note: I heard a report on the radio of a young woman who had lost her faith, but didn't want to let go. It was a starry night, and she stood outside of her college dorm, gazed up at the night sky and implored aloud -- okay God, this is your last chance, if you exist, give me a sign NOW. Suddenly an enormous meteor flashed across the whole span of sky. She recoiled, but soon got her bearings, noting that probability produces highly improbable confluences in random samples.
If you stick with the mongrel discourse, you will bear witness to a similar event. There being two such incidents within earshot of each other cannot but cause even a statistician to raise an eyebrow and even keep it there for a second split second if she's Jung at heart, but you should draw your own conclusions. In any case, a shooting star is its own reward.
The text needs to take the form of a star with each separate part radiating from a core in such a way that each beginning of each part is visible in the beginning.
the start of each ray (unfolding below) near the core:
instructions to activate the time machine: please do not skip any words, and just start at the top and read down the scroll slowly following my voice without hurrying or skipping around.
appropriating from Eastern philosophy the notion that theory apart from practice is nonsense, while maintaining the division -- poised between East and West -- insofar as here, every idea involves a choice, not a physical action, but an action of the soul or mind.
The objective/subjective world seen in particles that are waves, although that is impossible, by definition, is to mere human minds, at least, a complicated morass, and clear ideas can have nothing to do with it.
by folly herself . introduction -- in fits and starts -- as sputtering engine of ancient vehicle continues to attempt to awaken after, what -- 20 centuries of sleep?
in culture if not nature* ethereal ideas carrying immaculate conceptions, if they can survive the slaughter of these innocents authorized by the entrenched authorities in the mind and in the world and both, can and do materialize in golden ages.
dear kind reader -- please note: however you might find the mere mention, directly below, of the subject triggering, please take a deep breath, suspend judgement, -- at least until you get to the next call to suspend judgement a little longer.
apocotastasis now last warning/disclaimer: consisting in the performative and philosophical underpinnings and implications -- roots and crown -- of original not yet not gnostic along with not gnostic Christianity -- know the enemy, keep it close, if necessary, as in a James Bond movie, go to bed with it, and especially in this case DON'T underestimate it!
-- as written and still being shuffled and reordered -- hoping one day to win this game of solitaire -- in the process of being, but not yet completely, organized TIME FOR A NAP! into the image (below, but don't go there yet, just follow my voice across the lines and down the scroll -- whatever you take in, you take in, that's good enough, after you finish the scroll you can always take the tour again from the beginning -- it's all in my hands, there's a captain piloting this ship who knows these waters like the back of her own hand; isn't that at least a bit of a relief) that crystallizes and supplants it, while remaining transparent to it,
there are more rays, but I won't introduce them here, better to get on with it.
instructions to activate the time machine:
please do not skip any words, and just start at the top and read down the scroll slowly following my voice without hurrying or skipping around. Whatever seems endlessly frivolous or gratuitous or repetitive is there for a reason. If something is too complicated or difficult to understand on first reading, you may reread a few times, but if that doesn't work, just move on.
do not attempt to read when tired. do not be in a hurry to get it over with. It wants to be a part of your life forever or have nothing to do with you. So either leave or give it a chance on its own terms.
though there are many cognates, it is the wholly foreign language of a novel paradigm of knowledge, transparent to the way the world of words is continuous with the world of things, like a snake's head and tail, and also discontinuous, mirroring the property of light as both particle and wave. A percept is worth a thousand concepts -- and so a thousand will be provided to foster this novel perception that is aligned with longstanding discoveries in the domain of science. It takes many wacks of the pinata to find one's way to what Brian Greene, the string theory cosmologist, calls for -- "relativity in the bone", Be careful what you ask for Brian, you just might get it and die of fright. The numbers, the quantities, won't be able to save you from, or begin to help you fathom, the qualities.
ask not what the text can do for you, ask what you can do for text. It will meet you half way, like all good things, which don't give you too much or too little for your own life, liberty, and right to be most effectively pursued by happiness. (I trust you're wise enough to know not to pursue it.)
do not judge whether it works without visiting the site twelve times.
do not judge the ideas or references based on their immediate appearance or associations.
read only when refreshed and recently awakened, never when depleted
you would never want to spend more than a minute in this claustrophobic capsule were you not interested in actually traveling in time, and so, as with any video game, you do best to follow the rules or not play at all.
