note: UNLESS A TERMINAL TACKLE HAS FORCED ME TO RELEASE IT, PROGRAMMED THEN TO EXPAND TO FIT THE SHOES OF THE QUITE ESSENTIAL THING ITSELF (ALMOST EQUALLY FETCHINGLY (IMHO) SKETCHY), PLEASE GO AWAY AND MAKE NO ATTEMPT TO CATCH THIS GROSSLY WOBBLY FORWARD PASS, PRESENTLY A SHRUNK OR STRETCHED, LOOMING FORESHADOWING OF ITSELF. OH WELL, I GUESS I CAN'T STOP YOU, BUT PLEASE KEEP MY DISCLAIMER IN MIND.
welcome to the mongrel discourse --
where the rule of love has deposed all others,
arranging everything into a skein
of strangely sophisticated synchronicities...
an integral and integrated -- wholistic isn't the whole of it, not that the whole isn't holey -- language born at the discovery of its source in a fresco by Giotto painted around 1330, a fresco whose unusually distant focal point -- between the eyes of the fully cognizant viewer standing at the back of the Florentine church -- lies at the very crossing, the pivot point of convergent, sacred and dispersive, secular culture. That viewer, having located her station, gazes at the fresco having also, after copious research thoroughly described later, cracked the code of the hieroglyphic. I will fill in the rather large blank here later, that tells how one thing led to the other, for those interested in the machinery driving what appears to be a deus ex machina, until you examine the machinery. Suffice it now to say that in this novel language that I call the mongrel discourse, philosophy, poetry, prose, art history, prophesy, reportage, criticism, art, transparent projection or imagination as the pretext for illumination fuse. Yet all their traits reappear in this offspring, conceived in their convergence.
 |
| jennifer wynne reeves, untitled (tall ceiling) 2004, acrylic and gouache on paper |
Until it dawns on the reader that the convergence indeed happened, and this text is the offspring, it will feel like I'm jumping around or jamming things together trying to make different things occupy the same space -- as if literature, science, and all the different genres were not describing the same world, but in dividing them, the world had been divided too. Indeed, when this language became the language of my thoughts, I chose to remain silent for years rather than utter a word of it out loud.
Imagine if there had never before existed a child born of a man and woman manifesting their traits, and you came upon one. You would think nature had gone out of its mind, or you were seeing things, and proceed to attack the person confronting you with this representation with an obvious intention of provoking you and messing up your mind. Once it dawned on you that this being really existed and was there to replace you, you would, as a civilized person, unlike the cannibals all humans probably once were, feel in your rights to kill it before it kills you -- as Sigmund Freud discerned sons used to do to their fathers. Unlike those fathers, I suspect, I suspect you would no doubt feel in your rights to, and proceed to get rid of them first, however doing so would only kill your genes, adding, on reflection. insult to the injury of perennially denied -- on any sunny day after a good meal, even an elephant can forget -- mortality.
Thus are the civilized inclined to act more savagely than the prehistoric patricides who only wanted to strengthen the species and protect their father's genes by taking over a little sooner than nature alone had decreed. And thus have many savagely civilized souls tried to hack up, when they were not starving, this effort, having scourged and whipped it as an example of what never to do. Please be prepared for this savagely civilized impulse to arise within you and act according not to it, but to reflection and reason. And if you have ever behaved in such a savagely civilized way toward mongrel, please give it another chance and consider laughing at yourselves and it along with laughing at me, a total clown when my clowning doesn't melt into some serious crooning, as all this foreplay and technical manual-ese -- be prepared, that's the boy scouts marching song -- melts into passion. It's all very un-serious though, what love does and makes, thought generating thought to appreciate and generate more of it to enjoy and possibly use productively, women's work basically, while rocking the child or gardening, compared to the concentration and effort required for war.
One is not one's language, it is applied, or it is the seed that is destroyed in the plant's coming to be; in the recognition of the thing it points to, the word bows out. The different genres do not lay claim to any of the always free and open territory they describe. Rather, however it may inconvenience any old codgers or their sycophants, and put them out of jobs if they won't adapt, it is critical to the species to let fully articulate language evolve and correct itself when it has fallen out of alignment with reality -- the agony, the ecstasy, the magic, the poetry, the prosaic logic and absurdity of the working workaday world. If the sacred text is failing to read, it's time for a new translation, a raw young voice (I'm old enough.), a pointing finger.
Modern visual art as a whole and in many shining examples is a vibrant vital mongrel discourse, an autonomous, highly rebellious language, an imitatio Christi worthy of the name, hating its own father and leaving its mother to wait at the gate. Alas the instant you zoom in on it and stare long enough to hear it start to babble and burble, twist and shout in some sounds that might fit the movements of its own mouth and the flappings of its own native tongue, those very mothers and fathers, along with curators and critics who've upstaged it on Zoom, press the mute button. Then the artists proceed to feature their own processes, the curators and critics describing its surface, sometimes minutely, with exquisitely sensitive attention, then cut out and plug in the parts that fit the holes in their puzzles, floridly praising or blaming the crystal ball based on criteria that are largely irrelevant to crystal balls, to which the only criteria that applies is that they work as crystal balls.
The wise Confucius has much to say on the subject of the evolution of verbal language, and the healing political repercussions will be obvious on reflection, these repercussions disturbing for those (myself included, rid myself of one demon, and eleven more rush in) unconsciously invested in the convictions that they consciously deplore. Such a representation, a representation of the grotesque horrible then suddenly magnificently beautiful -- then back again to horrible -- what a roller coaster ride!-- whole, beside which representation I stamp my handprint, as did my female ancestors, functions as the etching of a buffalo on the wall of a cave, a single buffalo, unique in all the world, that is all buffalo being the whole world out there, to be assimilated and consumed, the world becoming whole, in a religious ceremony that sustains the body sustaining it. We artists also see the humor and joy in that -- ha ha -- I not only create! I am! a four legged buffalo tearing across the planes as I enjoy my buffalo burger and blueberry coffee, sssh here comes the boss, look serious. which isn't too difficult because I was just about to start sobbing over the fate of the buffalo and myself and the whole world. Long did I seek understanding of my condition from professionals but to no avail, and think of how many of us have taken our own lives. And yet Arachibutyrophobia, fear of peanut butter sticking on the roof of the mouth, is a disorder worthy of a name and an official listing.
Confronted by the consummately visual image at Santa Croce, this image of all images, quite transparent to the process that lead me to find it -- all this is carefully outlined in the book in progress unfolding in another post -- I first indeed lost my mind in a rather severe case of what is called Stendhal syndrome (see wiki). After it passed, and the words into which the walls had dissolved seeped back behind them, I, a new! updated! state of the art sibyl, began speaking this language, mongrel discourse. It will take some getting used to, but if you stick it out, I believe you will see how this correction has been long overdue.
to gain access to all posts, eventually, begin, if you not already done so, at themongreldiscourse.blogspot.com. The Previous Post list above and to the right always shows up to ten most recently posted posts previous to the opened one, the posts in this list reversing the chronological order of their appearance, the last appearing first. By continually clicking on the one at the bottom of the list, you gain access to more posts until you have reviewed the whole index. (I have, though, falsified some dates in the program, but not on the page, as this order is not always the order in which I choose to present the posts.)
