as art is the heart, the heart failure is an art failure, a failure if not in production, then in reception, not corrected, but, it is reasonable to project, exacerbated by slicing off art tissue and applying it to the wounds. So stop that and do this.
*******************************
18
higher than Platonic love is existential love, like that between a chicken and a horse, in which the only thing they share is being. (RG)
the resurrection of God
in the scourge of dead language
Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. The world will not receive truth in any other way. There is a rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is certainly necessary to be born again through the image. Which one? 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. Not only must those who produce the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, do so, but have produced them for you. If one does not acquire them, the name ("Christian") will also be taken from him. But one receives the unction of the [...] of the power of the cross. This power the apostles called "the right and the left." For this person is no longer a Christian but a Christ. the gnostic gospel of Philip
I’d sacrifice all my art to save the life of a cat. Giacometti
The isms and other dead stuff art’s made of might come alive like spiraling dead minerals or it might signal life or be a sign of it and point to where to find it. It might carry a living message from the living, though that star might have burnt out before the message arrives. It might represent life and affect it like a visualization exercise before a performance. It might meditate on life, on death, and scorn them both, how lively! It might share my mix up of appreciation for and hope to hide from life, or give rise to life in the numinous nest of transcendentally harmonious relations among pre- and post-existential entities, numbers playing on a page or vibrating in the form of musical notes, or to clothe life while it lives in such luxurious robes. Then art’s okay, one might do well to care about such art, because it serves life, is an arm of life, gives life legs, or a heart, or sustains it beyond death not in memory but in substance, as an immortal howl or endless echo or slow motion swirl of the luxurious robes life wore, slow enough to sustain the swirl as long as life lives to ascertain it.
For that is the original essence of life, its recognition of and by other life to which it is connected and from which it is divided, by the wedge that is also a bridge, the first, incompletely accomplished move toward difference, the first division/displacement of a point to create the first line connecting the first two points — the love line. Love is not yet awareness of another, because there is not yet another to be aware of, there is tendency in that direction and in the other, love is half asleep and half awake, love is a reverie. To identify a thing we must recognize it, and to recognize it, we must identify with it. Our life is lived by and through love drawing water from the underground stream of that original never severed connection.
Beauty is truth, the more truthful the object, the closer to the source, the more beautiful. and the more important, useful, nourishing, enlivening, enlightening, illuminating..
Many argue about love’s meaning, but its obvious material, phenomenal essence, the minimal terms, the very pure essence of the thing with no additions can’t be argued with. It inheres in two mutually responsive blobs (could be sausage shaped strands) --
any limbs are useful, but not essential, and love isn't in your head, however the neurons in the gut might play a role -- unless there's more connection with one of those sleek, sometimes super smart sentient blobs still streamlined by the water -- if your limbs offend you, cut them off, or better, as they're bound to, never grow any in the first place -- their heads a part of their bodies contained in one flowing line, not stuck on them with fat sticks that swivel so you don't have to move from your warm rock to look behind you if you hear an ominous sound back th... but wait, is that really a good ide...uh oh too late..
-- and the medium that carries their dreamy half-awareness and response across the space that divides them, the medium is love, the space or — as there’s no such thing as nothing, by definition — body, like a body of water (a person is one of those, mainly), the body or space of love that binds and divides as it shapes and creates the lovers as such as they shape it, now disappearing to play the body of love’s edges, now appearing to play themselves, the lovers, like the rabbit in the drawing who comes to chase away the duck that chased away the rabbit and on and on, as hider when found then plays seeker of the seeker become hider.
Holey love, flickering off and on however optimally fast enough to appear at least sporadically continuous, with the plot too riveting to notice splices in the collage connecting various perspectives, looms up between the oppositely off and on blobs carrying them and forming them as lovers, all three lover beloved love one flickering — frame splice frame splice — becomingness always changing tones and colors to harmonize in difference, their states flowing into one another like music, no hard edges or ideas, only feeling appearing on an undulating surface, space not divided from time, volume from plane.
To represent and recognize love the way we recognize other bodies, we make stills of what’s in constant motion, as if 3-D printing states suspended between the opening and closing of the shutter, gathering a collection of the enduring body/surface in various states and moods. To create these 3-d images of what’s previously invisible to the naked eye, love, is to conjure up, by a protracted or several times removed digital process, the causes of the effect, as when scientists visualize sub-microscopic particles.