I can only repair some old tropes and toss them down. You climb the frayed trope to the next plateau, then withdraw it, store it, and let the fibers rest. Meanwhile I've climbed and let down another trope from the next plateau. And so it goes -- up a thousand plateaus. Perhaps you've heard tell of them. Put all that away. Those who theorize things usually have no idea what they're really like in practice. As in all such cases, it's a rude awakening -- promising a dire downfall or a valiant victory. The fundamental things apply as time goes by.
questions:
what are the four rules of the game, and why should you stick to the rules?
do you know them by heart?
will you stick to the rules?
what can I offer, and how does it work?
another ray
appropriating from Eastern philosophy the notion that theory apart from practice is nonsense, while maintaining the division -- poised between East and West -- insofar as here, every idea involves a choice, not a physical action, but an action of the soul or mind. The choice arises in a hiatus -- as when water stops heating up in order to boil. The ideas are not chosen for seeming to be correct, but for seeming to be alive.
The objective/subjective world seen in particles that are waves, although that is impossible, by definition, is to mere human minds, at least, a complicated morass, and clear ideas can have nothing to do with it. In fact, relativity verifies that size, weight, and direction have no objective status, the sun revolves around the earth as much as vice versa. The machine loves them, and all social machines and media eat them up and run on them, but clear ideas are the enemies of vision, understanding, and hope for the world. They are the enemies of humanity, but first they attacked and brought down the humanities, which these inanities, clear ideas, have all turned into social sciences, which run on computers fed clear ideas. Clear ideas, though sometimes mesmerizingly beautiful and possibly tamable to our service with great patience and effort, are all by nature wicked memes evolved to pristine, ecological forms to fit the function of surviving. These parasites occupy our minds and harness them to their service and the built in call of the resilient survivors to be fruitful and multiply, even if that means mating with another of their species, but beware the lone cloners, these too have evolved to survive immutably possibly immortally. These clear ideas mirror us presently or in the future, but we might be conscious and able to choose to rise above the blindly voracious (originally sinful) nature we share with them and all of nature -- unless that idea too is a meme; if I didn't suspect it might be -- to fog up the window and de-clarify (detoxify) the idea -- it surely would be. "Deconstruction" was complicated, but it was driven by a clear idea, that language doesn't work. But that's wrong, language both does and doesn't work. You have to judge each case and make a choice as to the intention and degree of directness intended -- the writer winking and gesticulating, hoping to influence your move, but unable to show her hand -- steering clear of all clear ideas. If it's a card game, your only chance of winning is recognizing it at such. I'm also a master of shuffling performances and card tricks (for which there is no known explanation) between hands. Enjoy! Not just art is art. Everything is art because reading is an art, and whatever you're seeing, you're reading. Abstraction can thwart a level of reading, but silence must be read as such. The joy of a drug trip depends on recognizing the difference between being a distanced human and being, say, a visceral, visual dog, while briefly sharing the dog's experience, while for a dog it's just a dog's world from which there is no escape. Technology, entertainment, and design (TED) does not represent, it rather replaces science, art, and philosophy. This is not a clear idea and should not be applied across the board. As David Saint Hubbin of Spinal Tap put it something like: I believe everything I read and I think that's a lot more selective than people who don't read anything. There is a grain of wisdom everywhere, just as there is massive foolishness everywhere, the wisdom is spread out quite evenly. Even this north star suddenly emerging from behind a long strangely inert cloud is just another star among gazillions.
