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, including the concept that art abstracted to its essential nature is sensual and emotional, and language so abstracted is abstract, a duality wholly invented by language asserting its transcendental nobility and relegating art to the ignorant, emotional peasantry. (Giotto melts this false boundary.) I'm doing conceptualizing 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
"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.