Unlike an analog camera receiving light from the surface and reversing the image to form a negative, the computer functions like an actor playing the thing itself, however disingenuously, again, conjuring up the appearance from its original, in this case morphological causes, not a surface impression taken from the effect. But the machine in this case is a human being feeling his way toward this representation — like Einstein who discovered and wrote up relativity by dreaming or a genius intuitive chess player — out of love of the process and materials and intuitions as to what feels real, not fake, where to him, rightly, everything feels fake but love, which might be faked, but, uniquely, maybe not.
He would not attach the more easily faked word, even in his mind, I don’t think, but one never knows, to such a holy phenomenon as the free floating original thing itself — however as it's unrealized until the utterance, he is, if not merely discrete, which I doubt, simply clueless except to find and pass the baton to one who communicates on a higher plane as he put it, or one who risks lying as that’s the only way to tell the truth, one willing to suffer uttered naked autonomous original love’s unmanageable relative dearth of commercial and social viability, almost utterly done in now that everybody’s been promoted to managers of managers of managers of managers of risk, while he did the dirty work, sleeping with the enemy, relatively — may I be the enemy to a successor who will climb yet higher, not just the taming woman, boring… — in this hellish, man eating war for true, autonomous original love’s constant purification and revelation and hegemony on this bitterly soothingly — like a sylph that keeps morphing into a snake — beautiful earth.
Love’s fulfillment in its recognition whether never known or later lost inheres in the desire that knows not what it seeks until it finds it where the wildest wilds meet the apex of purely (pre-proto-) pre-robotic civilization, where one sallies forth on the saddle of it, holding before one the shield of it, though these metaphors that suggest and would soften the contours like snow were they not already softened to conform to the body that holds the shield or sits on the saddle melt away with the snow of language, and the acid rain of language melts the snow and dissolves the thing itself and then the pure rain of language washes away the acid and the spring bursts forth in all its abundance as this ungraspable ineluctable object embodies — chivalrously galloping in — ever-changing ever-the same creation itself, philophily -- love of love, Don Quixote, mad, impossible, destructive, but essential mirrors of everybody’s deepest truest self in a world of illusions no less illusory for being so resilient. Luckily, the authorities allow such romances if they’re aesthetic, formally evolved works, and we are, however the critics might not have caught up with me yet. But poor authorities, it’s like a finger pointing at the moon, and they can’t take their eye off the finger. They won’t last long in this Zendo.
and so, when one is swept into the swirl of space flung forth, filtered, and focused by the lens in question, that of my late spouse, whom I happen to love, by an irrelevant coincidence — as we must endeavor to separate and preserve that which utterly surpasses understanding from what doesn’t — being’s essence as love is mirrored everywhere splashing and spraying on and around the wavy surface, as described and enacted in his art, which I have so called appropriated, but in truth I am saving it from all the parents who neglected it, who fawned over it as the unknowable other, placing it on a pedestal, admiring it for its silence, laying flowers and at its feet, showering it with hundred and thousand dollar bills, appealing to its colossal vanity — vanity vanity all IS vanity — what a ruse to get women, children, and art to be seen and not heard, like silencing a forest, freezing forever the babbling brook, arresting all the wind in the willows, that it manifest only terrifying silence in pretty colors.
Gorchov objectifies the condition of original sentience as love, just as perspective objectifies previously only sentiently sensed space, and this processing, removing all the crude dulling generalizations and categorizing abstractions, restores the photographic specificity, shine, sensuality, returns without rupturing or denying it, information to experience, root to rose, where in this case the beloved medium melts into the message, the causes effects reasons and feelings melting and solidifying in the image transparent to the thing itself at the end and the beginning of the world.
Where the perspectival image returns all the detail and specificity to the schematized world, it cannot penetrate the observer and turn her into as generous and disinterested a lens; that quite transparent lens that can be taken for the thing itself leaves you pretty much just as you already are, as Brunelleschi's demonstration panels, or Cimabue's swatting of a fly painted by Giotto proved.
But love's image cannot be seen except by love, and just to look at it reclaims and reawakens the lover in you, instantly plotting to expel the usurpers from the palace, and whenever you're looking, you're soon in the fog of war -- it's mayhem in the palace. In the blinding rage of Odysseus, he is no better than his enemies. But he is better than a king who would send his troops to fight so as never to lose himself and suffer the stigma and shame of having sunk so low. So forgive yourself if all this is making you only feel crazy, confused, and anxious as to the outcome. But not if you ran away, protected by the muffling rhetoric and formalist nonsense that denies the fact that you can only dissolve all stories with another story, that only something can imagine or experience nothing, denies that you are living in and through not just a body, but a body's dreams and dream's images and parables, denies and lacks gratitude for the launching pad and the roots, and the egg that stays and waits as the spore goes to sow its wild oats -- and you wonder why we go mad and eat our children -- and why the part of you that's us does too, where if you have something on authority of respected authorities, and repeat anything enough times you will believe despite the logical fallacies and empirical evidence. Break the spell once and for all if you have not done so. If you have not already done so, which I doubt, but maybe I oughtn't, not sure -- go back and look and keep looking until the palace, littered with corpses, is dead silent. And like Prospero, deeper than did ever plummet sound, you drown your books. It could, even if it has already taken years, but keep looking. My words are helps that will keep your mind aligned with your eyes, that is, help you not just to look, but to see.
