book in progress ~~~

you made it past the gate?!  welcome!  

work in progress beware falling debris 

access to philosophy at high resolution is through an image.

the construction and reconstruction of surely one of the most, if not the very most philosophical image -- the one that deserves to be called the end of linear perspective before it had been officially discovered or re-discovered -- releases knowledge that remains as invisible otherwise as atoms and molecules are to the naked eye

the image holds knowledge of the essential elemental essence, the stuff of which all things are made as they are made of atoms, or perhaps photons, however their wave aspect cannot be quantified, only qualified -- 

until we tap the knowledge buried like gold in the image and making the ground of it glitter, we are as lost in all our modern inventions and technological trappings as cavemen before the taming of fire...  I'd be chained to a rock for eternity for sharing this knowledge and kindling this tame inner flame out of love and pity for humanity, but Jesus took the dive for me...

the image is a sea of contradictions you can only sail in by tacking back and forth and if you want to plumb to the ocean bed, strap on an oxymoron tank.  Yet the sea also follows the rigid rules that demand and allow an organism its capacity to remain itself, to condense after evaporating, say.  A sailor diver or swimmer in the sea of being is not without faculties to study its ways and make limited friends with it, however perceiving that its ways are not our ways until, perhaps they are for whale riders

We are not speaking of poetry as opposed to science or knowledge. We are speaking in parables because that is how language speaks to what transcends it while being at least half, if not more, made of it, as with a child who in coming of age will only rebel if you try to make your point directly.

scientific method depending on statistical analysis of likely possibilities can only address the symptoms and signs of disturbances, however such treatment affects the thing itself and should be applied whenever helpful if one is careful not to mask a deeper malaise that the symptom appears to call attention to, as one grows addicted to the expensive medicine treating it.  Science or knowledge is concentrated in the whole, in the sea of being where everything is joined in the philosophical image, and the misery of estrangement from that whole can never be assuaged significantly by treating signs and symptoms, however the elated cartoon characters of Oz waving their dream medals, diplomas, and lockets from the dream university linger in the air in her memory after Dorothy has woken up back on the farm.  We are called to choose at some point which persona to identify with, the tin man or the farm hand, the wizard or the vendor of toys and tricks however convincingly fun in the end known as such.  Dorothy is the revolving door that opens in both directions until it locks and one is stuck on the side one last chose, so it is wise to make a conscious decision, go there, and never pass through the door again.  Of course everybody thinks his or her dream, however zany, is the real farm, that's the rub. The monkey machine mind is very evolved and will fight sometimes almost or possibly to the death of the host to avoid being unplugged. 

The whole is holey,  like whole wheat bread, not just a hole yet more imaginary than the phantoms of the mind. The whole is visible, palpably felt and ascertained and fully immersed in living history, in presence and memory.  It is a living constantly unfolding appearance, an emanation burning a fixed image on the retina from which the whole is projected.  We are able to ascertain that we are here by this image and to navigate being by the North Star revealed when the clouds blow away.  Yet it will take some time to assimilate the fact that the world has long been turned inside out and all your faculties have adjusted to the illusion that you are standing on solid ground, not walking on water -- as after logical calculations revealed the earth was revolving around the sun, but then Einstein calculated and verified that the opposite was also the case because we are at sea in a relative world.  My finding arrives perhaps in the nick of time finally to assimilate what we have long known.  It is a tool of being here mentally spiritually and emotionally as one in words as in silence, gathering them all together.  It is the tool of prayer, the pray-er, as the hammer is the tool of hammering or the flute of flouting. The pray-er was an embryo now born into the world.

by way of further introduction, here's a minimally edited note I wrote today to a friend who is writing a book about Giotto and perspective in which he elaborates a positivist assertion that "space" is a modern concept that is irrelevant to the authors of perspective.   Following up his last remark...

