientific models.


But still, the artifacts in which perspective first appeared were works of art, and as I was in the art history department, I thought it okay actually to look hard at the works and see what they themselves were saying.  How wrong I was!  In absorbing the visual information about the history of perspective, along with the many insights gained by visually astute historians, all the scientific constructs began unraveling as wholly inadequate to the historical phenomenon being investigated.  One day the fabric simply disintegrated. Every scientific term, even science's definition of perspective, was all outrageous anachronism that shed no light on history and obscured our sense of being itself.  My advisor on reading the illuminated manuscript in which my perfectly logical findings unfolded among diagrams and illuminations with elaborations and irrepressible poetic flights in the margins -- you need all the tools you can find to fathom a multi-dimensional world in which time in fact does move in two directions, and exp

eriments have lead science to be "beyond agnostic" in this matter -- could only proclaim and I quote --



"My dear, you've become an artist, and we're very glad to have produced you, but if you think you're going to get a doctorate for this project, you are truly not a socialized person... and by the way, have you shown this to your psychiatrist.  (He kindly assumed I was not so far gone as not to be seeing one.)"


Often when I speak, people accuse me of being on drugs.  I guess from their point of view, as Hegel says, "truth is a Bacchanalian revel in which no-one is sober".  But really truth, like and as poetry, dissolves the difference between sobriety and inebriation.  All substantially novel insights sound like madness until the world settles into them.

Whatever it is or does, truth is truth, and we owe something to it, especially those who have comfortable jobs or missions as philosophers. If they are visually illiterate, they need to go to the back of the class, and give the podium to those who aren't until their eyes, minds, and hearts are opened to the cognitive function of the eye and heart.

As Afghani women released from domestic imprisonment and allowed to go school explained in an article I read in The New York Times, illiteracy is a form of blindness, but it goes both ways. Depending on what and how you read, literacy can also be a form of blindness.


Note: the visually literate reading of this or any other text feels the viscosity of the medium, can almost hear the rhythmic waves of the sea of seeing beating against the prow as the muse beckons the writer forward.  The visually illiterate reading scans mechanically for likeness to known objects.  The reason those tests that prove you're not a machine work is that they depend on a modicum of visual literacy.  Clearly the visual world is too complex for the most perfect mere machine to fathom, you need a quantum leap into incommensurable sentience to create, fathom, and navigate appearance.  (Members of a band of little robot machines sent together on a mission will uncannily evade each other in ways not programmed into them.  Machines that can drive a car without crashing must in some way be sentient enough to read a traffic light or a bus as that object from any angle or in any context they appear.)


A visually literate text must be read with a visually literate mind.  As a sentient being -- even if blind, you are spatially literate, you can pick up clues and assemble a whole in your mind -- you just have probably not applied this faculty as widely as possible and desirable.  The  faculty by which you recognize the stoplight whose form is camouflaged by its changing appearance relative to various contexts is part of the mind that is apart from the eye.  The Mongrel Discourse is written for the visually literate to practice and expand their visual literacy, that is, their sentience; but to break out of the relentless oppression of polemics in a word oppressed world, this must be an active productive practice on both sides.   I trust the replacement of passively watched television by the active effort of internet surfing, news and social media gleaning and commentary etc. has prepared the reader eventually to ace this supremely challenging state of the art video game. 

The visually literate text read visually literately doesn't end at the end, but at the beginning, like the Mobius Strip, and you must take the journey many times to be soaked with the surplus sentience it offers. You can read it again and again and always be more and more soaked.  Don't look for an anesthetic.  As Dante chants, "the more a soul perfects itself, the more it feels the good, the more the pain."  A visually literate person ascends to this always novel ethic in an always same old highly ethically challenged world.  There are other ways this project differs from New Age efforts, though, alas, there are some overlaps, indeed I feel that when they dance, all they do is step on my toes.  