Love undulates a shimmering wave, love changes and stays the same, love glows with unusual colors and vibrations, these are the minimal terms of true being, or true love, this is the reference, the genetic code repeated in every cell with the instructions for its specific unfolding. Yet to conceive and transmit this calculated conclusion falls short of loving and could even embody its opposite, an attempt to control more than manifest love, if only by wasting time thinking about it rather than doing it — unless it finds a bridge in art that empathizes with and embodies the idea.
Art not only lifts knowledge from hypocritical pronouncements that bely in their utterance the very thing pronounced, it compounds verifies and inhabits knowledge, and in communion with this art you do the same. It is not a vacation, it is life becoming one.
How I disagree with the prevalent idea that all readings of art are equally justified — it’s what you make it. True, one can read art any way one wants, just as one can read a person any way one wants, but in fact art, like a person, would like you to understand the particular thing it is being saying in its every stroke, demands you climb up to its ears and mouth and speak at its level, as is clear if you just shut up and listen and look enough, and finally it is the Galapagos Island of art that is talking to you and not you to it, it is devouring, self-resurrecting life and love itself, and if you see yourself in the mirror, it is a face you do not recognize, one you’ve never seen before.
It cajoled you playing your usual mirror only to create leverage to catapult you up to its higher plateau. And not for just a second or a minute or an hour, but always, in sickness and in health til death do you part. You need to, are eager to learn and get fluent in its foreign language to get along in the new world into which it has thrust you.
Art is not the artist, who is really just another viewer. As Malcolm Morley said — the paint goes from the table to the canvas, I’m just the night watchman. Artists have no idea what they are doing, they are possessed by the zeitgeist and art’s unfolding from the collective unconscious. I am typing words that are writing themselves, learning things I never knew just as I type them. They twist and turn knowing this forest like the back of their own hand, while I am completely in the dark, and when they stop, confronting an unknown obstacle, trying to choose a direction, I panic. What a relief when they, not I, see the light and grab my hand and fly forward, our footsteps thundering in the silence
Certainly it’s improper and un-liberated to be obsessed with my late mate’s project (including himself) and implicate myself in its unfolding, flagrantly catching a ride on bright wide wings that can fly fine without these dull under-feathers, which might hurt versus help despite my aerodynamic calculations; but an artist’s weakness is her strength. Though across the board, he corners the market on handsome and eye catching, a perfect peacock, he himself honors the support and lets it breathe, not just begin to peel off the wall, but in free standing works the rough scaffold behind is featured for its equal, rival beauty — though conventional merely wives as such usually provide both lovely painted face and scaffold, only the soul the man’s property. Our case is not confined to the conventional.
Or quite simply, I really appreciate logical, ethical rules and propriety usually, but to hell with them sometimes, such as right now. Right now I hear drowning out all others the call of Robert Frost — “Provide! Provide!” If you see something explosive in a good or bad way, you need to say something. And if embarrassing and even illegal crutches (these are motorized, disqualifying me if I place in any competition, but good advertisement for the provider, and I get a cut) are required to deliver the goods on time, so be it. If the apple has a worm, well, you can carve it out or eat around it, and toss the worm into the compost. In fact, I recommend avoiding wormless ones, whatever the label says, they’re probably genetically modified and chemically treated.
A black and white photograph or a grey day reveals the form in a poetic way — number two tries harder — if I say so myself. Speaking of which, to branch off from the path of my argument, though it appears continuous, a movie flickers, flashes on and off, that’s what gives it its shimmer and life. You don’t know art in all its colors until you read it in black and white. However at the deepest level and on the surface all dualities join at their furthest extension, the circle is closed, much happens between, riding on them.
Ron began by envisioning the tones on the grey scale, then found the colors, the serendipity so often he and others stressed verbally is applied, the logic is structural. The former flits in and out, riding on a prayer, the latter is the enduring religion’s creed.
