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?
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 --
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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...