"Human come forth! Human wake up!" The hypnotist has snapped her finger. "You will not remember waddling on the stage and flapping your wings like a chicken. Yes, it was I who put you to sleep eons ago. I needed you out of the way, so I could arrange things perfectly for your re-emergence."
by folly herself
introduction -- in fits and starts --
as sputtering engine of ancient vehicle continues to attempt to awaken after, what -- 20 centuries of sleep?
(see wikipedia for any unknown references)
in culture if not nature*
ethereal ideas carrying immaculate conceptions,
if they can survive the slaughter of these innocents
authorized by the entrenched authorities
in the mind and in the world and both,
can and do materialize in golden ages.
this project is not a gift to you.
it is a gift from us,
a vanguard of intrepid time travelers --
no guaranteed you won't get lost in space
attempting to return, as I did --
to such a hoped for future golden age
spoken in what will be by then an anachronistic
patois -- born this night to perish this night,
like a shooting star, neither here nor there --
of that age's unfathomable, foreign language --
a synthesis of current mutual antitheses
presently deemed un-matable...
*a cultural construct?
dear kind reader --
please note: however you might find the mere mention, directly below, of the subject triggering, please take a deep breath, suspend judgement, -- at least until you get to the next call to suspend judgement a little longer. I promise the approach will be novel; you might not even be able to discern which side I'm really on. Quite frankly, I'm not sure myself. Also, to give it a chance of providing some artistic pleasure or catharsis, however quite possibly wrong. Again, the ideas here are not presented to be right or wrong, but to offer a novel angle on old choices -- so don't judge the book by the cover.
also called praise of folly [me!], the sequel,
or my orthodox religion (including and commencing with, but not limited to, just being me)
which I think in the end (though being me might not be anything like being you, not that it might not be something like it) is at least as close to your orthodox Buddhism, or orthodox Islam or your orthodox atheism or your orthodox anything else as it is to anybody else's version of my orthodox religion.
Meanwhile my orthodox roamin catholic read marks-ist (in my orthodox religion the word impregnates via the ear, though the Greek orthodox think that's so ridiculous, it was one of the reasons for the schism) quite ultra-orthodox (also called internally reformed) version of my orthodox religion remains quite orthodox to my religion, perhaps more orthodox than the orthodoxy has ever managed before..
and so by getting to know me, an anomalously transparent case study in my orthodox religion, and studying me and my version of my orthodox religion, you will know yourself, or know your enemy if you're, say, a verbally militant atheist or physically militant Muslim or Marxist, better than ever before, by which you will hate your enemy less, and also be more equipped to fight your enemy if negotiations -- God forbid -- break down even after this fruitful exchange. Should that -- God forbid -- occur, let us all enjoy a cup of tea and warmly embrace before going into verbal or physical battle, as recommended in the Bhagavat Gita.
"There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." Cracks are interesting, beautiful, and sexy. However perfectly we protest, if we look hard enough, long enough, and mindfully enough in the mirror, we finally practically, not just theoretically see a crackpot shelved with other crackpots cracked in the same way. I say we, but maybe I just mean me. I've never seen another crackpot admit that's what he or she is. However humble everybody might be, some admitting they're not smart enough, some not beautiful enough, some not good enough, still it's always the other guy who's a crackpot. I'm just the opposite, I'm smart enough, I'm beautiful enough. I 'm good enough, but I'm a crackpot. And I think that really applies not just to me, folly herself, but to everybody.
apocotastasis now
last warning/disclaimer:
consisting in the performative and philosophical underpinnings and implications -- roots and crown -- of original not yet not gnostic along with not gnostic Christianity -- know the enemy, keep it close, if necessary, as in a James Bond movie, go to bed with it, and especially in this case DON'T underestimate it!