You don’t just experience a thing so profound when you’re in front of it, you don’t just casually take a ride in the viscera of being. It’s like when the creepy old priest who came up to me while I was ecstatically venerating Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and snarled “did you ever think of praying not just gaping.” I rolled my eyes, the man like a lot of them had the wrong job and placing him there was such a waste. Just gaping was praying and be prayed to by a very friendly god, one willing to drag his son up a mountain and sacrifice him to us, but we weren't so kind to renege and tell him no worries, it was just a test.
For us the ocean of it constantly breaks down the tunnel of time, two scientist assistants squeezing each other’s hands as we peer in wonder through the microscope at two amoeba swimming into the primal light on a parachute carrying us away to an anciently innocent world brimming with living spirits and figures in constant metamorphosis, like from parachute to shield and saddle as we, the don, with an army of fools who would compete with the real Pancho, gallop into battle. The instant glimpsed, the thing itself -- everything -- vanishes like Eurydice to Orpheus. Yet that glimpse shines radiant with immortal actuality, the footprints of God -- there! over there! there!... the aura lingering in the aftermath of those electric flashes offering their light and melting into this long awaited dawn like a fanfare of firefies.
The world and everybody are in a perilous state of fragmentation, division, self-disconnection and disembodiment. Art is not chiefly an illustration of ideas about embodiment, etc., describing the idea for the viewer to skim a shallow sensory experience of it off the top, claiming pride in displaying this affect, seeming a bit less disembodied than those who don't participate, but reneging in the realization in the least pinch and indeed thriving personally in the status quo. As if art were just another way to talk about things and complain about them, congratulate yourself for not being them, preach to the converted, idly dream of a better condition, march for a while in sporadic emergencies, make charitable contributions, and call yourself a radical protester. That is not what art naturally is and does. That is a damming and diversion of the mighty stream.
Art is ends as means, magnetically drawing in the beholder to the side of the beheld, the only bridge to the thing itself, redemption, integration, and the distraction of the guard at the gate, and compared to this function, all others pale. It is unsatisfactory to dawdle in gentile, un-troubling commentary on how the artist single-handedly purveys an interesting anomalous feeling about the desired condition, as the critic, however eloquent the description, watches from the sidelines, unwilling to be held in the arms of the art, dance, dissolve into the dance, and re-conceive the world, as is required. As Ron quoted Charlie Parker -- if you don't live your art, it aint comin out of your horn, and that applies to living the art you love.
The late, great artist, Jennifer Wynne Reeves wrote -- I believe in art, the long shot. Well, I believe in art, but it's not too long a shot, indeed it's a short cut, if you really believe in real art and in the people, which I must, as I must believe in children, those little monsters, and what are people but, if they're not called that, still just children with more experience and trickier tricks, but the same quality of experience, the same irrationally changing moods, as mutable as the weather, the same limitless lack of knowledge, despite all that one has obtained, amounting to a single grain of sand on a vast beach. And all the defensive maneuvers, fixations, twists and turns, and make believe games, to avoid the terror, and the desire to multiply one's powers by identifying with the larger collective, as verified by an A, a pat on the head, as well as points you can trade for more distracting, dazzling, trade-able, comforting, beautiful, etc. toys, the same lust for freedom and to be understood, the same tendency, without supervision, to regress to a lord in a lord of the flies scenario, however there's not much to be said for the supervision, and on and on. I personally have never noticed any appreciable difference, other than that our animal skins are wearing thin. We drive me crazy, we exhaust me, but my heart goes out to the people. I really believe in real art, and I must believe in the people, including myself, no matter how difficult for the designated ones to follow and memorize all the maneuvers of this Houdini so that, once escaped from the locked box, the people can take the next step, and by sticking to the short cut, arrive in the nick of time.
*******
footnote
...a warning dear reader -- don't ever try to nail down the living word. Words are all specific, and one must respect their specificity, but still, like the lively cells of the marvelously specific mushroom, the word in its natural habitat, respected by the natives there for many a millennia until the great disruption, can always choose among at least three or four, possibly more, symbiotic, but, until carefully contextualized, sometimes contradictory meanings into which to morph so as to serve one of the four or so possibly needed functions that might arise in a specific context, as forecast by that word's genius genetic code, the code so clairvoyant and resilient that many of these words you're reading right now can be traced back to the very origins of language, and I am right now resurrecting the dead art of cracking the code of common speech, so that people can actually understand what other people are saying as well as biologists understand viruses and beneficial bacteria, whereas now people can't even distinguish viral from benignly parasitic language, given the aforementioned, technical complexity of linguistic function and the fact that so called philosophers, supposed to be tending to this matter, up to this very moment have only operated with dead language on the dead kind (though they sometimes begin dissecting it, adding insult to injury, before it's quite ice cold, with the brain cells still buzzing, some insight then transmitted, as at least it's more alive than they are in performing this travesty), and I say it was the devil, not the dancer, who became that dance.
