The Mongrel Discourse pours out of, and leads back to a source, a strange, scholarly finding described in detail in the link found in the list of pages to the right below. At the climax of a scholarly inquest into the origins of perspective in late medieval and early Renaissance painting, I slipped through crack in the fictive wall that divides the past from the future. I say fictive because there's no time in the present for it to spread out from the point of the crossing between past and future without bleeding into either one, and neither past nor future presently exist either. That, along with other scientific research, assures us that these words,"past", "present", and "future" represent fictional objects.
We inhabit spacetime, not either one, but moderns, who verified this, seem generally incapable of experiencing it directly and call anyone who does quite crazy, whereas ancients never thought to question it enough to have to verify it, as it simply is that it is, and so it infused their immediate experience.
To navigate this uncontrollable flux, they created markers noting points of origin of repeated phenomena and began to construct recognizable objects and name them, gradually replacing the unmediated, immediately existent phenomenal world with an "objective" one discerned with "objectivity". How did the word objective, the attribute of objects formed for special interests and uses by filtering experience and organizing it according to those special interests and uses, come to mean the truth apart from special interests? I object! It is objectionable to call objects objective in that sense. The connotation belies and covers up the plain, honest annotation of an object, as with snow covering the breadcrumbs meant to lead Hansel and Gretel back home from the cage of the witch, who represents this very bewitchment that starves and disenchants the real world and is keen to devour its children and all its childish charm. When the veil is lifted, one beholds the goodness and transparency of the original annotations, when all objects remained transparent or translucent to their constructed nature, when objectivity and subjectivity -- had anybody thought to annotate them in those days -- would have represented two perfectly consistent, married attributes, like striped and four legged applied to a zebra. I call this original, pre-post-erous (though there's nothing "objectively" "preposterous" about it) order the visual order, the order once again visible when the scales fall from your eyes and the connotations falsifying the words evaporate from the surface, and the words and the world appears naked before us and innocent as a baby, which is not so innocent, don't get me wrong -- babies are little monsters imprisoned in bodies that prevent them from murderous deeds -- but a lot more innocent than a grown up. The original, functional/poetic annotations of language restrain the voracious, murderous world just as the baby's functional/poetic body restrains it. Original being-in-language is as rosy, vulnerable, adorable, troubled, indeed so many attributes align with that of the baby, one begins to wonder if a baby and original being-in-language are not originally and actually distinct objects at all, but just two attributes of the same phenomenon. The truth is very crazy compared to life confined to a cage where a bewitchment starves the world of childishness as a blizzard covers the original annotations leading back home.
Post-modernity crystallizes the cabal of connotations. We are surrounded by, and drawn into, a terrifyingly concerted, collective effort to erase all trace of original being-in-language, or reduce it to a putridly banal shadow of itself supported and upheld by putridly banal shadows of people parodied by those hellbent on wiping it out entirely. There remains, however, in the post-modern age, a remnant with faith in, and devotion to, original being-in-language.
Among us, there seem, for moderns, as for the ancient Greeks from whom we descend, to be two main ways back to original being-in-language, one an Iliad and another an Odyssey. The heroic, late late modern non-objective artists play Achilles, hacking down the connotation encrusted objects, no time or space to worry about the innocent annotations beneath them that get dragged through the dust in defiance of divine decree. They briefly return us to pre-human sentience, to be swimmers in raw sensation or inchoate dreams, or return us even to pre-sentient being, mere material matters without meaning, or leave even being behind to partake in pre-existential geometries. They are the pre-humanists. Theirs is a joyous rampage laying waste to the disenchanted, mechanized world of crystallized connotations turning everybody into its robotic servants. Of course today, the diminishing ranks of these earnest iconoclasts grow more and more difficult to find and hard to hear in of the ever-augmenting agglomeration of voices all busily whispering a thunderous -- kill it kill it kill it kill it -- and growing more and more effective and efficient. Especially as the post-humanist whisperers are very good at imitating and appropriating the more mysterious and moving, pre-humanist effects.
In any case, what happened to me and others who've broken past the fiction could, and by all accounts really did, happen. I fell so far over into the "past" side of the fictive walls dividing these fictive constructs that I arrived at a time when people still prophesied -- and prophesies tend to their self-fulfillment -- that the world was centered and originating in and converging on a single origin. In fact, all over the world this belief held sway, though some held the convergence closer, some further away, some called to seek and find it, some to let it be and simply pray for some action at a distance. In researching the origins of mathematical perspective, I fell in with the seek and finders, or perhaps they should more properly be called creators of the convergence, which would not be heresy by the unusual sacred teachings that drove them. I verified that I was really with them and tracking their journey by predicting its unusual twists and turns to avoid local obstacles not recorded, obstacles that only someone "back there" could have known about. I was trudging along with the avant-garde search party, when suddenly -- seek and ye shall find -- we arrived, our arrival verified by the shadow it cast, a shadow taking the form of a fresco surmounting a chapel in a Florentine church. At the arrival, I was also thrust back up to the "present", where for the ever-expanding avant-garde on the wider and wider outward fanning highway with an ever higher speed limit, everything is prophesied, and the prophesy ever more self-fulfilled, divergent. But though I'd returned to the "present", when I looked down I noticed I was still stuck to the spot of convergence, the spot where the official, sacred, centered world known by qualities crosses into the official, de-centered, quantified one, well before it’s official. I came to see that I was forever quite palpably sucked into this vortex, a whirlpool in the waters of the crossing, and pulled under. University is a mere attribute of the universal, but I got swept up by the thing itself, a wandering wind with nowhere in this world to lay its weary head, for when a wind stops, it ceases to be.
If you scientifically conjure up magic, is it still illicit?
(Note: this might be the most important text we will ever read, though I feel that it matters not a whit to me or you or him or her or anybody particularly. How strange though, and dangerous, that we members no longer identify with the body of which we are members, but really feel it more to be our enemy than anything else, if we even acknowledge that it exists. This is obvious from the fact that we are more than willing to slice it in two and expect it to survive. The mongrel discourse is not just the usual complaint about that. The mongrel discourse is the solution, the deep solution of a paradigm shift, the death and rebirth of the world of known things into a world of entirely different things. The mongrel discourse is not a theory; it is a theorized action aware of itself and checking itself all along the way, but not oppressively. It's more like a mother who can watch the baby and cook dinner at the same time than a father likely to kill one or the other if he tries to do both, not that that's always how it works. All my personal motherliness is swallowed up here, and in my everyday life it would be the baby or dinner, either/or. The motherliness of mongrel explains why it cannot find a home among authorized modes of discourse, including the so called feminist variety, which tries to criticize and oppose the masculinist; but criticism and opposition themselves are masculinist. The problem isn't necessarily that men tend to be running and overrunning all the institutions, it's which men are running them. Penelope is weaving and unweaving a shroud while an odyssey conjured up by the vengeful sea delays her mate, but when he returns, there will be hell to pay. Then people will understand what I mean and that I mean what I mean, and why I speak in parables.)