too anti-establishment, including the anti-establishment establishment, to find a respectable publisher to help me solidify this constantly melting endeavor; so internet courting readers as a last resort -- oh if only there were a bar in Soho where Everybody met ....this is the worst! But then again my ideas wouldn't have made it there; though read marks-ist enough, they're too roamin catholic, in principle perfect for the world wide web were there not something about the screen that makes you want to leave wherever you are as fast as possible, unless you're being pandered to -- that trumps any other effect -- not dwell on an incredibly dense, convoluted sentence/paragraph that must develop its own insanely intricate, muscular body toward fulfilling its transcendental mission as if it couldn't care less whether you like it or not, but that's not true at all. It's actually trying with all its heart to pander to you, but such a monster is only so moldable. In short, the mongrel discourse has nowhere to lay its weary head. It's just an obstacle in the road that you might or might not be able to make your way around. Or you could call it
a rickety, screeching, purposely un-renovated, to enhance the effect, Victorian roller coaster ride and an actually haunted house --
-- as written and still being shuffled and reordered -- hoping one day to win this game of solitaire -- in the process of being, but not yet completely, organized
TIME FOR A NAP!
into the image (below, but don't go there yet, just follow my voice across the lines and down the scroll -- whatever you take in, you take in, that's good enough, after you finish the scroll you can always take the tour again from the beginning -- it's all in my hands, there's a captain piloting this ship who knows these waters like the back of her own hand; isn't that at least a bit of a relief) that crystallizes and supplants it, while remaining transparent to it,
the image both globally more accurate and more minutely articulate
than it is --
the world as if seen through opaque cardboard glasses punched with pinholes, obliterating the untranslatable, subjective effect of depth perception, equalizing and maximizing the resolution in foreground and background --
as when in Piero della Francesca's monocular perspective --
a strictly mathematical translation of distances in space to lengths etched onto a flat plane that pictures it without regard to the spherical nature of the actual eye and the softening effects of imperfect perception,
 |
| the purely platonic, conceptual bones of fleshly perception; we will watch the skeleton arise and dance to know what we really are made of, not the bozons of dark matter, but the photons of light light more light, close the curtains, my eyes can't keep up. Only my skin, like that of a plant, can really take it in, though block the light when sleeping, they say, Even with a mask, light on the skin impedes the rest and recovery of the brain. |
the Duke of Montefeltro, with the supernatural objectivity of his supernatural inner eye, surveys the surrounds of Urbino under his benign patronage. As Boccaccio says of Giotto, he paints [with such accuracy that his master tries to squash the fictive fly on the panel] what the eye cannot see. Like Helen Keller writing the names into her teacher's hand, seeing every single object named and the whole of space more clearly than any eye -- except maybe Giotto's, Piero's (these two have their cake and eat it too, heaven on earth, and that's where I demand to live, however rickety the roller coaster or haunted the house turns out to be, that's what we're there at the fair for, isn't it?) and the fifties housewife on LSD as watchable on youtube -- has or will ever see it.
3
post-academic academically educated essay:
the gospel tooth
Only plants stay rooted, animals are free to roam, run, fly, and have no real roots. It might seem that the quest for roots is a perverse, regressive quest to reattach the umbilical cord. But the human mind is not just an animal mind, it is the mind of everything, the mind of a plant, of a rock, of a lightening bolt. The animal mind of the human resists this; the natural mind rejects the supernatural, poetic mind to which it accidentally, perhaps, gives birth. This natural mind thinks this poetic mind is useless and superfluous. In truth, although to be self-embattled causes problems, it's likely that both the natural and the supernatural mind are quite natural adaptations, and self-embattlement too serves a purpose. Uselessness has a use. But who cares really. It is that it is, and it is beautiful. I would leave it at that, but I cannot allow science to relegate beauty and poetry to extraneous, dysfunctional surplus, when the first thing a being needs to do in order to survive is to desire to survive. You don't always get what you want, and if you don't, you probably won't get what you need either. You will likely live a shorter life. You might even commit suicide. So many oppositions crystallized in literalist language melt away with a long hard look at what actually happens. But if you demand to dwell there, in what actually happens as revealed just by continually inquiring into it, and try to spread the good news that the world is whole -- no more merely wholistic than elders are merely elderly, Humpty Dumpty never fell off the wall after all -- even words are whole, sound bound to sense, uprooted, true, but their roots still there and propelling them like squids as they ink up the world; it's only degraded usage that creates the crude, prosaic oppositions of which the "facts" stack up to a house of cards you can blow right down with simple sigh, you will be accused, even by your best friends, of being incomprehensible, or "just" being poetic. It's just that the mortal body resists the deconstruction (the only deconstruction worthy of the name) of the world on which its very existence as such, not to mention the defense of that existence, depends. So in the moment it doesn't matter what you know, what matters is what you want to assimilate of what you know. But the truth is the truth whether it matters to anybody right now or not. It slips between the cracks and eventually erodes the stone. It cannot penetrate but washes over each present moment turning it uselessly beautiful, and you choose whether and how much that matters to you.