*Confucius says that keys to a happy healthy state are openness of heart, and to rectify the names to fit the things -- as in the case of Einstein's findings, where what is intuitive is called counter-intuitive, or where technical "science", or refined thinking on the unknowable, is called the one and only science, meaning knowledge or the known.  The words we use and on whom and what we pin them, properly or improperly, purvey relentless subliminal messages, the kinds that companies pay millions a minute for, such is the payoff to the dark messenger. The Mongrel Discourse moves to remove these  misleading subliminal messages and rectify this widespread misalignment of words and things as they appear in a reasonable amount of reflection -- as when playing chess, you want to reflect deeply, but eventually make a move.  (I believe this collaboration between human and machine is still a front runner.)  All you have to do is go with its flow wherever you go as the waters rise and rise and finally flood over the desert and cause it to bloom.  The pyramids, the hierarchies created in just and fair meritocracies will always stand by the river of knowledge, even in communistic anarchy.  Knowledge will recede, then knowledge will overflow and cause the dormant seeds to awaken and grow.   All the world's knowledge is one and owned not by us.  We only borrow it.  All the world's people are one.  Everyone has the right to pride in her own identity, but no-one has a right miserly to hoard the signs and symbols the unique angel or messenger of its identity has come to share with all.

reminder to go slow, more on mobius strip 2019

...

please read slowly, aware of the medium of language, just let it slowly flow, and wait to judge the dangerous monstrous sea creatures (metaphors) by their place in the whole.   I feed them well, so even the sharks won't attack if you just keep your distance and watch.  If you don't understand, maybe read the sentence a few times, and if you still don't understand, or you begin to object, just read on.  The organ is only known by the whole it serves.  Essentially productive philosophy is different from the essentially analytic type.  It's only trying to be perfect enough to work and play.  Play is its work.  There's no right answer to a dance.  It can only be judged by how well it's doing what it's trying to do, not whether it should do it.  It's risking everything and nothing.  On the other hand, please try to stick with it.  

Or if I didn't need to say that, because you really would like to get to the bottom of it, in short, make wasteful haste right now to baste, taste and clean the plate,  as you chew, swallow, digest, and absorb the nutrients of the full meal of the ancient adage that haste makes waste, this "trite" adage almost universally today ignored (unless one is under the sway of a mesmerizing "mentor," but however mesmerizing I (ha ha) or any might be, I personally wish to wean the reader from dependence on the writer; that's why I play a guy with a patch in her eye, passing on a torn, faded map to Treasure Island), explaining how and why waste is winning.  So don't worry about getting anywhere or finishing it today or this week or ever. 

I mention this even to thoughtful philosophers or mathematicians, who know how to go slow when you can't go at all any other way.   In this case, by contrast, the unbearably lightweight form of the text belies its unbearable heaviness.  Meanwhile, just to confuse things more, the unbearably light form bleeds in and out of the unbearably heavy content -- skiing up and down and all around the visual model of the one-sided, yet two-sided, yet one-sided -- which is it? -- Mobius strip, a band with twist creating an endless loop (shown below). As a whole, you can cover the whole strip in tracing one continuous side as it returns to its origin; it has no inside or outside, there's only one side, but at any point you can still read it conventionally as just a two-sided piece of, say, paper.  Still, the whole, simply by its arrangement, belies this reading.  

One can say, oh it's just a weird, clever arrangement that signifies nothing.  But maybe the world without it is just a weird clever arrangement that signifies nothing, and it signifies everything.  Reflection on, and empirical testing of, that hypothesis begins to weigh in its direction. Maybe the two weird clever arrangements will achieve a rapprochement in the future. Still, power corrupts, and by mutual agreement among the good willed, it is illegal to refuse equal service to a separate, but equal, or possibly better construct in any form of scientific, artistic, or philosophical endeavor.  No affirmative action is required when it out-performs competitors in the entry exams. 

 

Please make one yourself -- cut out a band of paper, twist it once, and join end to end -- and write a tautology upon it, such as -- ...I want to go there, but when I go there, there is here, and so... -- that just goes round and round forever.  Sitting still, and running it over your hands, while muttering aloud the endless mantra you inscribe on it for fifteen minutes a day might open so many chakras you'll shock your guru into going into hiding.  (I think I read somewhere that Buddha prohibits the selling of the teachings, so resenting the fact that no-one will hire me to do this would be foolish in the event that I really want to do the world some good.) 