As it lives, whether you can stand or understand it or not, by its deep bred adaptability, the word, again, like the mushroom -- after injecting this antidote to the increasingly robotic zombies' mortifying infusions -- can chew through a toxic waste dump and regurgitate a pristine field of wildflowers, however only an authorized orthodox exorcist can convince these philosophical fungi -- mushrooms in this case, but it also applies to words -- to withdraw from the intoxicatingly phlegmatic humors in the basement of a recently purchased French castle, that's a fact that the disinterested purchasers reported to me, obviously, as it's not something that would just pop into a person's head.
Other similarities between living words and mushrooms are well known, but if not, go ask Alice. Walt Whitman, my twice twinned astrological twin, first a fellow Gemini or twin, then born on the same day -- May goes in with a revolution and out with a revelation! -- offers an imperfectly titrated micro-dose, so be careful not to overdo it, like the recent New York poetry scene has done. True, at first, Whitman, like the loud's own peony, busting out all over, overshadows the burgeoning, modest, classical flowers in the thorny brambles of even the most treasured of our species, such as the king of the roses, Shakespeare, as well as yours truly, spakeSheer (Rose is my middle name.), a recent cultivar grafted onto a rediscovered, long believed extinct variety, a novelty of questionable viability, we'll see, but what a perfume!; but original human nature, quite naturally aligned with nature as a whole, quite naturally quickly surrenders to Whitman's gorgeous gigantic effusions' rejoining the leaves of grass as he flies off to at least three other planets to sew his wild seed, his broad trifoliate leavings sustained as an elegant backdrop to the romance of the roses, which lasts the whole season, of late through Christmas to the very bitter end of the year.
I learned this trying to read Walt Whitman's elated eulogies on death to my drastically disgustingly dying politician mother -- all she ever did was fight with him, who would have suspected his death would kill her, or maybe it's just that his moribund replacement, as we her progeny, unanimously concluded, bored her to death, though it might have gone further given his alarm at my moving to drink his fresh squeezed orange juice out of one of the two fine crystal vessels he'd brought over instead of the plain glass meant for me, but he misjudged the timing, and she died before he could get her to change her will with such dubious -- given her character -- enticements as fresh squeezed orange juice in fine crystal, compared to Crazee Clayzee (the fake fake play-doh, but that's another story) Harry's limited menu of salami and "caveman (that's another story) eggs". I thought that Walt Whitman would slide down the gullet of this optimistic, progressive, passionate, patriotic politician who called scrambled eggs of any ilk, if here and now, "the best eggs I've ever eaten in my whole life" as easily as pristine, arsenic-free, home squeezed orange juice in plain old glasses -- alas that deepest of her heart's desire's was never fulfilled -- but Whitman flew right over her head, where, though returned to relative denial, I now like him again, at the time I shuddered at his obnoxious acceptance, bragging happiness, and slobbering pandering, only able to feel the loss of his captain when it was too late, to the vicious beast that was devouring her. Only Sonnet 116 could elicit a smile, her last, and then a few weeks later, after tarrying for hours after all the signs presented still groping around desperately for the gate, the same sonnet carried her gently across the great divide. Please take note, attendants at my not yet scheduled but upcoming departure, the fruit, as she liked to repeat, does not fall far from the vine.
end of aside, however it seemed, unlike the rest of this text, to be evolving into something other than aside material, but then I, the narrator, basically killed myself off with that die hard killer of a Shakespeare sonnet. RIP
images:
ron gorchov: Aiaia,2019, oil on linen on saddle/shield shaped stretcher,
33 1/2 x40 x9 1/2 inches
ron gorchov, Spice of Life, oil on linen
veronika sheer: detail (mixed metaphorical mountain bike), 2020, watercolor and ink on paper
ron gorchov: Anna Perenna 2017, oil on linen, 71 x 102 x 15 inches,180.3 x 259.1 x 38.1 centimeters
ron gorchov: Timmi 2016, Oil on linen, 33 1/2 x 40 x 9 1/2 inches, 85.1 x 101.6 x 24.1 centimeters
veronika sheer, Spritz, 2020, 12" x16” - 3” space - 14 x 16” ( 29” x 16”), oil on linen
december 25, 2021