see you always were a quantum leaper, each novel now is a quantum leap, ready, get set, go, leap!
You can be an atheist, and many are, who, despite its criminal history and present crimes and associations, still appreciate the catholicity or multiversality of the Christian paradigm. As misunderstood, resented, flayed, and abused and (constantly) crucified as Jesus, the reflexive story, a perfect mirror of its hero, as self-similar as a living organism -- with this quality purveyed to the myriad, astonishing works of art and music that encapsulate it; whoever links beauty to truth (the truth that transcends facts, or transforms them in adding every one of them up) can't help noticing the vanishing point that those two tracks converge on -- becomes a quite perfect work of art (that won't be custom made to match a couch). If you don't yet appreciate it, think on it. The art and literature surrounding it and the Christian story itself stand at a crossroads of history featuring and giving rise to the modern, lonely existential hero, both god and man, both tribal and universal, also an ancient shaman with magic powers as confused as Hamlet, a manic depressive claiming his own as everybody's divinity -- "did not the psalm say ye are gods? -- while constantly debunking himself with such shameless transparency to his own raw, unmediated perception/conceptions, all you needed to do was touch him or think about him to get over your psychosomatic issue, where everybody knows and now physics affirms that's redundant, all issues are psychosomatic; nothing is but thinking makes it so. Now is always. Everything that ever happens happens all at once, Nothing lost, everything consolidated, activated to move forward, redeemed in having fully collapsed and hit rock bottom. All morality boils down to physically enacted personal love of anybody or everybody, the whole hodgepodge of different individuals. All codes and decrees are debunked in favor of this always differently enacted practice that demands constant turbulent reorganization of the world in order to fulfill the principle in novel ways in each novel moment, giving rise to the constant novelty in the modern world.
Shamen and magic are not alien to moderns, especially not to modern artists, whose mediation of the magic is as necessary and well rewarded as this mediation by artists has been in every human society ever known. You don't have to believe in a creator god to tune into the interconnectedness of global mind and find evidence of it. True, with nothing to revere and bow down to, slavish humans would be lost, so they revere and bow down to a beautiful machine that runs on a program of very simple principles. The machine is called science, in turn carried away with its novel role and, with all due respect -- and that's a lot of respect -- to science, frequently over-reaching itself as machines will do. Obedient to science, much so called art flying around today just seems nostalgic for the magic and/or has a fashionably ironic look or shows off obsessively compulsively wrought optical effects made with awe inspiring discipline and craftiness -- but art without magic is just an illustration of what not only art, but everything else, isn't. I am not that I am not, it says, being the anti-I am that I am. Sometimes art partakes of the latter, not the former, is a bearer of all the ancient magic, but critics won't read it that way, and it's appropriated to serve the anti-I am, the negation of self and everything, but of course the ego of the artist is the exception that proves that rule.