...space is a stand in for God, but it is not God.  In fact Brian Rotmans in “Much Ado about Nothing." explains the zero appeared to balance checkbooks as a function of capitalistic pragmatism.  Which Giotto was surely a pioneer in, he was a real estate shark.  But space also possesses a mystical aspect related to timeless presence, as well as empowering mathematics and assisting vision — as I agree that language can render visible the previously not clearly focused — but only when things like art are preparing you and helping that happen, so the word appears at the crystallization, not the formation or conception of the thing, or, in the case of space, no-thing.  This is what I realized in identifying with the process of arriving at perspective from inside out as you will see when I finish my book or video.  

For a while I could write nothing at all afraid of what people like you would think.  That was after I came to after the ground I thought solid crumbled under my feet.  When I showed the draft to my professors, they went a little cross eyed and could not figure out what to say.   Only that it failed to conform to their categories so call her an artist.  But science always confronts resistance when the categories must shift — and if it thinks it has everything nailed that can never again happen, this could actually be not just the harbinger, but a cause of the imminent end of the world blamed on the God people.  But as Ron would say— who’s the grown up?  Anyway re space you can look at things in many different ways and never really pin anything down and that also applies to matter.  And you will see that the painting I analyze is actually the end of perspective outside of public cultural events as this phenomenon transpires in the autonomous elite realm of art — where Boccaccio (historical source) says « Giotto paints what the eye cannot see [space  god] and Petrarch : « the ignorant cannot understand him. » Giotto clearly keen to recreate what we call space in Assisi clearly deflates space in this later image I analyze (and invoke poetically because a poem cannot be translated literally, but the visual data can in the case of art test thé accuracy) he was clearly very self-consciously returning to a sense of all palpable or physically realized Catholic communal continuous reality -- versus not yet invented, but formally implied and intuited Protestant individualism, imposing imaginary space isolating the bodies (bound to go off the gold standard; "everything solid melts into air"*), where Catholicism maintains the continuity of the whole, it is a continuous fabric torn but re-sewn (religion means religament as Ursula Goodenough notes and it's good enough for me) in a patchwork quilt; it is the body of God, holey but not a hole, always corporeal, no resurrection without that of the body, and Augustine says that God is what exists, this woven fabric— as opposed to the pragmatic zero (vilified by the Egyptians and medievals) and concepts like space. 

But Giotto in deflating it so concertedly (as you will see) after going to such pains to recreate it acknowledges the phenomenon of immaterial space; and as a practical woman, a practical person, as well as a mystic, I feel that there’s nothing wrong with pragmatics and giving status to what operates.  "Actually" literally means acting; the play's the thing. Modern science has identified potential energy as existent.  A vacuum pulls things toward it. Artists in my view channel and represent the sometimes pre-linguistic existent, the source of the uncanniness the strongest art projects. ). And I believe artists as such are all women in this really.  

Reading the poetry of Adrienne Rich, I relate deeply to her insistence that women inhabit a world in which the categorical rigidity* men entrenched a while back when they were making women do the mundane work and serve them and bear their children as they then denigrated them or worshipped them doesn’t just not apply to women — this categorical rigidity, useful to straightjacket opposition to the social scheme, does not apply to anybody's life or actual reality. And there comes a time when you shouldn’t just answer «  well some people might not want to hear that. » and of course I’m sure you agree not ever to be concerned with protecting your investments.  Ron was so adamant about that, willing to repaint that entire painting just to move a form a quarter of an inch.  Sibling rivalry breeds Greek tragedy but then again two sister elephants separated at birth and brought to the same zoo tore down a concrete wall and ran shoulder to shoulder thereafter.  Though there’s a concrete wall between us I still feel like I smell in you a sister elephant.  Probably the little sister did all the work tearing down the wall alas..