The relation of the two "sides" describes the relation between signs and what they signify in productive, visually informed philosophy as it aligns with the actual physical world. Without this visible "word", the Mobius Strip, language is relatively inarticulate, and language applying to being itself effectively quite inaccurate, as it strives in vain to fill in the holes in itself with more of what the hole-riddenness is made of, visual illiteracy. 

As the annotated illustration shows, the visual figure demonstrates how the inverted retinal image of what's "out there" becomes the upright thing itself that we are part of; there is an "out there" and there is an "in here", and yet there isn't any such thing.  How can this be?  Simple, just make a Mobius Strip, and this visual construct explains it.  And make a second one just for fun and slice it with the scissors right down the middle.  The strip quite magically becomes two, irrevocably intertwined, but now autonomous entities, like a "married" couple become flesh of one flesh returned what they were before they got "married", but were merely "engaged".  

After all that, you can just say no thanks and go your own way and read in any other way than the Bespoke tailored way just bespoke, but that's already to dismiss what the text says and does, so if you plan to read any other way, please don't bother and just go your own away in your own space, not mine.  It won't do any good to stay, as wedding guests appearing improperly attired will not be admitted to the feast.  

Probably the best thing just to go your own way in your own space, and let me keep going my own way like I've been doing for decades before it caught on; and now that everybody's doing it, I want to go my own way and not do it, as I corral everybody to go MY way in MY space.  Don't fall into the trap!  Go back to your own, and go your own way in your own space. It's the latest, most natural thing -- they say the universe is expanding even faster than they thought -- men, women, brown people, black people, white people, culture, nature, philosophers, artists, planets, their inhabitants, atoms, particles all, just going their own way in their own spaces with more and more space between them.  

But around here Sisyphus is us.  However futile, we resist. We are professionals like the New York Knicks who fight with all our might in the last two minutes when the score is something like 165 to 34, and as this is rather typical, there aren't too many fans left.  It's not just that we're professionals, that wouldn't be enough to keep us going.  Somewhere deep inside we believe in miracles, one of us has a elaborate logical proof of their ultimate inevitability, and a few of us have experienced them. One day the Knicks will rise again!

In truth, I'm not sissy enough to want to be anybody but Sisyphus.  I am happy to allow the universe and everything in it to go its own way quite naturally, and leave only whoever wishes to resist that to join me in doing so, because if everything naturally went one way, and that was my way, I would just be a black hole.   

One more point:  for the visually literate the subjective and objective, always on opposite sides of the Mobius Strip, merge or come apart depending on your focus.  There's no rigid, false division protecting one from the other, the protection and discernment lies within the reader.  With a bit of good faith, the reader can see that the writer here has discerned and is purveying something objective, but "about that which nothing can be said, one should remain silent".  The objective is like the God whose name should never be uttered.  To be nothing about me, the mongrel discourse must be all about me, and if I succeed, that's not narcissistic.  It's narcissistic when it's almost all about the artist, but something of the artist is withheld, so nothing objective emerges.  For the visually literate, words are not things, but displaced from them, you have to glimpse the things sidelong in the corner of your eye. 

(probably enough for today, there's more to digest here than meets the long visually illiterate mind, or rather the part of the mind (even of artists) brainwashed into believing in its visual illiteracy. If you don't sit with and think on any novel words or word arrangements, by tomorrow you'll have forgotten them. But if you don't keep at it, that won't work either. Hope to see you tomorrow! Thanks! this reminds me to do my twenty minutes of Italian a day.  Otherwise the whole project is futile.) 

fresco as anarchy 2019

Before this perfectly anarchic (to be explained) fresco appeared at the dawn of the Renaissance, the fresco that I call the parent of perspective, giving birth to the modern world, all of culture (all over the world, one just got there first) moved to converge on it, a notion that is difficult for us, versed in dispersal, to fathom. But sacred cultures everywhere all face toward, and move toward a unity or oneness, the godliness of their gods.  (By my anomalous nature and nurture, I managed to catapult myself or get sucked back there to see how quite precisely it worked.) 

After the fresco appeared, as if godliness had somehow touched down to prove or disprove itself, depending on your perspective, some drew back to the back of cage, terrified, and others took off like a flock of birds, as they were now free to. Again this is hard for us to fathom, that it must have happened once and only once, in a specific place, but from back there, on the other side of the divide, where everything is converging, not dispersing, it would have had to be like that.