To return, though, to art that is art, it is pleased to show off its magic, the artist happy to identify with or invoke a shaman, but it may not be Jesus. That transparent confidence man selling his own tricks -- it's all faith you blockheads! faith works! -- must be debunked, because what Christianity does with the shaman back up and running is just too perfect. It reroots and empowers the whole modern world by the magic that gave rise to this amazing work of literature, if nothing else.
I was unavoidably confronted by all of that in a systematic quest, sometimes unconscious, sometimes conscious, like a needle disappearing rhythmically behind the cloth, for truth and a true way of life that I was born into and indoctrinated into, and then pursued, rebellious against the letter, though not the spirit, of the indoctrination. What I found at the endless end of the quest was a single work of art that encapsulates and crystallizes the essence of Christianity in such a vital and comprehensive way that it possibly supersedes Christianity as we know it -- the way the finding of a tool that accomplishes a procedure redefines and supersedes the procedure strung out in time made of a pastiche of different actions as a single, unique one, instantaneous and continuous -- such as, hammering now. The magic came when I noticed the tool and reading the world from within the tool's nature as part of its being made time quite literally dissolve.
Whoever has loved and mastered a tool and become one with it knows what I mean, but this tool -- a hieroglyphic that I will decode in describing how I happened to find it -- is also transparent to its transformation of a temporal world into a spatial one, from a verbal to a visual order, the latter encompassing the former, while for the former, it's either/or. I am reining in the effect right now, but really just speaking of it technically, if left to its own devices, it takes off into poetry -- and is all the more technically clear for that, but the reader will no doubt fear to hop aboard at this point, so it's finally occurring me to try to slow down -- but when I can't, please just enjoy the ride on such a healthy feisty horse raring to run.
I am still trying not only to live within this discovery, but to make sense of it and how it fits into the world and fits me into the world, or doesn't. Cowboy scholar -- of course I was exiled from grad school for falling into this vortex, and I myself paralyzed myself for years -- a self-proclaimed brahmin like me touch this untouchable? never ! I'd rather die! -- fool, genius, prophet of a new religion that overlaps with an old one, indeed does not change one jot or tittle, but is particularly open to outsiders, necrophiliac, nice little old lady or ever young fashion design firm practicing Imitatio Christi??? I choose to be, over not to be, and that's all the choice I've got in me. Trying to make up my mind really is too hard a bind, so I backed into what I think is the most transparent liberating paradigm as it best imitates and disappears into nature, as humans innately construct it and know we do (if we're fully human) -- our nature being being in language -- so I can just live like a cat on a fence with a view of the whole neighborhood and quite dangerous to smaller things less free than it; however they show off their wings and soar across the sky, I know they're just twittering machines. Look at their staccato robotic gestures on the ground; it's only the air they ride that flows. We catliche cats are one with the air.
I tell you, and I will show you too,
from what I wrenched myself away
in blood, sweat, tears, or contrariwise
in a depressive excess of sleep,
how after my day job getting to outline
the toilets from a template and check
that the dimensions in the string
at the top and bottom of the drawings added up,
I dreamt my way up and down
irrationally interconnected
Escherly ladders of logic
on my way across city streets at rush hour
protected by an angel of mercy,
how I crawled on my hands and knees
up the Mount Everest of official mastery
in three disciplines, of my apprenticeships,
one aforementioned,
in the wide world, how I forged every stream
that spirals around those gigantic scaly pine cones,
how -- and for this next and unprecedented achievement I deserve
the unprecedented award for unprecedented achievements
in unprecedented, mongrel (not yet named, future pure bred) fields --
I never completely lost my sense of humor, as you can see,
when all this was and still truly is happening, as you will soon see --
to get to this level, and now my wrists
have turned Eve Klein blue clinging to the cliff
rising to this next plateau where no (hu)man has ever gone before,
and I need someone to find another way up
and pull me over, please!