*I look as much like a Marxist as one looks like oneself in the mirror, reversed, where in a mirror of the mirror that corrects the reversal as at the Pink Pony lounge in Manhattan, one appears a stranger to oneself.  But a read marksist (art-ist) for whom the word, an idea/energy, creates and reflects the world continuous with it and is not just applied to it, and for whom internal conditions trump external ones, though they often reflect and always affect them, as the source of alienation and redemption looks enough like a red Marxist to apply her make up in that mirror and poof her hair. Meanwhile, read marksism turns out to be roamin catholic (all inclusive) including both Marxists (like Saint Paul pretty much) and later Roman Catholics, who say the generative truth enters through the ear.  The word is a material mark that also signifies beyond itself but this significance is connected to the mark as a flower to the root or vice versa.  The bridge between word and world is not burned as is held in the myth that the fairy tale of being known only in parables and fairy tales has been de-mythified. Physicists are very adamant that time is reversible.  I experienced this in discovering the end of perspective occurring before it was discovered, just as I experienced the effects causing that which caused them, as the ancients understood.   What modern science can't fathom or control it claims does not exist.  Or relegates it to art apart from science, which alone claims to be knowledge or truth. That's a narcissistic personality disorder.  Everybody who doesn't know he or she has one has got a very bad one.    

**rooted living language maintains its structure, while remaining porous and fluid, the scorn of language, wallowing in conundrums and self-contradiction (a ruse in the art world to maintain the status quo essentially) is as debilitating as the reification of labels and contingent categories allied to an absence of the faith required to communicate with a kit of masks, which is all language can offer, but what an offering if the game is played well!  Yet academic philosophers just examine the masks and never distinguish the performances that optimize their function -- 

The rigorously constructed, then melting and evaporating, then recrystallizing molecules of


the scholarly finding of the ends and end of perspective in the 14th century,


in which together we carefully wend our way back to, and carefully untie, finally, the inmost inner loop of the modern, Gordian knot --


where moderns have learned that violence begets violence, and if violence is applied, the knot will only reconstitute itself.

it is open heart surgery applied to language and the collective body.

you've got to waste a lot of time to tame a fox.

  a telling of the finding accompanied by Carolyn Heitler (alto sax/flute)
 and Lucas McCrossen (bass) at Galerie Tanja Grunert in NYC
 in 2016, see parts one and two below. photo by jerid gooding.

free book available!!!

to pass onto your heirs


by printing up blog and/or files
linked here --
preferably on archival
cream colored paper
and installing in a cardboard folder.

radical shift of tone:  solemn meditative interlude or opening prayer

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W62l21za5KPexrv0MS5XPmuyIqF6HaC2/view?usp=sharing

part 1:

analytical instruction manual

and tools for repair of the vehicle (language)

also eventually involving

intellectual foreplay

https://drive.google.com/open?id=13IQ6oQpCTp5hjelUr1LgYnTGU4erYpCr

 if file won't open directly, please download

gradually melting into 
part 2:

healing verified by test ride

or

spiritual passion

incomplete draft,

some notes out of order, 

different versions included:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nRamMVOGDjxSn-4bdZa1ABcHVvZUG0ui/view?usp=sharing

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." 

                        (Gnostic) Gospel of Philip, Codex II, 3

many more illustrations illuminations and elaborations forthcoming

You must, using your own, unfolding life story, flesh out the skeleton of the journey and bring it to life in order to negate the negation in practice, not just theory.  The finding of the bones and assembly of the skeleton is just the preface.  Unless you choose to cut the flowers, enjoy the scent, and toss them in the trash after the performance, as most now do with, say, a performance of a symphony by Beethoven.  As the flowers, at the very least, have botanical interest in being of a novel species, I trust someone will preserve a source of the seeds.   

*Use the right tool for the right job.  The tool of language is not a precision instrument, it's more like the mercuric metamorphosing monster sent to terminate Terminator 2, except, if you love it, the monster can be tamed,

and words can be very illuminating and life changing in sharing ways of thinking and seeing that offer freedom and choice, and in unlocking the shackles of sham philosophy that is crowned with laurels.  People, even otherwise very intelligent people, are attracted to whatever is crowned with laurels  as bees fly to pollen,  and those crowned with laurels crown with new laurels those who are mesmerized by the old laurels,  so it goes; but meanwhile among the frauds, including the frauds who say they feel like they're frauds, but keep at it, meaning they don't really think they're frauds, there are some worthily crowned that you loathe to lose, weakening your resolve to toss the whole lot overboard.