Alas, united we stand, divided we fall, as those clinging the cage have too much power to let go of those flying free, and vice versa. They share the same land, they must share the same laws. Yet at the crossing point, where godliness hovers, neither proven nor disproven, there is both freedom and some security. There is a spirit there, nothing concrete, nothing limiting, just a watchful spirit. Here, where nothing is now, everything might go, sucked in by the vacuum. You don't always get what you want, you get what you need. Here might be hope for reconciliation. Notice the fear of lasting peace. The fear of lasting peace is the greatest of all fears. The return of war is greatly welcomed. Even at the rhetoric stage, everybody dives right in like fish to water. Yet everybody hates war too. Maybe we've come to hate war even more than we fear peace.

In all the apocalyptic ages, never before has man sought to supersede God in the task of seemingly preparing to destroy the world by building visible weapons of mass destruction whilst aiding and abetting, if not fostering, dramatic geological and atmospheric convulsions. Yet this degree of darkness cannot appear without a like degree of light. It bears repeating. You don't always get what you want, you get what you need.

This place of lasting peace has never before been located.  This way of speaking and thinking has never before been done.   It is like learning to speak the language of dolphins.  For whoever lives indigenous futuristically (moving forward by going backward, which in fact is indigenous to all native humanity, as forging ahead ungrounded amounts to slipping back), it is a paradigm shift of Copernican proportions, the one proclaimed and initiated by Immanuel Kant, who restored and expanded on ancient and medieval insight that the world is a mirror of the mind. For Kant it was such a dramatic shift, but for most if not all others, I doubt it ever crystallized in a truly novel perception of what's going out there, as well as in our heads.

This project moves to crystallize the idea to give birth to the novel and empowering perception Kant (not that I'm a Kant scholar or needed Kant, but as he located a key node of the constellation before I did I am happy to credit him) conceived to remove yet another huge impediment to personal and collective consciousness -- however, alas, the gap between serious philosophers and the public is increasing as fast as the gap between rich and poor.  But the mindful must dredge this well before it's bull dozed over and worry later how to distribute it.  

In the meantime, I will try to make of this manuscript a beautiful object, even if people never want to read it.  Note that it's a work in progress, though, so presently in many locations all you see is the unadorned structure, which itself is beautiful because it's taut and ecological to fulfill a noble function other than the admiration and adorning of itself.  The work in progress also has the charm of a ruin.  It is really just a ruin seen from the other direction of time.  But to add to the effect, my work in progress is also covered in vines, and I didn't do that on purpose either.  Very mysterious.   Oh if only the virtual form could have the effect of holding a medieval manuscript in a protectively white gloved hand, as it might have been that effect doing research that triggered all of this.  As you're gazing at an original, however phantasmagoric, we're directly communing, so maybe it can. Now why is this serious subject presented in this often personal and playful way?  

Because the world is a mirror of my mind mirroring yours mirroring mine mirroring yours...  

Because when rational principles and elucidations appear in and move through earthly forms that smell, look, hear, see, feel, intuit their presence, they become real.  

Because the truth here unfolding points to the primacy of art over science.  

Because it is the nature of being to be both unbearably heavy and unbearably light.  Gold is a relatively terribly heavy metal, but when you get down to IT, it's all just a lot of unbearably light molecules consisting in yet more unbearably light atoms consisting in yet more unbearably light particles that get more more and more unbearably light the deeper you go by the heaviness of heavy you are, and why you bother to go there is a mystery, as it's all relative, meaning it's so absolutely unbearably light that it doesn't exist at all.  That's why I sing and paint and play along the way to everywhere, because I'm always going nowhere.  And yet I did and do want to get where I've decided to go. I did want to find the holy grail, and so I did, and now I want to find a way to distribute it, so we can get on with our lives and stop funding the disingenuous quests for it.  

Moreover, even if there's nothing there to speak of when you get there, all along the way there, you're sipping from it,  and by the time you arrive you're high as a starry snowy night riding horseback on the beach in Montauk.  What a beast is the truth! No wonder many fear and dread it, but kissing the beast is the only way up for those lucky ones who've let life run them flat to the ground and have let go of having to be the star of the show for the far far better prize of getting to gaze at her.