*****
 |
KERYSTIANITY KERYSTALLIZED
Saint Francis posed for a jump shot
to catch the wounds of Christ,
this whole, consummately weird disposition
and the unprecedented, non-reproducible symbolic
and actual space it conjures up
in order to forge itself into the tool of prayer to everything and everywhere (once the hieroglyphic with its efficiently poetic (as with Chinese calligraphy) symbols is decoded by the method I will shortly begin to lay out) as honed to its task as a hammer is to hammering, or a Stradivarius to the task of fiddling, I will eventually show, represents a viable, novel paradigm of knowledge
that turns, once I've here tamed these vicious, ferocious
man eating symbols into the docile service they seem forged for, (they might not be wolves, just raised by them), the world right side in to gather everybody
into a single percept instead of scattering
us all into rival concepts (memes)
amassing armies in their defense,
as material reality, the divine mother,
reasserts command over language
rectifying the names to fit the things.
So powerful is the truth manifested
in this perfectly visualized vision of vision itself (as I will show), reduced to minimal referentiality* that if a mere dozen disciples,
the vanguard of the proletariat --
this is a roamin catholic read marks-ist revelation
a bit tipsy to be sure on the opiate of the masses
(all things tossed in the pot in the land of yes) --
will say in time "I see!"
that will be enough.
*an abstract painting -- from one angle, though from another it's just a happy escape into fortuitous form from all mundane objects, and you probably have to have a bad side that no-one should begrudge to be that good -- drags along a lot more baggage with the renegade word, (a fallen angel) as mentioned, effacing itself to dominate from behind the scenes, as the word world division is all the word's idea in the first place, while the real world weaves word and world indivisibly, language unless twisted into obfuscation a tool of vision; without the word for blue the Greeks never saw the thing at all, but in abstraction the word having recognized it, now washes its hands and will not even stoop to touch blue while pretending to be prostrated before it, this scam going right to blue's head -- not that I can't love the art of a religion in which I don't believe, but artists should know they're not just making art, they're proselytizing for the religion or world view that the kind of art they're making represents and make sure they really believe in it, and if not, like Philip Guston, they should forget their deep investments, scorn their community of hard earned supporters, light a cigar and say yes to real life. Of course abstraction and figuration are also reductive, verbal categories, so in rebelling against abstraction, he might have just succumbed to another of the renegade word's ploys to make the world its toy while pretending to be defeated.
friend teaching writing says to find your voice, know whom you're speaking to when writing -- oh I do, the members (not you, of course, reader, I never could have imagined in advance the critical nuances that make you you, nor can I fathom the forces that brought us together, our eyes meeting like this across a crowded room) of my carefully chosen audience hover vividly before my mind's eye. As I write I hone in like a flea skiing down the funnels of their interesting ears toward the holes in their heads, but alas this motley crew insists they find the flea with their finger and squash the annoying buzz. In short, who are these countrymen who won't lend me their ears to say I don't have a voice? In Jane*'s day, they were two parallel tracks that never shall meet running in opposite directions, but since then, one turned around, and now facing in the same direction and growing closer and closer, sense and sensibility have converged on pride and prejudice as on the vanishing point at the end of the world. -- On arriving there ahead -- don't ask me how -- of everybody who basically shares my (now lost) sense and sensibility, to move forward into the great beyond, I had to choose, it was almost like Sophie's Choice, and I shrieked -- okay take my (long cultivated, finally flowered) sense and sensibility! and clutching my newborn lack of pride and prejudice to my breast, wailed and whimpered all day and night for years, unable to pick up a pen or a brush, not even to honor and defend the precious fruit of my new found lack of pride and prejudice. And even after I got started, the horrible fate of my gratuitously, cruelly abducted sense and sensibility always hovered before my mind's eye, such that, while lacking pride and prejudice grew into a strapping lad I could not but beam and smile at proudly, I knew that my life was a lie. Maybe at that convergence, I fell off the edge of the world, it's really the end, or maybe it's a new beginning. To cultivate novel tastes, revive lost and discover new senses and sensibilities -- I'm sure they must be just around the corner, and my gut and my mind will again be aligned -- must relinquish old ones. Those not busy dying are not busy living.