Also violence begets violence, and truly, these fragile, green tares would not survive a weeding.  Fortunately, doing nothing, just knowing, just basking in pure consciousness, is the mightiest power in the world.  It rises and rises slowly slowly and one day floods the banks and all the sleeping seeds awaken turning the desert into an oasis.


So know what you know, and spread the wealth, that is all you need to do.  To spread the wealth of knowing, language is a very effective tool, and you must know your tool too, in this case that it's capable of sorcery and other monstrosities.  Still, the monster of language once tamed is as independent, disinterested, yet surprisingly loving as a house cat, or a lion to the lion whisperer.  Awaken your inner word whisperer before you go rolling around in words.  Until then, just know what you know and let people read it in your eyes and indirectly, in everything you say and do.

These metaphors are quite reasonably applied to language, which can reason very well once recognized in this way, because the metaphors are true to life, the life of language -- as opposed to the error of assuming words have a consistent one to one correspondence with things (which assumption Wittgenstein quite logically discredited), and one can use them to prove or disprove anything. 

Sadly, I think the fact that my approach works so well is what mitigates against people being interested in it.  People are interested in cutting edge craziness that can spit venom at some other cutting edge craziness, then blaming language for it, until all the cat can do is hiss and scratch, and then regress into the arch-villain sent to terminate the kindly, reformed terminator, Terminator 2, who represents science, the revealer and healer, unless you program it to harm and kill.

Society is made of these human cat (humans are like cats too. click lick lick lick lick) fights at every level.  Many profess the need and desire to re-establish the continuity of nature and culture and all things animate and inanimate and fleetingly glimpse and represent it, but to dive in and live in that turbulent sea, few will go there.  After their poetic or philosophical flights, they rush back home to their protected enclave keen to solidify rather than erode the wall around it.  

I'd like to gather an enclave of eroders in truth not just in profession of a freedom of mind that is betrayed the instant there's any discomfort or threat to whatever solidarity has been achieved with a few or many others.  Where one does not ever say enough! 

but where there is no attachment to any ideology or ideological look at all,  and questioning themselves and everything is like water to a school of fish, where unfamiliarity and anomaly are as familiar and nominally present as crudely labeled categories that no longer apply to the present, 

such categories now confused with language itself -- such that if you refuse them, people can hardly understand a word you are saying.  Using such outdated categories to formulate ideas is like trying to build a house out of sludge and slurry, and the more it fails, the more stridently is it defended, this psychosis strangely mirrored by the Covid-19 virus that infects people without their showing symptoms until it finds and lays low as many elders, the last people with any wisdom, as it can get its teeth into. 


Are people really interested in peace?  Are they ready to pay the price for truth love peace?   Is poison waiting for the reigning Socrates unless you've just learned to ignore him her or it, that works even better? The answers, my friends, are hardly blowin in the wind...   The answers, as you know, are -- no no yes.  Hope is not what we need.  We need consciousness, we need knowledge, that which transcends and can never be accounted for in all that is known.  This alone can move the presently immovable mountain, never before moved.   But with only fake faith in the self and in everybody, and in the goodness and power of truth, fake faith covered up with sentimental sounds and hubris and bravado, nobody will make her way over there. We the people will just remain what we have always been, an immovable mountain range standing in our own way, nibbling the sweets of our self-satisfied efforts, calibrated, when not openly calculated, to be ineffective, so as to preserve what has always been so, where even those dying of it are too attached to let go.  

note re the method in the attachments above 

-- reasonable methods for gaining historical knowledge of whole, living beings and phenomena include acting and psychoanalysis. To understand a subject objectively one allows it inside and enters into it subjectively. Then one departs, changed by the experience, more transparent to oneself, as the subject is more transparent to itself, and no longer a cipher to the subject, who goes its own way. There are dangers, but when successful, you shall know the process by its fruits. Does the understanding accrued reveal a consistent, organic whole making sense of the subject's behavior?  