*Jane Austen in case you're illiterate
|
There is a rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is certainly necessary to be born again through the image of Resurrection. The image must rise again through the image. The bridal chamber and the image must enter through the image into the truth: this is the restoration. This power the apostles called "the right and the left." For this person is no longer a Christian but a Christ.
(Gnostic) Gospel of Philip, Codex II, 3
It just occurred to me that in the upcoming version, including the book to be published by the perfect publisher, all the reflections here in this column should be transferred over there to appear after those on the right column. On the left column, here, the central narrative (noted and accessible in pages to the right below) -- the finding of the origin and end of perspective, including the birth of the modern world in a mystical vision -- will appear. All the additional reflections -- also edited and winnowed -- that appear now in the list of pages (draft notes, discards) will also appear as part of the continuous writing on the right column.
The right hand will thus play against and with the left -- actually both are to the left of a middle C (that has drifted so far to the right that the whole left side of the keyboard is probably all right too by now); the right has crossed over the left to be yet further left -- as in playing Les Barricades Mysterieuse, by Couperin, the only composer Polyanni can stand to listen to of late. If the Google Blog didn't come this way, I might have gotten the two column writing idea from Lauren Kogod, who wrote two simultaneous essays moving down one page when we were both in the masters degree in building design program at Columbia in Harlem.
To represent the unfathomable, un-translatable mystery of spatial perception that transcends the mere calculation of distance by mechanically understandable perspectival distortions, two simultaneous texts create binocular and stereoscopic effects. If you can perceptually integrate the two columns, that will prove you're not a machine, which soon will be able to recognize traffic lights from any perspective, I'll warrant. I could never have built this world out of words without my training and practice as an architect concerned that her structures, like Greta Garbo's body, for instance, be extravagantly beautiful, adaptable, sustainable, economical, and that they not fall down and kill anybody. I also learned that architecture, like clothing, is language, and so it goes both ways -- language is architecture or clothing and should be designed with this in mind. You live in it, wear it, and it speaks volumes.
This complex would function as a gigantic language treatment plant whose convoluted form only the expert designer can fathom. It would also serve as a magnificently (thank Giotto) strung bridge, a primitive hut, a house and temple ie. musically proportioned Palladian villa, a gothic cathedral, as well as a diaphanous tunic, more revealing than glaring nudity, like the ones worn by the Botticelli graces, and a Charles James designed day dress for Jackie Kennedy. Like his clothes, the garment of words is structured architecturally, the skeleton being the central narrative aforementioned. As with his gowns, much of this verbal garb was designed for specific friends, or muses, to wrap their minds around and vice versa, then adapted (a mission impossible) for mass dissemination.
In modern literature, that mountain of metaphors would represent an expression and appreciation -- for its own sake -- of the futile, florid human imagination in its aspiration for an unattainable utopia. But this is not modern (including so called post-modern) literature. This is more like a Renaissance painting, an expression of faith in the immediate manifestation of the mythological, that holy ghost a lost and found and lost and found... pentimento intermittently floating up from the ground of a palimpsest. (There are now about five versions of the central narrative -- The Mind of Beauty, Giotto's Yet More Divine Comedy, a Curious Move by the Green Knight, etc. -- that can be found by rooting around this planet for those prize truffles -- too bad you're not a pig, let's hope one didn't get here first and clean the place out. I plan somehow to consolidate the different versions into one or at least choose one.)
It's possible that the pretty recent enfranchisement of women in many countries all over the world is responsible for this giant step forward (backward; the wheel must regress to progress) in the re-integration of the public (communicable) mind, as female brains statistically demonstrate more commerce between right and left hemispheres. But men empathizing with and identifying with women have brought us to the precipice of this quantum leap, so it's probably irrelevant. We are all seeking truth and bending and stretching our native minds to get there.))