However imperfect, the process is rationally evolved, and notwithstanding many failures, results have been many times empirically verified — unlike the only philosophical method currently authorized — heading directly to a target, getting blinded by the light, and then running over it, or vice versa.  I'd rather be a friendly Freudly informed, method acting freight train, with the living truth -- just like R&B's kid, the maximum Max, Calliope's twin bro -- if I might happen to be going its way, hopping on and sliding inside of me for a while in order to hook up with its friends all over the country and make new ones, and then I'll be moving right along until the living truth might be going my way again.  My main job is to deliver roses from my Brooklyn backyard ex-trash dump rosary -- in full bloom as I write this!

my rosary, Callisto's Garden, May, 2019

followed by Italian tomatoes and cucumbers (I smuggled in the seeds), along with a breakthrough historical finding that should be of interest to scholars, and fresh, ripe questions for everybody -- come'n get em at this whistle stop! -- as all the questions out there seem to have hardened into the dried gourds of, to my mind, strictly ornamental, indigestible answers debated by the debaters.  Even when a rare event happens, and the debaters seem to be listening to each other and treating each other graciously, it's really mainly so they can shore up their answers and do better next time -- though they're converging on the future, perhaps soon they will arrive! So you see there's a great need for what I deliver, even if the Maximum or even minimum truth rarely, if ever, hops on for a ride.  

studio of the moi mole, 2016

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the graveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go! 

ps

in a note preserved in her then surviving childhood bedroom, Kristen Vallow* had written at the age of eleven:  people think I'm fake because I like to be proper, but that's the real me.  This applies as well to the quite incredible, rather Victorian, narrative voice that possesses me when I've spun through the revolving door to find myself again on the far side of the finding, when by my faith, I'm the real me, a dispassionate, phlegmatic, cocky know it all.

Yes, turns out that my emotionally responsive mild modern relatively mumbling manner in "real" life is the fable-ous or fabulous one that I've quite naturally been working on my whole life, the one that I use to be nice, like a key that fits the keyhole, and vice versa.  That works in (rare) civil discourse, which is like a toddler's toy with lock and key, and the whole point is to open and close the lock, there's nothing inside the game board, you just want to feel understood and be understanding, and pretty much nobody ever changes anybody else's mind. 

When civil discourse fails, the mask that allows it starts to fall, and people get angry, a sub-human, or if you prefer, trans-animal state, aligning a genius's iq to that of a growling dog, which is sometimes helpful, don't get me wrong, given the castles in the air that geniuses are wont to build, think of the first thousand times Edison tried and failed to invent the lightbulb, while neglecting to take out the garbage, quite rightly growling doggedly in such doggerel as LEAVE ME ALONE, I'M ONTO IT, I'M ALMOST THERE, TO HELL WITH THE GARBAGE!  GET JUNIOR TO TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE! the kind of thing a dog thinks when it's hot on a scent and might easily say if it spoke English.  

But a mask is necessary to accomplish civil discourse, and being a Renaissance woman, an actor playing a rather nice and soft spoken, quite empathetic, well educated (you wouldn't believe the holes in that well played scam) lady in touch with her own, highly refined feelings and evolved intuitions is a hat I was probably born wearing, though it took a few years to sprout, and I'm happy to wear and even wear out from so much wear and tear, but I could not agree with my dear friend, a writing instructor, when she argued that the writer's narrative voice, even in a memoir, is always a mask, and one should choose the proper mask for the occasion.  

On the far side of the finding, I am rather the unreasonable man described by George Bernard Shaw, who will not shape herself to the world around her, but must shape the world around her to herself, who believes there is such a thing, at least if the self in question sufficiently identifies with everybody and nobody and so is able to play a cipher.  Her voice is that of language itself having been chosen by the subject seeking the most direct route, which happens to be constantly twisting and turning, through this obstacle infested terrain.

* who rescued Callisto, my late she wolf guide, gone to bones and an iceberg rose in my late garden on rented turf now neglected by the landlord; may they rest in peace and stop haunting me... no no I take it back, stay dear squirming swirling ghosts, I'm not ready to let go...